“You crawl out that window, or swear to God, I’ll kill you.”
Her eyes glistening with water, Sammie pulled back the window latch, pushed up the frame and removed the screen, dropping it outside. As she began to climb through, flashlight in hand, Sammie ducked her head and faced Jamie.
“No matter what happens, I love you.”
Jamie felt a wave of sarcasm. “I’ll bet you say that to all your best friends when they’re gonna die in the morning.”
As he climbed through, a cell phone rang at full volume in another room, and he heard Grace Huggins shout. He stepped outside onto the ground strewn with pine needles. As he stood beside Sammie and told her to lead the way to the trail heading west along the shoreline, Jamie knew he was now living for the moment. He had no use for the past and less understanding of the future. No plan at all, just a desperate desire to run.
He cocked the hammer. “Move.”
19
4:50 a.m.
M ICHAEL COOPER DARED not move. To his left, Dexter Cobb maintained a stoic pose, his gun stuck in Michael’s side. To his right, Christian Bidwell focused on the rifle he tucked securely, as if ready to fire at an instant’s notice. Neither said a word since leaving the cornfield outside Albion. Agatha Bidwell and Arthur Tynes reviewed the findings on Jamie’s laptop and debated options with their cohorts by phone.
These four white people were not the cracker supremacists his Grandfather Earl – still something of a paranoiac – once spoke about. Earl talked of how black men would disappear in the middle of the night, spirited away in cars full of white men with guns, never to be seen again or perhaps to be found hanging from a tree. No, Michael thought, these people represented something more ominous. The determination in their voices and the focus in their eyes was unrelenting.
When Michael was 8, Grandfather Earl gave him a slingshot for his birthday, telling Michael to use it exclusively for “cracker hunting.” Earl then took Michael aside and explained three hundred years of American racial history in less than three minutes, concluding his series of epithets with a simple message.
“Smack them crackers in the ass.”
When Michael saw a white boy his age swimming naked in the Alamander River, he armed the slingshot with a quarter-sized rock, aimed and released. The rock skipped the water twice and plunked, enough to get the boy’s attention. The boy stood in chest-high water and studied Michael for a few seconds.
“Oh. Hey. C’mon in and have a swim. Water ain’t too cold today.”
Michael decided the boy completely missed the point, so he searched for another rock.
“Don’t move,” he told the boy. “I’m gonna smack you. Hold on.”
“Why you wanna do that?”
“Cause you’re a cracker.”
The boy tilted his head. “Cracker? You mean like a Saltine?”
Michael took aim. “You a dumb cracker, ain’t you?”
“I seen you at school. Who’s your teacher?”
Michael pulled back the slingshot. “Miss Huber.”
“Oh, yeah? I heard she’s mean.” The boy started toward shore. “Want a sandwich? I got some bread and some Skippy.”
The rock fell from the slingshot. “Peanut butter? Jelly, too?”
“Sure. You wanna see something cool?”
The boy was a few feet from the edge, but Michael turned away. “Reckon, but get your britches on first. That’s a damn sight, right there.”
The boy laughed and made his way to a small encampment which included clothes, a grocery bag containing lunch, and a thermos; sitting atop a flat boulder was a pad of graph paper and a box of colored pencils. Michael followed, after the boy slipped on a pair of shorts.
The boy handed Michael the peanut butter, two slices of bread and a plastic knife. “I’m not hungry yet. Gonna draw. C’mon over, take a look.”
As Michael made his sandwich, he studied the boy’s drawings, all of which were confined to panels. Most were fully colored, while a few toward the bottom were pencil sketches. Although the panels didn’t have words, the boy had drawn bubbles for the dialogue.
“Cool, huh? Still trying to get my characters right. I just need to keep practicing. They gotta be different from everybody else. I’m Jamie Sheridan. Come down to the river much? I like it down here. Gotta name?”
“Michael Cooper.”
“Good to meet you, Coop.”
Jamie flipped the pages until he came to the first empty grids.
“You wanna try, Coop? It’s fun once you get the hang of it.”
Michael saw generosity in Jamie’s deep brown eyes, partly hidden between the waterfalls of his dripping, snowy hair. How could Michael not trust a kid offering peanut butter?
Coop, he thought. Kinda cool, I reckon.
They met by the river often. They developed chemistry and a shorthand language only they understood.
Michael found his No. 1 hombre.
Now, as he stared into the face of imminent death, a desperate Michael looked for anything to get him and Jamie out of this nightmare, yet he saw no exit. Once the cars entered Lake Vernon National Park, the phone calls increased. He heard words such as “maximum force,” “air power,” and “precision assault.” They talked in staccato tones until the car stopped, its destination reached.
“Bring him,” Agatha told Dexter Cobb as they opened the doors.
The national park’s ranger station was a long, narrow, one-floor structure glowing pale green beneath a single nightlight, its frame trimmed with logs. Dexter kept one hand to Michael’s neck while the other steadied the gun in the boy’s side.
Agatha ordered Jonathan Cobb to search the property for a park-service helicopter. As he
