The Killer Is Dying Read Free

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 Warehouse,” “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,