Authors: Dave Zeltserman
Chapter 86
It was over twenty-four hours before Bill opened his eyes again. His being shot was more than just a grazing, and more than a flesh wound. The bullet had nicked his kidney, and had left him slowly bleeding to death. An emergency surgery at Boston City Hospital saved his life. When he next opened his eyes, he found that the story he broke for the
Tribune
had gone national. Federal agents were investigating ViGen. Simon and his ox-sized companion had disappeared, others had been arrested, including Lee Dobson. Howard Beasman was denying any involvement in the planned coup of the United States, but it didn’t matter. His campaign was dead, not that he would have had much chance anyway without the aid of Kloot’s fake memories. Federal agents were chomping at the bit to talk to Bill, but Jack had arranged a lawyer for him, and his lawyer was able to keep the agents at bay. Bill did meet Jack that first day, and he asked him to deliver a message to Emily, also to check whether anyone was taking care of Jeremy’s cat, Augustine. Jack promised he would do both.
It ended up taking Bill three weeks to recover enough to be discharged. If they had released him earlier he would’ve been arrested and taken to Suffolk County Jail. One of the district attorneys involved was adamant that Bill’s newspapers articles amounted to a confession to a long laundry list of violent crimes, including home invasion and kidnapping. All of that ended, though, when Bill received a presidential pardon.
It was four days after he was released from the hospital when a soft knocking outside his apartment door woke him from a nap that he had drifted into. He had been sitting in his recliner, and Augustine, who was laying in his lap, scrambled off him as Bill jerked awake.
“I’ll be right there,” Bill yelled out in a hoarse voice. It still felt as if someone was playing around inside of him with a knife, and he had to grit his teeth as he maneuvered out of the recliner and grabbed a hold of the cane that he was using. When he opened the door and saw Emily standing outside looking miserable, he felt his heart leap into his throat. He wanted to kiss her or hug her, or at least hold her hand, but he felt the distance between them, and instead he just smiled and invited her in. She followed him into the kitchen where he put up a pot of coffee for brewing.
“Are you in a lot of pain?” she asked.
“Nah, the gunshot was just a scratch,” Bill said with a forced lopsided grin. “I barely feel anything.”
“According to the news you almost died.”
There was concern in her eyes, but still that same distance as if everything that they had before was gone. Bill found himself tearing up, and he turned away, ostensibly so he could pour the coffee, but more so he could wipe a hand across his eyes.
“They exaggerated that part of it to sell papers,” Bill said as he struggled to keep his voice composed. He brought the coffee over to the table where Emily was sitting, then brought over a carton of milk from the refrigerator so Emily could have her coffee the way she liked it.
“I saw on the news that they’re going to be releasing Gail Hawes, and that other man, Trey Megeet. Because of you.”
“Yeah, I was glad to see that happen. They’re going to need a lot of help, though.”
Emily looked down at her clasped hands. “What those people were doing is so unbelievable,” she said, “and what they put you through…”
Bill nodded. He was too choked up to say anything. This was the same beautiful woman he had fallen for, but it was as if what they had earlier was gone, almost like they were strangers, and he couldn’t stand the thought of that.
They sat in an increasingly oppressive silence for several brutally long minutes, both of them seeming incapable of breaking it. Finally Emily offered him the saddest damn smile he had ever seen. He knew she was struggling to keep from weeping also.
“I’m sorry, Bill,” she said, tears seeping from her eyes. “I can’t do this. I wish so much I could, but I can’t. That memory of you covered in blood and the things you said is so real in my head. When I look at you it’s all I see.”
“It’s not real,” Bill said. “You know it never happened.”
“I know it isn’t real. God, I know it isn’t. But I can’t help how real it seems. I’m so, so sorry.”
She fled the room then. Bill heard the apartment door open and close. He wanted to chase after her, but it was as if all his strength had bled out of him and he couldn’t have moved if his life depended on it. He started sobbing then. He was ashamed of it, but he couldn’t help it. With everything he had lost in his life; his mom, his childhood, so many close friends, losing Emily just seemed as if it were the one loss he wouldn’t be able to recover from. As he cried, Augustine jumped onto the table and first started meowing loudly to get Bill to stop, then pushed his nose into Bill’s until he finally did stop. That was when he heard more knocking outside his door. Wiping his sleeve across his face, he got up and answered it. Emily stood there, her face as much a wreck as his own, her eyes red as if she’d been crying also, her skin pale and blotchy.
With a desperate smile, she said, “Maybe if we make enough new memories, we can someday push that one memory out of my head.”
Bill nodded, unable to talk.
As she moved towards him and their lips touched, the massive distance separating them vanished in that one heartbeat, and before too long they were busy making new memories.
The End
About Dave Zeltserman:
I was born in Boston and have lived in the Boston area my whole life except for five years when I was at the University of Colorado in Boulder working on my B.S. in Applied Math and Computer Science.
I spent a lot of hours as a kid watching old movies with Hitchcock, the Marx Brothers, and film noir being my favorite, especially The Roaring Twenties, The Third Man and The Maltese Falcon. I also always read a lot, everything from comic books, Mad Magazine, pulps (Robert E. Howard was my favorite), and science fiction. When I was 15 and spending a few weeks during the summer at my uncle's house in Maine, I picked up a dog-eared copy of I, the Jury by Mickey Spillane, and from that point on was hooked on crime fiction. From Spillane, I moved on to Hammett, Chandler, Rex Stout, Ross Macdonald, and lots of other crime writers before eventually discovering Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford in the early 90s. Thompson, in particular, had a big impact on my writing, not only in the way he got into the heads of broken psychopaths and had you rooting for them, but in the way he took chances in his writing. For years before I read my first Jim Thompson novel, Hell of a Woman, I was trying to write what amounted to bad Ross Macdonald. Once I started reading Thompson, it opened my eyes to how I could break every rule I wanted to as long as I could make it work, and this led me to finding my own voice. My first book, Fast Lane, was probably equally inspired by Macdonald and Thompson--it had the sins of the father theme that Macdonald did so well, but written from the unreliable narrator and mind of the killer that Thompson excelled at. Years after writing Fast Lane, I read about Macdonald's last unfinished Lew Archer novel, and was amazed to find that it had a major plot-point in common with Fast Lane.
After I graduated college I got a job developing data communication software, and over the years have worked at some of the world's leading networking and computer companies, including Motorola, DEC, Nokia, Lucent and Cisco Corporation. Off and on over the years I would be drawn to writing, usually dark crime fiction, but it always seemed more of a lark than anything real. I was a math and computer science guy, and outside of one creative writing course in college, and books I read on the subject, I never had any formal training in it--I was writing mostly at an instinctive and gut level. But a kind of crazy creative fever took over while I was working on Fast Lane, and when I was done I had something that I knew could be published someday, as well as a book that crime noir readers would enjoy. It turned out that day was 12 years after I wrote it, and I first sold the Italian rights to Meridiano Zero before Point Blank Press published it. During those 12 years I had a lot of ups and downs, mostly downs where I'd quit writing to focus on my software engineering career. It's been a long road but things are now looking up. I've had stories published in a lot of places, including Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock, as well as a 3-book 'man just out of prison' noir series that is being published by the prestigious UK publisher, Serpent's Tail (Small Crimes, Pariah, Killer), as well as books Fast Lane, Bad Thoughts and Bad Karma (Five Star Mysteries). And while it took a while, I know from the letters I get from noir fans who discover Fast Lane that I was right about it. These days I'm spending my time writing crime fiction and studying martial arts (I hold a black belt in Tiger-Crane style of Kung Fu), and enjoying every minute of it.
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