‘Cause of death,’ the coroner observed with early-morning irony, ‘is the total vaporization of his heart. The only way we’ll even be able to identify heart tissue is under a microscope. Steak tartare,’ the man added, shaking his head.
‘An obvious contact wound. The guy must have jammed the muzzle right into him, then triggered it off.’
‘Jesus, he didn’t even cough up any blood,’ Douglas said. The lack of an exit wound left no blood at all on the sidewalk, and from a distance Bandanna actually looked as though he were asleep – except for the wide and lifeless eyes.
‘No diaphragm,’ the ME explained, pointing to the entrance hole. ‘That’s between here and the heart. We’ll probably find that the whole respiratory system is wiped out, too. You know, I’ve never seen anything this clean in my life.’ And the man had been working this job for sixteen years. ‘We need lots of pictures. This one will find its way into a textbook.’
‘How experienced was he?’ Ryan asked the uniformed officer.
‘Long enough to know better.’
The detective lieutenant bent down, feeling around the left hip. ‘Still has a gun here.’
‘Somebody he knew?’ Douglas wondered. ‘Somebody he let get real close, that’s for damned sure.’
‘A shotgun’s kinda hard to conceal. Hell, even a sawed-off is bulky. No warning at all?’ Ryan stepped back for the ME to do his work.
‘Hands are clean, no signs of a struggle. Whoever did this got real close without alarming our friend at all.’ Douglas paused. ‘Goddamn it, a shotgun’s noisy. Nobody heard anything?’
‘Time of death, call it two or three for now,’ the medical examiner estimated, for again there was no rigor.
‘Streets are quiet then,’ Douglas went on. ‘And a shotgun makes a shitload of noise.’
Ryan looked at the pants pockets. No bulge of a money roll, again. He looked around. There were perhaps fifteen people watching from behind the police line. Street entertainment was where you found it, and the interest on their faces was no less clinical and no more involved than that of the medical examiner.
‘The Duo maybe?’ Ryan asked nobody in particular.
‘No, it wasn’t,’ the ME said at once. ‘This was a single-barrel weapon. A double would have made a mark left or right of the entrance wound, and the powder distribution would have been different. Shotgun, this close, you only need one. Anyway, a single-barrel weapon.’ ‘
‘Amen,’ Douglas agreed. ‘Someone is doing the Lord’s work. Three pushers down in a couple of days. Might put Mark Charon out of business if this keeps up.’
‘Tom,’ Ryan said, ‘not today.’ One more folder, he thought. Another drug-pusher ripoff, done very efficiently – but not the same guy who’d taken Ju-Ju down. Different ??.
Another shower, another shave, another jog in Chinquapin Park during which he could think. Now he had a place and a face to go along with the car. The mission was on profile, Kelly thought, turning right on Belvedere Avenue to cross the stream before jogging back the other way and completing his third lap. It was a pleasant park. Not much in the way of playground equipment, but that allowed kids to run and play free-form, which a number of them were doing, some under the semiwatchful eyes of a few neighborhood mothers, many with books to go along with the sleeping infants who would soon grow to enjoy the grass and open spaces. There was an undermanned pickup game of baseball. The ball evaded the glove of a nine-year-old and came close to his jogging path. Kelly bent down without breaking stride and tossed the ball to the kid, who caught it this time and yelled a thank-you. A younger child was playing with a Frisbee, not too well, and wandered in Kelly’s way, causing a quick avoidance maneuver that occasioned an embarrassed look from her mother, to which Kelly responded with a friendly wave and smile.
This is how it’s supposed to be, he told himself. Not very different from his own youth in Indianapolis. Dad’s at work. Mom’s with the kids because it was hard to be a good mom and have a job, especially when they were little; or at least, those mothers who had to work or chose to work could leave the kids with a trusted friend, sure that the little ones would be safe to play and enjoy their summer vacation in a green and open place, learning to play ball. And yet society had learned to accept the fact that it wasn’t this way for many. This area was so different from his area of operations, and the privileges these kids enjoyed ought not to be privileges at all, for how could a child grow to proper adulthood without an environment like this?
Those were dangerous thoughts, Kelly told himself. The logical conclusion was to try to change the whole world, and that was beyond his capacity, he thought, finishing his three-mile run with the usual sweaty and good-tired feel, walking it off to cool down before he drove back to the apartment. The sounds drifted over of laughing children, the squeals, the angry shouts of cheater! for some perceived violation of rules not fully understood by either player, and disagreements over who was out or who was ‘it’ in some other game. He got into his car, leaving the sounds and thought behind, because he was cheating, too, wasn’t he? He was breaking the rules, important rules that he did fully understand, but doing so in pursuit of justice, or what he called justice in his own mind.
Vengeance? Kelly asked himself, crossing a street. Vigilante was the next word that came unbidden into his mind. That was a better word, Kelly thought. It came from vigiles, a Roman term for those who kept the watch, the vigilia, during the night in the city streets, mainly watchmen for fire, if he remembered correctly from the Latin classes at St Ignatius High School, but being Romans they’d probably carried swords, too. He wondered if the streets of Rome had been safe, safer than the streets of this city. Perhaps so – probably so. Roman justice had been … stern. Crucifixion would not have been a pleasant way to die, and for some crimes, like the murder of one’s father, the penalty prescribed by law was to be bound in a cloth sack along with a dog and a rooster, and some other animal, then to be tossed in the Tiber – not to drown, but to be torn apart while drowning by animals crazed to get out of the sack. Perhaps he was the linear descendant of such times, of a vigile, Kelly told himself, keeping watch at night. It made him feel better than to believe that he was breaking the law. And ‘vigilantes’ in American history books were very different from those portrayed in the press. Before the organization of real police departments, private citizens had patrolled the streets and kept the peace in a rough-and-ready way. As he was doing?
Well, no, not really, Kelly admitted to himself, parking the car. So what if it was vengeance? Ten minutes later another garbage bag filled with another set of discarded clothes found its way to the Dumpster, and Kelly enjoyed another shower before making a telephone call.
‘Nurses’ station, O’Toole.’
‘Sandy? It’s John. Still getting out at three?’
‘You do have good timing,’ she said, allowing herself a private smile at her stand-up desk. ‘The damn car is broke again.’ And taxicabs cost too much.
‘Want me to look at it?’ Kelly asked.
‘I wish somebody could fix it.’
‘I make no promises,’ she heard him say. ‘But I come cheap.’
‘How cheap?’ Sandy asked, knowing what the reply would be.
‘Permit me to buy you dinner? You can pick the place, even.’
‘Yes, okay … but…’
‘But it’s still too soon for both of us. Yes, ma’am, I know that. Your virtue is not endangered – honest.’
She had to laugh. It was just so incongruous that this big man could be so self-effacing. And yet she knew that she could trust him, and she was weary of cooking dinner for one, and being alone and alone and alone. Too soon or not, she needed company sometimes.
‘Three-fifteen,’ she told him, ‘at the main entrance.’
‘I’ll even wear my patient bracelet.’
‘Okay.’ Another laugh, surprising another nurse who passed by the station with a trayful of medications. ‘Okay, I said yes, didn’t I?’
‘Yes, ma’am. See you then,’ Kelly said with a chuckle, hanging up.
Some human contact would be nice, he told himself, heading out the door. First Kelly headed to a shoe store, where he purchased a pair of black high-tops, size eleven. Then he found four more shoe stores, where he did the same, trying not to get the same brand, but he ended up with one duplicate pair even so. The same problem attended the purchase of bush jackets. He could find only two brand names for that type of garment, and ended up getting a pair of duplicates, then to discover that they were exactly the same, different only in the name tag inside the neck. Planned diversity in disguise, he found, was harder than he’d expected it to be, but that didn’t lessen the necessity of sticking to his plan. On getting back to his apartment – he was, perversely, thinking of it as ‘home’ though he knew better – he stripped everything of tags and headed for the laundry room, where all the clothes went into the machine on a hot-hot cycle with plenty of Clorox bleach, along with the remaining dark-color clothes he’d picked up at yard sales. He was down to three clothing sets now, and realized he’d have to shop for more.