Lie Still (47 page)

Self-defense is still such a romantic notion, isn’t it?”

“They would never believe you.”

“Oh, don’t forget, I am ‘highly credible.’ ”

My skin burned.

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355

“We’re going for a drive,” she said. “Your car.” She waved the gun at the door.

I rose slowly and put both hands in my jacket pockets.

The right came immediately to my ring of keys. The left found a long cylindrical thing I first took to be a pen. I almost pulled it out to check, but felt a flange in the middle and my brain turned over and fired up. It was a syringe full of succinylcholine.

With my hands still inside the pockets, I shook the right for her to hear the jangling keys. With the left I made a similar movement, feigning a child’s insistence on doing something with both hands, turning the syringe around to an angle from which I could work the cap off the needle. I was working with only my two fingers and a thumbnail in the tightly confined arena of my pocket. The cap was agoniz-ingly secure.

“Walk slowly,” she said.

As soon as I was five feet out of her condominium, she said, “Stop.” I turned back over my shoulder. She was locking her door. I stood still.

She got right up behind me. I waited. Just as I was envisioning the angle of her gun in my back, I felt the hard prod in my lower ribs. It pushed me forward. I had milliseconds to decide: I could have turned and fought there but with the cap still on the syringe I was unarmed. I hesitated and the moment was lost.

“Go,” she said. I started forward and lost contact with her pistol. “Hands out of your pockets.” I slid my right hand out slowly, still jangling the keys. In the left pocket the cap popped free of the needle.

“Both hands.” I slowly withdrew my left hand, empty.

“Keep your hands free.” She stayed several feet behind me.

“Where are you parked?” she said.

“The usual visitor space.” I took slow steps, visualizing the bare needle a few thin layers of clothing away from my flank.

Once moving, I had lost sight of her. I could hear her behind me but could not have anticipated accurately her position.

We wound down a curving sidewalk and out to the open 356

DAVID FARRIS

lot. Once to the driver’s door of my car, I stopped, put my left hand in my jacket pocket, grasped the syringe, and waited for the feel of the gun in my back. It never came.

“Unlock it and open it,” she said. I did it. “Now go around and open the other side.” I did that also. She was standing about ten feet behind the car.

“Now go around again. Quietly.” I did so.

At that hour of the evening there were only scattered cars in the lot and none around mine. No cover. We were indeed alone together.

Certainly I felt stupid for having walked up to a trapped animal and asked her if she cared to bite my head off, but I felt the fearlessness, I thought, of a man with absolutely nothing in his life to lose.

She went slowly to the passenger side, all the while pointing the pistol, it seemed to me, quite accurately at my heart.

When she was at the rear window she laid both hands on the car roof, leveling the gun at my head. “Get in slowly.”

As I slowly ducked down she slid back from the car. As soon as my head dropped below the level of the roof, she darted back away from the car slightly, ducked down, and by the time I could turn to see her through the open door she was staring down the black barrel at me again.

“Well done,” I said.

“Fuck you,” she said. “Start the car. Slowly,” she hissed.

She slid into her seat beside me.

“Drive,” she said. The gun in her right hand, braced against her lower chest, was pointing up just enough to prescribe a missile trajectory that would, barring divine intervention, pass through my right lung and the main branches of my right pulmonary artery, probably clip both upper chambers of my heart, and just might cream my descending aorta on the other side. I thought,
What a perfect time for her
to figure out some three-dimensional anatomy.

As I started the car I looked down at my left jacket pocket.

It was gapping open just enough for me to see the tip of the plunger of the syringe lying there. Teasingly.
Deus ex
machina, deus ex syrinx.
Out of reach and probably, when I LIE STILL

357

envisioned the possible angle of attack, useless. A lunge to my right to push away the gun would lack leverage and probably accomplish nothing beyond adding my hand to the list of perforated body parts.

“Where to?” I croaked.

“Get on the Superstition. Then the highway up to Globe.”

I drove. She watched me, she watched the road, she sometimes stared at the gun.

“Where’d you get the gun?” I asked.

“Shut up.”

I waited several minutes, then reached down with my left hand to the side of the seat to adjust the seat back.

“Both hands on the wheel,” she snapped loudly.

“I need to adjust the seat,” I said. “I’m not exactly relaxed.”

She leaned over and watched my hand. I slowly moved it around until I found the lever, then slid the seat up two notches. I put my hand back up on the wheel. She straightened up. I waited a minute, then reached down again, slowly, and under her stare moved the seat back down one notch.

She looked up at a big green freeway sign zipping overhead.

“Get over to the exit lane,” she said.

“Haven’t we been down this road before?” I asked. She said nothing. “Going to your friend’s cabin?”

“Yes.”

“Where Robin is waiting for us?”

“You’ll never see her again.”

“You don’t know any Robin but you’re pretty sure I will never see her again.”

“Absolutely certain of it.”

I looked at the black pistol, quivering only slightly with the vibration of the car at freeway speed. “What happened to Robin?”

“Robin has left the state. Safely.”

“Well, I am glad for that. We were lovers, you know.”

“Ha. You’ve always been such a terrible liar.”

“Why? Didn’t you hear?”

“I heard something about ‘taking a specimen.’ She got all 358

DAVID FARRIS

panicky and wanted to see just how suspicious you were and got you drunk. Sucked you off and spit it onto the sheets. It wasn’t part of the plan, but I think she made her weakness work for us. A little piece of you left at the scene of the crime.”

I gave a slight nod. “Seems your new protégé is a better liar than I am,” I said.

She glared at me.

“She fucked me,” I said, stupidly proud.

She made her eyes slits and tightened both hands on the pistol grip. “You’re living in lies,” she said, the gun twitching slightly.

I took deep, slow breaths and watched the road. I thought,
Here, the truth might get you killed.
Better to back off that topic. I said, “What crime are you talking about?”

“Didn’t you say you’d been questioned by homicide detectives? Why did you think they were interested in you?”

“You set this up to look like a murder.”

“Let’s see: Your girlfriend—at least there’s your semen on her sheets—disappears shortly after you’ve been overheard making threatening comments and yelling at her at work.

And then there’s that blood in her house.”

“But my cut wasn’t bleeding. Didn’t spill a drop.”

“You’re hilarious. A nurse can always get a couple tubes of blood. Throw it around, then wipe it up till it looks clean.

It leaves plenty of traces. The police know how to find every invisible little corpuscle.”

I bit my lips.

She went on: “I think my favorite part of the whole thing, though, was how easy it was to have Robin report what a bad doctor you are. Out of certain ‘ethical compulsions.’ A good nurse is like that.” My skin burned again. She said, “Your plot against me has cost me a year without a promotion. My tenure is on hold. If it doesn’t come through I’m as good as done with my career. And my career is what I have . . . left.”

I thought,
Another topic to get me shot.

“And where is Robin now?” I said. “Surely you didn’t kill her.”

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359

“No. I didn’t kill her.”

“She’s back in California?”

“Yes. Sure. California. If it’s not Florida it must be California. Pick a state, Malcolm. She’s safely there. You’ll never see her again. She’s gone forever.”

“Then why am I going to your cabin?”

After a mile of silence she said, “A lonely desert cabin is the perfect place for a desperate man to choose for his suicide.”

That was frighteningly true. My exoskeleton of calm was melting away. I had nothing to lose but my life, and the emotional component of seeing it pass away was beginning to well up. I fought to remain rational, to have the self-control not to cry or beg.

I needed to keep her talking. It would be good for both of us to be distracted. “Why would I kill myself?”

“Oh, Malcolm. You have so many reasons to hate your life.”

She was alternately watching me and the road. We were ascending the plateau east of Phoenix, revisiting the bullet-riddled cacti and the bastard cotton farms, seeking the clean air and haunted dreams just this side of Globe. My left hand had edged down on the steering wheel. Mimi did not react.

“Like what?”

“Your botched career. Your joke of a love life. Your botched asthma case. Lying there dying in the ICU.”

I thought,
It’s your case dying,
but kept it to myself. “How am I going to kill myself?”

“Actually you can have a choice. You can shoot up all the Demerol I have—and it’s more than enough to put you out for good—or I will shoot you in the face from close range, then wrap your hand around the gun, then drop it. I recommend the first. It will be much more pleasant for both of us.”

“So you took all that Demerol from the ICU.”

“No, Malcolm, I just wrote a prescription. Much simpler.”

“You have given this some thought, haven’t you?”

“Just like I always told you, one needs contingency plans.”

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DAVID FARRIS

It was silent until she said, “Slow down.” We passed a green highway sign. “Take the road to the right.”

As we ground along the gravel toward the rutted trail, I said, “And won’t the police think it odd that there is no vehicle outside the cabin? When the body is found? And the two sets of footprints . . .”

“Maybe you weren’t paying attention when you were here before, but the wind in that canyon keeps all the sand and dust moving just about day and night. There won’t be any footprints by the time the sun comes up.”

“Am I going to write a suicide note?”

“Maybe. I’ll think about it.”

I began trying to think of ways to slip secret messages into a suicide note, but even if I could come up with some dandies they would not help me stay alive.

I slid my hand slowly off the steering wheel and into my lap.

She made no response. “Actually my love life is wonderful.”

“Just give up even trying to lie,” she said. I began to edge my hand toward the pocket of my jacket, but she remembered her rules: “Both hands on the wheel,” she spat.

I obeyed without thinking, gripping the wheel intently, wondering if I could hold up. I needed to keep talking.

“Why are you so protective of Robin?” I asked.

“Watch the road and keep your hands high on the wheel.”

“Why did Robin do it for you?”

She stared ahead.

Three miles of scrubby oaks and pines passed by as a procession of lost souls in the light of the moon.

Mimi seemed pensive, but then turned and glared at me.

“She was willing to help me. You don’t need to know anything more.”

“Help you. By killing a boy.”

“That was never the plan. You were right about that.

When I told her my lover had turned on me, was out to destroy my career, destroy everything I’d ever been, ever wanted in the world, she wanted to hurt you. She would have killed you at first. I told her it would be sufficient to get you banished from medicine. Murderers we’re not.”

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“Yet.”

“I told you: contingency planning.”

The full moon glowed high overhead. The sky at the hori -

zon above us was a shimmering electric purple. By itself it might have seemed black, but the rim of the canyon was far darker. Even the darkness of night is relative.

“As for the car,” she said, “it’s only a five-mile walk to Globe. I’ve done it before. Any Boy Scout could do it in the dark. I’m sure a brain surgeon can handle it. Though I may drive out tonight and take a few days to get the car back here. I’ll have weeks. Nobody will find your shriveled remains for months.”

“Robin?”

“What?”

“You’ll get Robin to drive the other car? It would be eas -

ier with a ride. And who else could you trust?”

“You’re not listening. Robin is a long way from here and will never be back.”

We bounced down the trail, wound around the final switchback, and rolled slowly through the cottonwoods. I pulled up to the cabin.

I switched off the ignition.

I set the brake.

I said, “I can’t believe you would kill me over this.”

“I don’t have a choice. You want to tell the police I’m re -

sponsible for that boy in the ICU. Of course you could prove nothing, but even the investigation would be damaging. You brought this on yourself.”

“You killed a boy to get me disgraced.”

“You said he’s not dead.”

“No. Worse.”

She sat silently, boring through me with a cold stare. Fi -

nally she said slowly, very quietly, “You. You were my lover.

I took you into my life. I trusted you. With everything I knew about myself. You turned it against me.”

I slowly straightened. “No, I did not. I tried to help you. You were hurting patients. People who could not know any better.” Her face was hardening in front of me.

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DAVID FARRIS

“I tried to get you to get help. You wouldn’t even talk about it.”

“Get out.”

I said, “You could still—”

“Get out!” she screamed.