Джо Горес: Dead Man

He heard the roar even though he didn’t feel the shot pattern shred his shoulder, and rip his chest, and pop blood out of the side of his neck, and burst his cheek so his teeth were bared all the way back to the jaw hinge.

He crashed down, upsetting the table, as the shotgun belched yellow flame to smash Marie back and up, her mouth strained impossibly wide, her eyes wild, her hair an underwater slow-motion swirl, the black hole between her breasts blossoming red, her feet coming up off the floor with the force of her death. Her face thudded down a yard from his, her utterly dead eyes staring into his with inanimate patience.

Through cotton, Albie’s voice came faintly up the hall.

“Mommy! Mommy!” With terror in it.

No, Albie had never known terror. Mustn’t know terror. Eddie began a crabwise scrabble toward the voice. He couldn’t raise his head, so he could see only Albie’s stubby legs appear in the doorway, hesitate as he surveyed the room.

A question this time. “Mommy?”

“Run, Albie, ra—”

The second shooter blasted Albie’s legs back down the hall out of sight. No blood, no pellets striking flesh. Just the legs disappearing as the door frame was splintered and pocked and ripped by the edges of the shot pattern.

A voice croaked despairingly, “I wasn’t ready... Oh Christ... I wasn’t ready...”

The first shooter fired again, almost casually. The twin charges of buckshot swept Eddie’s body back against the legs of the table like a surge of floodwater. A widening red pool spread beneath his chest. His groping hand closed around The Tibetan Book of the Dead knocked from the table, held it.

His view was narrowing and darkening. His ears were failing. The voices were through steel wool.

“They... They all... dead?” Second shooter.

First shooter. “Yeah. We’ll check if he has any notes here, a computer... then we’ll burn the place down...”

Darkness. Silence.

Silence. Darkness.

I wasn’t ready... Oh Christ ... I wasn’t ready ...

Not a voice. A thought. A bed. Harsh antiseptic smell. Shush-shush of rubber-soled shoes in the corridor outside.

He knew he was in a hospital. He just didn’t know why.

But then voices. Real voices.

“Goddammit, when can I see him? Every hour—”

“Every hour he lives is a miracle, the blood he’s lost, the mess they made of him. He’s alive only because a neighbor saw the flames and dragged him out before the place collapsed. Right now he won’t remember anything anyway, Inspector. Why don’t you let it go? Leave him alone.”

“How about I just see him as a friend?”

Sounds. Movement. The voices were stereophonic now because they were on either side of his bed.

“Will he ever remember any of it, Doc?”

“This much massive trauma, who knows? He should be dead, he may be paralyzed... Physical survival is fifty-fifty at best, who can tell about memory?”

“Fifty-fifty? Was me, I’d make it,” said Randy’s voice thoughtfully. “I’d have too much to live for to check out yet.”

“In his condition, what could he possibly have to—”

“Death, Doc.” A pause, then Randy’s voice added, softly, “Was me, I’d be plannin’ a whole lotta other people’s deaths.”

Hearing that, knowing it to be true, Eddie died.

Leaving only Dain to live on.

Not that Eddie Dain knew any of this. The only thing functioning was his ancient lizard brain, nestled down there at the base of the cortex. Hunger, fear, survival — those were what the lizard brain knew about. And only one of those, survival, meant anything just then. If the organism could survive, the rest of what it needed would follow.

Because now some part of Dain had something to live for.

A whole lotta other people’s deaths.

Weight, 100 pounds. For two years, pain.

Constant. Low and throbbing, like drums. Or high and shrill, like red-hot irons laid lovingly against his flesh by medicine’s benevolent sadism.

Start with the bones. Pins here, steel rods there.

Then, muscles and tendons. Slow, careful reconstructions.

Finally, the flesh. Operate, wait for the scar tissue to heal, operate again.

Now, the physical therapy. Move this finger. Wiggle that toe. Wonderful! Can you move that arm? Can that leg support...

No no, that’s fine. Falling down is part of the therapy. One, two, three, four, rest. Let the pulse slow... One, two...

Two years. Weight, back up to his original 140.

For the year after that, Las Vegas. At first he’d thought Phoenix, Santa Fe — just so it was desert. He thought he ended up in Vegas only because more buses went there. Hot sun, dry air, burn out the pain that, often, had him sitting on the edge of the bathtub with a razor blade against the inside of his wrist.

Not just the physical pain, though that was bad enough.

two bulky men charged in with sawed-off shotguns

Fragments of nightmare.

the shotgun belched yellow flame to smash Marie back and up

Razor blade. A couple of swipes against the wrists, and...

Albie’s legs disappeared as the door frame splintered

But — these were not nightmares. These were memories sent to him by God. The half-formed idea of doing something about their deaths started small, grew with the nightmares.

To do what you ought to do, you had to survive. So he started getting up before dawn each morning to walk along the road out into the desert. Half a mile, but and back. A mile. After a while, that led to trotting. Two miles, four. Jogging was the next logical move, skin brown, legs and arms pumping, sweat rolling, three, five, eight, twelve miles a day.

Six months in, he found himself other disciplines. Health club. Boxing gym. Karate dojo.

Weight, 160.

Carrying a book to strengthen his hands — the heaviest he had was a leather-bound fire-singed copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Clutched in his hand as he was dragged from the fire.

I wasn’t ready... Oh Christ ... I wasn’t ready ...

So, strengthening not just his hands, but also his resolve. Until on the last morning of that first Vegas year, three years after it had happened, he was physically ready. Maybe emotionally he was still screwed up, maybe he couldn’t remember any of it without black swirling rage, but physically ready to...

To what? To find the people who had done it, of course. After that was still hazy, but...

Hey — find them how? How do you find two anonymous hitmen hired to kill you three years ago... hired!

Somebody had hired them! So simple, yet in three years he hadn’t thought of it. Easier to find him than the hitters, because he wasn’t anonymous. Had to have a connection with Grimes...

Also, had to be tied into organized crime. The Mob. Mr. Average Joe, no matter how pissed off, didn’t know anyone could blow up a boat and make it look like an accident even to the experts. Didn’t know shotgunners for hire who...

Then he realized why he had come to Vegas. The mob still ran it, no matter how many layers of cotton candy you laid over them. The old men who played golf, the young men who protected them with watchful, venal eyes. Just because he was there recuperating, for the past year Dain had been studying them. He’d learned the players, the rules, without knowing it. Had watched the watchers without being watched himself, because he hadn’t known he was watching.