Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

The patient sighs and relaxes again in my arms. “Kids, you all right?” I say.

“Yes, sir,” they both say, shaky.

“Akfal?”

“Lovely. Watch out: there’s blood on the floor.”

Later, when the students and I emerge from the ICU, we get stopped by a guy who looks just like a younger, less zombified version of the patient.

“How’s my dad?” he says.

“He’s doing great,” I tell him.

In the fire stairs, headed back up, I say:

“What’s the lesson, kids?”

“DNR,” they say in unison.

“Damn straight.”

The Do Not Resuscitate order. The for-Christ’s-sake-let-me-die request.

Which, if doctors explained it to their patients and patients signed it, might rescue a U.S. healthcare system that now spends 60 percent of its funds on people who will never see the outside of a hospital.

Think that’s doing the Reaper’s work? Newsflash: by that point, the Reaper’s work is done. “Brain death” doesn’t mean the brain is dead, although it is. It means the brain’s so gone that the body is effectively dead. The patient’s beating heart might as well be in a vat.

Speaking of not doing the Reaper’s work, I decide to head back to Squillante’s room, certain now that I will do everything possible to scare him into silence before I even think about killing him.

Pretty certain, anyway. I send the kids ahead to Attending Rounds—an event so loathsome that even under the circumstances I feel guilty for not getting them out of it—just in case.

Sure enough, though, when I get there, Squillante’s talking on a cell phone.

“I’ll be off in a minute,” he says to me, covering the mouthpiece. “What am I, a fuckin dinosaur, I don’t know how to use a cell phone?”

Then he holds up a finger and talks into the phone again. “Jimmy,” he says. “I gotta call you back. The Bearclaw’s here right now.”

In movies hitmen always use a silenced .22, which they drop at the scene. Dropping your gun at the scene I understood, since Michael drops his gun at the scene in The Godfather, a movie from the 1970s about the 1950s that mob guys model their lives on to this day. [17] Michael drops the gun after shooting the cop in because the kid drops the gun after shooting the cop in Where it at least makes sense, since during the Algerian Revolution the French had checkpoints every other block. When I first started thinking about it, though, using a .22 seemed idiotic.

Obviously, smaller bullets tend to go faster, and speed is the primary component of kinetic energy, and hence of the shock waves that a well-placed bullet will send through your body fluids until the walls meant to keep them apart dissolve. But the amount of kinetic energy that actually gets transferred from a bullet to a body is difficult to calculate, since it relies on things like rotational speed and “impulse,” which is what physicists call the amount of time two objects actually spend in contact.

Conservation of momentum, on the other hand, is easy to do the math on. For example, if a bullet weighing 230 grains (15 grams, the weight of a .45 bullet, which is 45 percent of an inch across) goes from the speed of sound (slow for a bullet) to a complete stop inside your body (much easier to achieve with a big bullet than a small one), then 15 grams of your body has to accelerate to the speed of sound to make up for it. Or 150 grams of your body to one-tenth the speed of sound, and so on. It’s much less demanding to think about.

I told the geek at the Nassau Coliseum Gun Show, which I’d read about in Shoot the Jew Weekly, or Blow Your Own Brains Out or whatever, that I wanted twin .45 automatics.

That was the easy part. The guns I ended up buying looked cheesy—they had walnut grips and barrels so shiny they looked mirrored—but they were solid, with clean actions, and I figured I could always paint them later. Plus, wooden grips supposedly absorb some recoil.

The hard part was buying the silencers.

Just possessing a silencer has been a felony since the Vietnam War. I’m not sure why this is so. True, silencers are only used to kill people, but you could say the same thing about assault rifles, and the NRA keeps them cheap and easy. At the gun show I had to walk around for hours after I’d bought the guns before anyone took the bait.

This was a white-haired guy with glasses and a polyester shirt. Not survivalist-looking in the least, though he had all the signs out on his table: memoirs of high-ranking Nazis, weird guns and knives. I asked him if he had any suppressors.

A suppressor is a half-assed version of a silencer you use on your assault rifle, so you don’t go deaf when you’re gunning down your classmates or whatever.

“Suppressors for what?” he said. When he stopped talking his tongue, which was gray, rested on his lower lip.

“Sidearm,” I said.

“Sidearm? You don’t suppress a sidearm.”

“I’m looking for some very strong suppressors,” I said.

“Very strong suppressors.”

“Very quiet suppressors,” I said.

He looked annoyed. “I look like a Fed to you?” he said.

“No.”

“Then speak your mind. What kind of ammo you lookin to use?”

“Magnum load hollow-points.”

“For serious?”

“Yeah.”

“Them the guns?”

“Yeah.” I handed over the shopping bag I was carrying. He pulled the two pistols out and laid them on a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For a moment he just stared at them. “Hmm,” he finally said. “That’s not so easy. But come around back.”

I went around the table to where there was an extra folding chair. The gun maniac picked a fishing-tackle box up off the floor and opened it under the skirt of the tablecloth. It was packed with silencers.

“Hmm,” he said, digging through them. “You need one for each?”

“Yes.”

He pulled a couple out. “Don’t know how good these are,” he said.

They were long—easily a foot, with six inches of thick tube attached to six inches of thin tube. “What is that?” I said, pointing to the thin part.

“It’s a barrel. Watch this.” In about ten seconds, entirely out of sight, he stripped one of my automatics down and built it back up. Only, instead of the original barrel, which he left lying on the table, the barrel that was part of the silencer was now integrated into the gun. “That way you can swap out and they can’t match the bullets,” he said. “Course, you want to make the shells impossible to trace, you got to switch out the breechblock. Sand it down, at least.”

“Huh,” I said.

“Keep the original in the weapon when you’re not using it, case the Feds come. And keep it loaded, too, case they come all hinky.” He winked, though that may have been a tic. “You hear me?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Good. That’ll be four hundred dollars.”

Around the middle of December 1992, Mrs. Locano said, “Pietro, what do you want for Christmas?” and I decided to make my move. We were all at dinner.

“I’m Jewish,” I said.

“Oh please.”

“The only thing I ever think about wanting,” I said, staring at David Locano, “is to know who killed my grandparents.”

Everyone fell silent. I thought: All this. And I’ve fucked it up.

And when it seemed to just blow over, I was grateful.

But a few days later David Locano called me and asked if I would come with him to Big 5 Sporting Goods to find a Christmas present for Skinflick. He’d come pick me up.

We went. He got Skinflick a speed bag, which was ridiculous—Skinflick couldn’t hold his hands above his head for ten minutes without having to punch something at the same time—but Locano didn’t really seem to want my advice.