Robert B. Parker’s the Hangman’s Sonnet

72

Hump knew it was late when he cracked his lids open, but he was still tired and fell back into that nether space between waking and sleep. Trapped inside since he’d come to Boston, moving only at night from place to place, he’d had very little option but to eat and watch TV in the shithole apartments of the men who’d been willing to put him up for the night. Overeating made him lazy and fat and he found that all he wanted to do was to escape into sleep. That morning it was especially bad because he was stressed and up against it.

He was running out of time and options. He was already taking stupid chances by staying with the last two guys he’d asked to put him up for a night. He had iffy relationships with both of them. Two days ago it was someone he knew as a kid but not exactly a friend and not a person he had a whole lot of faith in. Still, it had worked out. He’d thrown the guy two hundred bucks and asked him to forget he’d ever been there. Yesterday he’d taken a much bigger risk, staying at Milo Byrnes’s dump. Milo was a full-on tweaker, the kind of guy who’d steal anything from anyone and worry about consequences and the swag’s worth afterward. That’s how he’d ended up inside with Hump and King in the first place.

Hump was quickly falling out of the in-between world and back into sleep, his body relaxing as he fell. Somewhere in his head he thought he was at the beginning of an unpleasant dream. It was a dream of noises and odors, of a squeaking door hinge, creaking floorboards, the gentle rustling of fabric against fabric. It stank of old sweat and smoke. It didn’t take long for Hump to decipher that the stench and the noises were coming not from dreamland but from Milo Byrnes rifling through his stuff.

If Hump had been fully awake, there’d be no contest between a skinny, decayed weasel like Milo Byrnes and himself. Hump had been horrified at the sight of Byrnes when he’d come through his apartment door the night before. The guy’s skin was a sickly yellow, his teeth were rotting out of his head, and he looked like a walking skeleton. Hump opened his eyes just enough to get a sense of what was happening, but he was facing a wall, his back to Byrnes. Hump had his nine in bed with him and his cash was in a bag taped to the inside of his left thigh. The ring, though, was in one of his bundled-up socks. He couldn’t let a skel like Byrnes get to it.

Hump rolled around, tossing the moth-eaten sheet off him, raising the nine-millimeter toward Byrnes.

“What the fuck, Milo, you piece of—”

But he couldn’t finish the sentence because Byrnes had come armed, too, and plunged a serrated kitchen knife into Hump’s belly. Hump reached out with his left hand, grabbing onto Byrnes’s sweat-soaked T-shirt that hung off the tweaker like a tent. He pulled Byrnes close to him, put the muzzle of the gun into the flat of the bony man’s abdomen, and fired. He fired again. Again. The third bullet went right through the bag of bones and skin and into the wall of the closet-sized bedroom. Some of the noise was swallowed up by Byrnes’s now-lifeless body. Hump tossed the almost weightless dead man aside like an old foam pillow.

Ears ringing, light-headed, he stood. When he did, he collapsed back onto the bed. He noticed his shirt was slowly turning red, soaking with blood, and that the kitchen knife was still stuck in his belly. He laughed at his situation, wincing in pain as he did. The knife was going to have to come out, and when it did, it was going to hurt like a bastard. That wasn’t the worst of it. He knew that when he pulled it out, the serrated edge would do more damage and the bleeding would get much worse.

Hump forced himself to get up again, tossing the gun down on the bed. He found his way into the filthy bathroom, going through the cabinets for anything that might work as an antiseptic, for gauze or cotton, anything he could use to stanch the wound, and tape to hold the makeshift bandage to the wound. What he found in the bathroom was some cotton wadding and toilet paper. Nothing else. In Byrnes’s room, he found a syringe Milo had readied for himself and a pint bottle of cheap vodka with a few swallows left inside.

Hump took a swig of vodka, tied off his left biceps with the piece of rubber tubing Milo had meant to use for himself, poured a stream of vodka onto the syringe, and then stuck the needle into a bulging vein at the bend of his left arm. The jolt was immediate, intense. Hump’s whole body clenched, his eyes widened, the noise on the street below turned into the buzzing of a million mosquito wings. In a single motion he tore his shirt off as if it were made of tissue paper. Strangely, what had frightened him so only a few seconds before — the thought of yanking the knife out of his gut — now seemed like something he couldn’t wait to try. Without hesitating, he grabbed the knife’s handle, took a few deep breaths, and pulled.

He collapsed to his knees, the weirdest thought going through his head. Is this what getting hit by lightning feels like? Lightning always frightened him. As bad as the pain was, it almost felt like it was happening to someone else. When he managed to get to his feet, Hump realized he was still holding the knife. He laughed at it, dropped it. He noticed the blood now pouring out of him and onto his pants. He poured the remainder of the vodka onto the wound, lightning striking a second time. Then he wadded up the cotton and shoved it into the mouth of the wound. He covered the cotton with sheets of toilet paper and pressed his hand hard against it. He found Milo’s meth stash and pocketed it.

Hump went back into his room, rigged strapping out of some torn shirts, changed the bandage, and used the strapping to hold the new bandage to the wound. He got into different jeans, threw on a shirt and, in spite of the heat, a sweatshirt over that. He wiped off the bloody gun on the bedsheet, tucked it at the small of his back, and grabbed the Baggie of meth out of his old jeans. He thought about taking his duffel bag with him but decided not to try it. He had to travel light and move fast. Instead he collected the pair of socks in which he’d hidden the dragonfly ring. He had no choice now. He had to get to Dennis’s Place and find Mickey Coyle.