Lethal Injection Read online

  “No,” Royce protested, as his vision blurred into the colors of her nipples.

  “That’s right,” she said, leaning forward. “Eddie didn’t kill that woman clerk.” She covered his mouth with hers. Her pitted skin became an enlarged lunar surface as her lips met his lips, and she kissed him. “I did,” she whispered into his mouth before her tongue entered it.

  The truth of his error, the tremendous finality of his mistake and this penultimate repercussion advanced through his mind like a seething, enormous wave. He felt her tongue pass thickly between his lips, swell and stick to the walls of his mouth, filling it completely, dessicating it, only to dissolve in the absorbed fluids there, as if the paradox were that he secreted corrosive acids upon her tender flesh, not the other way around. Then the wave broke with a crash and Royce died.

  Colleen Valdez sat back on her heels. Royce’s open eyes saw nothing.

  She explained things to him anyway.

  “Thurman was real good to Bobby Mink, you know; he really loved that Bobby,” she continued, sighing as if she were very tired. “He told me all about how you were the prison doctor, and about how you helped put Bobby down…. He said…”

  The morphine was becoming too much for her. Had Royce not been dead, he might have modestly explained to her how he’d done what he could for Bobby Mencken at the end. As he was silent, she pulled herself to the head of the bed and slouched against the wall, much like her two companions flanking her. She clutched fitfully for a moment at the sheets with her fingers, but everybody was on top of them and she soon gave up. “Damn,” she whispered, in a sing-song, little girl voice. “Damn, damn, damn.” Then she sighed. “Bobby, Bobby, Bobby. He wouldn’t let me take my medicine for killing that old woman, and I never had a chance to talk him out of it. I never saw him but once again after they arrested him, except in the newspapers and on TV. Eddie kept telling me it wouldn’t do any good to go telling the police my story, that they’d never believe a woman had done what they had Bobby for….

  “Thurman said you got the whole file on Bobby, Royce, and said my name was on it from when I visited Bobby that one time and he told me to never come back because it was too hard on him to see me, and not be able to… to do anything but look and remember. He said seeing me was the hardest thing he’d had to do since he got to prison, and to please don’t make him go through it again…. Just… Just go with Eddie and do the best we could, and, remember… he loved us….”

  Though her eyes were closed now, hot tears fell out of them as if out of a permanent condition, as if a lifetime of this helpless seepage had scalded the surface of her face to its present state of irreparable corrosion.

  But soon she fell asleep as she was, for the morphine was good, and she felt secure, secure in the knowledge that another syringe full of morphine was just within reach, just on the other side of Eddie, behind the curtain on the window-sill, right where Royce had left it. So she could have another shot as soon as she woke up. …

  The police found them there just like that, the three of them in bed together, the narcotized girl between two naked corpses, about half an hour later.

  Fast Eddie hadn’t been so fast after all.