The Haze

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The Haze

James W. Hall

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

He killed for a living. Killed a lot of people a long way back. How far back he wasn't sure. Not sure of a lot these days. The days of haze.

Who he was now, a professional killer stuck in a nursing home. New Jersey, or maybe Florida. Not sure. But a home, the kind of place she promised she'd never take him. Lied to him. After all he'd done for her. Raised her, protected her, funded her hobbies, defended her against her mother. Her mother was the killer's wife. Where was she, that wife? What was her name? More things he didn't remember.

He went about his morning routine. Ate his two sunnyside eggs and toast and half a grapefruit, got a thrill levering the sections out with the pointy spoon. That's where his thrills came from these days.

He showered, doing it the same as always, start at the top. Shampoo his thick white hair, then his face, after that using his chest hair to lather up, with special attention to his armpits, ending with his ass. He valued a clean ass. Even now, even in his current state of disorder. He wasn't so far gone he'd put up with a dirty butt.

He knew he was confused. What he didn't know was exactly how much. In particular, he didn't know which stories from his past were his own actual personal history, or things he lifted from the stories of others. People he'd talked to or maybe books he'd read.

Books, it was mainly crime writers, that's who he'd been reading since he was a snotty kid growing up in West Virginia, or somewhere deprived like that, maybe Kentucky, Tennessee. He's reading crime novels while his wife, sitting on her side of the cold bed, read whatever it was she read. Women's books, how to fix a dying marriage, how to be happy, like that was in a book, like any of it was.

Crime writers, his specialty, was what his daughter did now. Worked in a store that sold the kind of books he used to read. Did he cause that? Did he drive his daughter, what was her name, did he drive her into crime? He'd ask her if she ever came back for a visit, built up her courage to face her father again after dumping him in this hellhole.

He had a mission. You had to have a mission. Something you thought about first thing in the morning when you woke up. His was to break out of this damn place. Kill anybody stood in his way. Especially the Puerto Rican who made him swallow the pills.

Force feeding dope pills was an old standby in the stories he read. Was it Chandler with the stocky guys in white uniforms? He thought he remembered a Travis book. Nightmare something. A guy being fed pills or maybe shots in the arm. A guy stuck in a perpetual nightmare. It was in Chandler too, he thought. Marlowe or Sam Spade. Maybe Archer, what was his name? Jake? No, no, it was Lew.

He'd known a Lew. He'd killed a Lew. A job, one of his last. Italian guy was boffing somebody's young wife. He couldn't recall whose. But a wife. He was sure of that. Or maybe a daughter. But he'd shot Lew. Three in the head, one in the heart. His signature. Four rounds. That way the dead stayed dead. He'd made a name for himself, thirty years in the business. Four slugs, three up, one down. His trademark. He remembered that very clearly. Not lost in the haze.

So there, that's what his mission was. Shoot his way out of this place.

First he needed to find his pistol. A .38, snubbie. Not a fancy gun. You get up close enough, you didn't need a top of the line gun to whack somebody. That was his approach, old school. Walk right up to the hit, breathe his air, nose to nose, then three up, one down.

He looked in the bureau for his gun. Dug under his socks and his Jockeys, looked in the closet, in the teeny kitchen, behind the dishes, the bowls, the glasses, everything on the shelves. He went in the bathroom, lifted the lid on the toilet. That's where they taped the guns sometime. Movies, books, that's where it was. Place nobody looked. The Godfather, that scene with whoever it was.

But here in the home, there was no gun. No gun anywhere.

Okay, fine. He'd find another way, maybe bribe somebody to unlock a door.

He needed to get on a schedule. He always had a schedule. It was another hallmark. A schedule: first this, then that, bing, bing, bing. In bed by eight, lights out at nine, up by four. Wake in the dark. An hour or two when nobody was up. He'd plan his day. Map out the hours ahead. Print it in a Month-in-a-Glance calendar. He'd never been good with dates and times and days of the week, had to see it written down for it to make sense. Maybe the haze had started early. Or was that some other guy, some guy from a book. Elmore whatever his name was.

So there you go. That was his problem. His big mountain to climb. Not sure if he was remembering shit he actually did or shit he read.

A plan. A sneaky plan, that's what he needed. He walked around the room. Trying to outwalk the haze, get some blood flowing into his skull. The room was tiny. He'd been in bigger jail cells. Spent years in a couple, one down in Florida, Raiford, he thought, counting the days, finding ways to cope.

That was all it was, all any of it was. Ways to cope. Doing things to fill up the hours, make them pass. That was the big secret. You climb a mountain, claw your way to the top, finally you're there at the summit, there's a wise man up there, you ask what's the secret and he says, hey, find something to fill up the hours. That's all there is. You can pay on your way down.

She came, his daughter. She smiled at him. Brought him some books. His weekly ration. Four hardbacks. His eyes weren't good enough for paperbacks.

“You'll like this one, Pop.”

A red cover, the shadow of a man looking down an alley.

“Already read it.”

“Just came out this week, Pop. No way you read it.”

“I'm on top of things. I read it already. What else you got?”

She showed him the other three. Covers used to have dames on them. You could stare at the women, imagine sinking into them. You could fall in love. Stare for hours before you even started to read. Every time you closed the book, there she was and her cleavage, her legs and hips. All those curves.

Now it was all shadows and shit.

“That all you got? You work in a bookstore, you bring me this crap?”

She left. The books stayed behind.

There was one written by a woman author. A photo of her in the back. Blonde, nice rack, trying to hide them under all those fluffy clothes like she was embarrassed by them. But still you could catch the outline. Just barely. But worth looking at. Better than the other photos, guys trying to be tough, slouching against walls or against the hoods of old cars, wearing leather jackets, mean ass dogs with spiked collars. Big deal. They were writers for christsakes. How tough could they be, sitting in a room all day, writing down the shit in their heads, make-believe shit.

His pills came at six. Right on time. Javier, the Puerto Rican, shiny shaved head. Earrings.

Christ, he'd lived too long. Guys wore earrings now. Guys married guys. He'd lived a century too long.

He palmed the pills, faked slinging them into his mouth. Then talking to Javier, showing him the photo of the woman writer.

“How big you think her tits are?”

“I saw what you did with them pills, Mr. Connors. You need to take them. They're good for you.”

“Like vitamins?”

“Better than vitamins.”

“You live in the haze, Javier?”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“The haze, this shit.”

He swung his arm around through the air.

“Let's see the pills, Mr. Connors. I help you with them.”

He swallowed the pills. The haze hung on.

In bed by eight, reading the book by the woman. About a serial killer. Like there weren't enough of those already. But this one was a woman. An old woman. She was about his age. Suffering from the haze like him, only not so dense yet. She goes out every night, finds somebody doing wrong, it could be a little thing, a little mean thing, somebody purse-snatching, shoplifting, whatever, not bad enough to kill somebody over, but she goes ahead and kills. That helps her sleep.

Something he should try.

He could use a good night's sleep.

He reads. Comes to a good part. The old woman bumps into a man her age. A retired killer. They talk, they have dinner, they walk on the city sidewalk, Manhattan maybe, they laugh about something. They look at the moon. They look at the stars. The two of them, they've got things in common. Killing is just one. They like pasta. They like to read. They got problems with their kids who want to stash them away somewhere, force feed them pills.

“I'm going to have to kill my daughter,” he tells her.

“Your own daughter? That's extreme.”

“Is it?”

“Your own flesh and blood, hell yes, extremely extreme.”

“If I'm going to escape the home, be with you, there's only one choice. She's got to go.”

“Maybe you could sneak out of the home.”