Free Death Claims by Joseph Hansen

wooden bowl with scraps of lettuce, circles of onion. A gold can of olive oil, a thin-necked bottle of tarragon vinegar stood guard with a wooden pepper mill. 
    He swung toward the shutter doors into the dining space and noticed a square of paper Scotch-taped to the red wall phone. CAMPOS was lettered on it in felt pen, bold and quick, Doug's writing. Under the name was an El Molino number. He peeled it off the phone, tucked it in a pocket, pushed the doors. While they did their wooden butterfly imitation behind him, he lit the room. Two settings at the table. Tomato-stained plates crisscrossed by Danish flatware. Empty cups and glasses, empty wine bottle. A thicket of frail candles melted halfway down. Had Doug brought his mother for dinner? His hand was bandaged, but it wouldn't be like Mrs. Sawyer not to wash up afterward. 
    A pass at another thermal switch brought circles of light from chrome Bauhaus lamps below in the living room. They gleamed on Parsons tables in high-gloss orange and blue, on long white couches strewn with color-swirled cushions, on a snow prairie of white carpet, a scatter of gaudy record covers in front of a turntable hooded by smoked Plexiglas. He went down the three wide steps. At the room's far end white shutter doors closed off a short hall, linen closet to the right, bathroom to the left, bedroom at the end. He started for the doors and stopped. 
    Over a couch arm lay a jacket, windbreaker type, glossy purple satin orlon. Frowning, he picked it up. Words were stitched across its back in pale lavender script: European Motors . He turned it around. In matching script but smaller, high and to the left of the zipper, was the name Lorant . Dave knew European Motors. It was where Doug had the Ferrari tuned. All the mechanics were born overseas, factory-trained overseas for work on foreign cars. Lorant wasn't French but, Dave supposed glumly, close enough to it-Belgian. He'd shaken hands with him at the garage. Lean, blond, blue-eyed. With beautiful square shoulders . Dave dropped the jacket. Turning off lights as he moved, he went back to the kitchen and dialed the number on the note. 
    In blue on a wrist no thicker than a ten-year-old's a tattoo needle had punctured the words BORN TO LOSE . Another kind of needle had punctured the chalky skin of the arm farther up. The boy kept rubbing the place. He sat in T-shirt, jockey shorts and fallen dime-store socks on a tan metal chair in an old room where tan paint was new on bare walls. On a tan metal table in front of him lay his coverall, green starched cotton, El Molino Hospital stitched in white on the breast pocket. With eyes the color of dirty water he stared across the table at Jesus-Maria Campos, who sat, and at Dave, who leaned in the doorway, smoking. He wasn't aware he was rubbing his arm. 
    "You got an infection there?" Campos asked. 
    "Fuck off," the boy said, and stopped rubbing. 
    "No — you wouldn't have." Campos was slim, even delicate. His hair was going. It lay across his scalp like black fishbones. He wore a Mexican bandido mustache and sideburns. His sandcolor uniform was tailored and knife-edged, but it had been a long night and patches of sweat were dark on its back and under its arms. "You wouldn't get an infection — not using hospital needles." 
    "I sell my blood," the boy said, "to the Red Cross. Needles is how they get it." 
    "Once every three months." Campos shook his head. "Too many marks." "I got small veins. And the nurses they got are all trainees. They keep jabbing around till they find the place." 
    "Yeah, and so do you." A paper lay in front of Campos. In its upper right corner were pasted two Polaroid photos of the boy, front face, profile, scared, sulky. Along the bottom margin, fingerprints were black in ruled boxes. Between the photos and the fingerprints, typing filled in blanks. Campos turned the paper over. Writing in blue ballpoint took up one and a half lines on the back. "After they brought you in and