Past Tense Read online

  “Who got murdered?”

  The litany was as nonchalant as a motto. “Guy named Chavez in the Mission. Guy named Jefferson in the Fillmore. Guy named Pearlstine in Lake Merced. They’re equal opportunity assassins—hire out to whoever has the bread to make it worth their while. I hear the current rate is ten grand.”

  “What’d the dead guys do to get themselves killed by some cops?”

  “Made someone mad, then kept their wallets in their pockets.”

  Without further ado, Charley walked behind the big guy and put the Ruger at the base of his neck. I put my hand on the butt of my Walther but kept it where it was. The rest of me started to shiver.

  “You’ll be doing him a favor, won’t you?” I said quietly, the scrim of sweat that bathed my body acting like a swamp cooler in the night breeze off the bay, making my voice quiver. When I stopped talking, my teeth started chattering.

  “What kind of favor?” Charley asked.

  “He goes to Folsom, there’s a good chance the prison gangs will make his life miserable.”

  His grin was broad and lascivious. “You mean let them have all the fun?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  Charley shook his head. “They got a balance of power working there now. He joins the Aryan Brotherhood, they protect him from the Mexican Mafia and the Black Guerrillas, and everything stays cool. Too much chance he hangs on that way.”

  “Give him up, Charley. Why waste your time?”

  “He’s the one who broke your finger, right?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Oh, he’s the one. He was bragging about it in there.”

  “So?”

  “So this.”

  Charley pulled the trigger. Thanks to the silencer, the report was no louder than a fish flopping out in the bay.

  The big guy fell on his face like a fir. Blood gushed, then streamed, then seeped. One of the others started yelling until Charley set the gun on the back of his neck and the scream became a stifled wail.

  “Jesus, Charley,” I said with as much sanity as I could muster. “This is beyond the pale.”

  “The guy was a fucking sadist. What was beyond the pale was the way he spent his career beating the shit out of innocent civilians. Seventeen brutality charges brought against him; not one resulted in suspension.”

  Charley took his gun off the neck of the whiner and strolled over to Gary Hilton and placed the muzzle in its familiar spot. Neither of them said anything and I stayed silent, too. I was afraid of a lot of things, but mostly of making it worse.

  “I can trade,” Hilton said with impressive calm. “I can give you stuff you never heard about. I can take down two dozen patrol and a dozen detectives. I can give you an assistant chief.”

  “Shut up,” Charley instructed, then turned to me. “You can put a stop to it right here,” he said easily, as though we were discussing trump in a bridge hand.

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you.”

  “How would I do that?”

  “You know how.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Sure you do. All you have to do is kill me.”

  Although I’d sensed it was coming, it still hit me like a cannonball. In the aftermath of their impact, I barely found the wind to speak. “Shit, Charley.”

  “What we have here is a simple situation,” Charley went on laconically, in what seemed to border on a state of euphoria. “It stops if you kill me; it doesn’t if you don’t.”

  “Why the fuck are you doing this to me?”

  “I imagine you’ve figured it out.”

  “Tell me.”

  Charley shrugged. “I can’t do much on my own these days, but at least I can decide how I die.”

  “But what does that—?”

  “Come on, Marsh. You know what I want. I don’t want these assholes to take me down. I don’t want to rot in jail or in some fucking hospital with tubes up everything from my nose to my cock. I want to die by a hand I respect. A hand that was there when I needed it. A hand that hits what it aims at and only aims at what needs to be killed.”

  “You want me to be your Kevorkian.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Put you out of your misery.”

  “Correct.”

  “And go to jail for my trouble.”

  “No chance. Justifiable homicide, open and shut. Defense of another; PC one-twelve.”

  “Who am I defending?”

  He pointed to his right. “Those three.”

  I gestured toward Hilton. “What about him?”

  “It’s too late for him,” Charley said, and pulled the trigger a second time. Same sound; same special effects—Gary Hilton was suddenly a well-dressed rag doll. The sight was so astounding I had to lean against the wall at my back to keep myself upright.

  Now I was the one who started to plead. “Charley, Jesus. Don’t do this. For God’s sake. I know you’re sick. I know you want to end it before the pain gets so bad you can’t stand it. I understand that, and I’ll help you find a way to die with some dignity. But don’t do it this way. Let them remember all the good you’ve done, not this shit.”

  “The only memory I care about is yours.”

  “If I have to shoot my best friend, what kind of memory is that going to be?”

  “You’ll sort it through. Sooner or later, you’ll see that this is the only way out. Hell, Marsh. I’d do the same for you and you know it.”

  I lifted my gun from my belt and let it dangle at my side. “No.”

  Charley seemed taken aback. “What?”

  “I won’t do it.”

  He gestured. “Then they’re dead meat.” He took his place behind the third man and placed the pistol in its deadly slot. When he was ready, he looked at me. “Still time to save them.”

  I shook my head. “Sorry.”

  “You stubborn bastard.” With a flick of his wrist, Charley reversed his aim and stuck the muzzle of his gun in his mouth. “If you won’t shoot me to save him,” he mumbled around the metal tube, “maybe you’ll shoot me to save me.”

  Somehow, I found myself laughing. “That tactic didn’t fly in Vietnam. I don’t think it’ll fare any better down here.”

  His face flushed; his free hand made a fist. A model of cool until now, suddenly Charley was outraged, at his illness, at my recalcitrance, at the surviving members of the Triad, at something only he was privy to, who knew?

  “You son of a bitch.” I’d heard less frightening growls from tigers.

  The muzzle of the Ruger slid out of his mouth and panned toward me. “I guess this is the way it goes down—you shoot me to save your ass. Self-defense, complete with witnesses. You don’t even get booked.”

  I shook my head. “Not even close.”

  “I guess you want your precious Eleanor to grow old without a papa,”

  His knuckles whitened around the grip; his finger seemed to squeeze the trigger, his hand seemed to tremble. I raised my Walther and aimed at what I hoped was his shoulder. “This is insane,” I said, but I don’t think he heard me.

  His finger tightened further and mine did, too, as though they were wired in parallel. Wars had started this way; widows had been made this way. But I didn’t know what to do.

  “Charley. Please, I—”

  “Your call, Tanner.”

  “I’m not going to kill you, Charley. So just put that out—”

  Something moved. Not Charley, but—

  The sounds were simultaneous and stupendous. I was thrown back against the wall so hard I bit the tip of my tongue off.

  The tongue hurt like hell, but for an instant I thought that was the only damage I’d suffered. But as I watched a stain spread across Charley’s massive chest and an expression close to rapture cross his face, a pain that was so much more than pain that it became a narcotic, a tingly numbness in the nature of a toxic shock, spread up and over me from somewhere below the chest.

  I became sightless and unfeeling, wea
k and tired and helpless. I tried to stand, but couldn’t move my legs. I tried to speak, but it came out in burbles and bubbles indecipherable even to me. I tugged free my shirt and tried to feel for my wound but felt only flesh over bone, then something warm and wet that should have been my belly but didn’t feel like any substance I’d ever felt before, didn’t feel like me.

  Then some inner hallucinogen kicked in. I saw things I had never seen and things I had last seen long ago, things that were dead and things that were merely distant, things that were comforting and things that sent slivers of terror darting through me that would surely be fatal if they passed through me a second time.

  I called to Charley but he didn’t answer. I called for my mother but she didn’t answer either. I called for Peggy and then I called for … Eleanor.

  And there she was, with her elfin smile, reaching a pudgy hand toward me, eager to be in my arms, happy to see her father. I called her name once more and she said something. It might have been Daddy, or might have been my name, or it might have been

  …

  might have been something so faint that I couldn’t … but something that was surely

  …

  something that …

  was definitely …

  …

  crucial

  About the Author

  STEPHEN GREENLEAF was educated at Carleton College, at the Boalt Hall School of Law (University of California, Berkeley), and through the Creative Writing Program at the University of Iowa. After some years practicing law, Mr. Greenleaf began writing fiction in 1977. He lives in Oregon.