(LB1) Shakespeare's Champion (26 page)

“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 hightech 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.