The Euthanist (3 page)

“Are you sure you want this?”

He nodded, maybe too eagerly. “Badly.”

“I can give you a sedative if you want.”

“I don’t want more needles.”

I shook an orange pill bottle from my satchel. “Diazepam. Valium. It can take the edge off.”

His eyes danced around the room while he considered it. “How long?”

“You’d feel it in under a half hour.”

“How long after you stick me?”

“After I give you the first injection, you should fall asleep in under a minute.”

“Stick with plan A.” I stroked his arm. An invisible layer of semidry sweat had greased his skin. He tried to smile, but his mouth just twitched. He ran his tongue between his lips and teeth to try and moisten his mouth.

I readied the needle at his arm and tried to find a vein. He was dehydrated, so I had to tap a few times. “Do you want to close your eyes for the pinch?”

“Give me one more moment,” he implored.

“All the time you want.”

“I’d like to pray.” Leland had never brought up religion, and this wasn’t my area of expertise, but other clients had asked. He held my hand to his chest, and his ribs quaked with a violent heartbeat. “Pray with me.”

“Of course.”

We closed our eyes.

Lost in a meditative moment, I almost ignored the sensation of something hard brushing against my wrist. Hard, like a bracelet. Cold metal pressed into my skin, first lightly and then sharply. Then I heard the click. Eyes open, I saw a gleam of silver steel clasp around my right wrist. A chrome chain draped from the cuff in a wide arc to a thick teak bedpost topped with a carved pinecone. Leland Mumm had chained my arm to the bed frame.

When he spoke, his voice was clear and resonant. “Kali, I’m with the police.”

Trigger temper.
I latched onto Leland’s neck with one hand. My volatile impulses set loose, I tried to crush his windpipe. I’d never attempted to hurt someone like this, but I dug my knuckles deep into his neck. To protect himself, he hunched his shoulders and stiffened his tendons into wires. His muscles flexed with a shocking power. This man was suddenly vital and dangerous. Leaning over him, I bore my weight down on his body. When my thumb wormed into the ribbed hose of his trachea, he gagged. His hands clawed at my arms, but in my furious blackout I kept my arms stiff as dowels. My palm clamped down over his arteries, and the way his eyelids flickered, I could tell he was losing oxygen fast. A few more seconds, he might have blacked out. I might have killed him.

Something fast flew into my face, like a kamikaze bird smacking a window. His fist hammered my left cheekbone, and my head snapped to the side. The impact shook me loose. My fingers lost their grip. Slackening with the force of the punch, I slid off the mattress. When my skull struck the floor, needles burst through my brain before the pitch darkness enveloped me.

Chapter 2

“You went rabid on me,” he said, delighting in my ridicule. There were no ellipses between the words now.

Leland only had a few seconds after he knocked me down, but he made use of them. He flopped me onto the bed and kicked my leather satchel across the room. Then he patted me down for weapons, even though the most dangerous thing on me was the syringe. He rolled that across the floor too.

Our positions reversed: I lay on the death-stink covers, tethered like a sacrificial goat. The mattress was still warm from his body heat. Leland was on his feet, looking down at me.
Miracle recovery.
His locomotive pajamas sagged at the crotch.

With my left arm pulled across my body, I yanked the chrome chain taut with the hope that it might decapitate the carved pinecone atop the bedpost. Leland kept his distance, which was a smart move. As soon as my head cleared, I kicked like crazy. When I couldn’t reach him with my boots, I grabbed what I could with my free hand and chucked it at him, including his coffee-stained copy of
The Peaceful End
. The green plastic book clip fell out and into the covers, and the book only flapped a few feet. Envelopes whirled like Frisbees, but few hit him, and nothing hurt him.

Leland gave me the same smirk as when he’d ask, “When are you going to tell me your real name?” But he’d mutated into a different man, fast and formidable.

A residual ache swelled under my left eye, and Leland appeared blurry as he hovered over me. I savagely tore at my handcuffs. As a firefighter, I should have known this wouldn’t have gotten me anywhere, but the pain and panic prevented rational thought.

It’s not that I’d never been punched. On plenty of calls, an addict half out of her senses could crazy it up and clobber me when I didn’t expect it. It wasn’t ever pleasant, but the shock of being punched was worse than the pain itself. Years of sparring taught me how to take a shot, and how to hit back. Leland Mumm hit hard, but he wasn’t Wladimir Klitschko. Just a tad stronger than my stepdad. He’d caught me off guard and landed a lucky blow. If I’d been ready for it, he wouldn’t have pushed me off my feet.

He seemed to marvel at my flushed face and gurgle of obscenities. The past several moments had changed me too. My legs thrashed whip-wild, and my growls and swears sounded feral.

The chain held. After a few minutes, my wrist burned and my lungs heaved. My skin pinked around a thread of crimson where the cuff sliced a faint incision line. I wasn’t about to break the bed frame. Not teak. The wood was too dense to crack the bedpost and too heavy for me to upturn the whole thing and whack apart the joints.

I split my attention between my shackles and Leland. I was still finding new pain from the punch, shooting down through my jaw now, and found it impossible to concentrate on any singular thing. I stared at Leland’s face above me, trying to focus on the tip of his nose with my foggy eye. Leland seemed taller now, or maybe that illusion was created from him on his feet and me on the mattress. When he sneered, all those healthy teeth reminded me what a goddamned sucker I’d been. I should have known something was up when I saw those pearlies. What I wouldn’t have given to chip a few with a boot heel.

“Who are you?” I ran a finger over the handcuff keyhole, as good as spinning a safe dial without the combination.

I kept expecting Leland to climb on top of me, but he hadn’t moved since he shackled me. “I told you. Cop,” he said with no frailty in his voice.

“No, you’re not. No fucking cop would chain me to a bed. Punch me in the face.”

“Sorry you think that. Because that’s exactly what a cop would do.”

Blood warmed the plumping welt under my eye. Where the cheek split, a trickle ran down my face and tickled the skin over where it hurt. “Fucker—I’m bleeding!”

“Believe what you want, but you’re good and busted.”

“Bullshit. What about Miranda?”

“Keep your mouth shut if you want. Call a lawyer when you can. That about cover it?”

I rattled my handcuffs, but if I fought anymore, I was going to spring a vein. Instead, I looked for weapons. I’d thrown all the loose stuff at Leland, leaving nothing on the nightstand. Pivoting off the mattress and stretching as far as the chain would allow, I stood on the floor and mule-kicked the nightstand at him. The flimsy table was light enough to sail at him, but he sidestepped it like fucking Fred Astaire. When it splintered on the wall behind him, he seemed amused. I went back to fidgeting with the lock, desperate enough to try working my pinky nail into the keyhole.

“It’s not going to work,” he said.

Handcuffs were easy. All I needed was a paper clip to spring it. But I didn’t have a paper clip. As Leland predicted, my pinky nail didn’t fit. All my tools were in my cowhide satchel, and that satchel sat by Leland’s ankle. Frustrated, I grasped the chain with both hands and tug-o-warred with the bedpost, but only succeeded in tearing the skin on my palms.

“You’re not going to pull the chain apart. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

The friction of steel against flesh dug down to the bone, and that hairline incision in my wrist began leaking rivulets of blood. The pain was enough for me to give it a rest.

The loss of control overwhelmed me. I couldn’t control my own body, not with my heart shuddering and my lungs on fire. I couldn’t remember breathing this hard, not even during the physical aptitude test for the fire department, and for that I had to sprint up and down six flights of stairs with fifty pounds of gear. Worse yet, I couldn’t control the man in the room. Leland was out of my reach and unpredictable. If I expected him to zig, he might zag.

He spoke like a toastmaster. “We’re going to have a long talk, but there’s something I’ve really got to do first.” He unbuttoned his flannel pajama top, button by yellow button. When I saw his bare stomach, I wrenched the chain again until the pain shooting up my arm made my shoulder spasm.

He bunched the flannel and absently tossed it against the wall. I didn’t want to look at him, but I felt like I needed to monitor Leland in case he came at me. I imagined him on top of me, his hot mothball breath steaming up my nostrils. The baggy clothes had hidden his musculature. Leland Mumm was thin but tight, a welterweight.
Sneaky mofo
.

“Kali. You killed nine people.” Again, it was twenty-seven. He’d counted wrong. “Did you expect this would have a happy ending?”

I writhed against my clasp. Smears of my blood rouged the sheets.

“Jesus Christ, calm down!” In the same breath, he pulled his pajama bottoms over his hips, and they dropped to his ankles. “You can’t imagine how good it feels to take these off.” He wore stained white briefs. In a moment he’d be naked. “I’m sorry to be so open about this, but we’re on intimate terms by now, aren’t we?” I dry heaved. He snapped. “For Christ’s sake, get a hold of yourself. It’s going to be a long day for you.”

I waited for him to charge at me. My mind raced, fishing for defensive options. He was naked, I reminded myself, and I was clothed. I could squat 260 pounds. His nuts were right there at the level of the mattress. If he ran straight at me, I might crack his pelvis. I drew my knee to my chest, readying my left leg, the strong one, for a kick.

But Leland turned and walked through the bathroom door.

A few seconds later, the shower ran.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he called through the open door. “I have to get clean. You have no idea what it takes to stink like you’re dying.” His voice sounded like it came through a soup can. “I figured you’d have been around death enough to smell it on people. That means I haven’t showered for a week. I’ll be honest, that was tough. You ever been that long without a shower?”

Now that he was out of the room, I fished around the sheets, in case I could find a stray object under the covers narrow enough to stand in for a paper clip.
Nothing
. The entire house had been staged, and since no one really lived there, no one would have carelessly discarded items during day-to-day routines. Leland had only packed in enough props to make the place believable. I’d knocked a pill bottle off the nightstand. It was close enough that I could snare it with a boot, but when I twisted off the lid, the bottle spilled out breath mints.

He repeated himself. “Kali, have you ever been that long without a shower?” Presumably, he was checking to make sure I hadn’t popped out of my cuffs.

“Yes,” I spat. I felt between the mattresses for a trace of something, maybe a safety pin.
Nothing
.

“You know what the secret is to smelling like death?” He paused for effect. “FlyNap! You ever heard of it?”

This time I didn’t wait for him to ask again. Maybe if I kept our banter going, we’d keep things congenial. “Fuck no.” Maybe not that congenial.

He rinsed out his mouth in the shower cascade and coughed the backwash into the tub. Revolting. When someone is repulsed by the sound of body noises like eating, there’s a name for that.
Misophonia
. Mine flared up listening to the swish of his saliva while he hawked up the shower water.

Soon enough the pipes whined and the water stopped. The curtain ripped back. Leland appeared in the doorway, dripping with a terrycloth towel wrapped around his waist. “FlyNap!” He sounded like a kid excited by something he learned in class. “It’s an anesthetic they use to put drosophila to sleep—fruit flies.”

I positioned myself back on the bed so I could kick easily. “I know what drosophilas are.”

“Of course you do,” he said dismissively. “I guess geneticists use the stuff to put flies to sleep, so they can count out which ones have red eyes, or some nonsense like that. It has the same compounds you find in rotting meat. So after a week of not showering, the added element you’re smelling is a few drops of…”

“FlyNap. I get it.”

“You know what you get? A perfect death cologne. I was worried you couldn’t be fooled, but I’m very happy you were.” He disappeared from the doorway. “You have no idea how bad it was. I mean, you only had to be around that smell for a couple hours tops. I had to live with it for weeks. A few days ago, I had to run a menthol stick under my nose just to get some relief.”

The master of the quick change came out in charcoal slacks and a T-shirt. Over the tee he buttoned up a blue Oxford, like he was getting ready for a business meeting. “You ever heard of Richard Angelo?”