Shakespeare’s Champion

Chapter Eight

Carrie wasn’t at the clinic that morning. It was the first time in a long time she hadn’t been there on a Saturday. I hadn’t realized how much I’d counted on seeing her until I pulled into the lot behind the clinic and found it empty.

She’d left me a note taped to the patients’ bathroom door, since she knew I cleaned that first.

Lily-I’m following your suggestion. Today the entire off-duty police department is moving Claude downstairs to the O’Hagens’ old apartment. Becca Whitley’s putting in a ramp at the back door! Knew you would want to know.

I was a little disconcerted by Carrie’s taking charge of Claude. I’d been to see him in the hospital a couple more times, and I realized now that both times he’d talked about Carrie. Maybe the reason I hadn’t worried about the problems of Claude’s homecoming was that I’d absorbed the clues that someone else was doing it for me? Well, well, well. Carrie and Claude. It sounded nice.

I got the clinic cleaned, though I felt lonely without Carrie. As I started work at my next client’s, I brooded about what Jack had told me. It gnawed at me that Howell didn’t trust me. I am very reliable, I keep my mouth shut, and I’m honest. My reputation as a cleaning woman depends on those qualities.

I struggled to recall all the contacts I’d had with Howell recently, trying to pick out one that would explain his sudden lack of faith in me.

By the time I was through for the day, I’d decided to make a call.

After checking the phone book and the map, I drove again into the black area of Shakespeare which surrounded Golgotha Church. I felt a wave of nausea when I passed the damaged structure, now bathed in bright winter sunshine. The cold wind rippled a large sheet of plastic over the hole in the roof, and temporary front doors had been hung. A junked pile of splintered pews lay outside in the grass. A whiff of burning still lingered in the air. Men were at work inside and out. A white man was among them, and after a careful look I recognized the Catholic priest from Montrose. Then I saw another white face: Brian Gruber, the mattress factory executive. And redheaded Al from Winthrops’ Sporting Goods. I felt a little better after that.

My business lay a block or two away, in one of the few brick homes in the area. Tidy and tiny, it sat within a four-foot chain-link fence, with a “Beware of the Dog” notice. The shutters and eaves were painted golden yellow to contrast with the brown bricks. I scanned the yard, didn’t see the dog to beware of. I lifted the gate latch, and a big tan short-eared dog of unfortunate parentage tore around the house. He woofed and he growled, and he ran from side to side right within the fence.

A small black woman came to the front door. She was trim and tidy like the house, and she had picked rose red to wear today, her day off. At her appearance, the dog instantly silenced, waiting to see what the woman’s attitude would be.

“What you want?” she called. She was neither welcoming nor repelling.

“If you’re Callie Gandy, I need to talk to you. I’m Lily Bard.”

“I know who you are. What do we have to talk about?”

“This.” I held up the shabby brown velvet ring box.

“What you doing with Mrs. Winthrop’s ring?”

Bingo. Just as I had suspected, this had never been Marie Hofstettler’s ring.

“Miss Gandy, I really want to talk.”

“Miss Bard, I’m not aiming to be rude, but you are only trouble and I don’t need any more of that than I have.”

I had already learned what I needed to know.

“All right. Good-bye.”

She didn’t answer. She and the tan dog watched me with poker-faced stillness while I returned to my car and buckled up. She closed her door then, and I drove home with even more to think about.

That afternoon I went to the grocery, cleaned my own house, and made some banana nut bread for Claude. He liked it for breakfast. It seemed very sweet, very personal to know that about a friend. That was what I’d missed most, without ever knowing it, in my wandering years and my first years in Shakespeare: the little details, the intimacy, of friendship.

I retrieved one of my homemade individual entrees from the freezer. Claude liked lasagna, I remembered. Feeling like a small-town paradigm of neighborliness, I walked over to the apartments.

The move was complete, apparently, and some of Claude’s cops were still there drinking a beer by way of thank-you. Claude was on his old couch, his bad leg propped up on an ottoman. The door was open, so I just stepped in, self-conscious at having an audience.

“Lily, are you a sight for sore eyes!” Claude boomed, and I noticed he looked better than he had since his injury. “Come on in and have a brew.”

I glanced around at the men lounging in the living room. I nodded at Dedford Jinks, whom I hadn’t seen since the Winthrop break-in, and Todd Picard. He seemed a little more relaxed in my presence than he had been in weeks past. Tom David was sitting on the floor, his long legs crossed at the ankle, a Michelob bottle in his hand. His bright mean eyes scanned me, and his mouth curved in a nasty smile.

Judas, I thought, drinking Claude’s beer when you knew he was going to be in that church. Could you have kept that child from dying?

My face must have become very unpleasant, because Tom David looked startled, then defensive. His smile faltered, then increased in wattage.

“Hoo hoo, it’s Miss Bard, tore herself away from her new love long enough to pay you a visit, Claude!”

Claude just smiled, perhaps because Carrie came out of the kitchen at that moment. Carrie was wearing leggings and a University of Arkansas sweatshirt, and she looked-for once-carefree. Her glasses were propped on top of her head, and her eyes were round and brown and warm.

Tom David was taken aback when he realized no one was going to pick up on his cue. Dedford Jinks, the detective, ran a hand over his own thinning hair and gave Tom David a look of sheer irritation.

I smiled at Carrie, bobbed my head to Dedford and a patrolman I didn’t know, a tall black man with a bandage on his arm. I looked at him carefully. I’d helped him up in the church. He recognized me, too. We exchanged nods.

I told Claude, “I figured you wouldn’t be baking anytime soon, so I brought you some bread.”

“Would that by any chance be banana nut? I can smell it from here.”

I nodded. “Some lasagna, too,” I muttered. I wished everyone would look somewhere else.

“Lily, you are sure sweet,” Claude declared. “Without Carrie helping me move and you cooking for me, I’d have to rely on pizza delivery.”

“Oh, of course, no one else in town will bring you meals,” Carrie said sarcastically. And she was right to take Claude’s words with a grain of salt. He’d be inundated with food within days, if not hours.

“Where should I put this?” I asked Carrie, tacitly acknowledging her place in the apartment.

She looked a little surprised, then pleased.

“Come help me unpack the kitchen, if you have a minute,” she invited. She could tell I was uncomfortable. I followed her from the room gladly, giving Claude a gentle pat on the shoulder as I passed him.

Carrie and I were a little old for girlish confidences, but I felt obliged to say something. “This what it looks like?” I asked, keeping my voice low.

She shrugged, trying to look noncommittal, but a little smile curved her lips.

“Good,” I said. “Now, where you think he wants these spices?”

“I’m trying to put everything where he had it in the apartment upstairs,” Carrie said. “I don’t want him to feel like a stranger in his own kitchen. I tried to remember. I even drew a diagram. But it got a little hectic up there with the men coming in and out.”

“Spices were here, I believe,” I said, opening the cabinet right by the stove. I was hoping Carrie wouldn’t take this wrong, and she didn’t, being above all a sensible woman.

Luckily, Becca Whitley (I assumed) had given the apartment a thorough cleaning after the O’Hagens moved out. All we had to do was put things in what we considered a logical place. After Carrie and I had worked a while, we took a break and had a Coke. Leaning against the counters in companionable weariness, we exchanged smiles.

“They carried everything down without a problem, but I guess the unpacking is woman’s work,” Carrie said wryly. She lowered her voice. “What’s this Tom David was trying to start trouble with?” We could still hear men’s voices in the living room, but we didn’t know who’d gone and who’d come in.

“I’m…” To my horror, I could feel myself turning red, and I had to look off into the distance.

“Are you all right?” Carrie asked. She got her doctor look on.

“Yes.” I took a breath. “I’m seeing the new man at Winthrop’s Sporting Goods.” For an awful minute I could not remember Jack’s cover name. “Jared Fletcher.”

“The one who lives here in the apartments? The one with the lips and the hair?”

I nodded, grinning at this description.

“How’d you meet him?”

“I went in to buy some weight-lifting gloves,” I said, sifting through the weeks past to find something believable.

“That’s romantic,” Carrie said.

I looked at her sharply to see if she was teasing me, but she was dead serious.

“Didn’t I see him at the hospital the night of the bombing?” She said doubtfully.

Now, that was before I’d officially met Jack. But Carrie didn’t know that, didn’t know when I’d bought my new gloves. This was so complicated. I hated telling lies, especially to one of my few friends.

“Yes,” I said.

“He came to see about you?”

I nodded, figuring that was a little better than trying to sort partial truth from fiction.

“Oh, wow,” Carrie said, all dewy-eyed.

As if on cue, I heard a familiar voice from the living room.

“Hey, I hear you deserted us upstairs. There must be a secret benefit to living down here!” Jack said heartily.

Claude’s response was less audible, but I heard the word “beer” clearly.

“I just may do that,” Jack answered. “I’ve been working all day and I could use some liquid refreshment. Speaking of which, I picked up this bottle for your housewarming.”

“Thank you, neighbor,” Claude said, more audibly. He must have turned his head toward a moving Jack. “You’ll have to come share it with me when I open it.”

Jack appeared in the kitchen doorway, wearing his red sweatshirt with the Winthrop logo and his leather jacket. He betrayed his surprise at finding me there only by a widening of his eyes.

“Lily,” he said, and kissed me on the cheek. His hand groped for mine, squeezed it hard for a moment, released it. “The chief says you have some loose beer in here.”

I pointed at the refrigerator. Carrie beamed at Jack and extended a hand.

“I’m so glad to meet you. I’m Carrie Thrush.”

“The good doctor Thrush. I’ve heard great things about you,” Jack said. “I’m Jared Fletcher. New man in town.” He was smiling genuinely. He set a bottle of bourbon on the counter, Claude’s homecoming gift, and opened the refrigerator to extract a beer.

“You’ll have to bring Lily down for supper some night. Maybe she and I can collaborate on cooking and you and Claude can evaluate the result,” Carrie said cheerfully.

“Tom David told on us, Jared,” I said, trying to speak lightly. But I haven’t done that in a long time, and it came out sounding very unnatural. Carrie swung a look in my direction, then back to Jack.

“That would be great, Carrie,” Jack said smoothly. He looked at me to tell me he’d gotten my message: the little cabal was having conversations about us.

“Lily brought Claude some bread and some lasagna,” Carrie said, pushing my praiseworthy aspects.

“Did you, baby?” Jack looked at me, and if there was a flash of heat in his eyes, there was none in his voice.

Baby? I was trying to imagine double-dating with Carrie and Claude. I was trying to imagine everything being straightforward, Jack really working at Winthrop’s Sporting Goods, having no other agenda than making a living. I would just be a maid, and he would just sell workout equipment… We’d date, go out on real dates, during which no one would get shot. We’d never hit each other, or even want to.

“Claude took care of me when I got hurt last spring,” I said, suddenly feeling very tired. I didn’t owe Jack an explanation, but I needed to say something.

“You got hurt…” Jack began, his eyes narrowing.

“Old story. Go out there and have your beer, sugar,” I said dismissively, and gave him what I hoped was a loverlike shove to the uninjured shoulder. He righted himself after a tense second and stalked into the living room.

“Did I catch some undercurrent there?” Carrie asked.

“Yeah, well, nothing’s easy,” I muttered.

“Not with you, anyway,” she said, but her voice was gentle.

“Actually, in this case, it’s him,” I told her grimly.

“Hmmm. You think this is going to work out?”

“Who knows?” I said, exasperated. “Let’s get this kitchen done.”

“It hardly seems right for you to work so hard, Lily. You spend all week cleaning and arranging other people’s things. Why don’t you go sit out there and have some down time?”

With Claude and Jack and Tom David? “Not on your life,” I told her, and finished placing pots and pans in the cabinet.

We worked on the bedroom next, sliding all the drawers back into their correct position, rearranging the clothes in the closet. I polished all the furniture after I found the cleaning supplies, and I quickly stowed away the bathroom things while Carrie set Claude’s desk to rights in the second bedroom.

Then I was through, and I knew it was time for me to leave. Carrie would have to be helping Claude do personal things, I supposed; he would be tired.

He was, in fact, asleep on the couch. All the men had left except Jack, who had opened a box of books and was shelving them in the low bookcase. He’d gathered up all the beer bottles and put them in a plastic garbage bag. He half-turned as he heard my steps, smiled at me, and pushed a dictionary into place. It all seemed so pleasant and normal. I didn’t know what attitude to take. He’d severed our connection until this episode was over. But we were alone in the room except for the sleeping policeman.

I knelt by him, and he turned and kissed me, his hand going to the back of my neck. It was a kiss that started out to be short and ended up to be long.

“Damn,” he breathed, moving back from me.

“Gotta go,” I said very quietly, not wanting to disturb the sleeper.

“Yeah, me, too,” he whispered, standing and stretching. “I need to listen to today’s tape.” He patted his jacket pocket.

“Jack,” I said in his ear, “if Howell won’t call the law, you have to. You’ll get in awful trouble.” It was an idea that had consumed any extra minute I’d had during the day. I darted a glance at “the law,” sound asleep on the couch. “Promise me,” I whispered. I looked straight into his hazel eyes.

“Are you scared?” he breathed.

I nodded. “For you,” I told him.

He stared at me. “I’ll talk to Howell tomorrow,” he said.

I smiled at him, rubbed my knuckles against his cheek in a caress. “ ‘Bye,” I whispered, and tiptoed out Claude’s door.

I pulled on my coat in the hall, zipping the front and pulling my hood up. It was really cold, biting cold; the temperature would be well below freezing tonight. I wouldn’t be able to walk even if I needed to. But after extracting Jack’s promise I felt very relaxed. It might not take me too long to sleep.

Just to make sure, I walked the four streets around the arboretum twice, very briskly, and then took the trails through the trees. When I emerged onto Track Street, it was full dark. My feet were feeling numb and my hands were chilled despite my gloves.

I was halfway across the street, angling to my house, when a Jeep rounded the corner at a high speed and screeched to a halt a foot away from my right leg.

“Where’ve you been, Lily?” Bobo was hatless and frantic, his brown coat unbuttoned. There was no trace of the ardent young man who had kissed me the night before.

“Helping Claude move downstairs. Walking.”

“I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Get inside your house and don’t go out tonight.”

His face, almost on a level with mine because of the height of the Jeep, was white and strained. No eighteen-year-old should look like that. Bobo was scared and angry and desperate.

“What’s going to happen?”

“You’ve been too many places, Lily. Some people don’t understand.” He wanted to say more. His teeth bared from his inner tension. He was on the verge of screaming.

“Tell me,” I said, as calmly as I could manage. I snatched off a glove and laid my hand over his. But instead of soothing him, my touch seemed to spark even more inner storms. He yanked away from me as if I’d poked him with a cattle prod. From between clenched teeth, he said, “Stay in!” He roared off as fast as he’d come, as recklessly.

My own anxiety level jumped off the scale. What could have happened so suddenly? I looked up at the facade of the apartment building. Claude’s new windows were dark. Deedra’s, above him, were also out. But Jack’s lights were on, at least some of them. His living room window was faintly illuminated.

I stood in the middle of street in the freezing cold and tried to make my brain work.

Without deciding it consciously, I began to run-not toward my house but toward the apartments. Once I was inside the hall, hurrying past Claude’s door, I tried to walk quietly. I went up the stairs like a snake, swift and silent. I tried Jack’s door. It was unlocked and open an inch. A ball of fear settled in my stomach.

I slipped inside. No one in the living room, lit only by the dim light reaching it from the kitchen. Jack’s leather jacket was tossed on the couch. Further down the hall, the overhead light in the spare bedroom glared through its open door. I listened, closing my eyes to listen more intently. I felt the hair stand up on my neck. Silence.

I’d only been in here once, so I picked my way through Jack’s sparse furniture very carefully.

No one in the kitchen, either.

I was biting my lip to keep from making a sound when I stood in the doorway of the guest bedroom. There was a card table holding a tape player, a pad of paper, and a pencil. There was a Dr. Pepper can on the table. The folding chair that had been in front of the table was lying on its side. I touched my fingers to the Dr. Pepper can. It was still cold. A red light indicated the tape player was on, but the tape compartment was open and empty. I ran back to the living room and fumbled through the pockets of the leather jacket. They were empty, too.

“They’ve got Jack,” I said to no one.

I covered my eyes to think more intently. Claude was downstairs unable to get around on his own. At least some portion of his police force was corrupt. Sheriff Schuster was dead and I didn’t know any of his people. Maybe the sheriff’s department, too, contained one or two men who at least sympathized with the Take Back Your Own group.

What if I couldn’t save Jack by myself? Whom could I call?

Carrie was a noncombatant. Raphael had a wife and family, and without putting it to myself clearly in words, I knew a black man’s involvement would escalate whatever was happening into a war.

If I went in and was captured, too, who would help?

Then I thought of someone.

I remembered the number and punched it in on Jack’s phone.

“Mookie,” I said when she answered. “I need you to come. Bring the rifle.”

“Where?”

“Winthrop’s. They’ve got-my man.” I was beyond trying to explain who Jack was. “He’s a detective. He’s been taping them.”

“Where’ll I meet you?” She sounded cool.

“Let’s go in over the back fence. I live right behind the Home Supply store.”

“I know. I’m coming.” She put her phone down.

This was the woman I’d cautioned about leaving town yesterday, and now I was urging her to put herself into danger on my say-so. But I didn’t have time to worry about irony. I ran down the stairs, leaving Jack’s door wide open. It wouldn’t hurt for someone else to become alarmed. I ran to my place, let myself in. I pulled off my coat, found a heavy dark sweatshirt, and yanked it down over my T-shirts. I found Jack’s forgotten watch cap. I pulled it over my light hair. No gloves, I needed my hands. I untied my high-tops and pulled on dark boots, laced them tight. I would have darkened my face if I could have thought of something to do it with. I came out of my front door as Mookie pulled in. She leaped out of the car with the rifle in one hand.

“What’s your weapon?” she asked.

I raised my hands.

“Cool,” she said, and we began to run for the tracks without further conversation. From the high point of the railroad, we surveyed the back lot of the Sporting Goods store. There were lights on in the store. The back lot was always lit, but there were pools of darkness, too.

“Let’s go,” my companion said. She seemed quite happy and relaxed. She required not one word of explanation, which was refreshing, since I wasn’t sure I could manage anything coherent. We jogged down the embankment. I was about to take a run at the fence and accept the barbed wire at the top, but Mookie pulled wire cutters from a pocket in her dark jumpsuit. This was no fashion model garment, but a padded, heavy, dark workman’s jumpsuit with many pockets. Mookie had a knit cap pulled over her hair, too. She went to work with the wire cutters, while I looked around us for any signs of detection.

Nothing moved but us.

Finally the opening was large enough and we scrambled through it, Mookie first. Again, nothing happened. We moved into a pool of darkness and crouched there behind a gleaming new four-wheeler. Mookie pointed at our next goal, a boat. We had to cross through some light, but made the boat safely. We waited.

In this run-and-wait fashion we worked our way from the rear of the lot to the back of the store. There was a customer door at ground level and a loading dock with a set of four steps going up to it. From the dock there was an employee door leading inside to the huge storeroom. The customer door was dark. I was willing to bet it was heavily locked.

They’d left someone on guard at the loading bay door. It was the pimply boy from the Home Supply store, and he was shifting from foot to foot in the cold, which I no longer felt. He had a rifle, too. Mookie whispered, “Can you take him out silently?”

I nodded. I’d never attacked anyone like this, someone who hadn’t attacked me first, but before that thought could lodge firmly in my consciousness and weaken me, I focused on his rifle. If he had it, I had to assume he was willing to use it.

The boy turned to peer through the window in the employee door, and sneezed. Under cover of that noise, I leaped silently up the steps, came up behind him, snaked my arms around him to grip the rifle, and pulled it up against his throat. He struggled against me but I was determined to silence him.

He weakened. He grew limp. Mookie helped me lower him to the concrete platform. She pulled a scarf from one of her pockets and tied it around his mouth and bound his hands behind him with another. She took his rifle and held it out to me. I shook my head. She placed it down against the base of the loading dock, out of sight. She evidently thought he was alive and worth binding, so I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know now if I’d killed him.

I wondered if they’d come to check on him. I stood sideways to the little head-high window reinforced with diamond-patterned wire, and looked through into the lighted storeroom. I could just see movement past a wall of boxes and racks, but I couldn’t tell what was happening.

“Cover inside,” I whispered to Mookie. “Go left when we go in.”

She nodded. I took a deep breath, turned the knob, praying that it would not make a noise. To me, the twist of the metal was loud as cymbals, but no one appeared at the gap in the boxes to investigate. I pulled the door open and Mookie went in low, rifle at the ready. No one shot her. No one shouted. I went in after a second, dropped to a squat right inside the door, letting it ease shut against me.

Mookie was crouched behind a chest-deep pile of stenciled boxes. An array of huge metal shelves, all labeled and aligned, loomed ahead of us. To our right, across the aisle left open for passage to the back door, was a rack of camouflage jumpsuits in the colder, grayer, green and black of winter camo. There were more rows of shelves in front of the rack.

I could hear voices now, the raucous laughter of men high on their testosterone. In the middle of the laughter there was a cut-off yelp. Jack.

I was ready to kill now. I worked my hands, getting the stiffness and cold out of them. Mookie eyed me with some doubt.

“Which man is yours?” she asked almost inaudibly.

“The one who yelled,” I told her. Her eyes widened. “He’s got long black hair.” She would need to know which one was Jack.

“We’ll work our way up there, see what happens,” she breathed.

That was as good a plan as any. We ducked around the boxes and concealed ourselves behind the next row of shelves.

We could see through the gaps in the stacked goods. Darcy was there, Jim was there, and Cleve Ragland, Tom David Meicklejohn. About who I’d expected. There was at least one person I couldn’t see; I noticed the men turn to their right a few times, addressing a remark to whoever sat there.

They were torturing Jack.

As we worked our way to the front of the storage area, I saw more and more. I saw too much. Jack was tied to a chair, a wooden one on rollers. His arms were tied to the chair arms. He had the beginning of a black eye, and a cut on one cheek, maybe from when they’d grabbed him in his apartment. They’d taken off his shirt. They’d pulled the bandage off his bullet wound. Darcy had a hunting knife, and Cleve had devised his own little implement by heating an arrowhead with a lighter and putting it on Jack’s skin. Jim Box looked nauseated. Tom David was watching, and though he did not look sick, he did not look happy, either. His eyes flickered toward whoever was seated out of sight, and back to Jack.

Darcy turned away from cutting Jack right under the nipple. The knife glistened with blood. I would kill him first, I thought, so consumed by the thought that I could not reason, could not plan what I should do. I had forgotten Mookie’s existence until she nudged me. She pointed a slim finger to a man sitting on his haunches in the shadow of a shelving unit, a man I hadn’t seen before, and I thought I would vomit. I recognized the pale floppy hair instantly. Bobo. Darcy said something to him.

Bobo raised his face to look at Darcy, and I saw tears on his face.

“I gotta ask you, boy, where you went just a while ago,” Darcy said genially. He raised the knife so the light caught the part of the blade that was not red. Bobo stood up. His shoulders squared.

“I’m hoping you didn’t betray your family by telling anyone what we’d caught here,” Darcy said, waiting for Bobo to answer.

When the silence dragged on, everyone turned to look at Bobo, even Jim Box. Jack was taking advantage of the respite by closing his eyes. I saw his hands working under the tight cord around his wrists. He was biting his lower lip. There were a dozen cuts and burns on his chest, and they’d reopened the bullet wound. Streaks of blood clotted his chest hair.

“Did you go tell that blond bitch?” Darcy asked, quietly. “You tell that gal her little bedmate was in trouble here?”

Bobo didn’t speak. He stared at Darcy, his blue eyes narrowed with turmoil. Something hardened in his face as I watched.

“I hope she does come looking,” Cleve said suddenly. “We get to reenact her worst nightmare.”

Darcy looked at Cleve in some surprise. Then he realized what Cleve meant. He laughed, his head thrown back, the overhead light scouring his face of any sign of humanity.

Jack’s eyes were open now, all right. He was looking at Cleve with a brand new nightmare for Cleve in his eyes. Cleve looked down, flinched. Then he seemed to recall that he was in charge.

“We can give her a real good time right here,” he told Jack. “You can watch, Bobo. Learn how it’s done.”

Tom David’s eyes were slitted in distaste. He was looking at his coconspirators as if he’d just learned something about them that he didn’t like. Bobo’s face said he couldn’t believe what he’d heard. He was waiting for some other explanation of the words to occur to him.

“This is going to be a pleasure,” Mookie said in my ear. She pulled a knife from one of her pockets, handed it to me.

“I cover you, you cut him free,” she said. “We get out the best way we can.”

I nodded.

“Or maybe I’ll kill them all,” she said, to herself.

“They killed Darnell?”

“Yeah, I do believe. My mother got some calls after Darnell’s death, anonymous, nasty really explicit about Darnell’s injuries. They came from this store. She has caller ID,” Mookie whispered. “Dumb shitasses didn’t even think about a black woman having caller ID. Get ready.”

She stepped out then, her rifle up at her shoulder.

“Okay, assholes,” she said. “Down on the floor.”

They all froze, Darcy in the act of bending over to put the knife to Jack’s chest again; Cleve had the arrow in one hand, the lighter in the other. Beyond them, Tom David was still leaning against the wall, his arms crossed on his chest. Jim Box was beside him. Bobo, who’d been close to the door into the store, turned and stepped through it, and the clunk as the heavy door closed behind him made Cleve jump.

In that flicker of time, Darcy threw the knife at Mookie and dived to his right. Mookie fired and ducked to her right. Her bullet hit Jim Box, who’d been beyond Darcy; I glimpsed a red flower blossoming on his chest. And the knife missed her, but got me. I felt the sudden cold where my shirt sliced open, felt the pressure, but I was running for Jack. Cleve charged me, his thick chest and heavy chin making him look like an angry bull. I stepped aside as he came to me, and I extended my arm. It caught him in the throat. His head stayed still, but his feet kept on going. When the rest of his body didn’t follow, they flew up in the air, and down he went. His head thudded against the concrete floor. And I heard the clunk of the door again. Someone else had fled into the store.

I knelt by the chair, cutting at the cords binding Jack. I was awkward about it, but Mookie’s knife was sharp. I heard a rush of feet, light and quick, and then the pow! of the rifle.

Mookie passing by, doing God knows what damage. I thought I heard the door again.

I could pay attention to nothing else while I was using the knife, and when I’d sawed through the second set of bonds and I could look up, everything had changed.

I saw no one, at least no one moving.

Cleve was down for good. I felt a flash of satisfaction. Jim Box had vanished, but there were drops of blood on the floor where he’d been standing. I saw there was a chair in the shadows, across from Jack’s. It was empty.

Jack whispered, “Help me up.”

I jumped to my feet, held out my hands. To my horror, I could not meet Jack’s eyes; that seemed worse, much worse, than what I’d done to Cleve Ragland. Jack made an awful sound of pain as he pulled himself up on me. There was a discarded brown coat, Bobo’s, lying on a nearby shelf. I grabbed it. I had in mind fleeing through the rear door, trying to make it through the back lot and hole in the fence to my house, calling-someone. Fleetingly, I thought of the FBI men, who might still be at the motel where they’d been camped since the bombing.

“Put this on,” I said urgently, holding out the coat to Jack. I was thinking of the bitter cold, Jack’s wounds, shock, God knows what.

I kept lookout while Jack tried to manage, but in the end I had to help him. I was so intent on maneuvering Jack’s left arm into the sleeve that I did not know anyone was behind me until Jack’s face gave me a second’s warning. Just as Jack began to move, something slammed against my shoulder. I shrieked involuntarily, knocked to my right, off my feet. I slammed my head into the shelves and fell to the floor hard enough to knock the breath from my lungs. I couldn’t move. I stared up at the bright lights of the storeroom, high above me. I could see tall dark Jim Box, his shirt soaked with blood. He gripped an oar, holding it like a baseball bat, and he was swinging it back. He was going to hit me in the head, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

Jack went mad. He launched himself at Jim, wrenched the oar from him, and slammed it into Jim’s head. Jim went over like a felled tree, without a sound. Jack stood over him, his blood-spattered chest heaving, wanting Jim to move, wanting to strike again.

But Jim didn’t move.

With a rush the air came back into my lungs. I moaned, not only from the pain but from black despair. We were both hurt now, weak. How many more were in the building? Where was Mookie? Had they killed her?

Jack stood over me with the oar. Gradually some of the madness seeped from his face and he crouched beside me.

“Can you get up?” he whispered. I saw the finger marks on his throat for the first time. They’d choked him, enough to almost cost him his voice. I wanted to tell him no, I couldn’t move, but found myself nodding instead. That was a mistake. Pain rocketed through my head. I had to lie still a moment, before I rolled over on my stomach, pushed up to my knees. My arm, sliced by Darcy’s knife, was bleeding. I touched my hair, which felt-funny. There was blood on my hand when I took it down. I’d hit a shelf with my head when I’d gone sideways, I remembered slowly. Maybe I had a concussion. As if to confirm that suspicion, I vomited. When the spasm was over, I felt like I would welcome dying. But Jack needed me to get up.

I gripped the nearest upright, a corner bar for the shelves, and tried to gain my feet while Jack stayed alert for another attack. Finally I was standing, though I could feel myself swaying from side to side; or maybe I was still and the warehouse was swaying? Earthquake?

“You’re really hurt,” Jack rasped, and I could hear a little fear even in his strained voice.

I felt weak and shaken. I was letting him down.

“Go,” I said.

“Right,” he whispered, the sarcasm diminished by his voice level.

“You can move. I’m not sure I can,” I faltered. I hated the wavering of my voice. “They won’t kill me. How many more are there?”

“Two in the store, and the old man.”

What old man?

“Bobo won’t hurt me,” I reassured Jack, thinking he was counting Bobo as one of the adversaries.

“No, I don’t think he will. I think he didn’t know any of this. I hope to God he’s calling the police.”

That was funny. Speaking of old men, it sure looked to me as if Howell Sr., uncrowned king of Shakespeare, was standing right over there by the door.

“Look,” I said to Jack, amazed.

Jack turned, and old Mr. Winthrop raised a hand. To my bewilderment, it held a gun. I opened my mouth to yell something, I don’t know what, when two strong arms wrapped around the old man and lifted him from the ground.

“No, Grandfather,” Bobo said. The expression on the wizened old rat terrier’s face had to be seen to be believed. Howell Sr. struggled and wriggled in his grandson’s grasp, but it was a futile effort. If I’d had any inclination toward humor, it would have been funny. Bobo walked through the storeroom and out onto the loading dock carrying the old man, who called him names I’d never heard an elderly person use.

Bobo’s face was tragic. He didn’t look at me, at Jack. He was alone with the bitterest betrayal of his short life.

I didn’t care where he was taking his grandfather, because the measure of that betrayal was unfolding itself to me. Howell Sr. had used his own son’s business as a cover for his little hate group. Howell Sr. was the reason his son, Jack’s employer, had kept secrets from Jack. Howell must have suspected his father’s involvement from the first. So he hadn’t contacted police, or ATF agents, or the FBI. He’d hired Jack.

And here we were, thanks to old man Winthrop, bleeding and maybe dying in a damn storeroom.

“Where’s Mookie?” I asked Jack. “The woman with the rifle.”

“She went in the store after Darcy,” Jack whispered. The jacket hung open over his bare bloody chest. He’d laid down the oar in favor of Mookie’s knife, the knife I’d used to slash his bonds.

“Tom David,” I said.

Jack was puzzled for a minute. Then his face cleared. “I don’t know. He may be in the store, too.”

“Naw, I’m here,” said a taut voice from a few feet away. “I’m out of the fight.”

I staggered over in the direction of the voice despite Jack’s telling me not to. I didn’t seem to have much control over my actions. Tom David was lying on the floor to the right of the door. The left leg of his jeans was soaked with red. Now I knew where Mookie’s second shot had gone. The policeman’s face was absolutely white. His eyes shone brilliant blue.

“I am sorry,” he said.

I stared down at him.

“You can call the police, it’ll be safe. I’m the only one.”

I nodded, and nearly threw up again.

“I don’t hold with what they did to Jared, and I wouldn’t have hurt you,” he said wearily, and closed his eyes.

“Did you kill Darnell?” I asked.

He opened his eyes at that. “I was there.”

“Who did it?”

“Darcy and Jim. The old man. Paulie who works over there,” and he moved his head infinitesimally in the direction of the Home Supply store. “Len. Bay Hodding, Bob’s dad. He ain’t here tonight. Wedding anniversary.” And Tom David grinned a horrible grin. Those blue eyes were now not so bright. “Who cares, anyway? Nigger. Now, Del Packard… that was Darcy. I regret it.” And his face relaxed. Looking down at the pool of blood beneath my feet, I thought Tom David Meicklejohn had closed his mean eyes forever.

But the policeman’s final testimony had taken valuable time, and in that time things once again had happened without my awareness or participation.

I was alone.

The bright storeroom, with its long stretches of shelves and dark shadows, was empty except for the silent bodies of the fallen and dead. I felt like an actor onstage after the play is over.

Then, from the store, I heard a scream.

I shuffled toward the door. The clear pane set at eye level had gone dark. The store lights had been shut off. As my hand closed around the knob, I realized that when I opened it, I would be silhouetted against the storeroom lights. I switched them off. Then I opened the door and propelled myself through it, and seconds later heard the distinctive clunk! of its falling shut.

There was a whoosh of sound over my head, a heavy impact. Then silence. I reached up cautiously. A hunting arrow protruded from the wooden doorframe. My skin crawled. Darcy was an avid bowhunter. He and Jim had discussed it morning after morning this fall.

I had to get away from the door. He’d be coming. I pulled myself forward on my elbows, trying to hug the floor as closely as possible. It was all too easy, and I cursed myself for a fool in thinking my venturing into this trap could help anyone.

I tried to summon up the floor plan, see it in my head. I felt hopeless when I thought of how familiar it was to Darcy.

“I got your yellow friend,” he called to me. “She’s de-ad. Got an arrow in her he-ad.” He was singing. He was having a good time.

I didn’t believe it. Mookie had screamed; at least, I was almost certain it had been her. You can’t scream if an arrow goes through your head. But I knew my reasoning, like my sense of balance and my judgment, was very shaky just now. If only I knew where Jack was, I thought, I’d just curl up somewhere and go to sleep. That sounded good. I laid my head on the rough indoor-outdoor carpet and began to drift.

“I’m com-ing,” Darcy crooned. Darcy, who had beaten a young man to death for being black. Darcy, who had crushed his friend’s throat.

He sounded so close I knew I shouldn’t move. I didn’t feel sleepy anymore. I felt close to death. I thought of the high-tech bows I’d seen dangling from the ceiling on my trips to the store, the ones that looked so lethal they would’ve scared Robin Hood… Wow, was I drifting…

A foot fell on the carpet an inch from my face. His next step would be on me. Act or die.

Galvanized, I shrieked and scrambled up, grabbing what I could, hoping for an arm. I locked my arms and legs around Darcy Orchard like a lover, holding him as tightly as I’d ever held Jack or Marshall, squeezing till tears ran from my eyes. I was riding his back.

He was so big and strong, and not wounded. He didn’t go down even with my full weight wrapped around him. I’d scared the shit out of him, and it took him seconds to recover, but only seconds. He heaved and bucked, and I heard the clatter of something falling, and I thought it might be the bow.

But he had an arrow in his hand, and he began stabbing backward with it, though not with the full force or range of his arm since I embraced him. He jabbed my thigh the first time, and he could tell where to go after that, and he scored my ribs a dozen times. Scars on scars, I thought through the terrible pain. I wanted to let go. But it seemed I couldn’t, couldn’t get the message to my fingers to relax. Death grip, I thought. Death grip.

The lights came on. The glare seemed to shoot a lance through my eyes, made me so sick I nearly fainted, but I was shocked into alertness by something so awful I could only believe it because it was this night, this bloody night. Behind one of the counters that held a display of knives, I glimpsed Mookie fixed to the wall by an arrow through her chest. Her head sagged to one side and her eyes were open.

Then past Darcy’s shoulder I saw someone running toward us, toward Darcy and me locked in our little dance. It was Jack, with a rifle in his hands. We were too close, he couldn’t shoot, I thought. As if we had one mind Jack reversed the rifle and clubbed Darcy in the head with the stock. Darcy howled and lurched, wanting to go for Jack, but I would not let go, would not would not would not…

Blackness.

“Wake up, honey. I have to check you.” No.

“Open your eyes, Lily. It’s me, Carrie.” No. “Lily!”

I slitted my eyes. “That’s better.” Blinding light. “Don’t moan. It’s just-necessary.”

Back to sleep. Nice period of darkness and silence. Then, “Wake up, Lily!”

The next day was agony. My head ached, a condition that bore no more relationship to a normal headache than a stomachache bore to appendicitis. My ribs were notched and gouged and the skin above them a bloody mess stitched together like a crazy quilt. The wound in my thigh, though not serious, added its own note to my symphony of pain, as did the slice in my arm.

I was in a private room, courtesy of Howell Winthrop, Jr., Carrie told me when I demanded to go home. When I realized someone else was paying for it, I decided to rest while I could. He was paying for Jack’s room next door, too. Jack came in during that horrible morning, when even the medication that made me mentally dull could not smother the hurt.

When I saw him in the doorway, tears began oozing from the corners of my eyes, running down the side of my face to soak my pillow.

“I didn’t mean to have that effect on you,” he said. His voice was husky, but stronger.

I raised a hand, and he shuffled slowly to the bed and wrapped his own around it. His hand felt warm and hard and steady.

“You should sit,” I said, and my own voice sounded distant and thick.

“Got you drugged, huh?”

“Yes.” Nodding hurt more than speaking. “How’d they get you, Jack?”

“They found the bug,” he said simply. “Jim spilled a Coke in the lounge, and in the process of mopping up the mess, he found it. Jim called old Mr. Winthrop. He advised them to watch from concealment and see who came to extract the tape; and that was me. They had to consult with each other for a while. They decided they could find out who hired me if they put me through the wringer. Cleve and Jim thought all along it was Howell, but the others voted for something federal. They thought Mookie was federal, too. They thought about going to get her, bring her along to join the party. Said she’d been in the store too much to be natural. Lucky for me they didn’t. Why did you think of calling her? Who the hell is she?”

I tried to explain Mookie to him without revealing any of her secrets. I am not sure I managed, but Jack knew I worked for her, that she had a personal stake in uncovering our fledgling white supremacy group, and that I had known she could shoot. Jack held my hand for some time, rubbing it gently as he thought, and then suddenly he said, “When he knocked you down, when you hit the shelf and the floor-and I swear to God, Lily, you bounced-I thought he’d killed you.”

“You went crazy,” I observed.

He smiled a little. “Yes, I did. When you could stand, and you could walk-sort of-I knew you’d be okay. Probably. And after a look at Tom David, I knew he wasn’t a threat to you…”

“So you left.”

“Hunting.” He was not apologetic. He’d had to pursue the man who had degraded him. I, of all people, could understand that.

“Who’s dead?” Carrie had refused to talk about it.

“Tom David. Jim Box.”

“That’s all?”

“I wanted Darcy to die, but I didn’t hit him that final time that would have settled it. His jaw is broken, though. The cops were there by then, for one thing.” Jack sank into the chair, and thoughtfully punched the button to lower my bed so I could see him more easily.

“How come?”

“Bobo called them, when he went into the store after all the shooting started. And he was trying to find his grandfather. The old man had armed himself, and Bobo managed to track him down just in time.”

I remembered Bobo’s face as he’d lifted his grandfather and carried him off. A few more tears oozed down my face. I wanted to know what would happen to old Mr. Winthrop, but it could wait. Roasting in hell came to mind as fitting. “Mookie’s alive?” I had belatedly realized her name was not on the dead list.

Jack closed his eyes. “She’s just hanging on. She wants to talk to you.”

“Oh, no.” I felt so washed out, and washed up, I couldn’t stand the thought of one more confession. “She’s really not going to make it?”

“The arrow went right through. You saw.”

“I was hoping I made it up.” I looked away, at the curtained window.

Jack kept holding my hand, waiting for me to make up my mind.

“So Cleve didn’t die?” I was stalling.

“He has a fractured skull. Much worse than your concussion.”

“Not possible. Okay, get a nurse or two to load me in a chair.”

After a lip-biting interval, I was being pushed into Mookie’s room. There were blinking machines, and a constant low hum, and Mookie was hooked into more tubes than I had ever imagined a human being could be. Her color was ashen, and her lips had lost color. Lanette was in the corner of the room, her hands over her face, rocking back and forth in a straight chair. Her firstborn child was dying, and she had already lost her second.

The nurse went to stand out of earshot, and I raised my hand, with great effort, to touch Mookie Preston, that odd and lonely and brave woman.

“Mookie, I’m here-Lily,” I said.

“Lily. You lived,” she said very slowly, and her eyes never opened.

“Thanks to you.” If I had gone in there by myself, I would have died horribly and slowly. By asking her to go with me, I had set her death in motion.

“Don’t be sorry,” she said. Her voice was slow, and soft, but the words were distinct. “I got to kill some of them, the ones that killed my brother.”

I sighed softly. I had been thinking, while in my haze of pain and drugs. “Did you kill someone else?” I whispered.

“Yes.” She dragged out the word painfully.

“Len Elgin?”

“Yes.”

“He was involved in Darnell’s death.”

“Yes. I talked to him before I shot him. He was my… father.”

I should not remind Mookie of Len Elgin. I should say something else to Mookie Preston, something good. She was on her way to meet her Maker, and I could not send her out thinking of the deaths she had caused.

She spoke again. Her eyes opened and fastened on mine. “Don’t tell.”

I understood after a moment, even through the drugs. “Don’t tell about Len,” I said, to be sure.

“Don’t tell,” she repeated.

This was my punishment for leading this woman to her death. I would know the truth, but could not reveal it. No matter what happened to Len Elgin’s extramarital lover, Erica Moore, and her husband Booth. No matter what suspicions attached to Mary Lee Elgin.

“I won’t tell,” I said, accepting it. I was so doped up it seemed logical and appropriate.

“Mama,” she said.

“Lanette,” I called, and she leaped up from her chair and came to the bed. I motioned to the nurse who was waiting in the doorway, and she came to take me back to my room.

I think Mookie died before I got there.

After three days, I went home. The doctor herself drove me.

This homecoming-from-the-hospital routine-the stale house, the life untouched while I was gone-was getting old. I didn’t want to get hurt anymore. I didn’t want pain. I needed to work, to have order, to have emotional quiet.

What I had was pain and phone calls from Jack.

He’d had to talk to many many people: local, state, federal. Most of that I had been spared because of my concussion, the second I’d had in a month, but I’d had my share of interviews. Some questions I just hadn’t been able to answer. Like: Why had I called Mookie Preston? The answer, because I thought she could help me kill the men who had Jack, just wasn’t palatable. So I had lied, just a little. I said that I’d called Mookie when I discovered Jack was gone-I figured they could find that out somehow from the phone company-and that she’d agreed to accompany me to Winthrop Sporting Goods because I was so distraught. Yes, I knew what Jack was doing, so I suspected where he’d been taken and who had taken him.

I never said that Mookie had brought the rifle or the knife, and I think they all assumed both weapons came from the store stock. When it was found the bullets that had killed Tom David (and ultimately Jim) had come from the same weapon that had killed Len Elgin months ago, the official line of reasoning seemed to be that someone from the store’s little cadre of bad boys had been responsible for shooting Len. A motivation for this assassination was never uncovered, but it was assumed that somehow he had thwarted one of their plans or uncovered evidence that implicated one of them in the death of Darnell.

So Len Elgin came out looking better in death than he’d been in life, and I never opened my mouth. The police knew, from all of us, that Mookie had shot men in the store; but since they all supposed she’d found and loaded the weapon when she got there, Mookie, too, emerged from the inquiry looking posthumously brave and resourceful-as, indeed, she had been.

The Winthrops pulled up the drawbridge and weathered the siege. Howell Winthrop, Sr., was arrested and promptly made bail, and he was denying all involvement in the bombing and in the deaths of Darnell Glass, Len Elgin, and Del Packard. He was admitting he’d been present during Jack’s torture, but alleging he’d thought Jack was a renegade white supremacist. No one believed him, but that was what he was saying. Bobo transferred to a college in Florida (Marshall told me), and Amber Jean and Howell Three just left school and went on a vacation with Beanie in an unspecified location.

Howell called me one afternoon before I left the hospital, and we had a brief, horribly uncomfortable conversation. He assured me that he would pay for every ache and pain I endured for the next few years, and I assured him just as earnestly that this hospitalization and the ensuing pharmacy bills were the only ones I would appreciate him paying.

“Your mother can have her ring back,” I said.

“She’ll never want it,” he answered.

“She told me it was Marie Hofstettler’s bequest to me.” I wanted to be sure Howell knew I had not taken the ring as some kind of bribe, which is what he had assumed when he saw the brown velvet box-which he knew to be his mother’s-in my hand. “Why did your parents want me to come to their house?”

“I can’t talk about that,” he said stiffly. “But Bobo told me I had to tell you he knew nothing.”

I am sure we were both glad to hang up. I thought about that strange evening on Partridge Road, the big white house, the tiny old people. I hoped Arnita Winthrop had not known about her husband then, had really been the gracious woman she had seemed. Maybe she had reasoned I deserved something tangible for being Marie’s friend; maybe that was why she’d given me an old ring of her own, passed it off as a posthumous gift. Maybe her husband had had a curiosity to see me, had asked her to think of a way to get me to the house so he could look me over. The running figure that night had been Jack, he’d finally told me. Jack had been asked to watch the comings and goings at the Partridge Road house whenever he could. He’d been at Marie’s funeral to get a good look at the older Winthrops, since there was no casual way for him to meet them.

Jack made the papers, state and national. He was something of a hero for a while. It was good for his business. He got all kinds of inquiries, and as soon as he could manage physically, he left for Little Rock. I had a feeling it was a relief to get a little distance between himself and the place and time of his ordeal. He’d been overpowered, bound, and tortured; he had managed to regain some measure of maleness, of wholeness, back by conquering Jim and Darcy. But I knew the bad nights he’d have, the self-doubts. Who could know better?

As the days passed, I began to have the dreary conviction he would write me off as part of that time. Sometimes I was anguished and sometimes I was angry, but I could not return to my former detachment.

I had been back at work for three weeks, back to working out at Body Time for one week, when I came home to find Jack’s car in the driveway. He had flowers-a bigger arrangement than Claude had sent me, of course-and a present festooned with a huge pink net bow.

I felt a rush of joy at the sight of him. Suddenly I didn’t know what to say to him, after weeks of imagining this moment. I pointed to the flowers. “For me?”

“Jeez,” he said, shaking his head and smiling. “If you are still the Lily Bard who sucker-punched me right here in this doorway, these are indeed for you.”

“Want me to do it again? Just to verify my identity?”

“No, thank you, ma’am.”

I unlocked the door and he followed me in. I took the flowers from him and headed down the hall with them.

“Where you taking those?” he asked, with some interest.

“My bedroom.”

“So… are you planning on letting me join you in admiring them?”

“I expect so, depending on your good behavior this evening. I’m assuming you brought a doctor’s note, to prove that you’re up to such vigorous… activity.”

“We are so playful this evening, Miss Bard. We are so relaxed and-normal-date-like.”

“It’s a stretch,” I said. “But I’m up to it.”