Lightning

3

Carver followed the Lebaron down A1A, which jogged east just outside of Del Moray and for a few miles became Magellan Avenue. It was easy to keep the LeBaron, which had started easily and seemed to be running okay, in sight. Despite its advanced age, the Olds, with its powerful V-8 engine, was faster than the newer convertible, and Beth was wearing a very visible bright yellow headband to keep her hair neat in the swirl of wind.

They passed the strip mall on Magellan where Carver’s office was located next to Golden World Insurance, drove south for a while, then turned west on Flamingo. South again on de Leon Boulevard.

De Leon was a wide street with a grassy median lined with palm trees whose trunks were painted white to a height of about five feet. There were mostly office buildings and shops on both sides of the street, then farther west de Leon narrowed and the neighborhood became residential. In the extreme west end of Del Moray, it ran through a poor, mostly Hispanic neighborhood, then continued west through orange grove country and ended near Interstate 101. John York, the subject of Beth’s interview, lived outside Del Moray, so they still had a long drive ahead of them. Carver didn’t mind. He had the top up on the Olds, but all of the windows were cranked down and the morning breeze bounced and buffeted through the car’s interior. The vibration of the rumbling, prehistoric engine ran from the accelerator pedal and steering wheel through his entire body. Shadows were still soft and the digital sign on the bank they were passing indicated that the temperature hadn’t yet touched eighty, He felt good, following Beth’s jaunty little convertible and watching errant strands of dark hair escape from beneath her headband and whip in the wind, loving her and contemplating their future with more pleasure than uncertainty. He didn’t mind the drive at all.

Brake lights flared on the LeBaron, and it slowed and veered toward the curb.

At first Carver assumed Beth was having trouble with the car. Then, ahead of them, just before the street began to narrow, he saw a crowd of people on the wide median directly across from a low brick building.

Beth let the LeBaron coast forward and parked half a block from the building. Carver saw now that the crowd was made up of demonstrators, many of them carrying placards. He couldn’t make out what the crudely printed signs said as he braked the Olds to a halt behind Beth’s car. The building they were picketing was, as far as he could determine, without lettering or a sign to indicate what went on inside.

Beth climbed out of her car and walked back toward Carver. He saw that she was wearing her sunglasses with the large round lenses. She was such a tall and graceful woman that her pregnancy, in its tenth week, was barely noticeable beneath the green blouse she wore loosely over tan slacks.

The sun was reflected in both lenses of her glasses as she approached the car, then leaned over to speak to Carver through his rolled down window.

“I’ve been meaning to phone this place and cancel my appointment,” she said. “Since we’re here, I think I’ll go in and cancel it in person.”

“This place is what?” Carver asked. But he had a pretty good idea. And he knew why Beth had stopped even though she was pressed for time.

“It’s Women’s Light,” she said. “An abortion clinic.”

Which explained the lack of a highly visible sign, Carver thought. “It would be easier to phone later from the cottage,” he said.

She shook her head. “No. I’m here, and it will only take a few minutes to cancel personally.”

“You were going to drive past it, then you saw the pro-life demonstrators.”

“I think of them as anti-choice.”

“Beth-”

“I don’t want them to scare me away. I’ve got a right to go in that building if I want to without being hassled.”

“Sure, but you don’t have to go in there at all. Not now or ever.”

She lowered her glasses on her nose and gazed over their rims at him with serious dark eyes. “You were me, Fred, would you go in there?”

“No.”

“Ha! You’d go. You’re the most stubborn, obsessive bastard I know. I don’t like you lying to me, Fred.”

“I wouldn’t go in there if I was pregnant. That’s God’s honest truth.”

She stared at him with disdain. “Well now, Fred, I think you’re pretty safe in saying that. Otherwise you wouldn’t say it.”

He knew she was right. Knew she was going.

“I’ve got business in there,” she said. “I’m just gonna walk in, cancel my appointment, then walk back out. No trouble. I’ll simply make my point, then leave.”

There was shouting coming from down the street, in front of Women’s Light. Beth straightened up and turned, and Carver watched through the windshield as a young woman with blond hair got out of a red Jeep with a canvas top and ran the gauntlet of demonstrators. The law prevented them from crossing the street to be close enough to the building to physically block access, but several of them were waving signs angrily and screaming at the woman. A man and a woman in jeans and red T-shirts with black lettering on them ran across the street and tried to stuff some literature into the blond woman’s hand. She tried to avoid them, batting the literature away, then hurried inside through the clinic’s glass double doors. Carver got a glimpse of someone just inside the clinic greeting her. The two demonstrators who’d flaunted the law hurried back to the median. The man was waving his brightly colored, glossy pamphlets in the air as he ran, as if they were the scalps of enemies.

Beth leaned down again so she was looking at Carver, her dark glasses back in place on the bridge of her nose. “I won’t be long, Fred.”

“Don’t rise to their bait,” he cautioned.

“I be cool,” she said jokingly.

He didn’t like that. A bright and educated woman who’d fought her way out of a Chicago ghetto, she slipped into street jargon only when she was angry and determined.

He watched her stride past her parked car, then along the sidewalk in the direction of Women’s Light. A few of the demonstrators had noticed the tall, regal figure heading toward the clinic and were either staring at her or telling others of her approach.

Carver waited a moment, then put the Olds in drive and glided it around the parked LeBaron and back in close to the curb, rolling forward slowly but staying twenty feet behind Beth. He could make out the demonstrators’ signs now, mostly red-lettered anti-abortion slogans on plain white backgrounds. A few of them featured reproductions of color photos of aborted fetuses. Some of the demonstrators were carrying long, white wooden crosses, thin and light enough to march with and wave without getting tired. The red T-shirts were lettered OPERATION ALIVE across their chests.

Carver stopped the car at the curb, turned off the engine, and continued watching Beth and the demonstrators. Several people were jabbing the air with their signs and crosses, their faces masks of rage as they screamed at Beth that babies were being killed inside the building and she shouldn’t be one of the murderers. Several of them shouted verses from scripture, and a tall man with white hair was waving a Bible frantically in his right hand and pointing to it with his left. Two large women wearing shorts and carrying aborted fetus signs screamed insults at Beth in perfect unison, as if they’d practiced in the manner of a singing duet. Unruffled, Beth removed her sunglasses, glanced over at them, and smiled.

When she was ten feet from the building, the man and woman with pamphlets darted across the street toward her. Several other people crossed the street west of the building, staying just outside the legal limit.

Instead of ignoring the pamphleteers or swatting their thrusting hands away, Beth clutched the man’s wrist and squeezed it hard, dragging him for a moment toward the building. He fought to pull back, dropping his pamphlets in the struggle, and she grinned and released him, then pushed inside through the glass doors. As soon as the man scooped up the dropped literature, he and his partner ran back across the street. Carver was aware of several other figures racing back across the street to the legal sanctuary of the median. At the same moment, a Del Moray police car approached from the other direction and parked about a hundred feet west of the demonstrators. Carver was relieved to see it.

Then the blast roared through the hot air and seemed to rock the heavy Olds. Stunned, Carver saw Beth come flying back out through the shower of sun-touched glass that had been the building’s doors and land hard on the sidewalk. She stayed propped up in a sitting position for a few seconds, then fell back. Even from where he sat, he could see her head bounce off the concrete. Black smoke began to roll above the building against the backdrop of bright blue sky.

Carver couldn’t move. Jesus! Is this real? Is this real?

Figures casting stark shadows were running in every direction. As he recovered from his shock and climbed out of the Olds, Carver saw two Del Moray cops pile out of the cruiser and race toward the building, leaving the police car’s doors hanging wide open. Placards and glossy pamphlets littered the street and median.

The stench of ruin was in the air. The feel of death.

Already sirens were screaming as Carver set the tip of his cane on the baked concrete and hobbled as fast as he could toward Beth.