Pain Killers (44 page)

“Do it!” Zell yelled at his son. “You putz, you schlemiel, what are you waiting for!”

Keeping his eyes on Mengele, Bernstein uncoiled fast and threw underhand.

Mengele didn’t even duck. He knew. When the pig-sticker caught Zell in the throat the doctor let out a high-pitched giggle. It was the first time I’d heard him laugh.

Zell clutched his throat, trying to staunch the blood. It looked like he was trying to strangle himself. Maybe for raising such fine boys. From somewhere came the sound of a walkie-talkie. It was staticky.
“Ambulance.” Crackle-crackle. “Copy that.” Crackle-crackle-crackle.

I had not even noticed the door behind us. With the private smile of the escape artist, Mengele backed toward it. Tina stuck out her foot and tripped him and he went down mustache-first, screaming,
“Scheiskopf!”

While the doctor floundered, Davey, the warden, Rincin and Bernstein were out the front door. I didn’t expect I’d be seeing them again. No doubt each man was off to an alibi.

I grabbed Mengele’s ankles and dragged him to cover behind the “operating table”. Zell had knocked it over when the blade hit him. If we crouched behind low enough nobody coming through the door would see us. At least not right away.

Mengele was remarkably light. But his skin, supple as it was, felt disturbingly hot and dry. Like a lizard plucked out of the sun. My need to do something did battle with the potential embarrassment of doing it diapered, packing God knows what underneath. Mengele wriggled. He freed a foot and kicked me in the head and I pinned him closer to the ground. I planted my hand over his mouth, repulsed by his wet lip-fur. I spotted the bloody screwdriver a few feet away. The thing had popped out of the sawed-off broom handle. I grabbed the raw metal and eyed the door.

Zell’s body was sprawled on its back near the door. He’d tried to stagger out. His face betrayed more shame than pain. Beneath that, I thought I could decipher an expression of deep regret—now he wouldn’t be able to film his own murder and sell it to the Discovery Channel.

I pressed the metal to the ancient man’s taut neck. Took a deep breath, expecting to savor the moment I got to avenge my people. It should have been dramatic. Instead, all I saw were the eyes of a frail, freakishly smooth nonagenarian, gazing blankly into my own.

I raised the knife like I meant to stick him. Just to show him I could. The point was half an inch from his jugular when Tina’s lips found my ear. “Kill him, you kill his secrets.” She snatched Bernstein’s weapon out of my hand. “You need clothes,” she said, the words warm on my face.

“I know…. But we need to get him out of here.”

From opposite sides, we peeked around the table at the scene around us. Somebody gets shanked in the joint, the incident response team is there before the paramedics. But not this time.

Shouts outside grew closer. His-and-hers paramedics rattled in with their gurney. We knew what we had to do. Mengele sensed it, too. I felt something wet on my knee, which I’d pressed on his leg to keep him pinned. I was hoping he’d be humiliated. But even pissing himself, he remained smug. No doubt it was master race pee, which made all the difference.

I grabbed the screwdriver, scooped a roll of tape from the doctor’s spilled surgical tray and tossed it to Tina, who caught it one handed. We had everything we needed to tie up the paramedics and steal their uniforms. We just had to knock them out.

I dug a dozen ampoules of morphine out of the paramedics’ kit. But it only took two to do the job. I wanted to knock them out, not give them an OD. The rest of the morphine I left. Let somebody else have a lucky day. I knew I’d be in throbbing pain later, when whatever he’d stuck me with to numb my nuggins wore off. Then again, if that happened, it would mean I was still alive. Life’s a trade-off.

Zell’s corpse farted when I rolled him over. Blood painted his hands and forearms from his doomed attempt to keep his life from gurgling out of his neck. The man didn’t die pretty. But he died in battle. Kind of.

I checked his pockets, hoping for a cell phone, maybe a number on a pack of matches. Zell had to have a lot of connections. All I found was a flash-roll of hundreds and fifties. I stuffed a wad of bills in each paramedic’s underwear—the one item Tina’d left on after I shot them up and she got their uniforms off. I hoped the cash would cover the cost of new ones. They looked like wholesome kids.

I dragged Zell’s body off and covered him with the starched sheet I’d been staring at during my stint as Mengele’s guinea pig. Done, I helped Tina pile the paramedics on top of him—girl, boy, boy—and jammed the sandwich behind the table.

Up to now we’d worked in silence, perfectly in sync, as if doping ambulance attendants and stealing their clothes was something we did recreationally.

Tina blew a bang off her forehead and looked at the stacked paramedics.

“That ought to give the staff something to talk about,” she said.

“I don’t know. It’s a little creepy. That’s twice in two days we’ve rearranged corpses into sex scenes.”

“Sometimes you don’t know you have a talent until you have to use it,” she said. “It’s nice to see you in pants.”

“Well, I’ve still got that diaper thing underneath. Would you please tell me what I’ve got going on down there?”

“It’s not important. You’re still you—even if you’re not, you know, symmetric.” She cupped her breasts. “I’m not either, and it hasn’t held me back. My life’s still a dream come true.”

“God, I fucking love you,” I said, scrambling to arrange my outfit. I pulled the male medic’s knit cap low and put on his tinted shades. We wheeled Mengele out under a sheet, so nobody would ask about the tape over his mouth.

Such was the magic of chaos. You could hide in the middle of it. Walk through like you belonged and keep on going. Just as Mengele had done, when the Americans arrested him in Czechoslovakian no-man’s-land, in June 1945.

Even then his vanity saved him. SS men had their blood groups tattooed under their biceps, and all the Allies had time to do was check the prisoner’s armpits for ink. But Mengele, the mama’s boy, liked his own skin too much to scar it, so he’d never gotten the SS ID. Maybe he knew, even then, that eventually he would need to escape.

He gave the Americans in the internment camp his real name. And walked out a free monster, his lab notes under his arm. There is, I now understood, no better feeling than undeserved escape.

We rolled our quarry to the ambulance without being stopped. We both knew this was the easy part. When we made it to the gate, they’d no doubt want to check the cargo. If we made it that far.

Everybody we passed stared at the vehicle as if they’d never seen one before. “You think we should hit the siren?” I asked her.

“Not on the compound.” Tina stared straight ahead. “Nobody’d get any sleep. Too much shit goes down at night.”

“What, like guys stabbing each other in their cells?”

“No. Like heart attacks. Most guys have them between midnight and three. They hit the cherry top, but not the siren.”

“How do you know that?”

“‘San Quentin Emergency’—it was one of Zell’s episodes.”

“Of course.”

“What can I say? I’m a sucker for jailhouse television. His plan was to start the APN.”

“Don’t tell me. The All Prison Network?”

“He was close to getting investors. The problem was he’d shot everything inside there was to shoot. He needed something nobody’d seen to get investors hot. You met the man. His big dream was ‘San Quentin Nazi Sex Change.’ To him, this was like dying and going to cable heaven.”

“Well,” I said, reaching back to make sure Mengele had a pulse, “one out of two isn’t bad.”

“Nice,” said Tina. “All I’m saying is, along came Mengele. Dr. Peroxide opened up whole new possibilities.”

“Except Zell got greedy, right?”

Tina shrugged. “It happens. Once he found out about the money the warden and Mengele were making from pharmacy companies, he wanted in. Zell was one of those guys who wants a finger in every pie—and if he can’t get it he’ll try to take your finger so you can’t have any, either. When he saw the reverend waving a camera around, he figured the warden was gonna cut him out, start filming his own action. You think it’s any accident Rev D got called to heaven early?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s no accident that Zell bought it either. And I’m still scratching my head about his wife.”

I thought something flickered in Tina’s eyes when I mentioned Dinah. Or not. “What’s the mystery? Either he didn’t care,” she said, “or he’d already taken care of the situation. Zell had prison business. He wasn’t about to leave Quentin and risk somebody stealing his turf. And from what I saw of the late, great Harry, he’d leave his mother’s body on a slab if he thought he could make a buck selling her shoes.”

“It is a loving family. You saw how he treated Davey. And I’m guessing half the reason his boy Bernstein went swasti-Hebe was to drive Daddy nuts.”

“Unless Daddy wanted to open up the Aryan market and the kid was his in-house ambassador. A dime in Q and a batch of SS tats might be worth a little something on the other side.”

Tina popped open the ambulance glove compartment, reached in and found a bottle of Advil. She opened it and gulped four dry and snapped the lid back on, disappointed. “Don’t you hate when there’s Advil in the Advil?” She tossed the plastic bottle in the back. “Fuck! I just hope they don’t find Zell’s body before we get out of here.”

“No!” I sat up suddenly—maybe forty yards from the gate—and it all clicked in. “We better hope they found him.”

“What?”

“You think the warden’s gonna risk taking us down if there’s a chance Dr. Death here might testify? Word gets out about the money he made letting Mengele experiment on prisoners, he’s going to be living in a cell instead of assigning them. Along with a few golf carts full of drug and cosmetic execs. Don’t forget, thanks to the warden, the state of California’s been supplying Mengele with the same thing the Nazis did.”

“What’s that?”

“A ready supply of expendable human beings. Only now he’s not doing research for the good of the race. He’s doing product testing for American business.”

Up ahead of us, a lanky guard on an overhead bridge lowered a key in a blue bucket to a uniform below.

“That’s your theory? The warden figures ’cause you’re Jewish, you’re going to take Mengele out and avenge your people?”

“Mengele’s the one who wants revenge, sugar. He’s had sixty years to stew about not getting the glory he deserves. If he gets a trial he’s going to go Nuremberg on everybody from Coca-Cola to Gerber baby foods. He’s waited all this time to name the biggest Nazi collaborator of all.”

“Who’s that?”

“The American government.”

“Who the warden thinks sent you to kill Mengele.”

“He wasn’t that far off.”

Tina stared as if I’d told her I was Napoleon. “Now you’re scaring me. You’re saying the government sent you to—”

“Not
me.
This fake Rastafarian named Jimmy. But he never got the chance.” I hadn’t put it together before, but now it seemed obvious. “He said he was FBI. But I think Rasta man was on a mission of his own.”

“So why not give Mengele his day in court? Bring him to justice.”

“Why give him the satisfaction? He’s waited his whole life to spout his side of reality.”

“So what are you saying—we punch his ticket?”

“Fuck no! He probably thinks we were sent to kill him. I’d rather let him live. I just need to figure a way to make him wish he was dead. What do you give the man who kills everything?”

“I have a few ideas,” said Tina.

“Me too. But it has to be something special.”

“Like what?”

“I’m not sure yet. But it’s going to work out.”

Despite my upbeat prognostication, I stared out at the grounds less like a tourist than a man contemplating his future home. Between buildings, I caught a glimpse of the yard. The sight triggered the same feeling it always did. I didn’t see rapists, embezzlers or violent offenders. I saw the strolling cons and thought,
One bad move and there’s me.

I wanted to believe what I’d told Tina. That everything would work out. But I had my doubts. Historical travesties aside, we were still imposters in a stolen ambulance, kidnapping a prisoner taped to a gurney. We passed the old convict weeding his flowerbed, and I waved. Now the roses looked dead.

Finally, we rolled up within three vehicles of the gate. The driver of a DOC truck in front of us waved us by, and then it was two. Tina slipped her hand over mine on the seat. The imminence of possible arrest got her talking.

“Listen,” she blurted, knuckles white on the wheel, “I saw how you left a bunch of morphine back there. If we make it out of this, maybe we can both, you know, start clean…”

“I always
start
clean, it’s where I end up that things get messy. As you know. And I’m still wondering what that maniac stuck inside me. Whatever it was, it feels a little inflamed.”

Tina held her mud.

“It was the Irish wolfhound, wasn’t it? Just say it: ‘Manny, you’ve got a dog ball.’ I can handle the truth.”

“Can we stop talking about you?” she said. “I’m serious here. If we make it out—”

“Don’t,” I said, touching her mouth. Those lips I wanted to eat. “Plans are bad luck.” Mengele picked that moment to start wriggling under the sheet. I turned and smacked his head. “Stop that, goddamn it!”

Tina pulled up to the guard booth. A beefy black guard checked us out through the window. Then picked up the phone.

“I’m gonna gun it,” Tina said.

“No! You do that, there’s gonna be a traffic jam. And all the cars’ll have cherries on top.”

Tina kept her face frozen forward, staring into middle distance straight ahead. But I saw the smile she was keeping under ice. “I love when you talk like you’re in a bad movie.”

“Nerves,” I said. “Some guys sweat, I go direct-to-video.”

The longer the guard stayed on the phone, the more I squirmed. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. I told her to jump. “As soon as you’re out,
I’ll
fucking gun it,” I said, keeping my voice low. “You disappear.”