Rage Against the Dying

Thirty-two





Once Zach dropped and the gun fell from his hand, photographers and cameramen swarmed forward while crouching down, staying low for fear of more gunfire but keeping their equipment raised overhead for the sake of a Pulitzer. Security from the courthouse swarmed back, linking arms, able to at least keep an opening for the emergency med techs who showed up within a long two minutes, one ambulance taking Lynch away and the other taking Zach. I wormed my way onto the latter and sat with Zach while the EMTs worked. He wasn’t used to firearms, the gun must have kicked, and he was aiming high to begin with, so death wasn’t immediate. He wanted to talk. I tried to shush him, but the paramedic told me it was better, with a brain injury, to keep him conscious.

“Got ’im,” Zach said, with a physical effort that went beyond anything I’d personally known.

“You sure did, buddy.” I glanced at the blood on his shirt, the blowback from Lynch mixed with that of his own head wound. You could still see the package creases in this shirt, too. He had put on a new shirt to kill Lynch.

Zach ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, moistening it enough to speak. “No life.”

I assumed he was talking about Lynch’s sentence just then, but he could have been talking about himself, that his own just wasn’t worth it anymore. I took his hand in mine, stroked it with the other. “Zach, dearest, why didn’t you talk to me?”

His eyes started to go up into his head and then came back down again. He grimaced with a sudden pain. “Dead?” he asked.

I wasn’t sure. “Sure Zach, he’s dead.”

He was having a harder time moving his tongue but managed to get out, “Gla?”

“Totally glad,” I said, though it was just another lie because now I’d never find out who really killed Jessica. “Zach … Zach? Stay with me, Zach.”

Then Zach died.

I leaned back out of the way so the paramedics could do what they were supposed to do, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. You could never change Zach’s mind once he’d made it up. I saw a bit of plastic protruding from his shirt pocket and drew out Jessica’s photograph. I spit on it and wiped it off against my own shirt, the lamination keeping the blood from sticking to it. I rode the rest of the way to the hospital, and helped with the paperwork. Told them how to get a hold of his estranged son, who was the closest next of kin and who I imagined would be the person to deal with his body. Jessica’s body, too.