“McGully. Let him up.”
“What?” says McGully sharply. “Absolutely not.”
We both look to Culverson instinctively; we’re all the same rank, but he’s the grown-up in the room. Culverson nods minutely. McGully glowers, comes up out of his squat like a gorilla rising from the jungle floor, and steps pointedly on Toussaint’s fingers on his way to the ratty sofa. Toussaint struggles to his knees, and Culverson murmurs, “That’s far enough,” so I get down on my knees, too, so I can look into his eyes, and I give my voice a coaxing, sweet gentleness, somewhere in the vocal range of my mother.
“Tell me what else.”
Long silence. “He’s—” starts McGully, and I hold up one hand, eyes still on the suspect, and McGully shuts up.
“Please, sir,” I say softly. “I just want to know the truth, Mr. Toussaint.
“I didn’t kill him.”
“I know that,” and I mean it. In this instant, looking into his eyes, I don’t believe that he did kill him. “I just want to know the truth. You said pills. Where did you get the pills?”
“I didn’t get them.” Toussaint looks at me, bewildered. “Peter brought ’em over.”
“What?”
“God’s truth,” he says, for he can see my skepticism. We’re down there on the floor, kneeling across from each other like two religious fanatics, a pair of penitents.
“Dead serious,” says Toussaint. “Guy shows up on my doorstep with two pill bottles, MS Contins, sixty milligrams a pill, a hundred pills in each bottle. He says he’d like to ingest the drugs in a safe and effective manner.”
“That’s what he said?” snorts McGully, settled in the easy chair, his sidearm trained on Toussaint.
“Yes.”
“Look at me,” I say. “Tell me what happened then.”
“I said, sure, but let me split ’em with you.” He looks up, looks around, his narrowed eyes flashing with nervousness, defiance, pride. “Well, what the hell was I supposed to do? I worked my whole life—every day, since I got out of high school I worked. For the specific reason that my old man was a piece of shit, and I didn’t want to be my old man.”
J. T. Toussaint’s massive frame is shaking with the force of expressing all this.
“And then, out of the clear blue sky, this bullshit? An asteroid is coming, no one’s building anything, the quarry shuts down, and just like that I got no job, no prospects, nothing to do but wait to die. Two days later Peter Zell comes to my house with a handful of opiates? What would you do?”
I look at him, his kneeling trembling frame, his giant head cast down at the rug. I look to Culverson, at the mantel, who shakes his head sadly. I become aware of a light high-pitching hum and look over at McGully on the sofa, his gun in his lap, pretending to play a little violin.
“Okay, J. T.,” I say. “Then what happened?”
It wasn’t hard for J. T. Toussaint to help Peter ingest morphine sulfate in a safe and effective manner, to circumvent the time-release mechanism and measure out the dosage to ration the share and minimize the risk of accidental overdose. He’d watched his father do it a million times with a million different kinds of pills: scrub off the wax, crush the tablet, measure it out, and place it under the tongue. When they were done, Peter got more.
“He never told you where it came from?”
“Nope.” A pause—a half-second hesitation—I stare into his eyes. “Really, man. This went on till, like, October. Wherever he was getting the shit, he ran out of it.” After October, says Toussaint, they’d still hang out, started going to see Distant Pale Glimmers together when that started up, grab a beer now and then after work. I’m thinking about all this, considering the raft of new details, trying to see what might be true.
“And last Monday night?”
“What?”
“What happened on Monday night?”
“Just like I told you, man. We went to the movie, we had a bunch of beer, and I left him there.”
“And you’re sure?” I say gently, almost tenderly. “Sure that’s the whole story?”
Silence. He looks at me, and he’s about to say something, I can see his mind working behind the rock-wall hardness of his face, he wants to tell me one thing more.
“McGully,” I say. “What’s the mandatory on the waste-vehicle violation?”
“Death,” says McGully, and Toussaint’s eyes go wide, and I shake my head.
“Come on, Detective,” I say. “Seriously.”
Culverson says, “Discretion.”
“Okay,” I say, eyes back on Toussaint. “Okay. So, look, we’re going to bring you in. We have to. But I’ll make it so you do two weeks on the car.” I stand up, hands out to him, to pull him up. “A month maybe. Easy time.”
And then McGully says, “Or we could shoot him right now.”
“McGully—” I turn away from J. T. Toussaint for one second, to Culverson, trying to get him to get McGully to knock it off, and by the time I turn back to J. T. he’s in motion, launching himself up like a rocket and ramming his head into my chest, the massive weight of him like a sledge. I’m down, backward, and McGully is up and Culverson is in motion, guns drawn. Toussaint’s big hand has got that model of the New Hampshire state house, and now Culverson has his gun out, too, but he’s not firing, and McGully isn’t either, because Toussaint is on top of me, and he comes right at my eye with that thing, its wicked golden steeple pointed down, and everything goes black.
“Son of a bitch,” says McGully. Toussaint lets me go and I hear him thunder toward the door, and I shout, “Don’t,” blood gushing from my face, my hands up over my eyes. I shout, “Don’t shoot!” but it’s too late, everybody’s shooting, the bullets a series of hot rushes in the corner of my blindness, and I hear Toussaint scream and fall down.
Houdini barking like crazy from the door by the kitchen, howling and woofing in grief and astonishment.
“Uh, yes, Detective? Excuse me? How does this tragic tale make the guy into a murder victim?”
These are the words ringing bitterly in the hollowed-out corners of my brain, as I’m lying here in the hospital, in pain. McGully’s sarcastic question back at headquarters, before we went over there.
J. T. Toussaint is dead. McGully shot him three times, and Culverson shot him once, and he was dead by the time he arrived at Concord Hospital.
My face hurts. I’m in a lot of pain. Maybe Toussaint went after me with the ashtray and tried to bolt because he murdered his friend Peter, but I don’t think so.
I think he attacked me simply because he was afraid. There were too many cops in the room, and McGully was cracking wise and I tried to tell him otherwise, but he was afraid that if we took him in for the stupid engine violation, he would rot in prison until October 3. He took a calculated risk, just like Peter did, and he lost.
McGully shot him three times, and Culverson shot him once, and now he’s dead.
“A quarter of an inch higher and your eyeball would have exploded,” says the doctor, a young woman with a high blonde ponytail and sneakers and the cuffs of her white doctor’s coat rolled up.
“Okay,” I say.
She secures a thick pad of gauze over my right eyeball with surgical tape.
“It’s called an orbital floor fracture,” she says, “and it’s going to cause some numbing of the cheek.”
“Okay,” I say.
“As well as mild to severe diplopia.”