The Killer Is Dying E-Book

James Sallis

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 263

Beschreibung

A hired killer on his final job; a burned-out detective whose wife is dying slowly and in agony; a young boy abandoned by his parents and living alone by his wits. Three people, solitary and disconnected from society. The detective is looking for the killer, Christian, though he doesn't know that. Christian is trying to find the man who stepped in and took down his target before he had the chance. And the boy, Jimmie, is having the killer's dreams. While they never meet, they are inextricably linked, and as their stories unfold, all find the solace of community. In what is at one and the same time a coming-of-age novel, a realistic crime novel and a novel of the contemporary Southwest, The Killer Is Dying is above all the story of three men of vastly different age and background, and of the shape their lives take against the unforgiving sunlight and sprawl of America's fifth largest city, Phoenix. James Sallis is the author of Drive, a hard-boiled crime fiction that has now been made into an award-winning film starring Ryan Gosling:

Leseprobe

A hired killer on his final job; a burned-out detective whose wife is dying slowly and in agony; a young boy abandoned by his parents and living alone by his wits. Three people, solitary and disconnected from society.

The detective is looking for the killer, Christian, though he doesn’t know that. Christian is trying to find the man who stepped in and took down his target before he had the chance. And the boy, Jimmie, is having the killer’s dreams. While they never meet, they are inextricably linked, and as their stories unfold, all find the solace of community.

In what is at one and the same time a coming-of-age novel, a realistic crime novel and a novel of the contemporary Southwest, The Killer Is Dying is above all the story of three men of vastly different age and background, and of the shape their lives take against the unforgiving sunlight and sprawl of America’s fifth largest city, Phoenix.

About the Author

Jim Sallis has published thirteen novels, multiple collections of short stories, essays, and poems, books of musicology, a biography of Chester Himes, and a translation of Raymond Queneau’s novel Saint Glinglin. He has written about books for the L.A. Times, New York Times, and Washington Post, and for some years served as a books columnist for the Boston Globe. In 2007 he received a lifetime achievement award from Bouchercon. In addition to Drive, the six Lew Griffin books are now in development as feature films. Jim teaches novel writing at Phoenix College and plays regularly with his string band, Three-Legged Dog. He stays busy.

SELECTED WORKS BY JAMES SALLIS

Novels Published by No Exit PressThe Long-Legged Fly Moth Black Hornet Eye of the Cricket Bluebottle Ghost of a Flea Death Will Have Your Eyes Cypress Grove Cripple Creek Salt River Drive Driven

Other NovelsRenderings What You Have Left: The Turner Trilogy

StoriesA Few Last Words Limits of the Sensible World Time’s Hammers: Collected Stories A City Equal to my Desire

PoemsSorrow’s Kitchen My Tongue In Other Cheeks: Selected Translations

As EditorAsh of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany Jazz Guitars The Guitar In Jazz

OtherThe Guitar Players Difficult Lives Saint Glinglin by Raymond Queneau (translator) Chester Himes: A Life A James Sallis Reader

Praise for James Sallis

‘Sallis is an unsung genius of crime writing’ – Independent on Sunday

‘James Sallis is a superb writer’ – The Times

‘Sallis’s spare, concrete prose achieves the level of poetry’ – Telegraph

‘[A] master of America noir… Sallis creates vivid images in very few words and his taut, pared down prose is distinctive and powerful’ – Sunday Telegraph

‘James Sallis is doing some of the most interesting and provocative work in the field of private eye fiction… Richly atmospheric and darker than noir’ – Lawrence Block

‘James Sallis - he’s right up there, one of the best of the best… Sallis, also a poet, is capable of smart phrasing and moments of elegiac energy’ – Ian Rankin, Guardian

THE KILLER IS DYING

A Novel

JAMES SALLIS

www.noexit.co.uk

Contents

About the AuthorSELECTED WORKS BY JAMES SALLISPraiseTitle PageDedicationCHAPTER ONECHAPTER TWOCHAPTER THREECHAPTER FOURCHAPTER FIVECHAPTER SIXCHAPTER SEVENCHAPTER EIGHTCHAPTER NINECHAPTER TENCHAPTER ELEVENCHAPTER TWELVECHAPTER THIRTEENCHAPTER FOURTEENCHAPTER FIFTEENCHAPTER SIXTEENCHAPTER SEVENTEENCHAPTER EIGHTEENCHAPTER NINETEENCHAPTER TWENTYCHAPTER TWENTY-ONECHAPTER TWENTY-TWOCHAPTER TWENTY-THREECHAPTER TWENTY-FOURCHAPTER TWENTY-FIVECHAPTER TWENTY-SIXCHAPTER TWENTY-SEVENCHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHTCHAPTER TWENTY-NINECHAPTER THIRTYCHAPTER THIRTY-ONECHAPTER THIRTY-TWOCHAPTER THIRTY-THREECHAPTER THIRTY-FOURCHAPTER THIRTY-FIVECHAPTER THIRTY-SIXCHAPTER THIRTY-SEVENCHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHTCHAPTER THIRTY-NINECHAPTER FORTYBy the Same AuthorORDER THE COMPLETE JAMES SALLIS COLLECTION Copyright

To Karyn, for just about everything

CHAPTER ONE

HE IS AWAKE AGAIN, with no idea what time it may be, or whether, really, he has slept at all. He sleeps poorly these days. Strange, too, how time’s become a blur. At first there’s no reason to know the time of day, then days themselves give way, finally years. Till only the change of seasons marks another passage, another decline. To remember, he has to think back to where he lived, what rented room or cheap apartment in Gary, Gretna, Memphis, Seattle.

There are no streetlights in this part of the city. These are reserved for kinder, gentler regions to the north and east. Here, it is about as dark as dark gets. Light from the billboard across the street, its legend in Spanish and advertising the latest luxury vehicle, enters the room at a slant. It does little more, he thinks, than blur the darkness.

Periodically he lifts one hand, the left, into that light, closes his fingers to a fist and opens them again, watching the play of muscle, tendons, and scars. As the hand opens, it begins to shake. That’s the drugs. The drugs make him shake. But without the drugs he shakes more. The drugs make him stupid, too—and he can’t afford to be stupid.

He hears two people shouting at one another outside, on the balcony the next floor up, from the sound of it.

“It’s my fucking money!”

“And it’s my fucking car!”

Then the rimshot of someone getting slammed against a wall or door.

A radio or TV in the next room drones on as it has for the four days he has been here. It’s tuned to talk shows, words indistinguishable, only the cadence and inflection changing with hosts, callers or guests, commercial announcements. From time to time another voice, that of the room’s occupant, joins in, as though in conversation.

He gets up and, feet swollen, pads to the bathroom. A cockroach that had been drinking from the bowl flows up the side of the sink and vanishes over the edge when the light goes on. With a razorblade he splits one of the pills in half. They stop the shaking, for a time. An hour, two. And while they don’t help the pain, they do cause the world to go soft in interesting ways. Walls curve outward, corners and angles retreat, everything slows. As though transparent panes have gone up between himself and all else.

While there he fills and drinks from the glass that, hating the smell and taste of plastic, he carries with him from place to place. The pills leave him permanently cotton-mouthed.

In T-shirt and boxers, he steps out onto the walkway. The clamor from the balcony above has subsided. He realizes that he had almost forgotten where he is, but now the far-off lights, low buildings, and sprawl of dark sky remind him. Out on the street, past the cracked black asphalt of a parking lot that looks like lava flow, a lowrider cruises by at fifteen miles an hour. It’s a Ford Galaxie from the fifties, tricked out with spinners for caps and painted all over with bright-colored dragons and iridescent, half-naked women. In the distance he hears what have to be gunshots from a large-bore handgun. The shots are clean, distinct, clearly separated. From that direction, within moments, a siren cries, then abruptly cuts off.

There is another sound, though. In the eaves of this low-end, by-the-week motel, in an angled joist just beneath the lip, a pigeon has built its nest, from which one of the nestlings has fallen. Frantic and helpless, the parent looks down, twisting its head and blinking, as the chick tries to get to its feet, flutters stubby wings, and chirps so softly it is barely audible.

He stands watching a long while before he turns and goes inside.

Someone in the next room, or someone on the radio, someone on TV, is weeping.

CHAPTER TWO

IT’S HIS THIRD DAY HERE, and he sees in the waitress’s eyes that she remembers him. For what he is about, this is the best location, but now he’ll have to change.

The man he is watching always arrives within five minutes either side of nine. He parks his year-old Hyundai by one of the skimpy palo verde trees at the rear of the lot. Lunch, he takes at the restaurant half a block away, Home Cooking and DailySpecials painted in block yellow letters on the front window. Periodically his head and shoulders may be seen in one of the second-story windows. He is among neither the first nor the last to leave.

How this man could possibly be of such concern as to bring someone to engage his services, Christian can’t imagine—a nondescript office-dweller at a nondescript accounting firm in a featureless city where everything is dun-colored.

None of that is any concern of his. Interesting, though, that he thinks it.

The client has asked that it be clean, without the possibility of connection, clue, or trace, no indication of professional work, nothing to suggest that it might be anything other than one of the random deaths occurring hourly in cities: drug deals or muggings gone sour, ramped-up lover’s quarrels, gang initiations, drive-bys.

Two tables over, a couple is having what his girlfriend back in college called The Talk. Their voices are quiet, their physical interchanges limited to gestures, eyes, and a gamelike shuffling of objects (spoons, glass bin of sweetener, water glass, coffee cups) on the tabletop, but the substance of their discourse is identical to that on the balcony last evening.

Every human interaction, even the most unremarkable, is an economic exchange, he thinks: each side wants something. And it still amazes him how much anger is in people. You see it always in their eyes, in the pitch of voices kept low, in the way they pass through doors or down hallways. So many of them are like jars, forever filling.

He finishes his coffee, toast, and oatmeal and leaves a small tip, pays at the register where the cashier and the other waitress are talking about “classic” TV shows.

On the street a well-appointed homeless man starts toward him, then, with a closer look at his face, something seen there, turns away. Christian steps after him, reaching for his wallet even as he does, but thinks better of it. Too much already, that the waitress remembers him.

There is a small park up the street, just a clump of trees and a bench at street’s edge, really, but somehow in this strange place it’s even earned a name, Willamette Park, and for two days he’s passed an hour or so there following breakfast. He is of an age that no one thinks it amiss for him to be dawdling unoccupied at nine in the morning; with his open-necked shirt, loose khaki pants, and polyester sports jacket, he could easily be a retiree from any of the dozen apartment complexes set in the interlocking streets back off the thoroughfare here. He has not read a newspaper in years, but carries one.

There are pigeon droppings like tides of dried chalk on the bench, so he removes a section from the paper and sits on that. It’s because they have no sphincters, he thinks. Birds have no sphincters, giraffes have no voice, dogs see only black and white. So little difference, finally, between an adaptive characteristic and a liability. We all make do. We find ways around.

He cannot see as well from here, but the building with the man he is watching, the building with the name Brell set into a fan of bricks above the entryway, remains in his line of sight.

He remembers one of his favorites, the show about cephalopods. Fish were disappearing from tanks in a marine lab. They couldn’t figure out what was going on, all these brilliant scientists. The lab was locked, and no one came in at night. The tanks were covered save for a narrow space at the top. Finally they set up cameras, caught it on film. Each night the octopus had been heaving itself out of its tank, crossing dry countertop, and pushing its body through the impossibly narrow opening to treat itself to a midnight buffet from a neighboring tank.

A bus comes by, one of those segmented doubles that looks like a worm. Space for, what, a hundred people within? With maybe a dozen heads afloat in the windows. Its sides bear banner ads for action movies and portraits of local newscasters with too many teeth. He watches the bus work its cautious way around a corner.

Just off the thoroughfare, on one of the narrow, short streets, a car has been parked since he first arrived. Late-model Buick, blue-gray, no parking decals or other stickers, with a single man inside. Lots of dust, but that doesn’t take long in this dry, brown place, and the vehicle is otherwise clean. Front plates are not required here, and the vehicle faces out. Though he can’t see clearly at this remove, Christian suspects the man is elderly. Light, perhaps silvery hair tops the newspaper he is reading, its color looking close to that of the smoke from his cigars. Likely he’s from one of the apartments, out to get away from his wife, or from the family he lives with, from their interdiction of his smoking.

After an hour, Christian has to relieve himself. Two office buildings nearby have bathrooms on the ground floor. He alternates using them.

All these movies and TV shows with stakeouts, you never hear how the guy has to pee in a Coke bottle. He’d done the Texas catheter thing a couple of times in the past—condom, tube, can—but only under duress. Plan well, stay loose, you don’t often have to resort to such. Soon enough, anyway, for catheters and their like. Not a chance he’d wait around for that. His old man went that way.

Beautiful young women in business clothes sit on the low wall outside the building smoking, and in the lobby a guard patiently explains why a man in a threadbare black suit and pink flip-flops cannot pass out religious brochures here.

Instinctively the watcher lowers his head as he passes beneath the security camera in the corridor leading down to the restrooms. He checks the other booths, enters one near the door, and sits listening to the sounds around him, some from far away, others close by. Thud and shudder of steel doors closing, clang of feet on mesh-metal stairs, voices stripped of mid-range by high ceilings and hallways. All the breaths going in and out, hundreds of them in dozens upon dozens of rooms, and beneath that, the building’s own breath as it pushes through miles of ever smaller ducts.

He looks down at the hand trembling on his bare thigh. He has to pee all the time now. The pills constipate him, despite his tossing back what seems like a gallon of mineral oil a week, and he spends hours on the pot trying, but the pee—the pee never stops.

Toward the end, back when he still lived at home, his father, well along in years (fifty-plus when he was born), would spend afternoons stalking about the front yard, staring at what was left of the city’s curb, at remnants of paint on the side of the house, at abandoned bird’s nests and tree trunks. He had always believed the old man to be thinking. About how his life had gone, maybe, or the meaning of it all. Slowly he came to understand that the old man wasn’t thinking at all, he was searching—looking aimlessly about, with a dull but per sis tent hope, for something he’d never had.

Coming back up the street, Christian sees activity at the entrance to the Brell building. Three police cruisers and a fire truck sit flanking an ambulance with loading doors agape. As he looks on, attendants wheel out a gurney through the reef of onlookers, who part to make room. One of the attendants is Hispanic, with short, short legs and no hips, his upper body huge, rotund, as though the stuff of his body has been forced upward, year after year, by a belt cinched too tightly. The other, an older black man with a soul patch, woolly sideburns, and not much else by way of hair, holds aloft an IV bag. The attendants bend to release and tuck the gurney’s legs as the watcher steps closer.

On the gurney, bloody, patched and pasty white, but still alive, is the man he has been watching.

CHAPTER THREE

WHEN WAYNE PORTER’S THROAT WAS SLIT, he was thinking about the time he and his friend Joe Weidinger played hooky from Sunday school to climb into the church steeple. They had pushed a table underneath a door in the ceiling of an unused room, put a chair on the table, and climbed into a honeycomb of passageways. The steeple, when they got there, like so much in life, was a disappointment. Bare fiberboard on the interior walls, a lot of pigeon shit. And not even a bell, just some electronic gizmo the size of his mom’s kitchen radio.

Interestingly, there was no pain, just the sudden gush of warmth, then a feeling as though his body were floating upward, floating away, before the world went dark around him.

Where the hell did that come from? Jimmie thought as he woke, heart pounding, to realize that he wasn’t breathing. And who was Wayne Porter? His hand had gone instinctively to his throat. He took a breath, looked around. He didn’t usually have dreams, and when he did, they were smoky gray and edgeless, washed-out like old movies, not vivid like this. He could remember every color, every angle and surface, every sound. That sensation of sudden warmth across his chest, eyes opening, the face above him already turning away.

Shadows climbed up window and wall as a car passed slowly by.

He’d never been like other children, afraid of the dark, always expecting the world somehow to move subversively against him. He understood that he was simply another object in it, like a rock or a tree. The world didn’t care that he was there, and most of the people in it would never know, which was exactly what he wanted. What he needed.

Nor was he in any manner frightened by this. But the dream was … interesting.

The book he’d been reading last night lay facedown and open on the floor by his bed. Cities:A Survival Guide. The cover showed a man in safari khaki peering out from a shower curtain upon which were orange, blue, and green representations of oversize tropical flowers and tall buildings. Intrigued by the title and blurb, he’d ordered the book online, as he did almost everything except food. Not what he’d expected at all, but he had kept reading, his interest modified but still piqued. Over the years he’d read many survival texts from alternative-lifestyle and libertarian publishers. This book wasn’t like those, wasn’t a survival guide at all, but a how-to to the ways of the city, how to find the best affordable restaurants, where to buy quality clothing for less, access to health care, employment tips—a user’s manual to a life he could barely imagine and would never be a part of.

In the bathroom he let the water run till warm, then washed his face. A moth beat at the inside of the window, and as he waited, he eased the window open on its latch to let the moth out.

In the kitchen he filled the small saucepan with water and set it on the stove to boil, rinsed one of the mugs and spooned in sugar, grabbed a tea bag from the open box.

In the front room he stood looking out the window at passing cars, then, with the water at boil and tea brewed, sat at the table. He was up, wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep for a while, didn’t feel much like reading. Might as well put the time to good use.

The bills slid all together out of the manila envelope where he kept them in the order they arrived. He turned the stack over and, righting them one by one, began writing checks, duplicating without conscious thought the signature he had worked so long and hard to master. Mortgage, power, gas, water, credit cards. On each invoice he printed check number, date, and amount paid. The third or fourth time he entered the date, something caught within him and he thought: It’s been a year now.

At first he had simply waited, living off what remained in the refrigerator and kitchen cabinets, assuming that someone would show up to question the car being gone, lack of activity around the house, his absence from school. By the time he’d run out of food it was clear that he had somehow slipped through society’s cracks. One day he walked past the laundry basket into which he’d been throwing the mail and realized there were certain things to which he would have to attend. He pulled the bills, long overdue, out of the bundle. In a hall closet he found a box of checks. In the lockbox under the bed he found papers—the deed to the house and insurance papers among them—with his father’s signature. Painstakingly he set about teaching himself to forge the signature—at which point he recalled that it was his mother who had paid the bills, and started over.

For a time, all had gone well. Then a check, the monthly mortgage check, of all things, got returned for insufficient funds. Following initial panic, he’d gone online to the local newspaper’s commercial site and managed to sell his father’s pride and joy, the ’55 cream-over-mint-green Chevy that never left the garage, the last thing he’d have thought his father would leave behind. There was a tense hour or so when the elderly man came to buy it. He told the man that his father, a nurse at the hospital, had been called in unexpectedly to work, and produced a receipt, signed by his father, for the amount agreed upon online. Wasting no time once the man had left, he ran check and deposit slip to the bank’s ATM site at the grocery store six blocks up Central.

He sold a few more things that way, furniture, his mother’s silver dollars, but he knew it was a dead end and that soon enough, one way or another, he was bound to get jammed up. So without preconceptions he took to skulking on eBay, Craigslist, and a dozen or more local Web listings, keeping an eye out, hopscotching back and forth, buying tentatively, selling quickly at low profit. Misfires and grief early on, but then he had it.

Toys.

Every once in a while some other collectable, lunchboxes in particular, but mostly toys. The market was widespread, huge, and absurd. One day he sold a two-level garage and service center made from tin for $1,200. Pickaninny figures and items linked to TV shows from long before he was born routinely brought in hundreds apiece. Someone in the UK paid $326 for a plastic ukulele that, though in perfect condition, looked as though it had been left out in the sun too long and begun melting.

Prices, though, had been rising steadily, as had (he surmised) the number of those like himself troubling the waters. Already he was looking to sidestep. And while he wasn’t sure of the market yet, still sounding that out, he was thinking hand tools. Adzes, awls, planes, levels, reamers, miter boxes. Woodworker’s tools.

He wrote the last check, entered check number, date, payee, and amount in the ledger, slipped the last check and payment slip into the envelope, sealed it. Then turned the stack of envelopes faceup and stamped each one. Also on each went a sticker from a thick roll:

James & Paula Kostof

1534 Dalmont

Phoenix, AZ 85014

The bills went back into the manila envelope, which he marked with the date. He noted again, as he always did, that the ampersand, that &, was the largest figure on the sticker.

Still, he wasn’t sleepy.

He brewed a second cup of tea and stood at the window. Never much traffic out here after eight or so. A battered truck, white gone gray, swayed by on bad shocks, Food for the Soul painted in an arc of rainbow letters on its side with, below that, pictographs of a bowl of steaming food and a Bible.

Sitting at the table beside the window, he clicked on the computer to run his Greatest Hits.

Like Downer Loads with its ever-changing headlines: “Secret Love Nest Found in Abandoned Ware house,” “Sadistic Skipper Drowns Parrot,” “Thalidomide Victim Becomes Concert Violinist,” “Water Will Kill You.” Or his all-time personal favorite, “Coyotes Protect Alien Baby.”

Like The Great Illusion America, flogging books, pamphlets and DVDs about the new world order, conspiracies that spiraled back thousands of years, Marines awakening from comas with memories of covert actions on Mars, simple sources of free energy, obtaining New Zealand citizenship, and releasing the secret power inside you.

Like The Real Triangle, which explained how we are being poisoned by the sea of micro waves washing over us: transmission towers (“500 in L.A. Alone!”), Wi-Fi, cell phones. Put an egg between two cell phones, the home page suggested. Use one cell phone to call the other. Within an hour the egg will be fully cooked.

All of them sites he’d stumbled across one way or another, and now visited daily.

Sometimes as he sat looking out the window, looking into the screen, it occurred to him that he collected the sites—puerile at best, possibly pernicious—the way others seized on Hopalong Cassidy lunchboxes, toy garages, and plastic ukuleles. He didn’t understand their attraction, why these sites drew him, but they’d become a refuge.

The best, he always saved for last.

Traveler’s comments had started appearing five years before. At first, they seemed just another blog: current events, oil supplies, immigration, foreign policy. Nothing, though, of the entertainment gossip, personal opinions, and political teeter-tottering that filled most blogs. Rarely much about people at all, in fact—just events. Jimmie had checked out the archives, followed the trail backward.

Then things Traveler had spoken of hypothetically—gas shortages, an election debacle, a flood in the Midwest—actually occurred. As the site became progressively more predictive than discursive, Traveler’s anonymity moderated as well. We, then I, came into use, hints were dropped, passing comments that over time coalesced to confession: she was a soldier sent back from the year 2063 on a mission she could not divulge. Interspersed with an oddly impersonal memoir, the predictions continued, some scarily on target, others wildly amiss. Three years to the day after the first blog, following shortly upon an entry headlined “I Haven’t Much Time Left,” Traveler stopped posting.

Others had kept the Web site going, so that it was now a vast beehive of commentary, speculation, testimonials, exegesis, and silliness accrued about the original postings and growing day by day, even to the point of a biography cobbled together from Traveler’s entries, on-site “scholarship,” and, it would seem, an imagination spawned of early and ongoing exposure to Star Trek.

Jimmie scrolled down the line of recent postings, clicking on those whose blurbs caught his interest, reading a sentence here, half an entry there. Many had quotations from Traveler’s entries as epigraphs in smaller typeface above their own.

When I found Traveler, I was really messed up, stupid, and hopeless. I’m still messed-up, but that’s just one out of three. I keep hearing all this “Give something back” and “Make a difference” crap, and all this stuff about how something changed your life, and mostly that’s what it is, crap. But it seems to me that Traveler really did give something back, and made a difference. She sure did for me—and my life doesn’t look much like it did before.

Truth is something you catch only out of the side of your eye; look straight on, and it’s gone.

When I was 16 I went to my parents and said I had something to tell them.

“O my God, you’ve got little Alice pregnant!” my mom said.

“No.”

“You’re gay,” my father said.

“No. It’s worse: I want to be a writer.”

That same sense of purpose, that I’d discovered my placein the world, my direction, came to me when I found these writings.

I came home last night and burned the bed. It’s no good without you in it.

The firemen are here now.

I was a great disappointment to my folks. They had always assumed I’d take over the funeral home that had been in my family for six generations. Instead, I became a doctor. Worked emergency first, then went back and certified in pediatrics. Now I take care of newborns. Some weigh a pound—you can fit them in the palm of your hand. My wife calls them frogs. “How were your frogs today?” I look at them sometimes and wonder what these tiny bodies will turn into (the ones who live), what kind of burdens and disappointments their parents will carry around.

“I looked over in the bed where my best friend used to lay.”—Willie McTell

Truth is, of course, relative. But then, so is relative.

He scrolled back to a headline he’d passed up before:

Something had been coming from a long way off for a long time. I always knew that. Then one day I woke up and there it was.

“Ride the devil, boy, or it’ll ride you.”

Intrigued, he tracked through a slurry of pointless anecdotes, embarrassingly candid memoirs, quotations from popular songs, a half acre of bad journalism and worse psychology, to the original post.

The first kill, you never forget.

About rabbit hunting, as it turned out, how the writer and his old m an used to go out together in “black Texas woods,” how it had made a man of him, but Jimmie was left with aftershocks of the tremor that surged through him on reading that initial sentence.

The sudden gush of warmth, then a feeling as though his body were floating upward, floating away, before the world went dark around him.

The dream, that he’d all but forgotten.

He took his hand away from his throat and went into the bathroom again. The moth had returned to the window, or another one had come, and beat against the glass outside. Briefly he imagined that he could hear the flutter of its wings, but of course he couldn’t. He imagined its small mouth making sounds.

CHAPTER FOUR

HE HATED HOSPITALS.

Probably everyone hated hospitals. And most with good reason: horror stories passed down from generation to generation, memories of helplessness and of pain, their constant reminder of death, like an elbow in the ribs. But he didn’t hate hospitals as symbols, for something they represented, he hated them for themselves, for what they were. The entryways that always looked like bad movie sets, the lobbies smelling of cut flowers and overcooked food, the endless din of TVs and overhead pages, the molded plastic chairs, the workers clumped outside every exit smoking.

He’d awakened this morning with his shoes standing like two gravestones at the bed’s far end, surprised that he had slept, reaching in those first moments, with a curious mix of instinctive panic and exercised calm, to remember where he was.