Read Step to the Graveyard Easy Online
Authors: Bill Pronzini
Step to the Graveyard Easy (22 page)
“I think you are,” D’Anzello said.
“Listen, Captain, I’ve got to have some sleep. Either charge me, or let me go. Get it over with.”
“I’m not going to charge you. You can leave, but not until you come clean about yourself. And give me some kind of guarantee that you can be found to appear as a prosecution witness when the case goes to trial in three to six months.”
“I can’t do that.”
“No? Why not?”
Cape took a breath, dribbled it out. Then, “Okay. Okay, you want to know why I quit my old life and took up the new one, I’ll tell you. I did it for the same reason I went up against the knife and the gun, the same reason I have the horror of being boxed in, the same reason I won’t be available to testify at the trial, the same reason I hope to God you let me out of here quick. Because I’m living on borrowed time, and what little I have left is running out fast.”
“Borrowed time? What—”
“I’m dying,” Cape said. “I’ll be dead in less than a year, maybe as soon as four or five months.”
Long silence. “From what?” D’Anzello asked in a different voice.
“Rare blood disease. One hundred percent fatal.”
“Sweet Jesus.”
“Specialists in Chicago passed sentence nine weeks ago. I’ll give you their names if you want them.”
“No, I believe you.” D’Anzello leaned forward, tight-lacing his fingers on the desktop. “What, uh…”
“Symptoms? Headaches, back and joint pain, increasing fatigue—you really want the whole list?”
“No.”
“I can function more or less normally until the last stages, they tell me. Then it’s a hospital bed, painkillers, last rites.” Cape bent a smile in half. “Maybe I won’t get that far.”
“Is that what’s really behind the heroics? Looking for a way to get yourself killed quick?”
“Hell, no. I want as much time aboveground as I can get. But if it happens suddenly, I won’t shy away from it.”
D’Anzello said slowly, “What about your wife? Your family?”
“What about them? They don’t know.”
“You didn’t tell any of them? People who care about you?”
“I made damn sure none of them found out. You’re the only one besides the doctors who knows.”
“Why not your family?”
“My wife, my sister and her family, my father, all have their own problems. They don’t need mine to make their lives any worse than they are. You didn’t talk to any of them personally, did you? Tell them where I am?”
D’Anzello shook his head. “You just walk out on your wife? Is that why she’s divorcing you?”
“No,” Cape said. “I set it up so she caught me screwing another woman in our bed.”
“… That’s pretty damn cruel.”
“Not the way I look at it. The marriage was over anyway, hanging together by a thread. If I’d told Anna about my condition, it would’ve made her life even more miserable. She’d have tried to hang on out of duty, right to the end. She’s a nurse—she wouldn’t walk out on a terminal patient.”
“There must’ve been another way—”
“What way? Disappear? She’d have worried herself sick, blamed herself, tried to find me—put her life on hold. Same thing if I’d told her the truth and then walked away. I couldn’t let her suffer like that. I loved her once. Part of me still does.”
Penetrating stare, as if D’Anzello was trying to cut away skin and bone to see inside his head. “I can’t figure you out, Cape.”
“Look at it this way. One quick hurt, and you heal pretty fast. Long, slow hurt, and the wound stays open, maybe never really heals at all.”
“All right. I see your point, even if I don’t agree with it.”
“Same goes with the rest of the way I’m handling my death sentence, right? You don’t agree with the traveling, the lifestyle. Well, I’ll tell you, I’ve packed more living into the past few weeks, found out more about myself and this world, than in all my previous thirty-five years. And I’m hungry for more of the same.”
D’Anzello opened his mouth, shut it again.
“There’re a lot of different ways of dying,” Cape said. “But when you boil them down, they amount to only two.”
“You think so?”
“I know so. Hard and easy. I’m doing it easy.”
“Doesn’t sound so easy to me. Not the past few days anyhow.”
“Even those were better than moping around Rockford, waiting passively for the Big Dark.” He bent another smile, pushed back his chair. “Can I leave now?”
“Go ahead.”
Cape went to the door, turned, and came back a couple of paces. “Think about it, Captain,” he said. “See what kind of answer you come up with.”
“Answer to what?”
“If you knew you had only a few months to live, what would
you
do?”
BLUE LONESOME
A WASTELAND OF STRANGERS
NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT
IN AN EVIL TIME
Copyright © 2011 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
All the characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious.
First published in the United States of America in 2002 by
Walker Publishing Company, Inc.
This electronic edition published in December 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pronzini, Bill
Step to the graveyard easy / Bill Pronzini.
p. cm.
ISBN 978 0 8027 4359 6 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS3566.R67 S73 2002
813’.54—dc21 2001055914
