STEPHEN KING
he was funny. Because he was charming. Maybe because he was Irish and had kissed the Blarney Stone.
That was about all. I started home. Somewhere along the way I took a detour, though, and ended up walking all over downtown. I zigged and zagged, walking down boulevards and cutting through parking lots, all the time thinking about Andrew Neff climbing into his bathtub and putting a Baggie over his head. A big one, a gallon-size, keeps all your leftovers supermarket-fresh.
He was funny. He was charming. And I had killed him. Neff had opened my letter and it had gotten into his head, somehow. Judging by what I’d read in the paper, the special words and symbols took maybe three days to fuck him up enough to swallow the pills and climb into the tub.
He deserved it.
That’s what Mr. Sharpton said about Skipper, and maybe he was right . . . that time. But did Neff deserve it? Was there shit about him I didn’t know, did he maybe like little girls in the wrong way or push dope or go after people too weak to fight back, like Skipper had gone after me with the shopping cart?
We want to help you use your talent for the betterment of all mankind, Mr.
Sharpton said, and surely that didn’t mean making a guy off himself because he thought the Defense Department was spending too much money on smart-bombs. Paranoid shit like that is strictly for movies starring Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme.
Then I had a bad idea—a scary idea.
Maybe TransCorp didn’t want him dead because he wrote that stuff.
Maybe they wanted him dead because people—the wrong people—were starting to think about what he wrote.
“That’s crazy,” I said, right out loud, and a woman looking into the window of Columbia City-Oh So Pretty turned around and gave me the old fish-eye.
I ended up at the public library around two o’clock, with my legs aching and my head throbbing. I kept seeing that guy in the bathtub, with his wrinkled old man’s tits and white chest-hair, his nice 254
EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL
smile gone, replaced by this vague Planet X look. I kept seeing him putting a Baggie over his head, humming a Sinatra tune (“My Way,”
maybe) as he snugged it down tight, then peered through it the way you’d peer through a cloudy window, so he could see to slit the veins in his wrists. I didn’t want to see that stuff, but I couldn’t stop.
My bombsight had turned into a telescope.
They had a computer room in the library, and you could get on the Internet at a very reasonable cost. I had to get a library card, too, but that was okay. A library card is good to have, you can never have too much ID.
It took me only three bucks’ worth of time to find Ann Tevitch and call up the report of her death. The story started, I saw with a sinking sensation, in the bottom righthand corner of page one, The Official Dead Folks’ Nook, and then jumped to the obituary page.
Professor Tevitch had been a pretty lady, blond, thirty-seven. In the photo she was holding her glasses in her hand, as if she wanted people to know she wore them . . . but as if she’d wanted people to see what pretty eyes she had, too. That made me feel sad and guilty.
Her death was startlingly like Skipper’s—coming home from her office at UNM just after dark, maybe hurrying a little because it was her turn to make supper, but what the hell, good driving conditions and great visibility. Her car—vanity license plate DNA FAN, I happened to know—had veered off the road, overturned, and landed in a drywash. She was still alive when someone spotted the headlights and found her, but there had never been any real hope; her injuries were too grave.
There was no alcohol in her system and her marriage was in good shape (no kids, at least, thank God for small favors), so the idea of suicide was farfetched. She had been looking forward to the future, had even talked about getting a computer to celebrate a new research grant. She’d refused to own a PC since 1988 or so; had lost some valuable data in one when it locked up, and had distrusted them ever since. She would use her department’s equipment when she absolutely had to, but that was all.