“Of course,” I say.
I set my bag on his table and open it. My heart skips a beat in my chest, but it does so only once before settling down.
Two vials. One syringe.
He watches me with dull suspicion. “What’s that for?”
“The pipes,” I reply.
He seems to accept that.
I stand there while my stomach does something slow and terrible.
He’s already settled back in, bottle against his chest, eyes at half-mast.
The pipes.
I look down at the syringe in my hand. Then at him. Then at the syringe again.
My mother could read a room in seconds. She could de-escalate a violent patient with her voice alone, keep a crashing body alive with one hand while charting with the other, think three steps ahead during a code blue while interns froze around her. She could spot a drug interaction from across a medication chart. She could talk a psych patient off a window ledge at 3 a.m. and still finish her shift without complaint. She was sharp and she was kind and she was so much more than this world ever deserved.
And this is what took her out.
This. A man who cannot tell the difference between a syringe and a pipe wrench.
All the understanding I tried to find for him, and this is where it ends. What did I really expect? A profound reason why he would murder a woman who probably saved his life?
Ridiculous.
And perhaps that’s why, at the same moment I draw the ketamine into the syringe and push it into his shoulder, a sense of wrongness begins to shake my hand.
Will killing him really be enough?
He flinches. Looks at me with a flash of something almost lucid, mouth opening to protest, but the drug is faster than his thoughts and whatever he was about to say dissolves into a slow blink. His head tips back against the couch.
I switch syringes and inject the second compound.
The paralysis is fast. His chest rises once, shallow, then barely at all. His eyes stay open but there is nothing behind them anymore. Whatever fight he had in him left before the drug even finished its work.
I watch him for a while. Longer than I need to. There is no medical reason for it. I just want to see the exact moment it ends.
Then I move to the table and start packing. One by one, each vial goes into the black evidence bag I brought for this. The syringes, the wipes, the caps. Only when the table is bare do I pull off my gloves, turning them inside out in one smooth motion and dropping them in with everything else.
I zip the bag shut, tuck it deep into my kit, and scan the apartment one last time. No footprints on the linoleum. I avoided the carpet entirely. I touched nothing except the things I brought and the man I came for.
This was… easier than I anticipated. I did not even have to use physical force.
Police probably won’t find him until he starts to decompose. And even if some ambitious detective decided to treat this scene with more care than they gave my mother’s, there’s nothing here that leads back to me. A coroner will open his chest and find cardiac failure in a body whose organs were already giving out under years of abuse. Natural causes. File closed, forgotten by lunch.
I sling my bag over my shoulder and listen at the door. When the hallway is quiet, I step out and lock up behind me.
Two blocks away, a row of dumpsters lines the back of an all-night laundromat. I kneel beside the largest one, pull the sealed bag from my kit, place it inside a heavy-duty garbage sack, tie it twice, and set it at the bottom. Compacted with the rest of the waste by morning. The hospital bins would have been simpler,but they log everything, and I don’t need that kind of trail anywhere near my workplace.
I wipe down the dumpster’s edge with a fresh alcohol pad, fold it into my pocket, and walk back to the main road.
Iarrive at the hospital early. Bag in the locker, hands washed, hair tied back. The routine is the same as it always is, and I keep waiting for it to feel different.
It doesn’t.
