Heaven Should Fall

the while tightening the bungee cords that Cade had secured too loosely for his taste.

“Sorry,” said Drew. “My bad. I got mixed signals. I thought we had a bond. Sorta like the one you had with Stan when you were fucking him all that time you lived in his apartment.”

My heart went cold. “What?”

Dodge and Cade exchanged a glance. “Where’s the duct tape?” Cade asked Dodge, but his voice had a nervous waver.

“In the truck. I’ll grab it.”

“Yeah, you know what I’m talking about,” Drew said to me. Looking at Cade, he said, “Slept in his bed every damn night. I saw it myself.”

“Bullshit,” said Cade.

“No bullshit. Tell him, Jill. No surprise you didn’t tell this white-supremacist SOB you were taking it from the big black dude. How’d the baby turn out?”

Cade grabbed the broom beside the gun safe and whacked him across the face with the handle. His mouth started to bleed, and he rolled his lips to suck back some of the blood. Beyond that, he didn’t react. “Don’t hit me, asshole,” he said. “Hit your nigger-loving girlfriend. Not my fault the soul brother’s too beaucoup.”

Cade thrust his palm against Drew’s forehead, making his head whip back and then forward. Streaks of blood poured down either side of Drew’s chin, vampirelike. “Shut up,” Cade shouted in his face. From the second floor came the drowsy cry of the baby. “Shut up. Shut up.”

Drew spit a mouthful of blood into Cade’s face, and Cade recoiled.

“You better let me out of here now,” Drew shouted back. “You’re gonna go to jail for the rest of your goddamn life. Best you show some mercy so they don’t hang you. Guys are gonna be bending you over in the shower till you grow a vagina. You fucked up for real, Cade. If I were you I’d let me go and run like hell to Guatemala. They know who you are. You’ll be lucky if they’re not here by sunrise.”

By now Dodge was back, tearing a noisy strip from the roll of tape. He slapped it over Drew’s mouth and Drew ceased to even try to talk. He just glared at me, trickling blood from around the bottom of the tape and now from his nose, as well. The baby’s cry had risen to an insistent howl. I broke with Drew’s stare and hurried up the steps to TJ.

He was sitting upright on the bed, red-faced and squalling, the top of his little bare chest shiny with tears and drool. I lifted him and pulled him against me to nurse, the tension in my throat growing tighter by the second. His small fists pounded my chest with frustration when my anxiety slowed the milk letting down. Downstairs I heard the cellar door bang shut, and at that a sob burst from me, a choking, helpless sound that startled TJ and set his arms waving. I gasped back the second sob and tried to breathe normally.

Cade’s footsteps clunked against the stairs. I backed up into the corner beside the window. The door swung open and Cade stepped in, looking first at me and then to TJ. For the first time since his return I noticed his clothes were grimy and his eyes exhausted. His tattooed forearm was smeared with blood where he had wiped Drew’s spit from his face. He was overdue for a haircut, and with his baseball cap off the lank strands hung around his face in a dirty, formless mess.

“What have you done, Cade,” I cried. At the dread in my voice he threw me the uneasiest of glances, reaching into the hamper for a washcloth to wipe his forearm. “Tell me how you’re going to get out of this one. Tell me now, and then get me and TJ out of this house before they come to arrest you.”

He tossed the washcloth back into the basket. “Nobody’s coming. We’re all on our own here. And nobody’s leaving until we figure out what to do next.”

The weight of that notion was almost physical. The house, this drafty and rattling old place, seemed to snug around me as if shrunk tight by Cade’s determination. I clutched TJ tighter against my body to steady the shivers that rippled through my muscles, but it didn’t work. “How could you do this to us,” I stammered, my voice at a whisper, without any hope that he would offer an answer. “If you were going to do something this awful you never should have come home.”

“I didn’t intend to,” he snapped. “I’m not that stupid. The idea was to lure him into the truck and hold him while I went into the building with his ID. And then I walked over and the entire office building went on lockdown out of ‘an abundance of caution’ because of a bomb on the Metro. So I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. I just told Dodge to drive and we’d figure the rest of it out once we got here. He was acting like I was supposed to have all the answers, and hell if I know how to cover our tracks.”

I waved a hand wildly toward the door. “Well, what are you going to do with him now? ”

He squinted in a peevish way. “I don’t know, Jill. Fucking bury him in the backyard. I’m driving back to D.C. tomorrow. I’ll think about it on the way down.”

I started to cry again.

“Jill, knock it the hell off. It has to be this way. The tree of liberty must be refreshed by the blood of patriots and tyrants, and if it has to be mine and his, then so be it. I’m not just going to let Elias die for nothing. Let them stick a toe tag on him and shove him into their freezer.”

“He wouldn’t want you to do this. And it isn’t going to work. They’ll connect this to you in no time. You heard what Drew said. He knew who Dodge is.”

“Well, I wasn’t expecting that. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. And you know why it all is.” He pointed savagely at TJ drowsing in my arms. When he spoke again, his voice sank to an aggressive hiss. “Why my life’s fucked up. Why Fielder’s downstairs. Why you’re stuck in this shithole, and why Elias is dead.”

“TJ’s got nothing to do with Elias.”

“Bullshit he doesn’t. Elias killed himself because I had you and he didn’t and he couldn’t stand it. Let’s just put it out there, all right? Let’s lay it all on the table. He came home from the Sandbox and he was doing okay in spite of it all—”

“No, he wasn’t.”

“Don’t cut me off! He was doing okay until I brought you home. I thought about this shit the whole way back from D.C., and there’s no point now in pretending it doesn’t exist. The VA had no business putting him on all those goddamn drugs and making it impossible for him to get up off his ass and get his life together. The fact that he couldn’t handle life anymore falls square on their shoulders. But just for the sake of argument, let’s say what it was that pushed him over the edge. It was him seeing that baby and knowing he was never, ever going to get a chance with you.”

“No,” I protested. But I knew it was probably true.

“And I love that kid with everything in me,” he continued. “I’d give him the world and it’s a damn good thing, because that’s about what he’s costing me. My freedom, my brother, my future, my loyalty to you—”

“That’s not TJ’s fault,” I snapped. “Back off the poor kid and take some responsibility.”

“That’s all I ever do anymore is take responsibility,” he shouted. “I’ve given all I goddamn can, and it’s time for the people who owe me to pay up.”

“Your son and I owe you nothing,” I yelled back raggedly. TJ, who had been almost asleep at my breast, awoke all at once and turned his head to look at his father, eyes baleful and mouth agape. “And we’re the ones who are going to be paying.”

Cade scowled at me. “‘Let justice be done though the heavens should fall.’”

Leave, the instinctive part of my mind commanded me. Leave now. It’s time. Whether or not I would be implicated with the rest of them, there would be no avoiding the consequence either way, and for TJ’s sake I needed to press forward without fear. With my son clutched against my chest with one arm, I snatched up the diaper bag from the bed and, before Cade could step into my path, hustled down the stairs. As I reached the landing Cade grabbed my shoulder, sending the bag sliding down my arm and disrupting my balance. I spun toward the wall to compensate, and then Dodge was in front of me, blocking off the bottom of the stairs.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Dodge said. “Don’t you even think about going anywhere.”

“I’m taking TJ to the hospital for his surgery. Whatever it is you’re doing here has nothing to do with me. I don’t know a thing about it.”