I park near Rice Stadium and walk the rest of the way to the Medical Center. It’s good to be outside, good to be walking, good to be alone. A few joggers dodge around me on the path that runs along University. A few cars zip by on the street, slowing down for the traffic stacked up at the intersection with Main.
Notes to self: Get a Christmas tree. Buy some gifts. Rejoin the normal world.
I pick my way through the Medical Center maze, approaching Ben Taub from the wrong direction. I pause in front of the Baylor College of Medicine, sit on the lip of the fountain, wondering if this is such a good idea after all.
According to my watch, it’s half past six. Charlotte will be waiting, full of news to share, ready to catch up, to have her husband back. It’s less than a week since Bayard broke into the house and nearly killed her, but she’s coping better than me. Not that I’d have any way of knowing, since my solution to the trauma has been to pack her up to Ann’s.
Note to self: Spend a day with Charlotte. Do whatever she wants. Remember what it’s like to be a couple again.
I get up, brush my pants off, and continue the journey, taking the long way round. Inside the hospital, I search for the gift shop, not sure that I’ve ever actually seen it before. It’s closed. I check my watch again. Now or never. Put up or shut up.
“What are you doing here?”
I turn. Kim Bayard stands there, clutching her purse like she’s afraid I’ll snatch it. Her husband, out on bail, comes up behind her, puts a restraining hand on each of her shoulders. He sees me and stops.
“Is something wrong?” he asks. “Is there a problem?”
Fear in his eyes. Fear of what I could do to him. Fear of what I have done.
“It’s probably better if we don’t talk,” I say. “Your lawyer would tell you the same thing.”
“What right do you have coming here? ” She spits the words out, shocking her husband as much as she does me. “What you people did to him is monstrous! It’s inhuman!”
He grips her tight, afraid she’ll slip the leash.
I step back, palms up, too tired to argue who did what to whom.
When I’m far enough off that the curious bystanders start to lose interest, I wheel around in search of an elevator. Monstrous and inhuman. She uses the words like they mean something, like she’d recognize the things they describe. There’s a recording I could play back for her. . but there’s no point now. She knows what she’s been harboring. She knows where the guilt lies. Her guilt is what’s crying out, and not at me.
I know a little something about guilt. I can cut her some slack.
I ride the elevator. I get off. I find a nurses’ station and get some much-needed guidance, then ride the elevator again. The room I’m looking for is at the end of a long corridor. I pass one half-open door after another, names written on whiteboards, the glow of televisions over rumpled bed sheets. I pause at one of the doors and knock.
Reverend Blunt pulls the door open, his finger jammed between the pages of a book to mark the place he left off.
“Detective?” he says.
“Do you mind if I-?”
“No, no,” he says, moving back.
The room is lit by a table lamp. Pinpoint lights blink on the machinery that flanks the bed. Blunt returns to his chair, setting the book down. He stands awkwardly by the rail, leaning forward slightly, hand knotted, as if he’s presenting the patient for my approval.
“Still unconscious,” I say.
“He could wake up anytime according to the doctors. Or not. The family’s been in and out, his mother especially. I told them I’d stay tonight so they could make some long-term arrangements. They’re hoping to remain in town until he’s better, but his dad has to go back to work Monday morning.”
I approach as far as the foot of the bed, pausing there, letting my eyes travel up the immobile form of Jason Young.
“He’s in a coma, but not on life support. Like I said, he could wake up at any time. There could be. . paralysis.” He lowers his voice in case Young can hear. “That’s something they don’t seem sure about, the extent of the damage.”
I listen to all this and nod. Not sure why I’ve come.
“We got him,” I say.
He tilts his head in confusion.
“We got the guy who killed Simone. He’s right here, in this hospital. He burnt himself to a crisp.”
“Where is he?” he asks. “What floor? Maybe I should pay a visit. In a pastoral capacity.”
“I’m not sure you’d be allowed to,” I say, which seems to satisfy his sense of duty. “Anyway, I guess it won’t make a difference to Jason one way or the other.”
“You’re wrong about that. He’ll be glad.”
“Well. .”
“Speaking of which, have you heard? The man who did this to Jason, he turned himself in. Called the police department and confessed. It wasn’t a bar fight at all-you were wrong about that. He was attacked by the man who’d been having an affair with his wife. I guess his conscience got the better of him. Though it’s hard to imagine a man like that having one.”
“It’s not that hard,” I say.
He goes silent, maybe sensing I know more than I’m letting on.
I grip the foot rail. Cold to the touch.
“I said some things to you,” he begins, “the last time we met-”
“It’s fine, Reverend. There’s no need to apologize. I can’t think of anything you said that wasn’t justified under the circumstances. I’m just sorry he ended up this way.”
“You’re just doing your job, I’m sure. The Bible talks about that, you know.” He reaches to the chair for his book. “The magistrate, I mean. The civil authority. ‘He beareth not the sword in vain.’ ”
“Romans thirteen,” I say, surprising him. It’s a conversation I’ve had before, with Carter.
He cracks open the book. “ ‘He is the minister of God to thee for good.’ ”
“If he wakes up, Reverend, I’d appreciate a call.”
“Let me pray for you,” he says, setting the book aside and moving toward me.
He puts a hand on my forearm and raises the other high, like he’s about to swear an oath in court. He utters a few lines in an incantatory monotone, speaking of my being lifted up and granted wisdom and kept safe on the mean streets. When he finishes, the man in black hugs me, his silver belt buckle dinging the foot rail.
Out in the hallway, the high-pitched gasoline reek strong in my nostrils, I run my hand down the wall for guidance. Past the nurses’ station and into the elevator. Then home, home at last, into the arms of a woman who can say as much as I can about suffering and loss.
CHAPTER 30
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 20–10:29 A.M.
The man onstage wears a black robe. He stands behind a table of bread and wine. I watch through the winking flame of the advent candles, seated next to Charlotte near the front. I glance over my shoulder at the dimly lit congregation, hundreds of faces glowing from the spotlights onstage. His eager voice gives the ancient, dusty words an electric charge. Even a reluctant observer can’t help being a little moved.
Smiling toward us, his easy manner cutting against the grain of the formal liturgy, he speaks the lines written before me in the program, which Charlotte tilts for my benefit.
“Let us proclaim the mystery of faith.”
She joins the people seated around us in responding:
CHRIST HAS DIED.
CHRIST IS RISEN.
CHRIST WILL COME AGAIN.
A tremor goes through me. Recognition, maybe. Nostalgia. My strict and beautiful aunt lining us up in the family pew, Moody and I in our short-sleeved shirts and clip-on ties. Mouthing the words at the right times, or at least a rough approximation of them.
Behind us and to the left, Carter and Gina are holding hands. Young parents-to-be. Earlier in the service, when the strangers all around suddenly came to life, shaking hands and greeting each other, a small throng gathered around the couple,
who’d just revealed their news. They’d swarmed me too, and all but killed the fatted calf, happy to see Charlotte’s prodigal husband in attendance, however awkwardly.
This is what she’d wanted. This above all things.
So I obliged, even to the point of donning another of her father’s tailored tweeds and letting her straighten my tie until the dimple was just right.
On the far side of the auditorium, a piano plays. There’s a cello, a violin, even a flute. The congregation sings and the mood is very different than I remember from childhood. More joy than morbid introspection.
The worshipers in front of us rise by row, filing toward the aisle and then forward. Up front, the waiting elders and deacons dispense first the bread-“The body of Christ broken for you”-then the wine-“The blood of Christ shed for you.”
As one row clears, the next rises. The people just in front of us get up, putting hymnals and programs down on their seats before going forward.
Charlotte leans closer. “I’ll stay here with you.”
“It’s okay.” I squeeze her bare knee. “You go ahead.”
She glances at the Robbs, then takes my hand, only dropping it when it’s her turn to go.
I watch as she edges toward the waiting sacrament. Carter and Gina follow behind her. Alone in my now-empty row, feeling more concealed than conspicuous, I see my wife cup her hands together to receive the bread. She places it in her mouth. She moves to the short line of people awaiting the wine, reaches the front, then accepts the little plastic thimble from the man in the black robe, drinking it down, her eyes fixed on the backlit cross above the stage.
She returns with a glow that has nothing to do with the reflection of stage lights, scooting her chair closer to me, taking my hand in hers. She says nothing. She doesn’t have to.
In the time it takes for the whole congregation to go forward, commune, and cycle back to their seats, several verses are sung. I watch them all, the men and women, old and young, white and black and brown, perhaps with nothing in common but this. It’s enough to make me forget the television hucksters and the paranoid conspiracists and the smiling, feel-good hypocrites, enough that I can almost see why Charlotte takes comfort in being here.
The minister ends the service with a benediction, his hands elevated. The gesture brings back Curtis Blunt’s strange prayer over me. If he could see me now, in church for the first time in ages on the heels of his incantation, would he claim credit? I smile at the thought.
Afterward, lunch at the Black Labrador, where Carter casts a few loaded glances in my direction, uncertain what my presence this morning might mean. They all know about the fire that consumed David Bayard, about the flames that nearly caught me. Maybe he’s telling himself that a near-death experience brought me round. Maybe he’s thinking there are no atheists in foxholes.
What he doesn’t know-what none of them do-is that a week ago today I chased a man to his death. If he did, if he knew that Bayard’s melted face and the crushed skull of Wayne Bourgeois have coalesced in my mind as a kind of bogeyman, hidden behind the curtain of sleep, he might make something of that, just as the psychologist would if I were foolish enough to share. But I won’t, and personally I don’t know what to make of it. I don’t know what to think of a policeman more haunted by the fate of the guilty than their victims.
“You’re quiet,” Charlotte says. “What are you thinking?”
What I didn’t tell my uncle, what I’ve never told anyone, is that the day my cousin Moody stole that gun and ran away, the boys he was with threw me in the trunk. They did it as a joke, Moody egging them on, and after running me around the block a few times, letting me stew in the sweaty darkness, he’d pulled me out again, pushing me down on the curb next to his abandoned bicycle. When he reached out, I shrank away.
Come to me, kid. Don’t be scared.
He had the gun in his waistband. The others looked on. I didn’t know what was happening and I still don’t.
You can go here and you can go there, but you can’t go away.
But I didn’t understand. Moody smiled an old man’s smile.
You just tell him I said that, okay?
When I did tell my uncle, finally working up the nerve, he made me repeat the words back to him several times over. He never told me what they meant. Only that it was a song.
“Roland,” Charlotte says. “What are you thinking?”
They all pause over their plates, silverware suspended, waiting.
And waiting.
“I was just thinking there’s something I need to do.” I check my watch. “If you can spare me for the afternoon.”
“O-kay,” Charlotte says, probing.
“I’m gonna drive up to Huntsville again. There’s a guy in the hospital I’m gonna try and talk to. A loose end to wrap up.”
Her knife and fork clink to the plate.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I’ll come home. No side trips to New Orleans this time.”
Carter takes a bite of fish, chewing, staring at the knots and grain in the rustic table. Gina slides her hand across to Charlotte’s, clasping it in a show of sympathy. I pretend not to notice.
There are more hoops than usual to jump through, more assurances to give. Not to mention the patient’s consent, which is given only grudgingly. After an hour and a half, after alternating expressions of impatience and inexorability-I will wait, but I will not be denied-I am escorted into the presence of Donald Fauk.
Seven years have passed since I last saw him face-to-face, and in that time he’s aged more than I would have expected. A wizened, almost emaciated man, distilled by time and trauma into a bitter essence. Eyes lit up with a malevolent gleam.
“You,” he says in a voice dry as parchment. Then to the corrections stiff: “Don’t leave me alone with him. He’ll try and kill me if you leave us alone.”
The guard shrugs, retreating to the corner, nodding me toward a chair placed some distance from Fauk’s bedside. According to the doctor, he’ll make a full and complete recovery. Anything else would be too much to hope for.
I unbutton my jacket and settle onto the chair, crossing my legs with studied nonchalance, getting comfortable for the show. Fauk seems amused by this. He licks his lips. The deep lines in his skin take me by surprise. He doesn’t look quite the way I remember him.
“It’s been a while,” I say. “I hardly recognize you.”
“If you’re here for another confession, you can pack it up right now. Unless you’ve brought your thumbscrews along. Have you brought them, March?”
“Don’t worry. I’m not here for a confession. And if I was, I wouldn’t beat it out of you. I wouldn’t have to. We both know that.”
He says nothing.
“I’ve been talking to a mutual friend of ours,” I say. “Your pen pal, Brad. I also had a run-in with one of your messenger boys, a con named Wayne Bourgeois.”
“So?”
“So I have a pretty good idea what’s been going on. I see your strategy, and I see where it’s gone off the rails.” He snorts. “Like I said, I’m not here to get a confession. The reason I came is to give you some advice. I’m in a position to help, Donald. I possess a certain expertise.”
“You’re gonna help me? What am I supposed to do, say thanks?”
“You don’t have to thank me. I owe you. You were decent to me when my daughter was killed. You didn’t have to be, but you were. And I think that was genuine. That was the real you. You didn’t have to, but you did the right thing. That told me something about you, Donald, something I wouldn’t have expected.”
He sneers. “And what was that?”
“You’re a lot like me. No, I’m serious. I haven’t done what you have, I’m not saying that. But you’re a father. You love your kid the way I loved mine. Now mine is gone and because of all this”-I wave my hand in the air, encompassing the room, the walls outside, the prison complex-“you can’t see yours. I got to thinking about that, Donald. I did some checking. It’
s been a long time, hasn’t it, since you’ve gotten a visit?”
He turns his head away, gazing toward the barred window.
“I know what it’s like, believe me. That’s one thing I can understand. The longing that can’t be satisfied. The sense that the cord between you, the cord binding you, is all but broken. We understand each other, don’t we? We always did. And that’s why I know that the man you’re protecting, the one who did this to you, he’s not like you.”
“I’m not protecting anyone.”
“Protection is exactly what it is,” I say. “What else would you call it? By my count he’s killed three women, but maybe it’s more than that. He’s smart, too. Smart enough that we never caught him, not for his real crimes.”
“That’s not saying much.”
“Maybe not. We can be slow on the uptake. I can be slow. Which is why I need your help again, and why I’m prepared to help you, too.”
He keeps his face bladed toward the window, saying nothing.
“You’re playing this all wrong, Donald. I spoke with your doctor, and he says you’ll be fit as a fiddle and ready to return to the general population. Maybe you’re thinking your money will be enough to buy some protection, but it didn’t help the first time around.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Here’s your problem: Brad Templeton has some documents in his possession-which means I have some documents in my possession-that tend to implicate you. If you looked guilty before you got shivved, believe me, you’re gonna look like a full-blown cooperator by the time you get back. I’m going to see to that personally.”
I pause to find out whether he’ll call my bluff. He doesn’t.
“Maybe you’re thinking your appeal is going to work. If so, you’re more naive than I gave you credit for. We’ve got it pretty much figured out at this point. The disappearing evidence, the alternate suspect, everything. The DA can’t wait for this to go to court, assuming it ever does. He’s looking forward to a reelection-quality performance.”
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