Innocent Blood

space of a few minutes, Franklin Avenue was crowded with emergency vehicles and police and firemen running out hoses.

A police officer with a gingery sweeping-brush moustache came up to Frank and said, ‘Did you witness this, sir?’

‘I was taking my boy to school . . . We were late.’

‘But you saw what happened?’

‘There was a white panel van . . . it just exploded. I came back to help but I didn’t know what to do.’

‘OK, listen. Right now we have to get this situation under control, but we’ll need to speak to you later. Give me your name and address and telephone number and somebody will be in touch with you later today.’

Frank reached into his billfold and took out his business card. ‘This young lady saw what happened, too.’

The police officer looked around him, left, then right, and then he shrugged in bafflement. Frank turned, and was just in time to see the girl disappearing around the corner of Gardner Street.

‘She . . . er . . . she left. She’s probably even more shocked than I am.’

‘That’s OK, sir. Now, if you can leave the area and let the emergency people get on with what they have to do.’

‘Of course, yes. Absolutely.’

Frank took one more look across at the school. Paramedics were already stepping through the litter of the fallen children, kneeling down now and again to check if any of them were still alive. The clock in the church steeple chimed the three-quarter hour. Usually this provoked a flutter of California quail, but this time there were none. They had all been frightened far away by the bomb blast.

Frank walked back to his car and climbed in. Danny was still sitting in the back seat, although he looked very pale. Delayed shock, thought Frank. He was suffering from shock, too, to the point where he found it difficult to make his lips speak any sense.

‘Danny? Did you manage to talk to Mom?’

Danny didn’t answer but simply stared at him. He had the strangest expression on his face, as if he were smiling at a private joke.

‘Danny? Are you feeling OK?’

Still Danny didn’t answer. Frank twisted round in his seat and said, ‘Come on, champ. I’ll take you home and you can go to bed for the rest of the day.’ Danny continued to stare at him. ‘Danny? Quit fooling around, Danny, this is too damn serious.’

He climbed out of the car again and opened Danny’s door. He reached out for Danny’s shoulder and as he did so the boy fell sideways on to the seat. The back of his blazer was soaked dark with blood.

Oh, God, no. Oh, God, not Danny. Frank lifted Danny up and cupped his face in both hands. He was still warm. But his eyes were unfocused and his mouth was hanging open and he wasn’t breathing.

Frank felt as if his heart had dropped ten thousand feet. He scooped his hands under Danny’s legs and lifted him awkwardly out of the car. There was blood everywhere, all over his shorts, all over his thighs, even on his sneakers.

‘Paramedic!’ he screamed, running back along the sidewalk with Danny lolling in his arms. ‘For Christ’s sake, get me a paramedic!’

Wednesday, September 22, 6:47 P.M.

At the hospital, the young medical examiner came out to the waiting area where Frank and Margot were sitting beside a parched yucca and a black youth with an interminable sniff. The medical examiner was soft-spoken, evasive, with hairy hands that crawled around his knees like two tame tarantulas.

‘I’ve examined Danny and I’ve discovered what happened. An ordinary woodworking nail penetrated his middle back between his fifth and sixth ribs. It was traveling at considerable velocity, almost as fast as a bullet. If it had gone right through him, back to front, his chances of survival would have been very much higher. But, unfortunately, it struck his sternum – his breastbone – and was deflected back into his abdomen. It entered his liver at an oblique angle, causing considerable trauma.’

Margot covered her mouth with her hand and her eyes filled up with tears.

Frank said, ‘I want you to be honest with me, doctor.’

‘Of course.’

‘If I had realized that Danny was so badly injured . . . I mean, if I had taken him to the hospital immediately he was injured . . . do you think they could have saved him?’

The medical examiner glanced uneasily at Margot, and then turned back to Frank.

‘In my opinion, yes. But that’s only my opinion.’

One

He sat on the couch in front of the television and watched the bombing on the news, again and again. Margot had taken a wicker chair to the conservatory window and sat staring out at the red and yellow swing set in the yard. He didn’t know whether she was listening to the television or not, or whether she was even aware that he was still sitting there. She was smoking for the first time in four and a half years. Very occasionally, she coughed.

‘Hollywood and the world were devastated this morning when a terrorist bomb exploded in the grounds of one of the city’s most exclusive elementary schools, killing at least seventeen students and three faculty members and seriously injuring very many more.

‘A suicide bomber drove the device into the school’s front yard in a white panel van, detonating it only ten feet away from a line of children who were on their way to play sports in a nearby field. Some of the children have yet to be formally identified.

‘Among the dead and injured were the sons and daughters of some of Hollywood’s best-known celebrities, including the ten-year-old daughter of Lynn Ashbee, who plays Megan White in May to September; the nine-year-old daughter of Billy Kretchmer, who plays Jed Summers in The Fairchild Family, and the eight-year-old son of scriptwriter Frank Bell, who has penned more than nineteen episodes of the hit comedy series If Pigs Could Sing.

‘Eye witnesses described the scene as “carnage,” with children’s bodies strewn all over the schoolyard. The bomb blast was heard seven miles away in Sherman Oaks, and initial estimates suggest that the van contained more than three hundred and fifty pounds of high explosive. It was also packed with scrap metal, including tools, ball bearings, razor-wire and auto parts, in order to make its effect doubly devastating.

‘Los Angeles police commissioner, Marvin Campbell, immediately called for the assistance of the Federal Emergency Management Agency from Denton, Texas, as well as FBI explosives experts and anti-terrorist teams. So far no group or individual has claimed responsibility for the outrage, which Commissioner Campbell described as “a sickening act of war against the innocent.”’

Eventually, Margot got up from her chair, came across the living room, and switched the television off. She stood and stared at Frank. A woman so small that she was almost like a child, she had a short brown bob, and she was wearing a brick-red artist’s smock that was two sizes too big for her, and black leggings. She had a sharp, uptilted nose and the same large brown eyes that had always made Danny look so serious.

‘Why did you leave him?’ she asked. Her throat sounded dry.

‘I told you, Margot, I left him for no time at all. Minutes, seconds, not even that. I didn’t realize that he was hurt so bad. There were other people – there was a woman with her hand blown off. Do you think that if I’d had the slightest inkling—?’

‘He was your son, Frank. He wasn’t other people. He was dying and you left him alone. He died by himself, don’t you understand that? He died and his daddy wasn’t even there to hold his hand.’

Frank stood up. ‘How do you think I feel about that? Do you have any idea? I picked him up off the sidewalk and I checked him to see if he was hurt and I couldn’t see anything, nothing at all. Just a scratch on his nose and a couple of scrapes on his knees.’

‘Not forgetting the four-inch nail that tore his liver to pieces.’

‘Margot, I couldn’t see it! There was no blood – his coat wasn’t torn. He said his back hurt but I thought that was only from the blast.’