a number on me with his knife. They’d had to remove a couple of sections of small intestine and stitch the rest back together in what they hoped would be a serviceable fashion. I’d lost a lot of blood, and kept losing some of the blood they transfused into me, and it was touch and go in there for a while. The moment I seemed to recall—We’re losing him!—had several real-life counterparts. There were several moments when they’d thought I was slipping away, and maybe I did, but each time something called me back.
“I yelled at you,” she said. “I said, ‘Don’t you dare leave me!’ ”
“Evidently I couldn’t.”
“Not with the all-star medical team you had. Marcus Welby, though?
I didn’t think he spent much time in the operating room. I thought he pretty much confined himself to dispensing good homespun wisdom.”
“I never realized I watched that many medical shows,” I said. “I guess they did a good job of imprinting on my consciousness.”
“Or unconsciousness,” she said.
They’d be feeding me through an IV line for a while, and it would be an indeterminate period of time before some parts of me worked as well as they used to.
One doctor advised Elaine that I might never be able to handle spicy foods again. “And I told him he obviously doesn’t know who he’s dealing with,” she said. “My man takes on killers with his bare hands, I told him. No Scotch bonnet pepper is going to lay him low.”
“The only reason I went after him with my bare hands,” I said, “is that’s all I had.”
“He had a knife and you ran right at him.”
“I’d risk anything to keep him from hurting you. And if you were already dead, well, then I didn’t really care what happened to me.” What had happened to him, meanwhile, was that he was dead.
While I was smashing his head against the floor, Elaine had managed to get the pistol from my bedside table. That noise I’d heard, the last thing I was aware of before the blood-dimmed tide swept over me, was indeed a gunshot, the first of several. She’d had to figure out how to disengage the safety, and then she’d had to get up close enough to get All the Flowers Are Dying
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off a shot at him without hitting me. She wound up sticking the gun in his ear and pulling the trigger, and I registered the sound of it even as I was letting go and slipping away.
“You told me if I ever used the gun I was supposed to keep on firing until it was empty,” she said, “and that’s what I did. The recoil didn’t seem any worse than with the thirty-eight. Or maybe I was better at anticipating it, I don’t know. When it started going click instead of bang I picked up the phone and called 911, but the cops were already on their way, and so was the ambulance.” I told her she’d saved my life, and she repeated that the cop and ambulance had already been on their way by the time she made the call.
“Not by calling,” I said. “By killing the bastard.”
“I don’t know if I killed him.”
“He’s dead,” I said, “and you shot him seven or eight times in the head. I think it’s safe to infer a cause-and- effect relationship there.”
“Except that he may have been dead already. They think you may have beaten him to death.”
“Oh. Well, I don’t think I could have managed it if he’d had two hands at his disposal. You took a lot of fight out of him by putting a bullet in his shoulder.”
“I could have saved us both a lot of aggravation by putting it in his heart instead.”
“He’s dead,” I said. “It doesn’t really matter who did it. We saved each other’s lives.”
“That’s nothing new,” she said. “We do that every day.” They never did pin a name to the son of a bitch. His prints weren’t on file anywhere, except as an unidentified suspect in a murder somewhere out west. Name or no name, Wentworth and Sussman assured me that his death would clear a lot of cases all over the country, including some that had already been attributed to other people, like Preston Applewhite.
“God knows how many people he killed,” Sussman said. “We pulled a lot out of his computer, but he’s only had that particular laptop for a 286
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year or two. Taking out someone like him, it’s not so much a win for the criminal justice system as it’s a vitally important public health measure. You kill him and it’s like you found a cure for cancer.” Elaine had some bruises where he’d hit her and some more from falling and hurting herself, and there was a narrow scar about an inch long on her shoulder, where he’d cut her. She was putting Vitamin E on it, though, and she’d picked up something at the drugstore that would make scars disappear.
I said it wasn’t all that much of a scar, and she said it didn’t matter.
“I don’t want his mark on me,” she said.
And he’d raped her.
“Aside from yours,” she said, “it’s been over a dozen years since I had anybody’s dick in me. I could probably find a more graceful way of putting it—”
“But why bother?”
“My thought exactly. I was so disgusted, baby. Not while it was going on, not while he had the knife at my throat. I was too busy with fear to have any time left for disgust. But later, thinking about him, I kept wanting to vomit. I kept taking baths and douching, trying to get clean, and then I just declared myself clean and said the hell with it.
Because there wasn’t anything there to wash away, you know?” I had a lot of visitors. TJ, of course, and Danny
