Lethal Injection Page 10

  “Oh?” Royce looked from one face to the other and back.

  “What’s that?”

  “Well,” said Eddie simply, staring at Royce, “we still need to get a bottle of whiskey and television.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s why we thought we’d borrow your truck.”

  A slightly uncomfortable feeling was trying to make its way into Royce’s brain, but he ignored it and said simply, “Sure. Borrow the truck.”

  “Well,” Eddie said, “you come with the truck, don’t you? I mean,” he opened his hands and closed them, one over the other, “you want to be at the wheel of your own truck, don’t you?”

  Attention, Royce thought, this is a test. “Sure. I guess. Do I? ”

  Colleen laughed. She had lovely teeth, though they were a little yellow from tobacco. Royce smiled. He could clean them for her.

  “Sure you do,” Eddie said. “Besides, you could wait in it if we need to, uh, double park or something.”

  “Right,” Royce agreed, with a distant smile, “double park.”

  “Good,” Eddie said. He slid open a drawer in the edge of the low table in front of them and pulled out a pistol.

  The pit of Royce’s stomach opened into a void. “What’s—” he began, and his voice caught in his throat. The only thought in his head was that Lamark and Valdez had seen right through him, and now all they would he needing to know was where he’d parked his truck, and could they have the keys, please, before they took him out into armadillo country and blew him away.

  Eddie stood up and smiled. The gun looked to be a .25 or .32 automatic. Not too big, but not particularly small, it was mostly black and very efficient looking. Eddie pulled back the slide until a slug nicked into the breach in front of it, then released the slide with a snap. Though he was undoubtedly trying to tell Royce something, Lamark made a point of keeping the muzzle of the gun pointed away from the populated areas of the room. He even snapped the safety on. He stuffed the business end of the gun down the front of his pants and went into the bedroom. “You use much, Doc?” he said from in there.

  Royce cleared his throat and found his voice. “Use much,” he repeated tonelessly.

  “Yeah.” Eddie came back through the door of the bedroom pulling on a longsleeved shirt and stood above him. The shirt had large yellow and purple flowers on it against a cream background, cut cowboy style. A double yoke in front dipped into breast pockets, each with a flap that closed with a pearl snap. Each long cuff closed snugly with three similar pearl snaps, but Eddie Lamark left these open and rolled them back a turn. He left two similar snaps open below his throat, exposing the upper rays of the torch of liberty tattooed on his chest, and buttoned the rest down the front of the shirt. He didn’t tuck in the shirttails. When he was finished he looked casual in a loud and cheap sort of way. There was no sign of the gun beneath the flowers.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Use much dope?”

  Royce looked from Colleen up to Eddie and said nothing.

  “Sure you do,” Lamark said, answering his own question. “A fancy doctor has to have a good reason to write scrips for dopers, rich or not, a kind of empathy, the kind that comes from mutual understanding of a mutual need.”

  Royce shook his head. “Quality pharmaceuticals are too hard to find in the joint,” he said. “I’m clean.” Colleen stood up from the sofa and went toward the bedroom. As she squeezed between Eddie and Royce in the doorway, Eddie rounded her behind with his hand and pinched the thin fabric that covered it. The material slid off her shoulders as she passed and left behind a glimpse of her nakedness as she entered the bedroom. Royce’s eyes tore at this vision like caged ferrets. He sniffed the air as she passed. Eddie stood smiling in the doorway, leering at Royce, the robe dangling from his fingers. Royce wondered if Eddie could manage to understand the need he was beginning to feel for Eddie’s girl. Maybe Eddie would like to prescribe Royce a little time with her.

  As if reading Royce’s thought, Eddie tossed the gown into the dark bedroom and said, “You up a long time?”

  Royce hauled himself to his feet and brushed his stained khakis. “Two years and some.”

  “Suit you?”

  “How’s that? “Royce peered at him. Eddie had a quizzical, amused expression in his eyes.

  “The life there suit you. No women and all that. ”

  Royce shook his head. “Worst part, I guess.”

  Eddie pursed his lips. “I guess Bobby adapted.”

  Royce had to think about that one for a moment. He remembered how Mencken had raised his pelvis off the stainless steel table as the morphine had gone in. A joke. It meant nothing in particular. Or had it?

  Rather than hazard a guess, he passed on it. “I never did.”

  Eddie turned his head and scratched a sideburn. “Seems like a logical thing to do when you’re in there long enough,” he said. “Kinda make yourself at home.”

  Royce looked at him, astonished. “You’ve never been in the big house?”

  Eddie looked at him and grinned.

  “Nice going,” Royce admitted. “How in hell have you managed that?”

  Eddie just kept grinning. Like hell he’d never been in a joint.

  Colleen appeared in the bedroom door. She had braided her hair to look much shorter. She wore tennis shoes, jeans, a checked western shirt and hoop earrings. Only the first button above the high waist of the jeans was buttoned on the shirt. The V that widened up to her shoulders showed plenty of breast to Royce, more than he’d seen in a long time.

  She patted Royce’s belly. He could smell her hair, cigarettes and baby shampoo; the top of her head came to just below his nose. “How’s the gut, Doc?” She had bright green eyes.

  Royce bit his lip and tried to make a joke. “I can’t tell if it’s post-reptilian trauma or pre-caper butterflies. I mean,” he looked from Lamark to Valdez and back, “are we going out to buy a television and a bottle of whiskey?”

  Eddie ducked his head and scratched a sideburn. “That all depends,” he said.

  Colleen Valdez slapped her buttocks with both her hands and pushed her tightly denimed pelvis forward. “Let’s ride,” she said.

  TEN

  The truck was where he’d left it. It was a Chevy Silverado, designed to haul a horse trailer, about five years old. Except for the damage recently applied to the front end by Pamela Royce, and the dust of Texas, the truck was a relatively clean one. A garage nearby Huntsville had repaired the headlights while Royce sat in a cafe and read the Mencken file, two days before.

  Eddie looked at the front end and asked whether all the lights still worked. When Royce said they did, Eddie patted the hood with approval. “Nice truck.”

  Colleen sat in the middle and fiddled with the radio. In a moment she had found an all-night country music program on WBAP, aimed at truckers, and sat back contentedly, her arms stretched over the back of the seat behind her two companions. Royce drove.

  First they bought a tank of gasoline so as to get a free trip through an automatic carwash.

  “Now we’re invisible,” Eddie said. Then he navigated them to a street in University Heights where, he assured them, the residents were unlikely to have block security.

  Royce was nervous. The first and last thing he’d ever stolen had been a watermelon when he was in junior high school, and he’d gotten caught. Slipping through the hot shadows of suburban Dallas looking for an easy score with two characters as desperate as he was scared, he seriously doubted the efficacy of his odyssey to vindicate Bobby Mencken’s wrongful death. Even the terms seemed overblown. One look at Eddie showed him a sociopath capable of anything, who by luck and cunning had miraculously avoided any serious scrapes with the law, a man entirely despicable enough to have allowed Bobby Mencken to die for something he himself had done.

  But why risk his life, as Royce was clearly doing, for a dead man he’d never known? To justify a squandered career, a medical practice so decrepit that he’d had to take on the odious
millstone of being medical practitioner to several thousand miserable, desperate men in the Huntsville prison? To justify the actions of a financially cornered moonlighter who, masquerading behind the Hippocratic oath, had taken the job of ensuring humane conditions during state executions; and all because he couldn’t control his own drinking or his wife’s excessive and compulsive expenditures?

  Or was it deeper than that? After so many years he wondered if life held anything more profound than monthly payments, overdrafts at the bank, unfair speeding tickets, a credit card scissored in two on a silver tray in a very nice restaurant, a life whose pecuniary rhythms sailed from troughs of embarrassment to peaks of anxiety and back again with no respite.

  Which is the bigger waste? A man born with a chance who blows it, or a man born with no chance who fights it? They’re both losers in the end, aren’t they?

  Yes and no, he decided. Bobby Mencken’s death had shown him a true wrong dealt a man whose life, on its own level, had probably been no more or less screwed up than Royce’s. Had such an injustice been perpetrated on Royce instead of Mencken, Royce would have fought tooth and nail for what he perceived as his God-given right to be allowed to continue his trivial suffering, rather than go through the twisted fate of being condemned to die for an act he hadn’t committed.

  Wouldn’t he?

  God-given indeed. Who was he kidding? You dance with your fate, or your fate dances with you. And nobody knows his fate until he’s looking at it, until it’s too late, until it’s practically over.

  God my ass. If Royce had taken a couple fewer drinks back when he was married to a rich cow man’s beautiful daughter, and paid more attention to his lucrative practice in Corpus Christi, his whole life would have been different. If Bobby Mencken hadn’t been jogging past a convenience store and found a gun on the sidewalk, just after somebody inside had been shooting the proprietor, as he’d claimed at his trial, the verdict might have been different. His life might have been allowed to go on. If he’d been a white man his whole life would have been different. As it was, the jury had laughed when the prosecutor summed up Mencken’s testimony.

  He recalled an old Huntsville con who used to quote a ditty as Royce dressed the man’s persistently gangrenous leg.

  Life is a game of poker.

  Happiness is in the pot.

  You’re dealt five cards from the cradle,

  And you play them whether you like it or not.

  Royce smiled bitterly. This is a Darwinian precept. The pair of deuces and your good looks are your inherited traits. The aces and queens across the table are your environment. Much later, it had turned out that the gangrene had persisted for so long because the con wanted it that way. He was using the cavity of the wound and its bandage to smuggle contraband goods around the prison, mostly drugs and weapons. The cache might never have been discovered had he not lost consciousness in the sweltering yard one day and been delivered to the infirmary. In the leg beneath the dressing they found 150 sodium amytal capsules. Royce was forced to amputate the leg before a decent surgeon could be gotten from Houston to Huntsville. Three days later the man died anyway. Just before he lost consciousness for the last time, he half opened his eyes and recognized Royce at the foot of his bed. He winked and said, “Life is just a game of poker….”

  “Einstein said something about God and dice,” the old con said to him once. “But God doesn’t use dice. He runs a poker game. There’s a difference.”

  God my ass, Royce thought.

  Justice, even retroactive justice, seemed a clear alternative to that final outrage. And in the act of securing justice for Bobby Mencken, Royce thought he could see a way to secure a modicum of dignity for his own miserable life—justification, even.

  But there was more to it than that. More than justice. More than justification. More than dignity. Nothing less than, perhaps, revenge.

  Revenge for whom? For Mencken?

  Mencken didn’t need any avenging, he was beyond it. Technically, morally, that’s what Royce was up to. But, as they say in Pravda sometimes, Royce was technically and morally worn out. What he wanted was revenge for the miserable, vacuous betrayal his own life had become.

  Go home? No. No more home.

  At a stop sign beneath a streetlight, Royce fingered the two burns throbbing on his neck above his left shoulder. Besides, enough was enough. He had a score to settle with this Eddie Lamark.

  As they approached a streetlight and drew under and away from it, Colleen Valdez touched the double burn with her fingertips. A thrill Royce hadn’t known in years traversed the length of his spine.

  “Slow down,” said Eddie tersely, turning down the radio. Royce did so. They idled past a large, dark house. No cars were visible in the driveway; no windows were lit. A lawn looking dark gray in the obscurity stretched from the street between the driveway on the right and a row of large, drooping willow trees on the left. Royce tried to see the place through the eyes of Eddie Lamark, as a set-up for a heist. The trees provided a perfect avenue of approach, beneath which an intruder would be well concealed from both the house and the street. All the windows on the first story were double hung, and potentially of easy access. The house was big and old and moderately prosperous, and therefore likely to contain many glitzy portable consumer items, suitable for quick resale. Most important, it looked as if nobody was home. Most important for the occupants, that is. Eddie wouldn’t care one way or the other. Eddie would like a nice straight-ahead job, but on the other hand, he would love trouble.

  There was always the chance that the house might contain a feisty old grandmother, who came west with Roy Bean and would settle Eddie’s hash with the sawed-off ten-gauge she kept under the bed. That would leave Colleen and Royce sitting in the pickup truck, slightly shocked at the loud discharge that woke the neighborhood and the flash that momentarily lit up one of the upper story windows.

  Leaning over Colleen to case the house with the others, Royce dropped his eye to Colleen’s cleavage and thought about that eventuality, how nice it could be if Eddie would just disappear. After a moment he looked up in the darkness. He could see the whites of her large eyes, slightly wider than they were high, looking down at him.

  Eddie sat back against the seat and stared ahead. “Watch where you’re going,” he hissed. Royce quickly looked forward and jerked the steering wheel. The pickup had drifted to the right and narrowly missed colliding with the rear end of a very new looking Lincoln parked half on the grass strip that ran along the side of the tree-lined street. The pickup’s front wheels squealed a little as he corrected their direction.

  Eddie was all business. He said nothing about Royce’s indiscretion, but sat rigidly in the darkness, thinking.

  “Thirty minutes,” he said. “There a clock in this thing?”

  Royce pushed a button on the radio and the correct time replaced the frequency of the country station in a liquid crystal display on the dash, black letters against a cool green: 11:25 P.M.

  “Thirty-five minutes. Drop me at the corner,” Eddie said. He ran the flat of his hand back and forth over the door. “How do you get out of this fucking thing?”

  “Under the armrest.”

  Eddie found the latch and put his hand on it. “You see those trees on the left?”

  “Willows,” Royce said.

  “Thirty-five minutes from now, midnight. You drive slow from the other end of the block; you don’t change speed much. Don’t come all the way down this same street. Zigzag onto it at the other end of the block, maybe two blocks away. But not too slow. No radio. I’ll be in the willows and see you coming. Flick your brights twice. Let Colleen hold this door off the latch. If I come out with much stuff you’ll have to stop. Otherwise keep going real slow. I’ll hop in. If I don’t show, ease out of here and don’t come back.” He gently worked the latch and opened the door a few inches. A loud, highly fractious, whining buzz that sounded like the back-up warning on a cement truck began to pulsate on the dash, and a woman’s
voice said, “Your passenger door is ajar. Please close your passenger door. Your passenger door is ajar. Please close—”

  “Jesus Christ, what is that?” Eddie said. He pulled the door to the jamb and the tone stopped. “Turn the corner.”

  Royce took a right.

  “Fix that thing before you come back,” Eddie hissed, then he went out the door. Colleen neatly caught the armrest and closed the door with a click. The dash alarm whined but didn’t have time to say its piece. Royce gradually accelerated to the next corner and took a left, checking the rear-view mirror as he turned. In spite of the loud shirt there was no sign of Lamark.

  They drove in silence for a moment, Royce concentrating on every detail he could make out by the headlights.

  “I assume you know where we are,” he said after a few more turns, “because I’m completely lost.”

  Colleen reopened the door and slammed it. “Keep going straight,” she said. They rode in silence for a few minutes, both watching the street in front of them. The suburban area began to open into a more commercial one. The street became four lanes with a divider in the middle. Soon business enterprises, most of them closed for the night, sprung up on both sides of the thoroughfare. “Turn here,” she said suddenly. Royce did so. His headlights were swallowed by an intensely illuminated area displaying four rows of shiny cars and trucks. Behind them a high white facade read: LANEY AND SONS, USED CARS AND TRUCKS in tall red capital letters. She pointed. “Drive to the left and then turn away from the street between the buildings.” Royce did so. The next building over was completely dark, set away from the used car lot by a narrow dirt alley. Swerving over the dirt the headlights showed a sign above two tall roll-away doors on the front of the dark building: LANEY’S LIVERY STABLE, HORSES AND TRAILERS, BLACKSMITH. “Behind the livery,” she said. Royce drove between the two buildings and found his way blocked by a maze of fenced corrals, small sheds with corrugated tin roofs, gates, loading chutes and odd vehicles. Here and there the eye of a horse glinted in the beams of his headlights. A row of horse trailers of every age and description blocked their way on the left. He backed across the access so that the truck was heading more or less out and switched off the motor and lights. Behind them a dark mound loomed as high as the top of the tailgate. The odor of horse manure was very strong.