23 Minutes

by Vivian Vande Velde

  As for the robber—Ricky Wallace, apparently—the friendliest thing that can be attributed to him is that when he gets to the sidewalk where Daniel is standing, he doesn’t pull out his gun. He does, however, get right in Daniel’s face. He’s loud enough Zoe can hear every word. “Lentini, you son-of-a-bitch—you following me?”

  From where she’s standing directly across the street, Zoe can see Daniel’s face clearly, and the back of Wallace’s head. But Daniel is soft-spoken and the rain is muffling sound, so now that he’s talking in a normal tone of voice, she can’t hear him. Despite years of eavesdropping on resident evaluation meetings held behind closed doors at her various group homes, which have made her quite accomplished at extrapolating and filling in the blanks, she can’t make out what Wallace is saying either—just, once in a while, a string of expletives.

  Daniel continues to speak quietly and calmly, which Zoe finds remarkable, considering he’s being sworn at by someone who has repeatedly shot and killed him.

  Still, instead of mollifying Wallace, Daniel’s composure seems to aggravate him even more. In a way, Zoe can empathize: There’s nothing worse than trying to get a reaction from a therapist who only murmurs, And why do you think you feel that way? In any case, Wallace shoves Daniel, backing him up against the plate-glass window of the bank and shouting loudly enough that Zoe can catch: “Think you’re better than me? You with your upscale East Ave. office, charging your five hundred dollars a day to ruin people’s lives? Most of the people I know are lucky to clear five hundred in a week. What gives you the right (mumble) just because you been to some (mumble, mumble) college (mumble) …” Just as his words once more become unintelligible, he stops shouting and again shoves Daniel for emphasis, hard enough the bank window must rattle, for Zoe can see one of the customers look up, startled, before returning to filling out his papers.

  Zoe has stepped out from the protective overhang of the card shop without even being aware of doing so, without even being aware of the rain running down her hair and molding her shirt to her body. You have a gun, she mentally reminds Daniel.

  But, frustrating as it is, Zoe guesses she understands Daniel’s reluctance; Wallace has been belligerent, but he hasn’t exactly demonstrated unequivocal intent to harm anyone. Clearly, the we’ve-lived-through-this-before-and-Wallace-was-about-to-kill-people defense would not stand up in court.

  Though this would still be better than getting killed, Zoe reflects.

  She finds herself nostalgic for the good old days of Mrs. Davies’s black-and-white Westerns, where—in the absence of due process of law—simple townsfolk knew who were the good guys and who were the bad guys, and gave the good guys a certain leeway.

  Of course, in those same days before due process, the simple townsfolk would have hanged, burned, or stoned Zoe as a witch, or put her in chains and locked her in an insane asylum. All Zoe has had to put up with are unneeded medications that made her sluggish and prone to gain weight, tedious group therapy sessions, and well-intentioned if clueless counselors.

  Daniel has gone from shaking his head to saying something Zoe still can’t hear, but Wallace isn’t buying any of it.

  “Liar!” he shouts. He raises his arm and Zoe can guess that he’s about to flat-hand Daniel in the face, to smack his head against—if not through—the glass.

  Daniel swings the handle of his umbrella hard against the side of Wallace’s head.

  You’ve got a gun, Zoe thinks at Daniel, and you’re using an umbrella?

  Zoe is unaware of the card shop door opening behind her, when out steps the woman in the hair rollers. Maybe she’s done with her card-shop needs, or maybe she’s come to check up on poor-little-duck Zoe. But her timing is perfect.

  Perfectly wrong.

  As a witness, the woman was still inside the store for Wallace yelling at Daniel, for Daniel’s unruffled replies, for Wallace shoving Daniel against the bank window—twice—and even for Wallace raising his hand with the how-much-more-obvious-can-you-get intention to pummel Daniel. All she is outside to see is Daniel’s purely defensive swing of the umbrella.

  “Hey!” Hair Roller Woman shouts. “Don’t you hit that poor defenseless homeless man! He’s gotta live, too.”

  Zoe can see the situation through Hair Roller Woman’s eyes: Daniel, young, well put together, the picture of someone with all the advantages of life; Wallace, older, an edge of desperation to him, his raincoat a bit shabby, a bit dirty. Hair Roller Woman is assuming Wallace has tried to wheedle a buck-or-two handout from Daniel, and that Daniel, full of himself and disdainful of others’ troubles, has heartlessly lashed out at him.

  And what Hair Roller Woman has done is to distract Daniel, who for one brief second glances away from Wallace.

  “Gun!” Zoe screams, even as Wallace’s hand goes for his raincoat pocket.

  Daniel is quick to tackle Wallace, but he is not acting on thorough information. Zoe told him Wallace is armed, but she had not thought to mention where he is carrying his gun. The way Daniel grabs hold of him to restrain his upper body, Zoe can tell that Daniel is assuming a shoulder holster, such as the one he himself is wearing.

  Without even drawing his gun from his pocket, Wallace fires.

  At a distance of fewer than six inches away, there is not a chance of his missing. Daniel doubles over, the umbrella dropped, his arms crossed over his midsection, but unable to stop the flow of blood spilling out between his fingers. As that other time in the bank, when Zoe was hit, the bullet has once again passed through Daniel—this time striking and shattering the bank window behind him.

  Hair Roller Woman, finally realizing she has thoroughly misjudged what’s going on, screams.

  Wallace whips around and fires a second shot.

  Zoe drops to her knees behind his silver car, her heart beating so hard she can’t even tell if she’s been hit.

  Apparently not.

  Not this time.

  Hair Roller Woman, on the other hand, has fallen to the sidewalk beside her, face up in the rain, a single red dot on her forehead, almost like a Hindu woman’s bindi. Was it her scream that caused Wallace to want her dead? Or, more likely, Zoe’s warning shout? Has Wallace in fact realized there were two witnesses, or is Hair Roller Woman dead in Zoe’s place?

  Without knowing if Wallace has seen her, there is no telling whether he’ll cross the street to come after her.

  She desperately wants to be away from here. Her chest and shoulder ache from the memory of the other story line, the one in which she was shot. She does not want to die. But meanwhile, what of Daniel? If there’s any chance he’s still alive, she does not want to desert him. She will not be the brain-dead observer she was when her father was shot. There is no receptionist now.

  Only Zoe.

  And Zoe is determined not to abandon Daniel.

  A glance at the cell phone he loaned her shows 1:33. Still lots of time. For good or ill.

  She hears a third gunshot. More glass breaking. Now she can hear the screams from within the bank. She hopes this means Wallace has not fired a second shot at Daniel. Though she feels awful for thinking it, she hopes this means Wallace has turned his attention away both from this side of the street and from Daniel, returning to his Daniel-interrupted original plan to rob the bank.

  Zoe flattens herself on the rain-wet sidewalk and tries to see beneath the car to what is going on, but she can’t make out much of anything. So she gets to her hands and knees and scuttles toward the back of the car. The hood is lower than the trunk, but to get there would mean skirting around the dead Hair Roller Woman, and Zoe can’t bring herself to look at her again. My fault, she thinks. My direct fault she’s dead.

  Her indirect fault about Daniel.

  Zoe peeks over the trunk and sees that Wallace has kicked in a section of the broken window and stepped into the bank.

  And, more than Zoe dared hope, Daniel is still alive. Wallace must have left him, not considering him a threat, not thinking it worth the time to finish h
im off when there’s a bank that needs robbing. Unable to stand, Daniel is dragging himself away from the opening that was formerly a window, heading to the brick corner of the building. With his left arm pressed against his stomach, still unsuccessful with slowing down the flow of blood, he has drawn his gun with his right hand. He uses the bricks to pull himself up to his feet. He has left a prodigious blood trail on the sidewalk, and Zoe tries her best to convince herself that it has been diluted and spread by the rain, that there is not really as much blood as there appears to be.

  Daniel still alive changes everything. Zoe dashes out from the cover of the car and across the street, where she takes hold of Daniel by the shoulders and gets him to sit back down—he’s resisting but unable to fend her off, which is not a good sign.

  “You’re supposed to be inside the card shop,” he reprimands her from between teeth clenched in pain.

  “I don’t listen well,” Zoe admits. That’s something else housemothers have included in their reports.

  Daniel grunts, either at what she’s just said or because of the pain, but in any case he says, “Help me up.”

  “Just keep your head down,” Zoe tells him. “Someone from the bank or the store must have alerted the police by now and they should be here any minute. And an ambulance.”

  Zoe is most fervently hoping for an ambulance. She is trying not to see the blood, and especially the wound from which it’s coming, so she’s concentrating on his face, which has gone very white. Somehow, that makes his eyes look bigger and bluer, almost like an anime character.

  “Do you think,” Daniel demands, “that when Wallace comes out of the bank and sees you here and me still alive, he won’t shoot again?”

  This seems a perfect reason for them to get out of there straightaway, but Zoe can see Daniel isn’t going to be able to move to cover anytime soon.

  “Help me up,” Daniel repeats, and this time Zoe does, letting him lean heavily on her, letting him bleed on her.

  Inside the bank, Wallace has gotten hold of the bag of money he’s made the tellers pass. The guard is lying on the marble floor, writhing in pain, and one of the bank managers is kneeling beside him in a position that partially blocks their line of sight to Wallace until Zoe helps Daniel to a higher vantage by standing.

  She prays Daniel is a good shot. If he misses, or even if he hits but only wounds, she and Daniel will be clear targets for Wallace.

  Still, what kind of person prays for someone’s success in killing someone else?

  Daniel takes a steadying breath, and fires.

  And Zoe’s prayer is answered: Wallace drops to the ground, as patently dead as Hair Roller Woman.

  Wallace was a human being, and Zoe tries not to think, Good riddance.

  Mostly, she’s not very successful at this.

  Daniel slips from Zoe’s grasp until he is once more sitting, his back against the support of the bricks between the door and the window. He’s shaking, which makes her fear he’s going into shock. And he is—but apparently not the kind of shock she’s worried about.

  “I’ve never shot anyone before,” he says, as though he owes her an explanation, as though that’s the important thing. “Damn. Damn, damn, damn.”

  That he could be distraught about killing the man who was trying to kill him … who may well … Zoe forces herself away from that train of thought. Daniel is not going to die. She is shaking, too.

  Zoe takes account of the damage: Daniel is wounded, badly, but she fervently hopes not so badly as it appears. Not that she’s an expert. But Dad survived—though there wasn’t nearly this much blood when he was shot. Still … She tries to squelch the negative thoughts. Still, Daniel has to be OK. The bank guard is wounded, though conscious and quite vocal, which might indicate he is not as seriously injured as he thinks. Wallace is dead—and Zoe can’t help but think, No loss there. Hair Roller Woman is dead, which she never was in any other version of this twenty-three minutes.

  Zoe asks herself: Is this as good as she’s going to be able to get it?

  “Take the gun,” Daniel tells her. His voice has become a reedy whisper. She can only hear him clearly because the rain has finally slowed to a drizzle.

  “Why?” she asks, thinking she’d never be able to fire it. And that, in any case, the need for firing it has passed.

  “Take the gun,” he repeats, so softly she isn’t even sure she really hears the words or if she’s just guessing by the movement of his lips.

  She puts her hand out and the gun falls into her grasp, and she realizes he didn’t have the strength to set it down. And he didn’t want it dropping to the sidewalk, potentially discharging.

  Carefully she lays the gun down on the sidewalk next to her, hating the feel of the weapon, not even taking into account that it’s sticky with Daniel’s blood.

  Sirens are wailing in the distance.

  “You’re going to be all right,” Zoe assures Daniel, pulling him so that he is leaning against her rather than the wall for support.

  And, for a moment or two, she even believes he might be.

  There’s no telling what he believes.

  He rests his head on her shoulder and closes his eyes.

  She could play back now, but she remembers the previous twenty-three minutes, when he comforted her when she couldn’t stop crying, after she realized she’d almost given up on trying to save him because she hadn’t trusted him, believing he himself was a bank robber. So she puts her arms around him and whispers, “Don’t be afraid,” and holds him close. And holds him close. And holds him close. Until long after she knows he’s died.

  But before 1:39.

  She stands up. She stands clear of him. She puts her Daniel-bloody arms around herself, and she whispers, “Playback.”

  CHAPTER 12

  TIME RESETS TO 1:16.

  Zoe tightens her hold on her folder, pure muscle reflex at this point, and starts running toward Independence Street when all she wants to do is curl into a ball and cry—even though she thinks of herself as not the crying type. Despite all the crying she did two playbacks past.

  Meanwhile, her mind is churning on its own. I hate this. Hate this. Hate this, she is thinking. How many times do I have to go through this same stupid damn thing?

  But she knows the answer. This time, and maybe once more. Then this twenty-three-minute interval will be closed forever. And she isn’t making good progress as far as damage control. Each time she’s relived it, she’s learned things—but then everything else shifts and leaves her unable to use what she’s learned, leaves her stumbling and falling. And taking Daniel with her.

  She thinks again: These twenty-three minutes will be gone. Except for memories.

  Always memories.

  And regrets.

  She arrives at the Victorian house. Not by any conscious effort, but because she’s begun weaving with mental and emotional exhaustion, her shutting of the front door behind her is somewhat feeble. The door does not slam. M. Van Der Meer, Designer, has not been alerted that there is something snoop-worthy going on in his building’s lobby.

  Despite her distress, Zoe has made good time. No sign yet of Daniel. Too drained to go to the second floor to intercept him the moment he steps out of his attorney’s office, or even to make it halfway up to the landing, Zoe sits on the bottom step to wait.

  Somehow this position reminds her body, as opposed to simply her mind, of sitting on the sidewalk holding Daniel while he bled out.

  Not now, she tells her body. There’s no time for this.

  Her body has ideas of its own.

  There’s a rapidly expanding balloon in her chest that’s squeezing her heart, cutting off her breathing. Her hands, clasped together on her lap, are trembling. In an attempt to hold them steady, she wraps her arms around her knees. But now the palsy has spread to her arms. And her shoulders. And pretty much all of her. She lowers her head to her knees.

  Don’t cry, she commands herself.

  She’s never been good at
taking direction. Even from herself, apparently. She releases her hold on her knees and puts her arms around her head to block out the world.

  Between the balloon in her chest and her sobbing, Zoe is unable to catch her breath. She thinks of Rasheena, who has asthma and sometimes has to use an inhaler, and for the first time understands how this feels.

  A gentle hand touches her shoulder.

  Somehow she missed him coming down the stairs. Daniel is once more sitting next to her. “Are you hurt?” he asks. “Did you fall?”

  Zoe shakes her head in her arm-pillow on her knees.

  “Has something bad happened?”

  Zoe is torn between thinking, Oh boy, has it ever, and wanting to point out to him that, as young as he might think she looks, he does not need to talk to her as though she’s nine years old.

  Instead of saying either of those things, she once more shakes her head.

  She hasn’t raised her face, so it takes him saying, “Here …” before she looks up and notices he is once again offering her the linen hankie, which is—once again—impeccably clean and ironed.

  This is never going to work if she keeps wasting precious time. She takes the hankie and blows her nose.

  He says, “I know you don’t know me, but is there anything I can do to help?”

  Yet again, she shakes her head. But this time she says, “I do know you. You’re Daniel Lentini. And you’re a private investigator. I came here to see you.”

  “Here?” he repeats.

  “It’s very complicated,” she tells him.

  “I can see that,” he answers.

  Won’t he stop treating her like a child? Because it’s easier to be annoyed at him than to face his death, she snaps, “Don’t be condescending.”

  “I didn’t mean to be.” He waits a moment to see if she’ll fill in any details. When she doesn’t, he explains, calm and quiet: “I only meant, you said I couldn’t help, but you also said you came to see me. And, then again, you came to see me someplace where I just happen to be visiting, not where I live or work. That sounds complicated to me.”