The Killer Is Dying Read Free Page B

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 man 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.
    Then, lying there still, to piece together the events of the day before.
    A call to the hospital had gained Christian no information. Another of the grand paradoxes of contemporary life. Half an hour on the Internet and any reasonably competent skulker could have all manner of personal information about the person he’d been talking to, including his Social Security number. Yet in the name of privacy that person on the phone would not so much as tell him if the man was dead or alive.
    “May I help you, sir?”
    The woman who had come up on his left had to be at the hard end of her sixties. That leathery skin people out here got, shamble to her walk, spots and runnels on hands and arms. The orange candy stripes made her look like a rapidly aging teenager. There was something behind the ready smile that betrayed her too, a well of sadness waiting there. Her eyes kept slipping to the window ledge, where a family of six Hispanics sat eating from greasy paper wrappers.
    He mumbled something about a daughter-in-law, a baby.
    “Third floor. Take the second elevator, step off, and turn right. Yellow line on the floor leads to OB, blue to the nursery.” She smiled, fleshy hinges below her mouth hanging loose, clearly pleased that some matters could be cleanly dealt with, as her eyes went back to the window ledge.
    There were three ICUs