Beat the Reaper Read online

  Dr. Friendly dries his hands on a blue towel, then does the little dance where you plunge your arms into the paper gown the scrub nurse holds out, then into the gloves, and then you tear the cardboard card off the front of your gown (touching only the blue half) and hand it to the circulating nurse, who holds it while you spin around once, so that the belt of your gown tears loose and you can tie it. Friendly does his best to look bored during this, but I don’t buy it. It probably never gets old.

  “I’ll take chain,” he announces. The instruments nurse opens a pair of chain-mail gloves and drops them onto the scrub nurse’s large blue table, where Friendly picks them up himself and puts them on over his rubber ones.

  He clanks his fingertips together. “Now another pair of Dermagels.” He winks at me. “HIV risk. The patient was wearing a pinkie ring. And in my book, gay gets you the chain mail.”

  The scrub nurse, a small Filipino man, rolls his eyes.

  “Oh, what?” Friendly says. “You’re offended? I can’t say the word ‘gay’? Worry about that on your own time. Let’s work.” To the circulating nurse he says, “Music, please, Constance.”

  The circulating nurse goes over to the boom box on one of the carts, and shortly afterwards that U2 song comes on about how Martin Luther King was shot in the early morning of April fourth. Martin Luther King was shot in the evening, even if you’re on Dublin time, but the U2 greatest-hits album is something you learn to live with in medicine. Every white surgeon over forty plays it. You learn to be grateful it’s not Coldplay.

  The scrub nurse and I unfold a blue paper sheet over Squillante and tear out the section above his abdomen. Then we drop a square of iodine-perfused polymer onto the revealed skin. It fuses to Squillante’s wrinkles.

  Friendly, meanwhile, wanders around with a stapler, stapling the paper sheet to Squillante’s skin. Stapling is pretty shocking the first time you see it. But the damage it does is minor compared to the damage from the surgery, and the old-schoolers swear by it. So people who want to act like the old-schoolers swear by it too.

  As Friendly’s finishing up, my other med student comes into the room and whispers “The LD50 of defenestration is five stories, sir.”

  To review, “LD” is “lethal dose,” and the LD50 is the lethal dose for 50 percent of people. Defenestration is being thrown out a window. So the student is telling me that if you throw a hundred people out a fifth-floor window, half of them will live.

  “Jesus fuck,” I say. I threw Skinflick out a sixth-story window. What does that make the odds?

  And why can’t I catch a break? “What’s the usual cause of death?” I say.

  “Aortic rupture,” the med student says.

  “Okay.” The aorta, our largest artery, is essentially a long thin balloon, like the ones pedophiles twist into the shapes of animals.* Since it’s filled with blood, it makes sense that it would burst on impact. “What’s next?” I say.

  “Head injury, then bleed-out from organ laceration,” the med student says.

  “Good work,” I say.

  My mouth fills up with bile as I think about it. Although my mouth has been filling with bile regularly since I ate my last four Moxfanes half an hour ago. At least I’m alert.

  “Labs from the needle stick aren’t back yet, sir,” the med student says.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I say. True, my forearm is throbbing, but Assman’s sample has probably long since been thrown out. If it ever got sent in the first place. Too many people’s workday would be lengthened by five minutes if it survived.

  “Let’s do this,” Friendly says. He kicks a metal step stool into place on Squillante’s right and gets on it. The scrubbed-in med student kicks a stool into place farther down. I go to Squillante’s left side. The instruments nurse is already on a stool by the head, with his trays in place on their various booms.

  “Okay, everybody,” Friendly says. “The patient is PMS. I know we’d all like to treat him specially because of that, like he’s a cop and we work at a drive-through. But we don’t work at a drive-through. So let’s be professionals.”

  “What do you mean by ‘PMS?’” my med student asks.

  “Post–Malpractice Suit,” Friendly says. “Settled a claim nine years ago.”*

  I’m thankful my student asked, since I didn’t know what Friendly was talking about either. But I’m distracted. The Moxfane has just given me the weirdest feeling. Like I just lost consciousness, but only for a thousandth of a second.

  “Signor?” Friendly says.

  I shake the sensation off.

  “Pen,” I say.

  An instant later there’s a pen with the cap off in my hand. I’m not sure if the scrub nurse just uncapped it and handed it to the instruments nurse incredibly quickly, or whether I blacked out again for a moment. Either way, it’s creepy.

  I stare down at Squillante’s abdomen. I’m assuming the incision is going to be vertical, since the only times I’ve seen transverse incisions on an abdomen have been in C-sections. I just have no idea how long the incision’s supposed to be, or where it’s supposed to start.

  So I wave the pen slowly through the air above Squillante’s midline, like I’m trying to make up my mind, until Friendly finally says, “Right there is fine. Go, already.” Then I draw a line from that spot, which is just below the ribs, to Squillante’s pubic bone. I curve around the navel, since that’s basically impossible to repair if you slice it.

  I hand the pen back to the instruments nurse and say “Knife.”

  16

  On the day Skinflick and I hit the Farm, I had the grocery kid pick me up at a gas station about ten miles north of there at two thirty in the afternoon. I got there at six in the morning to look for cops. When the kid arrived and stood by the payphone to wait for the call I’d told him was coming, I came up behind him and dropped my left elbow over his chest. Took hold of his chin. He went stiff.

  “You’re fine,” I said. “Just relax. But don’t turn around, and don’t look at me. This is going exactly as it was supposed to.”

  “Yes sir,” the kid said.

  “I’m letting go of you now. Let’s walk to the truck.”

  When we got to it, I was still just behind him. I said, “Keep the window down and set the odometer. Let me know when it’s at almost six miles.” Then I swung up into the bed and sat with my back to the glass and my feet against the boxes of groceries. I was wearing a “U MASS” baseball hat, a sweatshirt with the hood up, and a full-length cashmere overcoat. The idea was to look like a frat asshole and be impossible to identify.

  When we turned onto a dirt road and the kid called out that we were almost at the six-mile mark, I told him to slow the truck down, and Skinflick came out of the trees ahead of us. Skinflick was dressed like I was, but he didn’t look like a frat asshole. He looked like a Jawa. He had covered up our stolen car pretty well, though, off in the brush by the side of the road.

  I gave him a hand up into the truck, and we tucked into the left side of the bed, because we knew the security camera was going to be on the left. The road got progressively rougher. Skinflick’s body next to mine felt like a cashmere-covered duffel bag.

  We reached the gate. You could hear the hum of the electrified fence. After a while a man’s voice said, “Yeah, who’s that?” through a loudspeaker. The voice had that nasal George Bush fake-cracker accent that resentful white men all over America now use.

  The driver said, “It’s Mike. From Cost-Barn.”

  “Lean out so’s I can see you.”

  I guess Mike leaned out. An electric motor started, and the gate rolled noisily aside. When we drove through, I could see that the fence had rails of barbed wire, slanted inward.

  The truck banged and fishtailed uphill for a while, then stopped. The kid came around and opened the fantail, doing his best not to look at us as he lifted out a box that had a bunch of large cans of food and bottles of detergent in it. He looked nervous, but not so nervous I was worried he would fuc
k up.

  The second he was out of sight I slid out the back of the truck to the ground, and Skinflick came down after me.

  The face of the house was done in brown overlapping planks, like it was shingled. Four windows in front, one on either side of the doorway, and another two up top. To our left you could just see the green fiberglass shack at the side of the house that Locano’s plumbers had run the pipes into. The back of the truck was angled toward it to give us another couple feet of cover.

  When the driver pushed the doorbell, I ran for the front of the house, putting my back against the wall beneath the corner window. Skinflick landed hard beside me just as the door opened up. I put a finger to my lips in annoyance, and he gave me an apologetic thumbs-up. When the kid disappeared inside, we dashed around the corner.

  This was the part we knew would be bad. The side of the house had the same two-up, two-down window setup as the front, though the rear ground-floor window was covered by the shack. The entrance to the shack, meanwhile, faced the back yard. To go around to it we’d have to make ourselves visible from at least two windows and the back yard.

  So instead we ran in a crouch along the side of the house. The feeling of being watched was intense, but I’d warned Skinflick not to look up or back. I already knew by then that people can see almost anything and convince themselves they didn’t, but that human faces tend to be undeniable. Half your visual cortex lights up when you see one. So we didn’t raise our faces, and we reached the shack not knowing whether we’d been spotted or not. I held two sheets of the fiberglass back wall apart just long enough for us to slip through.

  Inside the shed everything looked green, because the ceiling was the same translucent fiberglass as the walls. The doorway facing the back yard was just a cutout with a blue tarp hung over it from the outside. As promised, the wall shared with the house had a low spigot coming out of it. There was a steel bucket with a hose and a nozzle gun, and a drain in the muddy ground.

  I went and looked out through the tarp door. The back yard was about three hundred yards deep before it hit the barbed-wire fence. There were some picnic tables and a cement barbecue pit. I could just see the edge of another fiberglass hut. I wondered if that was the one the dead girl had been found in.

  I tried not to wonder whether the dead girl had really existed, or whether she had, just somewhere else. The job was blind. I’d known that coming in, and there was no point to opening my eyes now. The best I could hope for was that some evidence showed up before the killing began.

  The fantail of the truck slammed, and as the engine started we could hear a man’s voice speaking to the delivery kid in a tone that was casual enough for us to assume we hadn’t been seen.

  That meant the dangerous part was probably over. Now the boring part—the twelve hours of waiting before we went through the hole in the wall and started shooting people—was about to begin. I went and sat down by the spigot, on the tails of my new cashmere coat.*

  Skinflick stayed standing, pacing the walls, and after a while I started to feel a bit embarrassed. Like I had some office job that sounded glamorous but really wasn’t, and now my kid had come to visit and I had to show him how Daddy waits all day and night in the mud and then sneaks into people’s houses to shoot them in the head.

  Then I started thinking about how it was that my life had turned out like this.

  How there’d been a time when I used to read books, and had a pet squirrel.

  “Pietro,” Skinflick whispered, jolting me. “I gotta take a piss.”

  This was not entirely unexpected on a twelve-hour layover. But we’d only been there for five minutes.

  “You couldn’t have pissed in the woods?” I said.

  “I did piss in the woods.”

  “So go,” I said.

  Skinflick went over to the corner and unzipped. When the urine hit it, the fiberglass rattled like a steel drum. Skinflick stopped pissing.

  He looked around. Let loose a few experimental drops into the mud just short of the wall. They made a splatting sound, and he stopped again. He started to look desperate.

  “Get down low,” I whispered.

  Skinflick tried various crouches and kneelings, and ultimately lay on his side in the mud, pissing toward the wall in a fanning motion.

  It worried me. Skinflick was as immune to shame as anyone I knew, but even he had his limits. And the journey from shame to resentment is the shortest one there is.

  But as Skinflick shook his dick, he just said, “Fuck. I hope the FBI can’t DNA-test for urine.”*

  A moment later he said, “Holy shit. Look.”

  I went over and looked. They were almost invisible in the greenish gloom, but there were footprints all over the mud floor. All over—even where I’d been sitting.

  Adolescent-girl-sized footprints. From many different feet.

  It wasn’t evidence, but at least it was creepy.

  Then the front door opened, and a teenage boy’s voice yelled, “Dad—I’m letting the dogs back out!”

  Given the slowness with which some things reveal themselves, it’s amazing how fast other things become clear. Like how, if someone has dogs but has to keep them inside when a plumber or the grocery guy is there, then those must be some pretty bad-assed dogs.

  The feeling of surrealism, and passiveness, and fogged stupidity, lifted from me instantly. I had placed myself here. Now I had to survive.

  I pulled my gun out of one pocket and my silencer out of the other, and heard loping sounds as I screwed them together. Two enormous, Doberman-shaped shadows appeared on the fiberglass wall.

  I later found out they were something called “King Dobermans,” which you get by crossing a Doberman with a Great Dane, then backcrossing it until all that’s left of the Great Dane is the size. “Fuck,” I said at the time.

  Like all sane people, I love dogs. A dog is a hell of a lot harder to make vicious than a human. And it was clear we’d have to kill them.

  The dogs started sniffing along the base of the wall that Skinflick had just pissed against. Then one of them started to push against the fiberglass, and the other stood back and started to growl.

  The front door of the house slammed. That meant that either whoever slammed it was now outside, and should be taken out as fast as possible, or else was inside, and maybe wouldn’t hear what was about to happen.

  Either way, it was time to do something.

  The dog that was standing back woofed. Prelude to a bark. I shot it twice in the head through the wall, flipping it backwards, then shot the nearer one twice in the chest. It went down squealing.

  I quickly switched magazines, listening. The shots had been silenced, but all four of them had made a loud impact noise going through the fiberglass, and the walls of the shack were still rattling. The bullet holes had frayed edges, like cloth.

  The front door of the house opened up again.

  The same teenage-boy voice said, “Ebay? Xena?”

  I started toward the tarp-covered doorway at the back of the shack.

  “Ebay!” the voice screamed, much closer.

  “I’ve got this one,” Skinflick said.

  “No!” I hissed.

  But Skinflick was already running toward the wall of the shack, with his gun in his hand.

  “No!” I shouted.

  It was action movie bullshit. Skinflick jumped, and hit the back wall of the shack high with one shoulder, parting two sheets of fiberglass outward far enough for him to see, and shoot, through the V-shaped gap. Then the wall recoiled, flinging him back into the middle of the shack.

  In a movie, though, he wouldn’t have missed. Or forgotten to put his silencer on.

  The gunshot sounded like a car crash. If you’re in the trunk. It rang in my ears as I swung through the tarp-covered doorway and around to the front of the shack, almost slipping in dog blood, just in time to see the door to the house slam shut.

  “Did I get him?” Skinflick said, as he came up behind me.

&
nbsp; “I don’t think so,” I said. “He’s back in the house.”

  “Oh, shit. What should we do?”

  Like his fucking us like this was something I had planned for.

  “Get moving,” I said.

  And not into the back yard, either. With the exception of their drywalling, these guys knew their house a lot better than we ever would.

  I ran back into the shack. Kicked in the wall around the spigot and stomped the painted cardboard to the ground.

  The opening it left was ridiculously small. Eighteen inches diagonally, maybe. And that was after I bent the spigot out of the way.

  I could barely compress my shoulders enough to squeeze, head first, into the hole. And when I did, I blocked out all the light. I grabbed onto some pipes in the darkness and used them to pull myself into the mold smell.

  My face knocked over a bunch of half-filled plastic bottles, and the smell turned to chlorine and dish soap. I almost laughed. Then I pushed open the cabinet door and squirmed out from beneath the kitchen sink.

  The light was blinding. There was a wide stove on one side of me and a butcher’s block on the other. I got to my feet quickly.

  The butcher’s block was no yuppie accessory: it was gore-stained and had a giant meat grinder screwed to one end. Also, there were two women standing on the other side of it, staring at me.

  One was about fifty, the other maybe half that age. Both of them had that look you get after every bone in your face has been broken at least once and then allowed to set without medical attention. Though the older one’s was worse.

  They were armed, sort of. The older one held out a carving knife two-handed, and the younger one had a raised heavy iron grate from one of the stove burners. Both women looked terrified.

  I kept my gun on the women and helped Skinflick to his feet as he came through the crawlway. “Careful,” I said to him. “We’ve got two bystanders. Don’t shoot them.”

  When Skinflick saw them he swung his own gun up. “Bystanders?” he said. “One of them’s got a knife!”