The Mercy Rule

Friday, you fool, he told himself. Business day. Customer day. Make-your-rent day. Keep your life together the one day you’ve got to!

‘No, no, no!’ Yelling at himself, stomping on the floor, furious. He swore again, violently, then kicked at the chair near the table, but it just sat there, obstinate. So he grabbed the back of it and sent it flying across the room, where it slammed into the cabinets, cutting new gouges into the pitted wood.

He left the chair where it was on the floor, then stood a long moment, forcing himself to calm down, to think.

This was one of the signs, wasn’t it? He’d warned himself to be sure to recognize them when they got here, and now he wasn’t going to go denying them. His mind was going to leave him someday – inevitably – and in the lucid moments he was clear on his strategy. He wasn’t going to go out mumbling with shit in his diapers. He was going to die like a man.

He had the syringes, the morphine. He still knew where they were. Thank God for Graham – his one good son. The one good thing, when he looked back over it all.

He would call Graham. That’s what he’d do.

He walked back through the living room. How had the window gotten closed? He was sure he’d been sitting in the chair and then he’d remembered it was Friday and he’d gone into the kitchen…

All right. The syringe. He remembered. He could still remember, God damn it.

But then he saw his watercolor and stopped again, lost in the lines he’d painted so long ago, trying to render his old boat. A foghorn sounded and he stared at the window again – the closed window. He stood in the center of the room, unmoving. He had been going somewhere specific. It would come to him.

Another minute, standing there, trying to remember. And another blinding stab of pain in his head.

Tears ran down his face.

The vials – the supply of morphine – were in the medicine cabinet with a couple of syringes, and he took the stuff out and laid it on the dresser next to his bed.

He went back to the kitchen. Somebody had knocked the chair over, but he’d get that in a minute. Or not. That wasn’t what he’d come in here for.

He’d come in to check… something. Oh, there it was. The fluorescent orange sticker taped to the front of the refrigerator. Opening the freezer, he found the aluminum tube where he kept the doctor’s Do Not Resuscitate form. It was still inside the tube, where it should be, where the paramedics would look for it. The form told whoever found him to let him alone, don’t try to help him, don’t hook him up to any damn machines.

He left the form in the freezer. In his bedroom again, he gathered the other paraphernalia and went back into the living room, where he laid it all out on the coffee table next to his bottle of Old Crow.

The window drew him to it. The thin ribbon of light over the fog. He sat himself on the couch and poured himself another couple of fingers of bourbon for courage.

He hadn’t heard any approaching footsteps out in the hallway, but now someone was knocking on his door.

Suddenly he realized he must have called Graham after all. To save his life for this moment. It wasn’t time for him to die yet. It was close, maybe, but it wasn’t time.

He had called Graham – he remembered now – and his boy had come and they would find some way to work it all out until it really was time.

Dignity. That was all he wanted anymore. A little dignity. And perhaps a few more good days.

He got up to answer the door.

PART ONE

1

Dismas Hardy was enjoying a superb round of darts, closing in on what might become a personal best. He was in his office on a Monday morning, throwing his 20-gram hand-tooled, custom-flighted tungsten beauties. He called the game ‘20-down’ although it wasn’t any kind of sanctioned affair. It had begun as simple practice – once around and down the board from ‘20’ to bull’s-eye. He’d turned the practice rounds into a game against himself.

His record was twenty-five throws. The best possible round was twenty-one, and now he was shooting at the ‘3’ with his nineteenth dart. A twenty-two was still possible. Beating twenty-five was going to be a lock, assuming his concentration didn’t get interrupted.

On his desk the telephone buzzed.

He’d worked downtown at an office on Sutter Street for nearly six years. The rest of the building was home to David Freeman & Associates, a law firm specializing in plaintiff’s personal injury and criminal defense work. But Hardy wasn’t one of Freeman’s associates. Technically, he didn’t work for Freeman at all, although lately almost all of his billable hours had come from a client his landlord had farmed out to him.

Hardy occupied the only office on the top floor of the building. Both literally and figuratively he was on his own.

He held on to his dart and threw an evil eye at the telephone behind him, which buzzed again. To throw now would be to miss. He sat back on the desk, punched a button. ‘Yo.’

Freeman’s receptionist, Phyllis, had grown to tolerate, perhaps even like, Hardy, although it was plain that she disapproved of his casual attitude. This was a law firm. Lawyers should answer their phone crisply, with authority and dignity. They shouldn’t just pick up and say, ‘Yo.’

He took an instant’s pleasure in her sigh. She lowered her voice. ‘There’s a man down here to see you. He doesn’t have an appointment.’ It was the same tone she would have used if the guest had stepped in something on the sidewalk. ‘He says he knows you from’ – a pause while she sought a suitable euphemism. She finally failed and had to come out with the hated truth – ‘your bar. His name is Graham Russo.’

Hardy knew half a dozen Russos – it was a common name in San Francisco – but hearing that Graham from the Little Shamrock was downstairs, presumably in need of a lawyer’s services, narrowed it down.

Hardy glanced at his wall calendar. It was Monday, May 12. Sighing, he put his precious dart down on his desk and told Phyllis to send Mr Russo right on up.

Hardy was standing at his door as Graham trudged up the stairs, a handsome, athletic young guy with the weight of this world on his shoulders. And at least one other world, Hardy knew, that had crashed and burned all around him.

They had met when Graham showed up for a beer at the Shamrock. Over the course of the night Hardy, moonlighting behind the bar, found out a lot about him. Graham, too, was an attorney, although he wasn’t practicing right at the moment. The community had blackballed him.

Hardy had had his own run-ins with the legal bureaucracy and knew how devastating the ostracism could be. Hell, even when you were solidly within it, the law life itself was so unrelentingly adversarial that the whole world sometimes took on a hostile aspect.

So the two men had hit it off. Both men were estranged from the law in their own ways. Graham had stayed after last call, helped clean up. He was a sweet kid – maybe a little naive and idealistic, but his head seemed to be on straight. Hardy liked him.

Before the law Graham’s world had been baseball. An All-American center fielder at USF during the late eighties, he’d batted.373 and had been drafted in the sixth round by the Dodgers. He then played two years in the minor leagues, making it to Double-A San Antonio before he’d fouled a ball into his own left eye. That injury had hospitalized him for three weeks, and when he got out, his vision didn’t come with him. And so with a lifetime pro average of.327, well on the way to the bigs, he’d had to give it all up.

Rootless and disheartened, he had enrolled in law school at Boalt Hall in Berkeley. Graduating at the top of his class, he beat out intense competition and got hired for a one-year term as a clerk with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. But he only stayed six months.