of her face, calm with beauty and determination. 'I'm the one they're after. If you get out now, you can go back to some semblance of normalcy.'
'That's the dumbest thing I have heard in the past ten years,' she said. 'Mom's dead; Lashonna may or may not be. This has everything to do with Talmadge, and you know as well as I do if I keep pushing his case, they'll come after me. Get a grip.'
Jael's lungs burned raw like a cattle brand as she drew abreast of the red Mercedes, now two lanes over to her right. She saw the lawyer behind the wheel, head turned away. An easy shot, but she needed to get Stone, the most dangerous target, first. Traffic surged and stopped, surged and stopped. She needed to time her final move perfectly
'Then drop the Talmadge thing,' I suggested.
'Okay, that's the dumbest thing I've heard in twenty years.' She laughed, then laid a gaze on me that made me realize I'd rather walk a rotten log over hell than disappoint her.
Now! Jael told herself. She waited for the vehicle closest to her to come to a stop. She lunged in front of the car; the driver leaned an angry hand on the horn.
Fuck you pal, she thought, focusing on the Mercedes now just one vehicle away. She thumbed off the HK4's safety.
Jasmine concentrated on the side-view mirror on my side of the Mercedes, watching the stream of vehicles heading west along the shoulder. Her lips mouthed something I couldn't hear over the rain thrumming on the roof and the horns of cars on the other side. Suddenly she hit the accelerator and launched us into a space just inches longer than the big old Mercedes.
An incandescent rage rocked Jael as the Mercedes rocketed into the darkness. The impulse to kill shook her. Kill. Anybody. Everybody. A living, molten surge rose in her belly, demanding release. Now.
An impatient horn sounded behind her. She whirled toward the sound and raised the HK-4. The rain broke the night into a streaky impressionistic canvas and stained it with the white, yellow, and red kinetic hues of headlights, running lights, and turn signals. But through it she could make out the vague outlines of the driver's face as his mask of anger and frustration switched to mortal fear. He froze. Jael held her pistol steady, her finger taking slack out of the trigger.
The anger was all wrong, she thought, as she struggled for control. This man was not the mission. But the urge swelled in her belly. Oh, God! She needed the release. Wrong. All wrong.
Then, she lowered the HK-4, raised her left hand like a mock pistol, and aimed it at the man's amazed face.
'Bang,' she said softly, then sprinted back to the hotel lot, where she jumped into the cable company truck and pulled it forward to unblock her SUV.
Before Jael drove away, she retrieved a Ziploc from her duffel and scattered its contents on the dead driver's body, making sure they stuck in bloody places where they would not be missed.
CHAPTER 50
The rain began to ease as Jasmine accelerated toward Park Road and turned right.
'That was sweet of you, offering me an out and everything. But this was my fight long before it was yours. Besides, it's too late to turn back. We're in this together.'
Jasmine's words connected with my heart and took all my words away. She turned right and pressed on through a shabby section of town.
'Where do we go?' I said finally. 'They'll look at every hotel and motel. They'll stake out your house and your office if they haven't already done it.'
'I have an idea.'
I waited expectantly as she threaded the Mercedes along the cluttered street with an easy familiarity. We reached Main Street, then right, back across the railroad tracks, and past Stone Street.
'So.' I looked at her. 'You have an idea?'
'Sorry. Years ago, probably twenty or more, Mama bought a two-thousand-acre plantation southwest of Itta Bena out of an IRS lien auction, then donated it to Mississippi Valley State University.'
She steered us along frontage roads, industrial driveways, and slushy one-lane gravel paths as only a local can do, bypassing the traffic jam. We were somewhere north of Rising Sun when we hit pavement again.
'Her brother, my uncle Quincy, teaches African-American history at Valley State there, and the donation helped his standing there immensely.' Jasmine paused. 'Mama was always doing things like that. And not just for family.'
Jasmine turned right, crossed a new bridge over the Yazoo River, and headed west on Quito Road. The rain stopped as suddenly as it had started; stars dotted the sky. In the distance, lightning still illuminated the towering spires of more storm cells.
'Anyway, one small part of the deed gave Uncle Quincy the title to a small plot of land containing a collection of old shacks dating from the 1870s. You know, a two-room shotgun with a tin roof, bare wooden floors, and not much else other than a hole in the ground out back to crap in?'
A guilty memory found me as a child riding in the bed of a pickup driven by Al Thompson along the dusty roads through Mossy Plantation. The child almost saw the weathered, unpainted gray-wood shacks always complete with a sagging porch and lots of small naked or nearly naked black children playing outside. To privileged white children, they had been an almost-seen-but-not-quite-noticed element of the landscape, something no more significant than moss in the cypress trees or the green duckweed carpeting stagnant water.
'One of the shacks sat about a hundred yards off in a thicket of oaks and pecan trees. Mama restored it as a retreat, a simple environment outfitted no more elaborately than the original. No phone, no electricity, no indoor plumbing, She said it helped her remember where she came from.'
Jasmine looked at me. I nodded that I understood.
'We're headed there. There aren't ten people who know about Mama's cabin, and you and I are two of them.'
Around us, the moon found cracks in the clouds and painted pale, high-contrast silhouettes of the landscape.
'Mom always questioned why you turned out so different from the rest of your family.'
'Me too.'
'Mom said it never made any sense to her,' Jasmine continued. 'Here you are, born into this enormous position of privilege, a white boy from Delta planter stock, the offspring of a U.S. senator and the chancellor of Ole Miss, a football player, a scholar, and from what I can tell something of a boy genius. That put you about as high on the white Mississippi food chain as you can get.'
I chewed on this silently 'Well, Papa was gone most of my life and Mama never realized that a sense of superiority needs careful nurturing,' I said tentatively, seeking answers from the moonlit fields rushing by. 'Papa's conflict with the Judge always made me like an outsider. I played alone a lot. I learned how to make up my own mind and tell everybody else to go to hell.'
'A free will kind of thing?'
'I never thought of it that way before.'
'Maybe you should.' That Mona Lisa smile again.
I had thought about this for decades, didn't understand it any better today than I had in 1967.
We chased the moon across the table-flat fields in silence for several minutes. What lessons did God want me to learn from all of this? And if God really existed and we were supposed to do his will, or hers, why the hell couldn't we get a clue about what it was?
Then I told Jasmine about the social insecurity I had experienced with Giles Claiborne.
'That's silly,' she said. If anything, you should feel superior, given your accomplishments in medicine,'
'Whatever.' I shook my head. 'But it's the biggest reason I could never live here again.'
'Never?'
I shook my head emphatically. 'No way. Never.'
