Chapter 52 #3
Sarcasm bleeds into his tone, and his eyes start to drift to the left. Hugo immediately steps in front of me, giving Timms a subtle shake of his head. Timms smoothly shifts back to the camera. After all, he’s got more grievances to unspool.
“Maybe if our offices weren’t overrun with unqualified diversity hires, they’d have reached the logical conclusion: the man who did it took it with him.”
He sets the gun on the couch cushion and grabs the golf club, brandishing it proudly for ten seconds longer than necessary before he lowers his arm.
“Yes, you will find little Pauly Franklin’s soy boy DNA on here. It’s been in the back of my closet since the night I did it.”
Timms sets the club down and picks up the gun, rolling his head to the left until his neck gives an audible crack.
“Here’s the part that’ll make the bloodsuckers—sorry, lawyers—cream their panties.
Pull the intake log from evidence the day of the murder, and you’ll find a parking receipt from a pay box two blocks west of my wife’s house.
Some tech bagged it off the floor like it was trash.
” He leans forward to whisper, “Here’s a clue: it wasn’t trash. ”
An electric charge races down my spine. I told the tech to bag that receipt. Something about it niggled at me, but when I went to look for it the following week, though, it was nowhere.
“That’s my receipt,” he says. “My fingerprints are all over it. It puts me in that house an hour before Angie made her whiny 911 call. By the time I noticed I’d dropped it, it was already collected.
But did I panic? Did I cry about it like a little bitch?
No.” He taps the barrel of his gun to his temple. “I was smart. I called in a favor.”
Timms waves his hand like a magician revealing one of his illusions.
“That receipt’s been sitting in the warehouse the whole time, filed as evidence under an embezzlement cold case from a decade ago.
And no, I’m not saying who moved it. That man did me a solid without asking questions.
A man who gives up a brother isn’t worth the paper. ”
Hugo’s weight shifts from foot to foot, and I can practically feel his impatience for Timms to wrap this up so we can go after whatever crony helped him cover up a murder and frame an innocent.
“Now, Socrates went to his death defiant. He even told the court he deserved free dinners for life. I’m not saying I’m owed free meals.
I work for my daily bread.” Timms jabs his finger into his chest. “But what I am owed is my good name. My pension. The love of a good woman. A little gratitude from the soft, spoiled citizens of this city.”
Timms goes on like that for a good five minutes, demanding apologies from every woman who ever crossed his path, every commanding officer who ever looked down at him, every dog that dared pee on his lawn while on a walk.
I focus my eyes over his bald, sweaty head and try to guess how many of the books on the shelf he’s actually read.
Of the twenty-three, I’d guess two and a half.
When his ranting finally draws to a close, I pull myself back into my body for his final farewell.
“Stay awake, brothers,” he says, his voice vibrating with intensity. “Don’t let them tear you down. Don’t let those bitches—”
Nope, still going. I tune him out again, having heard enough of the entitlement. The grudges and grievances. The justification for ruining lives. And we’re going to be complicit in amplifying his message.
Then again, Angie will be a free woman. The world will know who killed Paul. And this exhausting, dangerous man will be gone.
“That’s it,” Timms finally says. “That’s my Apology.
I’m leaving you now, brothers. Not with hemlock, but something more modern.
It’s an end suitable for a man of my worth.
” His lips thin as he fights back a wave of emotion, and I’ll admit to curiosity about what he’s feeling in these final moments.
Does he regret losing the woman he loved, or taking another man’s life?
Does he regret dying in the presence of strangers?
“Don’t forget, my brothers: there’s value in an examined life.” He looks earnestly into the camera. “And fuck those ungrateful cunts. They don’t deserve us.”
He stands and stops the recording, exactly as Hugo maneuvered him to do. Timms really is going to die believing everything that just happened was his idea.
Hugo and I stay silent while he taps his phone screen a handful of times, then lifts his head, ready to receive praise for his performance.
“Well done, brother,” Hugo says with quiet approval, and if I never hear that word after tonight, it’ll be a-OK with me.
“He’s telling the truth,” Fi whispers in our ears. “It’s posted. I’ve got it from here.” She means sending it anonymously to the state’s attorney’s office and local media.
“Now finish it, make like sheep, and get the flock out,” Pell says.
Quinn snorts loudly enough for the mics to pick up. Then everything that happens next unfolds too quickly for me to make sense of in real time. Instead, it’s like flashbulbs going off, one after another, illuminating a different part of the scene each time.
Timms sets his phone on the floor at his feet.
Timms adjusts the cushion at his back, making sure it sits square with the seat.
Timms lifts the gun to his chin.
Timms blinks.
Timms lets his hand fall away.
Timms bends to reach for his phone.
Timms says, “I can’t. I can’t do it. I’ve gotta delete it. I can’t do it.”
Hugo steps forward.
Hugo kicks the phone away.
Hugo says, “The Crito, brother. Only a chosen death is an argument.”
Timms stands.
Timms turns his gun on Hugo.
Timms asks, “Why are you here, really?”
Hugo lifts his hands and says, “I told y—”
Timms screams, “Why are you here?”
Timms doesn’t notice me stepping around Hugo.
Timms doesn’t notice me reaching into my pocket.
Timms doesn’t notice me pulling out the tube of lipstick.
Timms doesn’t notice when I slide behind him.
Timms doesn’t notice when I click the wheel once, twice, three times.
Timms notices when I inject Quinn’s hemlock compound into the soft hollow under his jaw.
Timms stops noticing anything at all when he falls back onto the couch a few seconds later, unmoving.
“Rue! Baby!”
Hugo’s shout snaps me back into the present, and time starts flowing normally again. That’s Felicity’s voice in my ear, screaming for me. So much for code names.
I lurch forward and press my fingers to the pulse in Timms’s neck.
Strong. Steady. Furious.
“He’s got a pulse, but his chest isn’t moving. Q, how much time until his heart quits?”
“Based on how quickly the coniine froze his diaphragm, I’d say maybe a minute,” Quinn says. “Once he’s hypoxic, it’ll fade fast.”
“That’s when his heart stops pumping blood,” I tell Hugo. “And we need it moving if we want to sell a self-inflicted wound.”
“What can I do?” he asks.
“Give me room to work while he’s still in there.”
Hugo steps aside so I can snatch the gun in my gloved hands and confirm that Timms landed in a position that reasonably reads as natural.
“Twenty seconds,” Quinn whispers as I wrap his deadweight fingers around the grip.
The window’s closing on his body’s ability to bleed like a living man. Still, I can’t stop myself from bending over his inert body.
“A Socratic scholar like you knows hemlock keeps the mind intact while the rest of you goes, so I hope you can still hear me,” I say into his ear. “Your new friend Joe? Your ‘brother’ standing right behind me? He’s the one who killed Danny.”
I lean even closer, my breath heating his skin.
“Also? We kept the dog.”
Message delivered, I move his index finger onto the trigger, seat the muzzle under his chin on top of my injection site, and position myself as far below and to the side as possible to avoid the backspatter.
Then with one hand controlling the angle from the butt of the gun, I press my fingertip against the back of his nail inside the guard.
Together, Lester Timms and I pull the trigger.