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Yup: a lawyer. I closed my eyes.
I woke up again. This time it was a doctor. He was a mean-looking old man with a bow tie, a beard, and a nasty glint in his eye. He wore a white coat. He was holding up my left eyelid with a hard thumb and shining a bright light into my eye.
“Cut it out,” I yelled. Or at least, I thought I yelled it. What came out was a kind of muffled, raspy whine.
“Good. You’re awake,” the doctor said. He snapped off the light. “I think you’re going to live.” He sounded like that offended him.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to live. I wasn’t even sure what it meant. I closed my eyes.
I woke up again. Captain Spaulding was sitting in the chair beside my bed.
“Billy,” he said, and stopped. The hum was gone now. I could hear fine, although everything still sounded like it was coming from the next room.
“Billy,” Captain Spaulding said again. I closed my eyes, but this time I didn’t go to sleep. This time I couldn’t. Seeing Spaulding there, hearing him calling me Billy—
It had happened. It had really
happened.
They let me go home the next day. The house was neat, a little too neat. It had been cleaned up by someone who expected to be away for a while.
They had given me the note Jennifer came down to the station to leave for me. It said she’d had about enough and she was taking our daughter away for a few weeks. They would stay with her brother in Paso Robles and call in a few days. She hoped we might be able to work things out, but she wasn’t holding her breath.
That night was the first time I tasted my gun. It tasted pretty good.
But I didn’t pull the trigger. I don’t know why. Maybe I was just being stubborn. Jennifer always said I was too stubborn. Maybe it was the fact that I couldn’t seem to summon up the energy and motor skills to do anything but turn on the TV and fall into the easy chair.
And maybe it was curiosity. Some funny things had been going on and I guess I wanted to know how it was going to come out. That hyena-faced lawyer was on the phone to me a dozen times over the next few days and came to see me in person four times, since I kept hanging up on him. He’d come to my house, where I was just sitting in a chair with the TV on. I had special condolence leave. Hyena would knock and when I didn’t answer he’d kind of oil in the door and wave his stack of papers and wheedle for me to sign. It turned out he worked for the city. I was supposed to sign a half-dozen forms that said I didn’t hold the city responsible for the deaths of my family.
I didn’t sign. Even when Captain Spaulding showed up at my house and asked me in person, as a personal favor to him, I wouldn’t sign.
I was not holding out for anything, not planning to sue, not trying to prove anything. I just didn’t feel very much like signing anything. I really didn’t feel capable of anything that complicated. I would look at the heap of forms requiring my signature, and my eyes would drift away. I couldn’t concentrate on anything long enough to sign. All I could think about was all the really good reasons to swallow a slug.
The City, meanwhile, was worried sick. Mind you, L.A. has two dozen excellent reasons for being worried sick every day of the year, but now they thought they had a new one.
When a cop was injured trying to save his wife and kid from a bomb blast caused by what might have been overzealous aggressiveness on the part of the cop’s commanding officer, the City figured it had a PR problem. The media agreed.
Nobody knew where the gangbangers had learned how to rig a bomb with a dead man’s switch, and I guess we’ll never find out. But a few of the reporters figured somebody should have known. And the City decided I was stonewalling, refusing to sign because I was gathering my dark forces to sue the shit out of them.
So about two weeks after the Rossmore’s surprise remodeling, a different lawyer came to see me. He was much more refined than the hyena. He looked like an Episcopalian bishop. He wore the nicest suit I have ever seen in my life and carried a $3,000 briefcase.
He told me that the City still hoped to avoid any kind of difficulty over the matter and if I was simply willing to sign a release, a quitclaim, a statement, and a waiver, the City would, while certainly not acknowledging any culpability, nonetheless be willing to make a final payment in appreciation of my cooperation in letting this whole painful matter come to a quiet close. The bishop said he was authorized to go as high as a half-million dollars on the condition that I sign a couple of standard forms, which he happened to have with him in his $3,000 briefcase.
When I still didn’t answer, he gave me a small sympathetic smile and left the forms on the table. He put the check on top of them.
If I’d been firing on all cylinders, and if I’d been in any shape to give a damn, I would have realized that all this attention meant the City was scared to death I would sue. There’d been an awful lot of suits against the city the past two years, and they’d been paying out damages in the millions on a semiregular basis.
A half-million bucks looked like a pretty good bargain compared to a long and drawn-out lawsuit that would certainly create a wave of negative publicity and probably end up costing $5 or $10 million anyway. Especially since as part of the bargain they got a statement signed by me—written by them, of course—clearly stating that I forgave them completely for everything they had never even done.
It was a couple of months before I put all that together, though. For the first few weeks it was all I could do to get up in the morning and reach for the coffee instead of my weapon.
About ten days after the bishop left his stack of papers I had a spasm of neatness. It was three A.M. I was watching an old sci-fi movie. I’d seen it before. But the sudden sight of giant ants terrorizing Los Angeles had a funny effect on me. It made me see myself from one step away, in just the same way seeing the giant ants on familiar streets made me see the City in a funny way.
I was suddenly filled with a strange energy for the first time since I’d come home. The place was filthy. I jumped up and loaded dirty dishes into the dishwasher. I threw all my laundry into the washing machine. I took a shower and shaved. I swept the floor. And in clearing off the stacks of mostly unread newspapers from the dining table, I found the stack of papers from the bishop.
The papers were unfinished business. I couldn’t throw them away; more would come and that would make more clutter. The neatest solution, clearly, was to sign them and mail them immediately.
I circled the room at high speed, looking for a pen. I had to stop to organize the magazine rack by my easy chair. I got the spines lined up and put the older issues in the recycle stack by the back door. That reminded me of the empty bottles in the kitchen and I moved them to the recycle box for containers.
