have aspirin.
“What happened?” Blondie finally asked. She held up her purse strap and stared at it like a betrayed lover. “Why didn’t you stop him? Aren’t you a cop? You told that—that jerk who took my purse you were a cop.”
“Not anymore. I mean, I am, but I’m on desk duty now.” Boy, did that admission taste bad. She actually spat to clear her mouth, then continued. “I got hurt a while ago. I’m off the streets.” Her knee throbbed agreement, as if to say, Damn right, chickie, and what’d you take off after him for, anyway? You must’ve known you couldn’t have caught him. Couldn’t resist playing hero again, sap?
But it wasn’t that simple. She’d seen someone in trouble, that was all. Heard the shriek and limped to the rescue. “Lois,” her dad said before he choked to death on that Dorito, “boy, was that a bad choice for a name. You’re nobody’s sidekick, and you sure as shit never need rescuing.”
That was then.
The black-and-white pulled up. She didn’t recognize either of the officers who got out and approached them. They were as alike as two peas in a pod: both tall, stocky, and blond, with blue eyes—typical Minnesota stock. Lois, with her wild curly black hair and brown eyes, always felt like a gypsy among her Scandinavian coworkers.
“Good evening. I’m Officer Ristau, and this is my partner, Officer Carlson. Miss, do you need an ambulance? Either of you?”
“It’s Detective Miss,” she said, “and no. Just some Valium. Possibly some Percocets. But the vic would probably like an ambulance.” Or at least a shoulder to cry on.
“He took my purse,” Blondie said in a wounded voice. “My purse that my husband gave to me for Christmas. He took it. She tried to stop him and he took it anyway. My husband gave it to me.”
She’d go on in this vein, Lois knew, for some time. Civilians were always utterly shocked when something unpleasant happened to them. They thought if they paid their taxes and didn’t jaywalk and ate enough fiber, they were immune from mugging, rape, homicide, and intestinal trouble.
She envied them that surety.
While giving her statement, Lois studied the cop’s side-arm and thought about death.
Chapter 2
How to do it? Pills? Jump off the IDS Tower? Stick the barrel of her Beretta in her mouth and pull the trigger? Watch the Star Trek marathon until she was brain dead? Eat all the leftovers in her fridge?
The gun, Lois decided, was not an option. Bad enough she was seriously considering the coward’s way out; she wouldn’t pervert her weapon by making it the instrument of her death. How many bad guys had she pointed it at? How many vics had she defended with it? How many hours had she spent on the shooting range, honing her skill to better serve her city? No, the gun was definitely out.
Pills were tempting. She had some excellent ones for her knee. Fifty of those, chased with a daiquiri or six, would probably do the job nicely. Add the Trekkie marathon to that and death was a certainty.
She got up from the couch, limped to her bathroom, grabbed the bottles out of the medicine cabinet, limped back, and lined them up like soldiers on her coffee table.
She looked at them thoughtfully. There wasn’t much. She didn’t believe in crutches, even when she had to use them to get down her front steps. As for pharmaceutical crutches, she hardly ever indulged. “Ballsy,” her dad would have said. “Martyr,” her mom would have sighed, shaking her head.
Well, they were both dead now. Following the Dorito Mishap, her mother had mourned for eight months, then made two decisions: to visit her sister in Saint Paul, and to fix her makeup at sixty-two miles an hour. The coroner hadn’t been able to decide if she’d died from the impact of crashing into the back of the semi, or from the eyeliner (Revlon’s Indigo Night) being driven into her right eye.
She didn’t miss her father much, if truth be told. He’d been too big, too gruff, too disappointed she wasn’t a boy, and toward the end, too drunk. Mostly she felt bad because he was dead, but she didn’t feel too bad.
Her mother, though…that was a different story. Lois had felt adrift ever since her mother’s death. When the one who bore you was gone, why bother with anything?
She shook off thoughts of her poor, doomed parents and returned her attention to the medication. There was a small bottle of OxyContin, the drug of choice for addicts—she’d busted a few OxyContin clinics in her day—a larger bottle of methadone, always popular with the chronic pain set, and a number of Duragesic patches.
She picked up one of the patches. How could she kill herself with these? Eat them? Stick a bunch around her heart?
And was she really, truly considering this? It sucked. It was the coward’s way out. It defined her, forever, as a loser. The cops who found her after the neighbors called to report the smell would roll their eyes at each other. The coroner would roughly bundle her into a body bag. Her neighbors would shake their heads (“So quiet!” “Never a minute’s trouble.”), and her captain would be irritated. Her fellow detectives would be shocked that ballsy Lois Commoner had done such a thing, and would pity her, and would forget her.
She could feel a tear trickling down her left cheek, but made no move to wipe it away. Sure, it was a rotten thing to do, but what was the alternative? She’d been shot almost a year ago, and still woke to pain every morning. They’d never let her back on the streets. She’d been busted to desk officer, which meant she was one of the few secretaries in the city licensed to carry a firearm. Worst of all, she’d lost her shield.
The desk job was mindless, torturous, but she refused to take a medical retirement. Then what would she do? Sit around and try not to think about how badly her knee hurt? Real fulfilling.
And also you’re so alone—
She shut that thought away, fast. That had nothing to do with anything.
There’s got to be something else. Heaven. Hell. Reincarnation. Something. This isn’t it, this can’t be all there is. I didn’t work so hard for so long to have this e the end of everything. There’s something else out there, I know it.
And if she was wrong, if there was nothing, she’d take that over an unfulfilling life of pain and ennui.
She unbuttoned her shirt, then grabbed the remote and flicked it on to the Sci-Fi channel. Ah, there was Kirk talking to a doomed red-shirted security guard. Hour three of the marathon. She wondered what people who weren’t suicidal were watching.
She took one of the Duragesic patches and stuck it to her chest, just above her bra. She did the same with the rest, then poured out the pills and looked at them. It was funny—they were so small, but they could stop her heart if she took enough of them. And she planned to swallow every one.
If you do this, it’s real. You’ll be brain dead, followed by body dead. You can’t take it back.
“God, I hope not,” she said aloud, and went to plug in the blender.
For the first time in forever, her knee didn’t hurt. Nothing hurt. She was floating—well, not really, she was still sitting on the couch but she was also floating…floating and watching McCoy chew Spock a new asshole…she spilled her drink oh no red stain on the carpet…oh
