I can teach skills, but courage is of God; we must have courage, and thegrisettes have it.”
— FROM FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH: THE STORY OF THE NURSING SISTERS OF THE BLOOD OF CHRIST, BY SR. BENEDICTA COOLEY, SBC, ROSARIAN PRESS, BOSTON, 1947.
Twenty
They were both naked in Lorna’s bed, but neither of them could recall getting there. Lorna threw a thigh over him. She wanted more. She regretted waking up, she wanted that blotting out, she was counting each fuck as her last, who knew when the disease would render her disgusting or incapable?
He said, “Look, we have a problem.”
“You don’t vant me anymore?”
“No I vant you a lot. But we have to spring Emmylou. They’re going to come for her and she’ll disappear.”
“They can’t do that.”
“They can. They can call her a terrorist because of that drugs and guns thing she was in. Plus, she had some kind of connection with that Sudanese, and Sudan is a terrorist center, and they can make up any story they want. This is the new USA, and fuck habeas corpus. So we have to get her out.”
“Jimmy, that’s crazy.”
“Is it? Wait here.”
He slid out of bed and left the room. In a few minutes, he was back, dressed in his trousers and a T-shirt, barefoot. He had a manila envelope in his hand.
“Oh, God!” she cried when she saw them.
“Yeah. This is not good. This is a message that they can whack us anytime, and what I can’t figure?”
“I saw the man who took those. At the beach. You were sleeping and I saw a man with a telephoto lens on a boat.”
“Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”
“Maybe…probably…he had red hair. Oh, God, Jimmy! What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to find these guys, find out what this whole deal is about, why they killed the Arab and Wilson, and why they want the confessions of Emmylou Dideroff so bad. And if possible, pull them in. You’re going to come with me.”
“Come with you? Where?”
“Grand Cayman for starters. We need to find out what happened in that hotel room when the Arab went out the window. I guess we should check out her native land, too, Caluga County.”
“They won’t have anything to add that’s germane, and besides who cares? The key to what makes Emmylou tick is her religious life and she got that in St. Catherine’s.” To his inquiring look, she added, “It’s a priory in the Virginia panhandle. Where she converted. Or so she told me.”
“Okay, we’ll tour the Blue Ridge, too. But first we have to get her out. Is there any way she can get off the locked ward? Special treatments or whatever?”
“She’s scheduled for an MRI. It’s in another building. I could go over there and say it was today.”
“Perfect,” said Paz, and together they worked out a plan, after which Lorna said, “You know, if someone had told me a month ago that I would be conspiring to kidnap a ward of the court from medical custody, I would have told them they were crazy.”
“They would have been. You’ve changed.”
“Yes. Your bad influence.” She looked him in the eye. “How did you sleep?”
“Like a baby.”
“The power of the voodoo mama.”
“No,” he said. “The voodoo mama says it’s mainly you.”
Lorna finds she is a natural conspirator and she knows why. She has been thinking about her mother a lot since the events of the previous evening and she understands that much of her up-bringing has involved training herself to keep some personal space free from the didactic intrusions of her father and the demands of her big brother. Silences, false agreement, blandishments, and naked lies had been the essence of their family life. She thinks more kindly of Emmylou?sisters beneath the skin actually. Thus she has no trouble faking an appointment at the MRI center, or obtaining a set of pink scrubs, a pair of Nikes, a clipboard, cheap steel-frame reading glasses and a blond wig. She also contributes an expired Jackson ID card to wear on a chain. Emmylou is instantly with the plan. She asks where she will be staying, and Lorna has to tell her she doesn’t know. Paz has not contributed that part yet.
Darryla accompanies the two women for the short van ride across the Jackson campus to Building 403, where the magnetic resonance imager lives. They arrive at the suite. Darryla argues with the receptionist that yes they do have an appointment. Emmylou asks to visit the bathroom and Lorna volunteers to accompany her and stand outside the door. She passes her large handbag to Emmylou as she goes in. A few minutes later this obvious hospital employee, a blond woman with glasses and pink scrubs, walks out of the ladies’ room, moving swiftly as such people do, consulting the papers on her clipboard. Darryla doesn’t give her a second glance. She is on the phone with the scheduler for ten minutes, then slams the phone down, curses mildly under her breath, and goes into the ladies’, where she finds Emmylou’s hospital clothes in a heap. The alarm is given but Emmylou Dideroff has left the building.
Paz was behind the wheel of the rented white Taurus, driving fast and north up the center of the state. Lorna for some reason had climbed into the backseat, leaving the shotgun seat for Emmylou, who was wearing sunglasses, a Marlins ball cap, T-shirt, and shorts. Paz occasionally glanced her way and thought she looked like she had dropped ten years. She had one of her notebooks on her lap and occasionally scratched in it, otherwise she stared out the window with a contented smile on her face. Paz felt a certain discomfort. He liked a well-ordered life and, like many young men reared hardscrabble, was ordinarily a friend of discipline. He was conscious of going off the map now, not to mention all that wacko business at thebembe. He was doing his usual thing, replaying the memory tape in his mind and reinterpreting all the things he had seen and felt in terms more suitable to what he imagined was real life. He also occasionally glanced in the rearview at Lorna, another problem child. Paz was no enemy of hot sex in quantities, but he thought Lorna was a little strange in that department too. Something not right there, a fear there, she was using sex to drown something. He wondered when, if ever, she would tell him what it was. In fact, he now thought, really who gave a shit? He hardly knew the woman, and here he was dragging her over half the country to try to find out why this maniac next to him was a maniac. Was that what he was trying to do? He tried to recall why he had just torpedoed his entire career and set himself up for a stiff prison term…what was hethinking?
The road stretched out a dark two-lane ribbing through utterly flat greenness, tedious to get through, like his life, he thought, stupid and tedious, like this car ride to nowhere with a Jesus fruitcake in front and a fat, neurotic nympho in the back. A little roadside shrine whipped by, a white cross and some plastic flowers, and he thought there was someone with the right idea, he wished he had something to drink, rum or even vodka, but really he didn’t need it, all it would take was a little flick of the wheel and why not, what was the fucking point anyway? A big semi appeared out of the heat shimmer, rushing closer, all it would take was a little twitch to the left, was a little…
An air horn, loud, and Emmylou’s scream in his ear and then she had the wheel and they were rattling and jumping over the right-hand shoulder.
Paz brought the car to a stop, shaking and sweat-faced. “Holy shit, I must’ve gone to sleep. Christ…”
“No, you didn’t,” said Emmylou. “You were wide awake and in control. I was watching you. You steered us right at that truck.”
“Oh, for crying out loud! I did not! Why the hell would I do a thing like that?”
“What were you just thinking about?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said, “just, you know, driving, the time, scenery…” Her eyes stopped the easy fabrication well
