The Survivor by Gregg Hurwitz Page B

the pad. How dismal to see his worth laid out like this, his life reduced to this sad figure. He was not much use at all to Cielle, but he was more use to her dead now than dead later.
    He tossed down the pad, went to the kitchen, came back with ham sandwich in hand, chewing. He clicked on the radio, Lady Gaga still caught in that bad romance. Just because it was a suicide didn’t mean it had to be depressing.
    Taking another bite, he paused in the middle of the living room for a final survey. Everything was death. The unread books on the shelf, Moby-Dick staring out, unvanquished. The browning fern in the corner that would outlive him. That pillar candle that would be removed, half burned, from the shelf by a cleanup crew hired by his landlord. There was such a horrible self-centeredness to dying. Every detail, filtered through a gray lens. He’d been unable to break out of his own head. Until this morning in the bank when he’d floated past the bullets in a perfect suspended state of who-gives-a-fuck.
    Grabbing a bottle of Knob Creek from the cupboard, he sat at the kitchen table, lined up his pill bottles, and took roll. Vicodin and antibiotics from the ER this morning. Xanax for sleep. Gold pearls of vitamin E. And his nemesis, riluzole—oblong tablets that left him alternately weak, fatigued, dizzy, or nauseous. Eleven Xanax, eighteen Vicodin—more than enough to do the trick. He arranged them in a vast smiley face, poured himself a tall shot of bourbon.
    The thought of his dead body bloating here sickened him. The stench would seep into the walls, and then some poor person would stumble onto him, maybe the landlord’s wife— No, he couldn’t have that. He thumbed open his cell phone and called the number on the back of Agent Abara’s card. Voice mail. “Hi, it’s Nate. You said to call if … Well, I remembered something that might help in the investigation. I’m out right now, won’t be home for a few hours at least, so if you could come by my place late…?” He hung up. Walked across. Unlocked the front door for Abara. Now. Now he was ready.
    Sitting again at the kitchen table, he reached for the bottle of bourbon, but another hand gripped it suddenly from the other side, the fingers caked with blood and sand. Charles sat in the opposite chair, his torso a gruesome scramble. “They say suicide is a coward’s way out.”
    Nate pulled the bottle irritably from Charles’s grasp. “I’d like to see them stand eleven stories up and look down at the spot their body’s gonna mark with a Rorschach.”
    Tendrils of black smoke lifted from the edges of his charred flesh. “Christ, you’re touchy.”
    “Look, all I wanted to do is jump off a building.”
    “I get it. You got served a shit sandwich. Any way you slice it, you gotta eat the fucker. But still. I don’t think you have to go all Jane Austen.”
    “Huh?”
    “You know, the Bell Jar chick who offed herself.”
    “That was Sylvia Plath.”
    “Whatever. I’m just saying, look at the bright side. For the first time in your life, you can say and do whatever the hell you want.”
    “The bright side ? I’m dying, I’ve still got PTSD or whatever the hell they’re calling it these days as evidenced by … well, you. Plus, I’m one signature away from divorced, and my kid hates me.”
    Charles crossed his arms over the hole in his chest and did his best to look bored. “I won’t sit here and listen to you whine. You can do that to a wall.”
    “I am doing that to a wall.”
    Charles shook his head with disappointment. “I’m outta here, then. I’m not sticking around for this.”
    “Fine.”
    “Fine.” But Charles remained, looking away like a pouty child.
    Nate banged down the bottle. “Look, I have to do this while I’m still up for it. Do you have any idea how pathetic it feels to be too depressed to kill yourself?”
    “You’re still sitting there talking to me. Which means you want something. ” Charles spread his arms,