SHELTON HAD ALWAYS been a hard man to kill.
But this time he looked nervous.
He came to my shabby little office on a Tuesday in early March, 2019. It had been a few weeks since I’d seen him last and he didn’t look good. But that wasn’t unusual. He never looked good. He was covered in liver spots like a paisley tie and was built like a bowling pin — round in the middle and meager up top. His head was small.
He was in the customer’s chair and I was behind my desk.
He was seventy-three, bald, and short, and getting shorter all the time.
I was fifty, Irish, and nuts, and getting nuttier all the time.
Outside there was a downpour. LA was crying and had been for weeks. The window behind my desk was being pelted; the noise was like a symphony gone mad.
It was rainy season. An old-fashioned one. An anomaly. Hadn’t rained this long in years, and LA had turned Irish green: the brown, scorched hills were soft with new grass, like chest hair on a burn victim. You could almost think that everything was going to be all right with the world. Almost.
“I’m in a bad way, Hank,” Shelton said. “That’s why I came to see you in person. Even in this weather.”
His tan raincoat was wet and splotched and looked like the greasy wax paper they use for deli meat. He fished his Pall Malls out of his right pocket and set one on fire. He knew I didn’t mind, and it didn’t matter anyway. Even when he wasn’t smoking, he smelled like he was. His open mouth was like an idling car.
“Why you in a bad way, Lou? What’s going on?” I pushed my ashtray, littered with the ends of joints, closer to his side of the desk.
“You know I lost the kidney, right?” he said.
“Yeah. Of course,” I said. “I visited you. Remember?” I took a joint out of my desk drawer, struck a match, and lit up. But I knew I wouldn’t get high. I’ve smoked too much over the years and I’m saturated with THC. So at this point, it’s just a placebo. A placebo that takes the edge off. Makes the nightmare something you don’t have to wake up from. You know it’s all a dream. Even if it’s a bad dream.
“I know. I know,” Lou said. “I’m just saying. You know I lost one, and now, well, the good kidney, which wasn’t that good, is going. And I’m looking at dialysis. And dialysis is a living death.”
He sucked on his cigarette. Lou Shelton had been smoking two packs a day since he was fifteen. He’d had open-heart surgery three times and had more stents than fingers. He’d survived mouth cancer and throat cancer and tongue cancer, and his voice was a toss-up between a rasp, a wheeze, and a death rattle.
I’d seen him once with his shirt off, and he had a fat scar, like an ugly red snake, down the middle of his chest. It was a zipper that kept getting opened, and from being in hospitals so much, he had a more or less permanent case of MRSA, which made him prone to boils on his ass that had to be lanced.
And he sucked on the Pall Mall.
Like I said, he was a hard man to kill.
“They say it’s definite? You got to do the dialysis? What is it, once a week?”
“Once a week? Are you crazy? You go every other day, sometimes every day. For hours on end. And you need help. A woman. A child. I don’t have any of that.”
Shelton’s wife, also a heavy smoker, had died of pneumonia five years before. She had gone fast. Her lungs were shot.
They’d had one kid, a daughter, but she wouldn’t see Shelton. After he lost the first kidney and wouldn’t quit smoking, she cut him out of her life. Said she couldn’t stand by anymore and watch him kill himself. Like mom.
Still, he sent her a nice check every month. He would never stop loving her, but I guess he loved his cigarettes more. He had a grandchild he’d never seen. And his daughter cashed the checks. Never said thank you. Why should she?
“Maybe dialysis isn’t that bad,” I said.
“No! It’s death. I’m never gonna do it.”
Part of me wanted to say, “Just give up already, Lou. You’re done. You’re dead. And you did it to yourself.”
But who was I to deprive him — in my mind — of one more cup of coffee, one more good feeling, one more bit of happiness?
So I pulled on my joint and said, “You could at least try it. Maybe it’s easier than you think. And what choice do you have?”
“No way. Remember MacKenzie from Homicide? He’s on it. Too much booze. Pickled himself. I went to see him. He’s bent over like a shrimp cocktail. Can’t lift his head. And nobody was tougher.”
“I should give him a call,” I said. But I probably wouldn’t. I always put those calls off, and then the person dies. Someday somebody won’t call me.
“He asked me to shoot him in the head,” Lou said. “He knows I still carry. He said, ‘Come on, Lou, you remember how I was. End this for me. Or just give me the piece and I’ll do it myself.’ I got out of there fast, and so now I’m telling everybody: I need a new kidney. I’m looking for volunteers. I’ll go off these —”
He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. His troubled eyes were a watery, cataract blue — his nicest feature — and the smoke from the new cigarette plumed out of his nose, two wispy trails, not long for this world.
“What do the doctors at the VA say?” I asked. “Can you get a transplant?”
Shelton had been in Vietnam. Got a Purple Heart. But never talked about it. Like most people, he was a mix of things. Heroic and selfish. Insightful and blind. Sane and insane.
“I asked, but they won’t put me on the list,” he said. “I’m not a good candidate. It’d be a waste of a kidney … but not to me.”
“I’m sorry, Lou. This is rough. Real rough.”
“Anyway, even if I got on the list, by the time they called my number, I’d be dead. So I gotta buy one,” he said, and then added real fast, “I’ll give you fifty thousand, Hank. Maybe even seventy-five, maybe more — I’m working on an angle — and I’ll pay all your medical expenses. We just have to see if you’re the right blood type.”
Then he looked down, ashamed. I hadn’t caught his meaning when he said he was looking for volunteers. “Lou, jeez. Come on,” I pleaded.
“I’m serious,” he said, and he lifted his head and looked at me dead-on, not scared or ashamed anymore. He’d made his ask. “I know you could use the money. I’m O positive. What are you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But who’s gonna do the surgery? You can’t buy an organ and then find some doctor to put it in you.”
“No — I’d take you to the VA. They’ll check your blood and you say you’re doing it because you love me or because of God — there’s a whole process — but as long as nobody knows about the money, it’s totally legit. And they’d believe you, because we go way back. And because … you know.”
Now it was my turn to look down.
Lou Shelton had saved my life back in ’94. I was a rookie cop and he was a desk sergeant. But this one time, during a mini riot down in Inglewood, he was on the street with us. We needed extra bodies, and we were going around the alley side of a strip mall to get at some looters from behind, but they chose that moment to slip out the back, and there was a gunfight. Lou pushed me out of the way and took a bullet. Lost his spleen. The one thing not cut out of him because of the cigarettes.
But because of me.
Now he wanted one of my kidneys. Almost like a trade. I sucked on the joint. Could I do it? Should I do it? I didn’t know what to say. So he bailed me out. “Just think about it,” he said. “I know it’s asking a lot.”
“Okay, Lou, I will.”
“And it’s not all on you. Don’t worry. I’m asking everybody, and I’m looking into the black market. I met this kid. A computer whiz. A Pakistani at the motel” — Lou was the night man at the Mirage Suites, a transient motel on Ventura Boulevard in North Hollywood — “knows all about what they call the dark web. You heard of it?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of it. But black market? Are you crazy?”
“What the fuck you want from me?” he said, angry all of a sudden. “I’m on death row! I gotta try everything. And ifyou can’t do it, you work that Asian spa. There’s gotta be one of them who’d sell me a kidney. You could ask around.”
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