Private Screening (51 page)

A dog barked inside his neighbor's home.

Pulse racing, Parnell dropped into their yard, falling on his hands and knees as the revolver slid from his pocket. Desperately, he began to pat the grass around him.

Floodlights bathed the yard.

Three feet in front of him, Parnell saw the revolver.

He shoved it in his pocket, running from floodlight to floodlight, a shadow holding its hat. Turning sideways to see the curtain open as he reached the steps to Broderick Street.

As he disappeared, the dog stopped barking.

Broderick Street was quiet. Its sidewalk ran along one curving private drive, heading downward toward the bay, away from Broadway.

He skittered down, knees straining, getting no traction from the flat soles of his shoes until he reached the bottom.

Pull yourself together, he thought. Don't look suspicious.

He wiped his forehead; suddenly he was a neatly dressed eccentric, calmly taking his late-night walk. A block right to Divisadero, a second steep one back up toward Broadway, looking for squad cars as his breathing became a wheeze. His glasses were steamed.

She had told him to exercise.

Cleaning his glasses, he looked one block down Broadway, at their home. Lights and sound trucks lined both sides of the street; the crowd filled their entire block and half the next. Above them was the steel web of an SNI satellite truck.

He turned away.

One more flat block, another downhill, still expecting the police. Then a bus was coming toward him with its sign illuminated. Three Jackson.

They would recognize him.

Quickly, Parnell took off his glasses. His palms were damp.

When the bus stopped, opening its door, he could not see the driver's face. Fumbling through his wallet, he found a bill.

“That's a five, sir.”

“I know.”

“We don't make change. Sixty cents, please.”

“That's all right. Please, just take this.”

As he took the bill, Parnell felt the man appraising him. He looked down.

A hand appeared, holding something.

“It's a transfer.”

“Oh, yes.” Belatedly, Parnell took it. “Thank you.”

A few vague shapes stirred to look at him. Hastily, he sat next to a black woman in a straight red wig.

The bus headed down Fillmore Street, past empty windows and blinking liquor signs Parnell could not read, then toward Van Ness or a street he did not recognize. Dark forms drifted from the liquor stores, aimless.

Parnell turned to the woman, holding out his transfer. “Pardon me,” he asked, “but how does one use this?”

The woman stared at him, suspicious. Finally, she said, “Just give it to the driver on the next bus.”

“Are we near Van Ness yet?”

“Is that where you're going?”

“Yes, to start.” He hesitated. “I suppose I should tell our driver.”

Glancing out, she pulled a strap above the window. There was a sound not unlike a department store chime, and then the bus was stopping.

“You're here,” she told him.

Parnell stood, stuffing the transfer in with his revolver.

“Thank you,” he said, reached for a pole beside the door, and stumbled from the bus.

Putting on his glasses, he oriented himself.

Alone again and colder, he watched waves of car lights pass. Without a bus, feeling outwitted by a city he had never known.

It was already half past one.

As more minutes crept by, Parnell waited, lonely and irresolute. The shock he could not think of turned to numbness.

Another sign, moving above the cars. Number forty-two.

He took off his glasses just before it stopped. Uncertainly, he offered up the transfer.

The driver took it.

Parnell slumped in the seat behind him, alone.

The bus crept forward, block by block, picking up drunks and strays who boarded in its bleak yellow light. Face to the window, Parnell knew with fleeting triumph that they would not recognize him, for he had come where he did not belong. Down through a district of warehouses, street after street without trees or people or any change at all, the image as alien and cold to him as the future John Damone had willed that he live out.

Damone would face him first.

The bus turned onto Bryant Street.

It was silent, barren as the others. Turning to the front, Parnell was suddenly sure they had taken Damone elsewhere, that he was performing one last feckless act. Then he put on his glasses.

Two blocks distant, the Hall of Justice was surrounded by the red flash of squad cars. For an instant, Parnell remembered films of the night they'd brought in Carson, and then he wondered if Moore had already arrived there with Damone.

Reaching for the cord, he could not bring himself to pull it.

The bus kept moving.

One block, then entering the second, Parnell's face pressed to the glass. Passing newsmen, handheld cameras, another satellite truck with the SNI logo.

It froze him.

When the bus stopped, he saw the dark-haired woman, standing across the street.

She was talking to her cameraman, Parnell saw. The man was facing the main doors of the building; as if agitated, she pointed toward a side street, to the exit of its underground garage.

Parnell jerked the cord.

It was 2:00
A.M.
before Stacy saw Lord's headlights.

Since his call, she had tended the fire, unable to absorb what he had said. Her television remained on SNI; their films of Alexis, used as filler until they learned what had happened to her, made what Stacy knew but could not accept more eerie. And yet to turn off her living image seemed an act of disrespect; it was only John Damone she could not watch.

When she opened the door, Lord's mouth was swollen, and he seemed to look through her. He was white, as if he had been cold for hours.

Slowly, Stacy put her head against his chest.

His arms came tight around her.

For a moment, they stayed like that. Then she led him to the fire and brought a snifter of brandy. Next to them, Rachel reappeared on screen.

“There will be no televised execution,” she said in a higher, rapid voice. “We now have confirmation that Phoenix
has
been captured, and is being brought to San Francisco. But the FBI has not revealed his identity, or the fate of Alexis Parnell, John Damone, or Anthony Lord.…”

Lord took a long swallow, staring at the flame.

“After you,” he said at length, “I called my son.

“He thought I was in San Francisco. Were we still going to the beach, he asked me. I said yes, and that I had to get off now. I was just standing there in the phone booth. My voice hadn't changed at all, and I was crying. I didn't even know why.”

She said nothing.

“I'm sorry, Stacy.”

The words unloosed her horror and anger. “It's ten years of my life,” she answered in a low voice, “and all I know is that I can't ever look back at that or him and feel the same. God, he must have hated me.”

“It's more the opposite.” Lord drank more brandy. “I think he wanted to know if you'd go through all this for him.”

“But
Alexis
…”

“Something went wrong.” His voice was flat. “I'm not sure what.”

“Wrong,” she repeated.

Lord still watched the fire dance. Almost as if he could not look away.

“He could have shot me right there,” he said. “But he needed to do it on television.”

Stacy was quiet. “John wanted to kill
you
,” she said finally, “but Jamie was the first, wasn't he?”

He seemed to wince. In her confusing mix of hurt and horror and betrayal, Stacy felt both that this was right and that she had said something cruel. Reaching for his snifter, she took one sip, and put it next to him again.

“When I asked why he'd killed Alexis,” Lord murmured, “all he said was, ‘Because she saw my face.'”

It made her shiver. Then, in Lord's silence, she heard Rachel again.

“We are told that even at this late hour, millions across America are waiting in front of their televisions for their first glimpse of Phoenix, wondering who he really is.…”

Lord's eyes were still narrow.

“All those voices.…” When he turned from the fire, something in his face had changed. “When he said that, Stacy, he didn't have an accent.”

“What do you mean …”

As he stood, turning to the screen, a streak of red split the night surrounding the Hall of Justice.

Red lights appeared in the distance, flashing without sirens. Moving toward him, they seemed to swirl on their own, suspended in a phalanx over Bryant Street.

Heart pounding, Parnell stopped at the corner, unsure of where to go.

As if to mirror this, the cameras and reporters hesitated across the street, torn between the front entrance and the underground garage. And then he saw the dark-haired woman start scrambling toward the alley.

Parnell clipped the press pass on his coat. The lights kept coming, too fast to stop in front.

He was running across Bryant, after the woman, when they swept past the main entrance.

A pack of the others bolted from the doors, scurrying between them. He ran at their backs through the alley, down the ramp to the mouth of the garage.

As the first lights swirled the corner, he was underground.

The garage was dim and enormous and dark at the corners, row upon row of cars facing sideways with drive-throughs between them. When the ramp ended, the mob veered sharply left toward a wall of elevators, footsteps echoing off cement. Parnell saw police lining the elevators and then a mop of dark curly hair already behind them with her cameraman, shoulder against the wall. Perfectly angled on the squad cars as they stopped.

At his back, the red lights flashed down the ramp.

The pack ahead kept pushing to the elevators, less people than bodies fighting for space, blocking his way.

Parnell broke from them and started running between two lines of cars, parallel to the wall they rushed toward. Sweating, chest constricted, legs feeling like lead. Torn between panic and elation.

Looking back, he saw the first squad car swing behind the mob, slowing as they pushed each other.

Parnell ran faster.

When he turned toward the woman, they were separated by four rows of cars. Sliding between them, he saw her mouth open, the man thrust his camera overhead with both hands. What she said was lost in shouted echoes.

He was one row from her now, a few feet at her back.

The first car stopped.

Parnell heard her voice above the tumult, speaking to her audience. “In seconds now, we will finally see the face of Phoenix.…”

As she rose to her toes, three sheriff's deputies burst from the car to the elevator. And then the second car was there.

Trembling, Parnell hurried through the final row, behind her. Heads kept moving in front of him: hers, a deputy's, the cameraman's. No one saw him.

A line of vision opened between their shoulders.

In seeming slow motion, the rear door of the second car opened.

Moore got out, glancing behind him at the third car as it emptied two more deputies. There were shouts, flashbulbs.

With the woman, Parnell looked back to the second car.

Another man waited in the backseat. Only his legs and torso could be seen.

Moore reached inside to grasp his arm, and then the figure was bending through the door. Parnell saw the manacled hands first, then the muscled forearms and the top of his head. Dark, straight hair.

Grasping the revolver, Parnell could not take it from his pocket. The camera began to whine.

Then Damone stood, and Parnell saw his profile.

Parnell gaped in confusion. The woman thrust out her microphone, shouting to the murderer, “
Why
…”

Turning, he saw Parnell behind her.

Parnell felt himself raise the gun, still staring at his face, paralyzed by shock and disbelief. Then Moore and Rachel followed the killer's returning look of terrible recognition. As Rachel screamed, Moore started between them.

Instinctively, Robert Parnell raised cuffed hands, and covered his eyes.

A shiver of horror and revulsion ran through Parnell to the trigger.

The gunshot echoed from her television.

In its reverberation, the man Stacy knew as John Damone fell back, blood coming from between his fingers.

“He's shot,” Rachel cried out. “Oh my God, he's shot.…”

Moore was running toward her. Veering wildly to follow him, the camera found Parnell.

He stared at it, revolver to his temple. Almost shyly, he turned before he pulled the trigger.

Stacy and Rachel gasped together.

Facing Moore, Parnell's head snapped sideways. The agent caught him before he hit the cement, and then more cameras closed in around them.

There was blood on Rachel's blouse. “Colby Parnell has shot himself,” she was chanting. “He shot Phoenix right in front of us.…”

The camera swung toward him.

Damone lay on his back, not moving. The dark stain beneath his head was like Jamie's.

Stacy turned, face pressed against Lord's chest. She was not sure which one of them was shaking.

Consequences:

APRIL–SEPTEMBER

T
HEY
stayed at Sea Ranch two more days.

Lord ran a fever, sleeping fitfully. Stacy did the things for him that friends do for each other; seeing what Colby Parnell had done, and knowing who Damone was, drained their desire to talk of it. Neither could turn on the television. They did not make love.

On the third morning, when Lord was better, they drank coffee in the window seat. He had talked to Moore; they were burying the Parnells that morning, and that Damone was their son had been confirmed from dental records. There was nothing more to do.

Stacy was quiet; the horror of what they had witnessed still showed in her eyes.

“It's not just John,” she said finally. “It's that Colby and Alexis are dead, and what we did was meaningless.”