In the Deathroom (7)

year and a half in all, I think.”
“Have a cigarette, Mr. Fletcher.” Escobar opened a drawer and took out a thin folder.

“Not just yet. Thank you.”
“Okay.” From Escobar it of course came out ho-kay. When he did the TV weather, the boys in the control room would sometimes superimpose a photograph of a woman in a bikini on the weather map. When he saw this, Escobar would laugh and wave his hands and pat his chest. People liked it. It was comical. It was like the sound of ho-kay. It was like the sound of steenkin batches.

Escobar opened the folder with his own cigarette planted squarely in the middle of his mouth with the smoke running up into his eyes. It was the way you saw the old men smoking on the street corners down here, the ones who still wore straw hats, sandals, and baggy white pants. Now Escobar was smiling, keeping his lips shut so his Marlboro wouldn’t fall out of his mouth and onto the table but smiling just the same. He took a glossy black-and-white photograph out of the thin folder and slid it across to Fletcher. “Here is your friend Tomás. Not too pretty, is he?”

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

In the Deathroom (6)

“Close enough,” Fletcher said. He thought: What you must guard against is your desire to believe them. It is natural to want to believe, and probably natural to want to tell the truth—especially after you’ve been grabbed outside your favorite café and briskly beaten by men who smell of refried beans—but giving them what they want won’t help you. That’s the thing to hold onto, the only idea that’s any good in a room like this. What they say means nothing. What matters is the thing on that trolley, the thing under that piece of cloth. What matters is the guy who hasn’t said anything yet. And the stains on the walls, of course.

Escobar leaned forward, looking serious. “Do you deny that for the last fourteen months you have givencertain information to a man named Tomás Herrera, who has in turn funneled it to a certain Communist insurgent named Pedro Núñez?”

“No,” Fletcher said. “I don’t deny it.” To adequately keep up his side of this charade—the charade summarized by the difference between the words conversation and interrogation—he should now justify, attempt to explain. As if anyone in the history of the world had ever won a political argument in a room like this. But he didn’t have it in him to do so. “Although it was a little longer than that. Almost a year and a half in all, I think.”

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

In the Deathroom (5)

“I ask have you been checked out of your room—although after all this time it probably seems more like an apartment to you, yes?— and if there’s a car to take you to the airport when we finish our onversation.”
Except conversation hadn’t been the word he used.

“Ye-es?” Sounding as if he could not believe his own good fortune.
Or so Fletcher hoped. “You’ll be on the first Delta flight back to Miami,” the Bride of Frankenstein said. She spoke without a trace of Spanish accent. “Your passport will be given back to you once the plane has touched down on American soil. You will not be harmed or held here, Mr.
Fletcher—not if you cooperate with our inquiries—but you are being deported, let’s be clear on that. Kicked out. Given what you Americans call the bum’s rush.”

She was much smoother than Escobar. Fletcher found it amusing that he had thought her Escobar’s assistant. And you call yourself a reporter, he thought. Of course if he was just a reporter, the Times’s man in Central America, he would not be here in the basement of the Ministry
of Information, where the stains on the wall looked suspiciously like blood. He had ceased being a reporter some sixteen months ago, around the time he’d first met Núñez.

“I understand,” Fletcher said. Escobar had taken a cigarette. He lighted it with a gold-plated Zippo. There was a fake ruby in the side of the Zippo. He said, “Are you prepared to help us in our inquiries, Mr. Fletcher?”

“Do I have any choice?” “You always have a choice,” Escobar said, “but I think you have worn out your carpet in our country, yes? Is that what you say, worn out your carpet?”

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

In the Deathroom (3)

We don’t need no steenkin handcuffs, Fletcher thought.The woman who looked like the Bride of Frankenstein with a very deep tan leaned toward Escobar and whispered briefly behind her hand. Escobar nodded, smiling.

“Of course, Ramón, if our guest should try anything foolish or make any aggressive moves, you would have to shoot him a little.” He roared laughter—roly-poly TV laughter—and then repeated what he had said in Spanish, so that Ramón would understand as well as Fletcher. Ramón nodded seriously, replaced his handcuffs on his belt, and stepped back to the periphery of Fletcher’s vision.

Escobar returned his attention to Fletcher. From one pocket of his parrot-and-foliage-studded guayabera he removed a red-and-white
package: Marlboros, the preferred cigarette of third-world peoples
everywhere. “Smoke, Mr. Fletcher?”

Fletcher reached toward the pack, which Escobar had placed on the edge of the table, then withdrew his hand. He had quit smoking three years ago, and supposed he might take the habit up again if he actually did get out of this—drinking high-tension liquor as well, quite likely—but at this moment he had no craving or need for a cigarette. He had wanted them to see his fingers shaking, that was all.

“Perhaps later. Right now a cigarette might—” Might what? It didn’t matter to Escobar; he just nodded understandingly and left the red-and-white pack where it was, on the edge of the table. Fletcher had a sudden, agonizing vision in which he saw himself stopping at a newsstand on Forty-third Street and buying apack of Marlboros. A free man buying the happy poison on a New York street. He told himself that if he got out of this, he would do that. He would do it as some people went on pilgrimages to Rome or Jerusalem after their cancer was cured or their sight was restored.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

In the Deathroom (2)

“Handcuffs?” the guard asked, also in Spanish, and held up a pair of the plastic kind. Fletcher tried to keep his look of dazed incomprehension.
If they cuffed him, it was over. He could forget about one chance in thirty, or one in three hundred.

Escobar turned briefly to the woman on his right. Her face was very dark, her hair black with startling white streaks. It flowed back and up from her forehead as if blown by a gale-force wind. The look of her hair reminded Fletcher of Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein. He gripped this similarity with a fierceness that was close to panic, the way he gripped the thought of bright light on the river, or his sister laughing with her friends as they walked to the water. He wanted images, not ideas. Images were luxury items now. And ideas were no good in a place like this. In a place like this all you got were the wrong ideas.

The woman gave Escobar a small nod. Fletcher had seen her around the building, always garbed in shapeless dresses like the one she wore now. She had been with Escobar often enough for Fletcherto assume she was his secretary, personal assistant, perhaps even his biographer—Christ knew that men like Escobar had egos large enough to warrant such accessories. Now Fletcher wondered if he’d had it backward all along, if she was his boss.

In any case, the nod seemed to satisfy Escobar. When he turned back to Fletcher, Escobar was smiling. And when he spoke, it was in English. “Don’t be silly, put them away. Mr. Fletcher is only here to help us in a few matters. He will soon be returning to his own country” —Escobar sighed deeply to show how deeply he regretted this. “. . . but in the meantime he is an honored guest.”

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

The Death Of Jack Hamilton (44)

He then poured the lye over Jack’s cheeks and mouth and brow. It hissed and bubbled and turned white. When it started to eat through his closed eyelids, I turned away. And of course none of it done no good; the body was found by a farmer after a load of gravel. A pack of dogs had knocked away most of the stones we covered him with and were eating what was left of his hands and face. As for the rest of him, there were enough scars for the cops to I.D. him as Jack Hamilton.

It was the end of Johnnie’s luck, all right. Every move he made after that—right up to the night Purvis and his badge-carrying gunsels got him at the Biograph—was a bad one. Could he have just thrown up his hands that night and surrendered? I’d have to say no. Purvis meant to have him dead one way or the other. That’s why the Gees never told the Chicago cops Johnnie was in town.

I’ll never forget the way Jack laughed when I brought them flies in on
their strings. He was a good fellow. They all were, mostly—good fellows
who got into the wrong line of work. And Johnnie was the best of the bunch. No man ever had a truer friend. We robbed one more bank together, the Merchants National in South Bend, Indiana. Lester Nel-son joined us on that caper. Getting out of town, it seemed like every hick in Indiana was throwing lead at us, and we still got away. But for what? We’d been expecting more than a hundred grand, enough to move to Mexico and live like kings. We ended up with a lousy twenty thousand, most of it in dimes and dirty dollar bills.

God makes it all come right in the end, that’s what Johnnie told Dock Barker just before we parted company. I was raised a Christian— I admit I fell away a bit along my journey—and I believe that: we’re stuck with what we have, but that’s all right; in God’s eyes, none of us are really much more than flies on strings and all that matters is how much sunshine you can spread along the way. The last time I seen Johnnie Dillinger was in Chicago, and he was laughing at something I said. That’s good enough for me.

As a kid, I was fascinated by tales of the Depression-era outlaws, an interest that probably peaked with Arthur Penn’s remarkable Bonnie and Clyde. In the spring of 2000, I re-read John Toland’s history of that era, The Dillinger Days, and was particularly taken by his story about how Dillinger’s sidekick, Homer Van Meter, taught himself how to rope flies in Pendleton Reformatory. Jack “Red” Hamilton’s lingering death is a documented fact; my story of what happened in Dock Barker’s hideout
is, of course, pure imagination . . . or myth, if you like that word better; I do.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

The Death Of Jack Hamilton (43)

“Don’t talk like that,” I says.
“Why not? It’s true.” The sky above us was white and full of rain. I reckoned we’d have a muddy splash of it between Aurora and Chicago (Johnnie had decided we should go back there because the Feds would be expecting us in St. Paul). Somewhere crows was calling. The only other sound was the ticktock of the cooling engine. I kept looking into the mirror at the wrapped-up body in the backseat. I could see the bumps of elbows and knees, the fine red spatters where he’d bent over, coughing and laughing, at the end.

“Look at this, Homer,” Johnnie says, and points to the .38, which was tucked back in his belt. Then he twiddled Mr. Francis’s key ring with the tips of his fingers, where the prints were growing back inspite of all his trouble. There were four or five keys on the ring besides the one to the Ford. And that lucky rabbit’s foot. “Butt of the gun hit this when it come down,” he says. He nodded his head. “Hit my very own lucky piece. And now my luck’s gone. Help me with him.”

We lugged Jack to the gravel slope. Then Johnnie got the bottle of lye. It had a big brown skull and crossbones on the label. Johnnie knelt down and pulled the sheet back. “Get his rings,” he says, and I pulled them off. Johnnie put them in his pocket. We ended up getting forty-five dollars for them in Calumet City, although Johnnie swore up and down that the little one had a real diamond in it.

“Now hold out his hands.”
I did, and Johnnie poured a cap of lye over the tip of each finger. That
was one set of prints wasn’t ever going to come back. Then he leaned
over Jack’s face and kissed him on the forehead. “I hate to do this, Red,
but I know you’d do the same to me if it’d gone the other way.”

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

The Death Of Jack Hamilton (41)

“Sure,” Johnnie says. He had one of her Band-Aids stuck on his upper lip, over that place where his mustache never grew in later on. He sounded listless and he wouldn’t meet her eye.

“Make him do it, Homer,” she says, then jerked her thumb toward the bedroom, where Jack was laying wrapped up in the bloodstained sheet. “If they find that one and identify him before you get clear, it’ll
make things just so much worse for you. Us, too, maybe.” “You took us in when nobody else would,” Johnnie says, “and you won’t live to regret it.”

She gave him a smile. Women almost always fell for Johnnie. I’d thought this one was an exception because she was so businesslike, but now I seen she wasn’t. She’d just kept it all business because she knew she wasn’t much in the looks department. Also, when a bunch of men with guns are cooped up like we were, a woman in her right mind doesn’t want to make trouble among them.

“We’ll be gone when you get back,” Volney says. “Ma keeps talking
about Florida, she got her eye on a place in Lake Weir—” “Shut up, Vol,” Dock says, and gives him a hard poke in the shoulder.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

The Death Of Jack Hamilton (40)

At first I thought he was dead, because when I turned him over there was blood all over his mouth and his cheek. Then he sat up. He wiped his face, looked at the blood, then looked at me. “Holy shit, Homer, did I just shoot myself?” Johnnie says. “I think you did,” I says. “How bad is it?”

Before I could tell him I didn’t know, Rabbits pushed me to the side and wiped away the blood with her apron. She looked at him hard for a second or two, and then she says, “You’re all right. It’s just a scrape.” Only we seen later, when she dabbled him up with the iodine, that it was actually two scrapes. The bullet cut through theskin over his lip on the right side, flew through maybe two inches of air, then it cut him again on the cheekbone, right beside his eye. After that it went into the ceiling, but before it did it plugged one of my flies. I know that’s hard to believe, but it’s true, I swear. The fly lay there on the floor in a little heap of white thread, nothing left of it but a couple of legs.

“Johnnie?” Dock says. “I think I got some bad news for you, partner.” He didn’t have to tell us what it was. Jack was still sitting up, but now his head was bowed over so far that his hair was touching the sheet between his knees. While we were checking to see how bad Johnnie was hurt, Jack had died.

Dock told us to take the body to a gravel pit about two miles farther
down the road, just past the Aurora town line. There was a bottle of
lye under the sink, and Rabbits gave it to us. “You know what to do
with this, don’t you?” she asks.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

The Death Of Jack Hamilton (38)

Johnnie’s face looked terrible. I could see he wanted me to getout of the bedroom before Jack tore himself apart; at the same time, he knew it didn’t matter a fiddler’s fuck, and if this was a way Jack could die happy, looking at a handful of roped shithouse flies, then so be it.

“Jack,” I says, “you got to be quiet.” “Naw, I’m all right now,” he says, grinning and wheezing. “Bring em over here! Bring em over where I can see!” But before he could say any more he was coughing again, all bent over with his knees up, and the sheet, spattered with a spray of blood, like a trough between them.

I looked at Johnnie and he nodded. He’d passed beyond something in his mind. He beckoned me over. I went slowly, the strings in my hand, floating up, just white lines in the gloom. And Jack too tickled to know he was coughing his last.

“Let em go,” he says, in a wet and husky voice I could hardly
understand. “I remember . . .” And so I did. I let the strings go. For a second or two, they stayed clumped together at the bottom—stuck together on the sweat from my palm—and then they drifted apart, hanging straight and upright in the air. I suddenly thought of Jack standing in the street after the Mason City bank job. He was firing his tommy gun and was covering me and Johnnie and Lester as we herded the hostages to the getaway car. Bullets flew all around him, and although he took a flesh wound, he looked like he’d live forever. Now he lay with his knees sticking up in a sheet filled with blood.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual