Don't Ever Get Old (30 page)

“I don't need to scream,” I told him. Couldn't have if I'd wanted to. My mouth had gone all cotton-ball dry.

My eyes flicked toward the button next to my pillow that would call a nurse. But Jennings saw it, too, and he wagged a finger at me.

“Buck, there's an easy way and a hard way to do this thing. If there is an extra corpse in this room when I'm done here, I am going to add that murder to your grandson's tab.”

With nobody around to say anything different, he could make it stick, too.

“I ain't planning to call a nurse to come save me,” I said. My voice was barely a whisper, more of a rasp.

“Good,” Jennings said, nodding. “Wouldn't do much for the Buck Schatz legend, would it?”

I glared at him. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a syringe.

“You let me put this into your IV line, and that's the easy way. What's in here won't show up on your toxicity screening. Won't show up in your autopsy. You'll drift to sleep and that will be the end of it; an old man dying of natural causes. There's dignity in that, and peace. Best possible death I can imagine. But if you try to struggle, I'm going to get the knife out and make a mess. Ain't no point in wrestling the needle into you when you'll just bruise up like rotten fruit and everyone will know it's murder anyway.”

“Is there any possible way to not die?”

He shook his head. “You and I both know that if you leave here alive, you'll be coming for me. You and I can't cut any deal. I can't stick anything to you that will shut you up, except this needle. As long as you're alive, I'll have to watch my back. Am I wrong, Buck?”

He wasn't. Somewhere inside my skull, my primal detective instinct was bellowing a battle cry. But there was also a weary part of me that didn't want to face months of painful recovery, didn't want to face Valhalla Estates, didn't want to face degenerative cognitive impairment.

Jennings put his hand on mine, touching the spot where the intravenous line was stuck in the vein. “So, how do you want to do this?”

“How long have I got to decide?” I asked, pulling my hand back.

“Take your time. I got nowhere to be.”

We sat in silence for a few moments, staring at each other. I coughed noisily.

“When did you find out?” I asked him. No negotiations. No deals. No tricks. Just two professionals, talking.

“What? About the gold?”

“Yeah.”

It couldn't have been news to him when I handed it over. He'd already killed three people for it by then. He must have known about it almost as long as I had. I thought he was out of the loop; I hadn't even suspected him.

“Norris Feely was tailing you the day you drove down to the CJC, the first day I met you. He came sniffing around after you left, trying to find out what you were up to. He spilled pretty much everything to me, right there.”

Goddamn Feely. I hadn't even started watching my back until after my conversation with Avram Silver; hadn't known there was a reason to.

“Then you lied to poor Norris about the treasure, right in his face, at his father in-law's funeral.” Jennings sucked on his teeth, making a reproachful, clucking noise. “Cold, Buck. Real cold.”

Feely must have believed Kind and I were squeezing him out. So he'd gone back to Jennings for help finding the gold. They had been trying to get to it ahead of me.

“And all the while, you and the preacher were having your late night strategy sessions. It seems a little unfair of you to ambush poor Norris at that dinner party.”

The way I remembered, it was me who got ambushed by the dinner party. But the point seemed largely moot.

“So you killed Kind because you thought he was working with me to get the gold?”

“We figured you wouldn't be able to chase it down on your own, so if we eliminated the reverend, you'd just go away.”

“Tequila,” I said.

“You have no idea how close he was to getting the treatment,” Jennings said, drawing a finger across his throat and then downward in a zigzag diagonal line over his belly. “But then we found out where the gold actually was, and decided we might need to keep y'all alive for a bit.”

“You found Avram Silver,” I said.

“I never heard of Avram Silver until you told me about him.”

That didn't make sense. I asked him how he found out the Nazi was in St. Louis.

“We punched the name ‘Heinrich Ziegler' into the police database,” he said. “The feds investigated him for war crimes years ago, and never ended up charging him with anything, but their files were in the computer and all the information came right up.”

The same information he'd refused to look for when I tried to get him to help me out.

“Have I mentioned that you're an ass, and I don't like you?” I asked.

“You have no idea how happy it makes me to know that is the last time I will have to hear you say that,” he said, smiling at me. “Anyway, I sent Feely out to the house in St. Louis that Ziegler owned before his stroke. The neighborhood has gone to shit since he left, and half the street was foreclosed, so the place was empty. Norris went in and broke up the walls and floors with a sledgehammer. He even rented a backhoe and dug up the lawn. He didn't find a goddamn thing.”

“That's why Norris wasn't at the Kind funeral.”

“Probably,” Jennings said. “Who gives a shit?”

I grunted.

“So when the gold wasn't hidden in the house, we guessed he'd either buried it someplace off his property or stashed it in a safe deposit box. And either way, we couldn't get to the gold without getting to Ziegler, and we had no pretense to get into a room alone with him. So we decided to stand back and see if you could get any information from the guy. Seems you had a pretty easy time of it.” He wagged a finger at me. “Nobody ever suspects the elderly.”

“And you figured that between chasing us in your black car after we left the bank, and threatening to arrest us for the murder you committed, we'd tell the truth and hand you the gold.”

He nodded. “I expected you to spill it right there in the hotel parking lot. The kid started crying as soon as I told him about the girl. I didn't think it would take much. But you didn't budge an inch. And then you disappeared somewhere along the highway, and turned up in a different car. That was clever. I didn't know what you'd done with the gold, so it was like I was right back where I started.”

“So you locked up Feely, your partner. Why?”

“I was never going to split the gold with him, and I needed him to take the fall for killing Kind. I was planning to bump him off and set you up for it.”

That was why he put us in that interrogation room together. Feely had imagined that Jennings was watching what was going on in that room, eavesdropping on our conversation. But the room was a sealed box. Nobody could see what happened in there, and that was the whole point. If I had showed up at the police station alone or with Tequila, I would have gone into the room, and Feely would have come out in a rubber bag. With no proof to the contrary, Jennings could have blamed the gun-toting, senile loose cannon for killing the suspect. I'd spoiled the frame by accident when I showed up with the reverend's widow; she'd seen me leave Feely alive. And since that didn't work, Jennings killed Yitzchak Steinblatt to frame Tequila for the murders.

“How could you do those things to innocent people?”

Jennings laughed. “Memphis will top a hundred and sixty murders this year. We're probably going to edge out Detroit and Newark to be the most violent city in America. A couple more killings don't make a difference on top of all that. Hell, maybe carving up somebody like Lawrence Kind will get people upset about crime, and the city will have to find some extra resources to throw at the police department. But either way, I'm through busting my ass trying to clean this town up. I'm cashing out.”

“Max Heller and I didn't see eye to eye on many things, Randall, but he'd be just as disgusted with you as I am. You sold out your own ideals, and nothing is worth that. You'll regret it, if you live long enough.”

“If I do, I'll dry my tears with my big-ass piles of money, and then I'll cheer myself up by pissing on your grave. Speaking of which, how do you want to do this?”

I sighed. “I guess I don't want to make things any worse than they have to be for my family.”

I reached over to the tray next to the bed with my right hand, the one with the tubes coming out of it, and I picked up my memory notebook. I gripped it tightly and brought it in close to my chest.

“Will you do me just one favor, Randall?” I asked.

He frowned. “Depends on what it is.”

“This notebook, right here, is where I write down things I don't want to forget. This is my life, sort of, and I'd like for my grandson to have it. I sure don't want it to get thrown away or bagged up in some evidence locker after I'm gone.”

Jennings mulled that over for a second. “So you want me to give it to him?”

I nodded. “It would mean a hell of a lot to me.”

“No secret messages in here, are there?”

“That's not my style,” I told him.

He frowned. “You're going to have to excuse me, Buck, for not trusting you.”

“You can read it if you want to,” I said. “But keep it safe and see that he gets it.”

“That's your life, there, in that little book?”

“Yeah,” I said. “The parts that matter, at least.”

“Shit, man. That's pretty sad.”

I glared at him. “It is what it is.”

“Okay,” he said. “I'll take it. But no promises.”

He stood up out of his chair and leaned over me. He reached out his hand.

“I sure hope I don't ever get old like you,” he said as he grabbed the notebook.

I didn't let go, though. I yanked my memories toward me as hard as I could, which wasn't very hard. But he was off balance, and I'd managed to surprise him. He fell across me, catching himself on his right arm.

His face was barely six inches from mine, close enough that I could smell coffee on his breath, even with the oxygen tube in my nose.

I stared Death right in the eye.

And I smiled, because in my left hand I had an obscene, nonregulation Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum, and it was pressed against his ribs.

“I wouldn't worry about it too much,” I told him.

From this range, I didn't need to be able to hold my arm steady. From this range, I didn't need to be able to control the recoil. From this range, I couldn't miss. So I didn't do anything except raise a wall of noise; sound a clarion call of protest; bellow with rage at the enveloping shadow. And even though my ears were ringing from the blast, I'm pretty sure I heard Randall Jennings's guts splatter against the wall behind him.

Tequila had brought the rod up from the house along with my other things, along with cigarettes and my notebook. He knew I didn't feel comfortable without it.

And I'd been sleeping with it under the pillow, for two reasons:

The first was that, goddamn it, I'm superstitious. I hate birthdays, and I really fucking hate hospitals. When folks get scared, they cling to what makes them feel secure, and I'm no different.

The second reason was General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

History remembered Eisenhower for crushing the Axis and for becoming the thirty-fourth president of the United States. But what I remembered about him was that he told a frightened young soldier what to hang on to when all else was lost.

For sixty-five years I followed the general's orders, and when I faced my Enemy in the dark, when I was weak and afraid, I wasn't alone. Not entirely. When Lawrence Kind met death, he had Jesus with him. I had Smith & Wesson.

Jennings was still holding himself up with his right arm; his left still clung to a corner of my notebook. He tried to speak, but all that came out of his mouth was a froth of pink bubbles, because his right lung was mostly pulp.

“Sorry, Randall,” I said. “But if you were in my shoes, you'd be doing the same thing.”

Jennings let go of my notebook and started clawing at his armpit beneath his jacket, trying to get his sidearm out of its holster. But I just pressed the .357 against the right side of his jaw and I squeezed the trigger, and then his left eye and the top part of his head were gone, and the body collapsed on top of me.

Dropping a two-hundred-pound corpse into my lap is kind of like hitting a wet loaf of bread with a sledgehammer. Even with the painkillers, it hurt something awful, and I wasn't strong enough to roll the body off me. Through the blinding pain, I could barely even perceive the warmth and wetness around my legs and ass as Jennings drained into the sheets.

I reached behind me to press the nurse-call button. Since my legs were pinned under the body, I had to twist, and I popped all my stitches. The dark room went white for a moment, and I figured my valiant heroism had been to no avail; I'd probably seen my last sunrise. It would be okay, though. Tequila would be smart enough to figure out what had happened. He would be able to exonerate himself and, less important, Feely, who didn't deserve to take a murder rap.

I yanked the oxygen line out of my nose and threw it as far as I could. Then I picked up the pack of Luckys from the tray next to the bed. I shook out the last cigarette, stuck it between my lips, and lit it.

I took a deep pull and held on to the smoke. I figured this one might have to last me.

The nurse on duty, a middle-aged white woman, showed up about five minutes later, a silhouette in the doorway of the dark room.

“What's the problem, Mr. Schatz?” she asked.

“I seem to have made a mess here,” I told her.

“Oh, that's nothing to be embarrassed about,” she said with a little giggle. “It happens all the time. We'll get you cleaned right up.”