The Haze by James Hall

He killed for a living. Killed a lot of people a long way back. How far back he wasn’t sure. Not sure of a lot these days. The days of haze.
    Who he was now, a professional killer stuck in a nursing home. New Jersey, or maybe Florida. Not sure. But a home, the kind of place she promised she’d never take him. Lied to him. After all he’d done for her. Raised her, protected her, funded her hobbies, defended her against her mother. Her mother was the killer’s wife. Where was she, that wife? What was her name? More things he didn’t remember.
    He went about his morning routine. Ate his two sunnyside eggs and toast and half a grapefruit, got a thrill levering the sections out with the pointy spoon. That’s where his thrills came from these days.
    He showered, doing it the same as always, start at the top. Shampoo his thick white hair, then his face, after that using his chest hair to lather up, with special attention to his armpits, ending with his ass. He valued a clean ass. Even now, even in his current state of disorder. He wasn’t so far gone he’d put up with a dirty butt.
    He knew he was confused. What he didn’t know was exactly how much. In particular, he didn’t know which stories from his past were his own actual personal history, or things he lifted from the stories of others. People he’d talked to or maybe books he’d read.
    Books, it was mainly crime writers, that’s who he’d been reading since he was a snotty kid growing up in West Virginia, or somewhere deprived like that, maybe Kentucky, Tennessee. He’s reading crime novels while his wife, sitting on her side of the cold bed, read whatever it was she read. Women’s books, how to fix a dying marriage, how to be happy, like that was in a book, like any of it was.
    Crime writers, his specialty, was what his daughter did now. Worked in a store that sold the kind of books he used to read. Did he cause that? Did he drive his daughter, what was her name, did he drive her into crime? He’d ask her if she ever came back for a visit, built up her courage to face her father again after dumping him in this hellhole.
    He had a mission. You had to have a mission. Something you thought about first thing in the morning when you woke up. His was to break out of this damn place. Kill anybody stood in his way. Especially the Puerto Rican who made him swallow the pills.
    Force feeding dope pills was an old standby in the stories he read. Was it Chandler with the stocky guys in white uniforms? He thought he remembered a Travis book. Nightmare something. A guy being fed pills or maybe shots in the arm. A guy stuck in a perpetual nightmare. It was in Chandler too, he thought. Marlowe or Sam Spade. Maybe Archer, what was his name? Jake? No, no, it was Lew.
    He’d known a Lew. He’d killed a Lew. A job, one of his last. Italian guy was boffing somebody’s young wife. He couldn’t recall whose. But a wife. He was sure of that. Or maybe a daughter. But he’d shot Lew. Three in the head, one in the heart. His signature. Four rounds. That way the dead stayed dead. He’d made a name for himself, thirty years in the business. Four slugs, three up, one down. His trademark. He remembered that very clearly. Not lost in the haze.
    So there, that’s what his mission was. Shoot his way out of this place.
    First he needed to find his pistol. A .38, snubbie. Not a fancy gun. You get up close enough, you didn’t need a top of the line gun to whack somebody. That was his approach, old school. Walk right up to the hit, breathe his air, nose to nose, then three up, one down.
    He looked in the bureau for his gun. Dug under his socks and his Jockeys, looked in the closet, in the teeny kitchen, behind the dishes, the bowls, the glasses, everything on the shelves. He went in the bathroom, lifted the lid on the toilet. That’s where they taped the guns sometime. Movies, books, that’s where it was.