The man from the black Ford orders her to stand next to him, on the other side of the room.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Bernie says weakly.
“You’re not going anywhere,” the man says.
“She’s eight months’ pregnant, man. Let her go to the fucking bathroom.”
Jay lowers his gun finally, placing it at his feet. He kicks it across the matted carpet toward the man from the black Ford.
“Let her go.”
The man picks up Jay’s .38, a gun in each hand now.
He nods to Bernie, who takes one last look at her husband.
She looks frightened, unsure of herself and what comes next.
“Jay?”
“Go on, B,” he says.
He watches his wife shuffle slowly out of the room.
The man from the black Ford calls after her, “And leave the door open so I can hear you.” Then he turns to Jay, who raises his arms in a grand show of surrender, counting the seconds in his mind, how many steps to the closet door.
“I’m losing faith in you, Porter,” the man from the black Ford says. “You got about five seconds to tell me why I shouldn’t shoot you right now.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Jay sees her enter the room, lead ing with the long nose of his shotgun, the rifle he keeps in the hall closet. He tells her to shoot and don’t think. The man from the black Ford sees Bernie and the rifle and reacts quickly, point ing his .45 at her. Bernie holds her breath and shoots.
The blow knocks them both to the floor, the kickback push ing Bernie into the wall behind her. The man from the black Ford falls to his knees, blood oozing from the place where his right hand used to be. The stump at the end of his arm is almost unrecognizable as a feature of the human body. Bernie, aiming God knows where, blew the thing clean off. The man, howling in pain, raises Jay’s .38, shooting weakly with his left hand. The bullet whizzes past Jay’s right ear, but misses him completely. Jay grabs the shotgun from his wife, slides a bullet into the chamber, and points the barrel of the rifle at the intruder. The man sits up at the waist. Jay has a clean shot at the center of his forehead.
“Jay!”
The sound of his wife’s voice ricochets inside his skull, lighting up the place where his reason still has a hold. A breath away from pulling the trigger, he moves the gun six inches to the left and shoots a hole through the man’s right shoulder. The man’s eyes go blank. The .38 falls from his one good hand, and he collapses completely, his body crumpling onto its side. For a moment, the air in the room is perfectly still, nothing moving but gun smoke winding in the air.
“He’s still breathing,” Bernie whispers.
“He passed out.”
Which means they don’t have a lot of time.
“Is Mr. Johnson home?” he asks.
Bernie stares at her husband, confused by such a simple ques tion. “Not yet, I don’t think,” she stutters. “His wife doesn’t get off work until nine.”
Jay sets the gun against the television.
The sight of this man incapacitated on his living room floor does not relieve his fears about the mess he’s in. This guy was only ever a messenger, moving on instructions from someone else. This is not the end of anything, Jay suspects.
He turns and looks at his wife. “You’ll have to help me move him.”
They drive to Riverside in silence, listening to the whistle of the man’s breath in the backseat. Bernie rests her head against the passenger-side window. Jay stares straight ahead through the windshield, following every traffic law of Harris County, Texas, to the letter. When they get within spitting distance of the hos pital, Jay turns off his car lights and puts the Buick in neutral, coasting in darkness to the rarely used service entrance around back.
Riverside is a county hospital, its patients mostly black and poor. The hospital staff is used to treating gunshot victims, and they are not known to ask a lot of questions. Jay leaves the man from the black Ford on his knees, a few feet from the service door. As they pull away from the hospital, Bernie starts to cry again. Jay reaches for his wife’s hand and trains his eyes on the road ahead.
Chapter 24
Jay lost track of Cynthia sometime after his trial.
She simply vanished from his life, disappearing without explanation or apology, without a word to him or even a kiss good-bye. She was just
The rumors on campus were rampant:
Cynthia Maddox was a fed.
No, she had gotten picked up on drug charges in Matamoros, Mexico. LSD, somebody had heard.
No, she was living on a commune in Oregon. Or she had run off with a married sheriff’s deputy and was living down in Corpus.
Somebody said she had transferred to George Washington University.
Somebody else said it was UT.
He waited for her to come back. He quietly finished out his
final semester, skipping meetings at the Scott Street house and dropping his global equality crusade. He kept his head down, got a job somewhere. He took his old room at Miss Mitchell’s board inghouse, renting by the week.
