Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder(51)

Jessie said nothing. His eyes closed and his breath came in short, wheezing gasps. Carol didn’t know what to do. Her mind raced. She picked up the phone on the nightstand and called Collier.

“Tim, what do I do now?”

Carol looked down at Jessie.

“He’s still alive! You said it would take fifteen minutes!”

“You gotta remember he’s a big man,” Tim reminded her. “Where did you give it to him?”

“I gave him his insulin in the butt so he wouldn’t be able to see the color of the liquid in the needle.”

“That’s why it’s taking so long,” Tim answered, sounding like Sherlock Holmes solving a mystery. “Because you gave it to him in his butt, which is farther, you know, farther from the heart than if you had given it to him in his arm. And then there’s his fat tissue.”

“Yeah, I know, it’s thick,” she answered, relieved at the explanation for her husband’s continued presence on this earth.

“You have to remember,” Tim continued, “that he’s over four hundred pounds, that it’s going to take longer.”

“Damn, Tim, it shouldn’t take this long,” Carol said anxiously.

“Don’t panic, don’t panic; it will be all right,” Tim said soothingly. “The guy that I got the heroin from is right here at my house. Let me talk to him.”

Tim’s buddy Alphonso Roland had thought, from the cock-and-bull story Tim fed him, that the heroin had been for some guy who lived halfway across the state. Roland had no idea that a man living in a home across town was dying, at that moment, from the heroin he had supplied.

Collier held the receiver in his hand and turned to Roland, who sat across from him. He told Roland what the problem was.

“Okay, Alphonso wants to know what’s happening?”

Carol looked down.

“Nothing. Nothing’s happening. He’s still alive. For crissake—”

“Carol, calm down.” Tim interrupted her hysteria. “Alphonso wants to know if his eyes are open or closed?”

Carol looked again.

“Closed,” she answered.

Carol heard muffled talking and then Tim was back.

“Yeah, Alphonso says that’s normal; he’s in the coma now. See, Jessie’s a diabetic and Alphonso says that he’s in the diabetic coma now. What’s that, Alphonso? Hold on, Carol, Alphonso is telling me something.”

Carol waited a minute; then Tim was back.

“He says you just have to wait for the heart to get tired. He goes into the diabetic coma and then it’s just a matter of his heart stopping. Now, look, one other thing.”

Tim wanted her to stay out of the room where Jessie was dying; even though Jessie was in a coma, he could hear everything.

Carol looked down at her husband.

“Jessie, I’m sorry, you’ll be all right.” Carol bent down and kissed his forehead; showing her continued concern, she left the room.

Downstairs, standing in the garage on the portable phone, she called Tim again. He wanted to know what she was doing. She said she was going to go back and check on him, to see if he was breathing.

“Don’t!” Tim hissed. “Every time you go back in the room and he hears a noise, the longer it will take before he dies. When he hears a noise, he will want to live longer, because he will stay with the noise.”

Without telling him, Carol defied Tim. She just didn’t think it was right that Jessie should have to die alone. Jessie was probably scared already because he didn’t know what was happening to him. For her to leave him there like that, it just wasn’t right.

Tim didn’t care. He didn’t want her going back in. But Carol did.

“It’ll be all right, Jessie,” she said, looking down at the pathetic hulk of a man. “It’ll be all right.”

She must have waited there a good half hour. At about 12:30 P.M., he stopped making breathing noises. She went out and phoned Tim.

“He’s probably dead,” she said.

She was going to take his pulse, to make sure.

“Don’t touch him! Just get out. Now,” Tim warned her.

As she was about to leave, she remembered Jessie had his customers’ drug stash right in the house. Taking one of the cellophane bags with a snow-white powder in it, she drove over to Tim’s in her Plymouth Sable. Tim was extremely happy to see her.

Alphonso had split, but two of Tim’s other friends had come over. He cooked up the powder Carol supplied and made it hard, into a rock. Then he distributed pieces of the rock to everybody and they all began smoking the crack, all except Carol. Tim took a couple of deep hits, savoring the high.

Carol stayed for about an hour and then went back home because she didn’t know for sure if Jessie was dead and she didn’t know what would happen if somebody came over and just, sort of, dropped in.

“When you get back, call 911,” Tim said before she left. “They’ll tell you what to do. Tell them you just got home from shoppin’. Tell them that Jessie told you to go shoppin’, so you went shoppin’. You came home and you found him on the floor and that’s when you called 911.”

Carol got back a little after two o’clock. The only change in Jessie’s position was that his elbow was now on the floor. She touched him; he was cold. She looked out the window and saw the landlord in the backyard with his son, so she ran out into the backyard and told him to come on; something’s wrong with Jessie.