He turned abruptly to Martha. “Then here comes your friend.” I did not look at her. I couldn’t. “Sad little mush-mouth Jim Dirkson. Talking about this wife in the mines. Here’s my chance. I push you on the priest, let’s do this one, let me quarterback it. Tutor me, Padre, you know? Here’s my chance to learn some secrets, get into the inside. Agent Lawler keeps saying, get what we need and you’re done. You’re free.”
Every time he said that word, free, I felt sick. Lord, what they had done to this man. What they had done to me. The monsters they had made us into, prowling along, sniffing for chances.
“But then you”-he pointed one finger at me, wagged it-“you go and turn out to be what you are. Turn out to be like me. And I was like, whoa, whoa. Wait. This is even better.”
Morris belched, long and loud. Settled in the armchair, coasting through this dull guard duty with the bored confidence of a white man lording it over a black and a woman. I stared at Cook, remembering his excitement that morning on the banks of the White River. Kevin lying dead, Maris furious, Barton grieving, Cook seizing the moment. I was having my realization in that moment, and he was having his.
“I explained to Barton that he should send you to go and get this thing. I told him how we could tap your chip, how I had me a solid connect in the marshals. Then I called up Agent Lawler.”
Me on the phone with Bridge, sending him to BWI airport, and Cook-or whatever this man’s name was-on the phone with Lawler. Phones ringing off the hook in Gaithersburg.
“I said, listen, baby, remember this evidence Barton’s been so hot on? What about I get that for you? Illegal collusion. Major federal lawbreaking. Well, she liked that a lot. She loved it.”
There was no point in explaining to Cook that his agent wanted her hands on the evidence for the same reason mine did: to get rid of it.
“And better than that, I said to her, I said, what if I can get you one of me, a nigger-catcher soul-stealer motherfucker like me-except this one’s gone to the dark side? He’s working freelance for the Airlines. What if I get you all that? If I get you all that, you gotta let me go, right? Then you gotta set me free.”
He lifted the envelope off the table, and I was surprised at the sudden pain I felt. I felt it in his hands like it was a part of my body, like it was my heart he was holding. The idea of that thing going back to Maryland, getting buried by the marshals, after all Kevin had gone through to get it, all that Luna had gone through. Even me. But that’s where it was always headed anyway, wasn’t it? I was never really going to bring it to Father Barton so he could announce it to the world.
But somehow in the wake of Cook’s revelations, I was mourning that alternative future, longing for a victory I had never really contemplated.
“So here’s what’s up, man,” said Cook. “We’re going to take out this hard drive, hook it into the laptop here.” He gestured to the computer on the table. “Just to make sure you didn’t pull a fast one, like my pops used to like to say. Make sure we got what we think we got. And then I’ll call Agent Lawler.”
He tore the envelope open at the top. I held up my hands, the chains rattling.
“Wait, though. What if Barton’s right?” I said. “What if there really is information on here that could”-what were the words, all those hopeful, lunatic words?-“shake the foundations? Change the world? Just-what if?”
“Come on, now,” he said. “Barton’s full of shit.”
“Yeah, I know. I know.” I took a step toward Cook, aware of Morris in the corner of my eye. “But we’re talking about the future. The future of the country. Talking about three million slaves.”
Cook said something familiar; something I had thought to myself-and not long ago, either. “I ain’t thinking about the three million” is what he said. “I’m thinking about me.”
“Wait…”
“Hey. Hey!” He had the package open. He pulled out what was inside. He looked up at me. “What the fuck?”
Motion from the other side of the room, Morris rising from the chair. “What is that?”
We were all staring at what was in Cook’s palm, then suddenly Martha was moving. She was off the bed just as Morris was off the chair, quick as choreography. She grabbed Morris’s beer bottle and smashed it on the edge of the table, making a weapon that caught Morris in his rush, so it was really his own running that drove the broken edges into his belly.
He screamed while Martha turned the bottle deeper, and I lurched my body forward, overturning the table into Cook, knocking him against the wall and banging his head hard into it, sending a small burst of plaster out onto the both of us.
“Goddamn it,” he said and reached for his gun where it had skittered on the tabletop, but I put my hands on top of his hands on top of the weapon, and we were struggling for it when over my shoulder I heard Martha shouting, “Shit! Asshole!” I jerked up, hard, bringing all four of our hands up off the table, Cook clutching the pistol and me clutching his fingers, both of us yelling. Morris was holding his wounded guts with one hand, but the other hand held his automatic, and he was trying to get a bead on Martha, who had just rolled behind the bed.
I wrenched Cook’s finger, and the shot was an explosion in the small room. Morris fell but got off one shot at me as he was falling. I did not feel the bullet-didn’t feel it because it had caught not me but Cook, and a geyser of blood erupted from the center of his throat, and his eyes went wide and white, wide like Castle’s eyes. His eyes in the darkness. Pleading eyes, wide in the rain. Castle wanted to go back and help Reedy, and I said no we couldn’t go back, and I was scared, too, but there would be no more chances, not like this one. Reedy was dying and the rain was pounding and that fence post was loose, I had seen it come loose, and this was the only opportunity we were going to get, the only one we would ever get. I told Castle what he’d told me, so many times he’d told me, that we were different, that there was more for us, but he said not if we died! Not if we got caught running and they put us down or sold us offshore! And he was scared, I understood that, goddamn it, I was scared, too, but standing out there in the rain arguing made no sense, we had to go, we had to fucking go. I grabbed him by the neck and told him we were going and he said no again, fighting and pushing back at me, and I squeezed his throat and his eyes went wide and wider till he stopped fighting and then I ran, I ran away alone. Rain washed the blood from me while I was running, and everything I’ve gotten since I have deserved.
“He’s dead,” Martha was saying. Yelling. “Victor! Brother! He’s dead. It’s too late.”
Cook was under me. We were on the ground. I had my hands on his neck, trying to hold back the blood, push it back in. I was trying to heal the man, but his eyes were open, staring, white.
Very slowly I let him go. There was blood all over me, blood on my hands and up my arms and on my naked chest. I stood up. The room was full of red.
“Okay,” Martha was saying. She was trembling. I was trembling, too. “Okay. Okay. Okay.”
2.
The steps of the monument were gray and slick with rain.
I stood beneath the Martyr with my hands in my pockets. I didn’t smoke. I didn’t tilt my head up to feel the drizzle on my cheeks. I didn’t move. I stood beneath Old Abraham, quietly fiddling with the green bracelet I was still wearing on my arm. Doing nothing but waiting.
The streets were empty, more or less. Laughing voices, now and then, carried over from Georgia Street, the blocks of bars a quarter mile or so away. I saw a couple leaning into each other, climbing unsteadily into the back of a cab, way down on Market Street.