alone and held them at gunpoint until the others caught up.
If Apgard was surprised to recognize Shea, Ruford seemed relieved to see his landlord. “Mistah Apgard, sah! What’s going on heah?” He’d already rolled off the woman; he pulled up his pants and scrambled to his feet. Angela remained on her back, skirtless, with her blouse rucked up to her neck. She tugged her blouse down to her midriff and draped the tiny skirt over as much of her groin as it would cover, but offered no other resistance, not even when Emily started going through her purse.
“Ruford, it’s an incredibly,
“Twenty-two,” said Emily, removing Angela’s Saturday night special from the purse.
“Let’s get them in position first,” said Phil. “We want all the forensics to line up just right.”
“Mistah Apgard?”
“Be over in a sec, Ruford. We just want to get some pictures of Miss…”
“Angela Martin,” said Emily, who had handed Phil the.22 and was using her flashlight to examine Angela’s wallet.
“Miss Angela Martin plying her trade, so we can deport her back to…”
“Montserrat,” said Emily.
“Montserrat.”
“An’ me, sah?” asked Ruford.
“Pull your pants back down and get on top of her. Unless Immigration can identify you by your ass, you’ll be fine. And for your trouble, I’ll even forgive next month’s rent.”
Ruford couldn’t quite make sense of what was happening. Was Mr. Apgard helping the INS now? Or were the old folks Vice? And where did the silent Chinaman fit in? A month’s free rent sounded pretty good, though. Sounded even better when the old white lady told him he and Angela could finish their business, if he were still in the mood.
As for Angela, she’d been deported from better islands than this one. A free airplane ride home wasn’t the worst thing in the world, especially when her first thought had been that the St. Vincent man had set her up, and that she was about to be gang-raped and murdered. So she tossed her skirt aside again-don’t have to worry about vinyl wrinkling-and pulled up her blouse. Ruford pulled down his pants and knelt between her legs, but he couldn’t get hard with everybody standing around.
“We haven’t got all night,” said the older woman. “Just lie down on top of her.”
Ruford did as instructed-and now that he was no longer making an effort, he found himself getting hard. “Here we go,” he said, scooting his hips back and raising himself on his forearms. He was vaguely aware that the white woman was now kneeling to his right, beside the blanket, but most of his concentration was on striking the right angle to reach the promised land. At least until the first shot.
Ruford felt it as a blow to the rib cage, then a searing pain in his abdomen, like being speared with a hot poker. He collapsed onto Angela. A second shot, at a steeper angle, tore through his side and groin and smashed his pelvic bone from the inside.
He tried to roll off; a foot pressed against the small of his back, pinning him against the terrified woman. The last thing he saw was Angela’s face, lit up like an icon of some African saint by the beam of the old woman’s flashlight.
9
“Nobody dies.” Dawson had turned her face to the hut wall. “That’s what Leo said-those were his exact words.”
“We’re talking about…” said Pender. It was a question, but without the interrogatory rise at the end of the sentence.
“University of Wisconsin. Madison. August twenty-fourth, nineteen seventy. The Army Math Research Center in Sterling Hall. It was right after Kent State. We thought it was the endgame-that they were starting to kill students now. We waited until three in the morning. Final exams had been canceled on account of the riots-there wasn’t supposed to be anybody in the building.”
Pender searched his memory. He’d been a sheriff’s deputy in upstate New York at the time, but two of the bombers were still on the Ten Most Wanted when he joined the Bureau shortly afterward, and heaven help the special agent who failed to memorize
“And jet fuel,” Dawson told the wall. “They found pieces of the truck on top of an eight-story building three blocks away. And the building hadn’t been empty. Robert Fassnacht, a grad student who’d been working late on a research project, left a widow and three children-a three-year-old son and a pair of twin girls who’d just turned…” Dawson’s voice broke. “Who’d just turned one.”
She recovered herself, ran the rest of it down for him-she’d kept track of, though not in touch with, her old comrades. Karl Armstrong picked up in Canada by the Mounties in ’72. Served seven years. Runs a juice stand three blocks from Sterling Hall. Dwight Armstrong picked up in Canada four years after his brother. Dwight served four years, drives a cab in Madison. Dave Fine was picked up in California. He only served three years-he’s a lawyer now, in Vancouver. “And they never caught Leo Burt.”
Hearing the names triggered Pender’s memory. “Or Karen Bannerman,” he said.
Dawson’s shoulders shuddered under the thin nightgown as if a whip had just come down across her back- she hadn’t heard that name spoken out loud for twenty years, she explained to the wall. Charlene Dawson was an identity the New York underground had fixed her up with in the seventies.
“You look more like a Karen than a Charlene,” said Pender.
“What happens now?” she asked the wall.
Pender was slouched back in the beanbag with his Panama tipped over his eyes. “I was thinking maybe a romantic candlelight dinner at Captain Wick’s tomorrow night, followed by me trying to figure out a way to get you into bed without you feeling like I’m blackmailing you or me feeling like I’m being bribed.”
Dawson’s spirits had been down to such depths, then risen so far so fast that she had the emotional bends. And she did so want to be held. So would she have slept with him if he weren’t a cop, just a good kisser? she asked herself. Or if she really were Charlene Dawson? She rolled over to face him. “Hey, Ed, you know what I think?”
He raised his head, tilted his hat back. He didn’t look quite so homely in the pleasant glow of the oil lamp. “What?”
“I think two ulterior motives cancel each other out.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.” She sat up, reached over, cupped her hand behind the glass chimney of the oil lamp, and blew out the flame.
10
The lime grove reverberated. Three shots-Emily had placed the pistol in the whore’s hand for the third, and pressed the whore’s forefinger against the trigger so her hand would test positive for gunshot residue. Lewis had his back turned; he looked out over the grove, the low, tangled silhouettes of the trees, the sharp-smelling limes, the cold silver starlight. The grass was wet. He remembered coming there with his father when he was a boy, and being told the story of how his grandfather had given the grove away to the people of St. Luke.
“Lew, over here!” Emily, in a sharp whisper. “Hurry up.”
He was squeezing the bottle of rum by the neck. The cap was still screwed on, but somehow the bottle had almost emptied itself. He took a jolt, turned back. Shea’s body lay prone atop Angela, his head resting on her chest. She was still on her back. Her eyes were closed but her mouth was open-she was hyperventilating fiercely, but not
