Deadline Man

I say, “We’ve got to go back there. Tell the police.”

“No.”

“That’s where those cops were going, to Pam’s house. We have to go back.”

“No.” Amber sits back, pulls the seatbelt across her long, slim frame, and drives back into traffic. “They’ll think you did it. You were with her last night and I bet you didn’t wear a condom. She tossed a glass of water on you in front of witnesses. I bet her girlfriends know she was doing you. That’s motive. You knew that instinctively or you would have called 911 and waited for the cops. Did you call 911?”

I say that I didn’t.

“Well, somebody did. Maybe you were meant to be caught there, still passed out. Don’t worry. The cops’ll come to see you soon enough.”

I slowly come to, as if I am awakening from the kind of afternoon nap that presages a nasty head cold. Amber turns onto Denny Way and then slides south again on Second Avenue. The Jetta’s white speedometer needle stays fixed on thirty-five.

“What did you do with the gun?” she asks.

I tell her that I left it on the bed. After I had wiped it down with my T-shirt. After I rinsed my bloody hands off in the sink, not even noticing Pam’s blood on my face.

She says nothing as we pass through the condo canyons of Belltown and head into the central business district. I know what she’s thinking: Why did you have the presence of mind to do that? Did you really kill them both in, as they say in the newspaper, a jealous rage?

I talk as we crawl along a street clogged with cars and roaring buses and crosswalks crowded with pedestrians in coats. I feel hemmed in and vulnerable, scan the sidewalks for Stu and Bill. My neck hurts from looking behind us. “I knew they were going to try to frame me. I knew they had put my fingerprints on the gun.” I am more awake now, finally feeling the chill of the morning. “After that, I didn’t know whether to stay or go. Call 911 or go. I don’t know. Then I was just out on the street, walking.”

“You sound drugged.”

I ask her what she means. Why would Pam slip me a mickey?

“Whoever killed her could have use a cloth with chloroform. Or injected you with valium, something like that. There’s lots of ways. They drugged you before they shot her.”

And with Ron thrown in as a bonus. Pam’s boyfriend must have let himself into the house as they were finishing up and they killed him. A colder thought comes through: They waited for him, hoping to frame me for both killings with the everyday motive of a love triangle gone bad. “You’re right. They intended for the cops to find me with the bodies…”

“Who is ‘they’?” she demands.

I don’t know how to answer. I hear my voice: “Her face was just gone…”

“That’s an exit wound.” Amber sounds clinical, detached.

“But it was such a small gun, like a .22.”

“Soft-point bullets,” she says. “They expand on impact. Nasty. Assassination issue. You have blood spatter on your face. They would have shot her in the back of her head. Probably used a pillow as a silencer.”

“How do you know these things?”

By that time we are at my apartment. She finds a parallel parking space a block away and expertly slides in.

“What time is it?” I ask.

“Nine-fifteen.”

I curse. I have a column due at one. “Maybe I’ll call in sick.”

“No.” She turns off the car and jams up the parking brake. “You have to act normal. Like nothing happened. Let’s go.”

Inside my loft, she helps me out of my clothes. I am sitting naked on the bed as she momentarily cups my crotch in her warm hand. But it’s only for a moment, a half-smile on her face. “You are trouble. Get in the shower, now. And clean under your nails really well.”

I do, even though I feel every individual spray of water as if it’s an electrical charge hitting my skin. I scrub hard everywhere, washing off Pam. Pam who is dead and I’m to blame. When I watch the water swirling down the drain, I start to feel nauseous again. I imagine gallons of blood spilling down, circling counter-clockwise in a dark red vortex. But it’s only water. The familiar shower is brightly lit and white tiled but it feels like a cell. When I step out and towel off, Amber is putting my clothes and shoes into a plastic garbage bag. She walks over and kisses me, then holds my face tightly, aiming eyes to eyes.

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

She might as well have asked me to give the GDP price deflator for Bolivia in 1998. I search my scrambled brain. The wine bottle empty. In bed with Pam, starting to fall asleep. Nothing out of place. The house locked.