Dead Watch

forty-five?”
    He looked at his watch: One o’clock. “Okay—but give me a hint.”
    “Madison Bowe.”
    “I’ll be there.”

    The killer could feel the pull of the .45 in his pocket, pulling down on his shoulders, and maybe his soul.
    He was moving Lincoln Bowe. Bowe was pale, naked, unconscious, a sack of meat, for all practical purposes. The killer had him slung in a blue plastic tarp, purchased at a Wal-Mart, and wrestled him down the narrow stairs, under the single bare basement bulb.
    He was a big man, straining with the load, trying for a kind of tenderness while moving two hundred pounds of inert human being. He wore blue coveralls from Wal-Mart, purchased for the murder, and a hooded sweatshirt, with the hood pulled over his head, and plastic gloves. He knew all about DNA, and it worried him. A hair, a little spit, and he could wind up strapped to the death gurney, a needle in the arm . . .
    He got the load down, puffing and heaving all the way, then looked back up the stairs: two minutes and he’d have to take the body back up. But he couldn’t do the killing upstairs, the neighborhood was too tight, somebody might hear the shot.
    He moved Bowe under the light, spread the tarp, exposed him. He was lying on his back, soft and helpless. His body was dead white, touched here and there with blemishes, pimples, the rashes and scrapes of an out-of-shape man in his fifth decade. He looked at Bowe for a few seconds, then said aloud, “Here we are. Christ Almighty.”
    No response. Bowe had taken an overdose of Rinolat.
    The killer took the .45 out of his pocket, an old, worn gun, made in the first half of the twentieth century, bought at a weekend sale, inaccurate at any distance farther than arm’s length. Which was enough for the task.
    He cocked it with a gloved hand, then thought: “The phone book. Damnit.” He ran up the short flight of stairs, got the phone book off the kitchen table, and went back down, closing the door behind him. The phone book already had two bullet holes in it: tests he’d done out in the Virginia countryside. He placed it on the naked man’s chest.
    He slipped the safety and said, “Linc . . .” and thought:
    Ears . . . damnit.
    He put the safety back on, ran back up the stairs, and got the earplugs. They were two bullet-sized bits of compressible yellow foam, made for target shooters. He twisted each one, fitted them into his ears, waited for them to reexpand. If he’d fired the gun in the confines of the basement, without the ear protection, he wouldn’t have been able to hear for a week.
    He slipped the safety again, teared up, wiped the tears away, pointed the pistol at the point where the phone book covered the naked man’s heart, said, “Lincoln,” and pulled the trigger.
    Without the earplugs, the blast would have been shattering; it was bad enough as it was. The naked man bucked upward, his eyes opening in reflex, the pupils milky with sleep. He stared at the killer for a second, then two, then dropped back flat on the floor.
    “Holy mother,” the killer said, appalled. He stood staring for a second, shocked by the milky eyes, by a possible gleam of intelligence, the hair rising on the back of his neck. Then, after a moment, he stooped and picked up the phone book. The slug had gone through, and blood bubbled from a purple hole in the naked man’s chest. The hole was directly over his heart. He engaged the safety on the .45, slipped the gun back in his pocket, and squatted.
    The naked man wasn’t breathing. His eyes, when the lids were withdrawn, had rolled up, showing only the whites. He pressed a plastic-covered finger against the naked man’s neck, waiting for any sign of a pulse. Didn’t find one. Lincoln Bowe was dead.
    He rolled Bowe up, enough to look at his back. No exit wound. The phone book had worked like a charm: the slug was buried inside the dead man.
    The killer was silent, kneeling, looking at the face of the man on the floor. So many years. Who would have thought it’d come to this? Then he sighed, stood up, pulled the magazine on the pistol, jacked the shell out of the chamber, replaced it in the magazine. Looked at the stairs.
    This would be the dangerous part, moving the body. If the cops stopped him for anything, he was done.
    But they’d made their plans, and he was running with them. He had a lot to do. He stood, still looking at the dead man’s face, then said, “Let’s move, Linc. Let’s go.”

2 

    Jake