I lifted my head to see three different cops shooting the man. He crumpled, hit a bench seat on the way down, and then slid into the railing.
The shooter’s eyes were open.
On the other side of that railing, Daniel was sprawled on the marble floor.
I slid out of the aisle and made my way to Daniel. He was bleeding heavily. He looked at me. His lips moved, but I couldn’t hear him. For a moment, I thought the deafness had returned, but it hadn’t.
Daniel couldn’t get enough air to speak.
I didn’t give him comfort. I couldn’t. Jimmy had been right after all. I hated this man.
People were running out of the courtroom. Behind me, someone was screaming.
A policeman crouched beside me, then another, and another. Some moved aside the shooter. A man in black, with a medical kit, knelt in Daniel’s blood, touched his neck, and shook his head.
A man I didn’t know moved me away from Daniel.
“He’s dead,” the man said. “I’m so sorry.”
I looked down. Of course he was dead. His skin was gray, his blood pooling with the shooter’s on the marble floor.
A camera crew arrived. I made my way to the back of the courtroom, careful to stay out of the sight. The other defendants had disappeared into the back. The bailiffs must have hustled them out when the shooting started.
The judge peered up from underneath his desk, astonishment on his face. His clerk stood beside him, equally stunned. The bailiff finally convinced them to go inside the judge’s chambers.
Daniel was dead, and there had been a single shooter.
A man who had waited until he had his chance, waited with patience and a plan.
A man who was at war and knew it.
A man who had known where his enemy would be, just like he had known all along.
Jervis had come here — and he had ended it, once and for all.
FIFTY-EIGHT
I stayed in the courtroom, waiting for an opportune moment to disappear. Everything was chaos. Whickam was shouting for his daughter, who was probably back at the jail. The crime-scene people were trying to shut down the room.
The camera crews had gotten footage of the dead before the police shoved them outside. I remained in my chair until someone sat down beside me.
Captain Donato, a slender middle-aged man, said he recognized me from my injuries. “I thought you might be here.”
“I didn’t want those kids back on the streets,” I said.
“Looks like you got your wish.”
He seemed quiet, even though he must have known there was a shitstorm brewing in the corridors. The reporters were already asking how a man with a gun had gotten into the courthouse. The answer was simple: he had gotten in the same way the rest of us had. He had walked through the front door, found the courtroom, and sat down. No one patted us down; no one checked for weapons. Somehow people assumed civility in a courtroom.
Our assumptions were false.
“I checked your information yesterday,” he said. “You were right.”
I nodded.
“We’ve reconstructed everything, but I’d still like you to testify.”
“I’m not well,” I said, running my hands along my torso to indicate the injuries. “I just want to go home.”
“Figured you’d say that,” he said. “Figured you might say that even if you hadn’t been injured.”
He was silent for a moment, maybe waiting for me to tell him my real reasons for wanting to leave.
I didn’t say anything.
He put a hand on my shoulder. “We owe you.”
I shook my head. “I just gave you a starting point. You’d have found your own.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”
Then he stood, squared his shoulders, and left, ready to face the crowd.
Apparently he’d given word to the crime-scene people, because I was allowed to stay until the corridors were empty. It wasn’t quite eleven. If I was careful, I’d make it back to Newark in plenty of time.
But before I left, I took care of one last thing. I was afraid Grace would turn on the news, see the footage of the dramatic New York courtroom shooting, and find herself looking at the face of her dead son.
For all I knew, Daniel had called her the night before, letting her know he had been arrested. If so, she’d be frightened.
I didn’t want her to hear the news from an impersonal source. I used a courthouse pay phone to call her.
She sounded hopeful when she answered the phone.
“I was getting worried,” she said. “I hadn’t heard from you in so long.”
I didn’t know how to do this. I didn’t want to do it. “I found some things, Grace.”
“Things?”
“Daniel. He….” I paused, uncertain which tense to use. “He had gotten in with some violent people.”
“Gangs?” Her voice was filled with fear.
“No,” I said. “You’ve been hearing how the protestors, the antiwar protestors, have been having violent demonstrations?”
“What’s going on, Bill?” she asked. “Just tell me what’s happened.”
I took a deep breath. “Daniel’s dead. He was shot this morning. He was in a courtroom. He’d been arraigned, and a guy got in with a gun, and just starting shooting….”
I made it sound random. God help me, I was still protecting Grace.
“He’s dead?” Grace’s voice shook.
“I’m sorry.”
“Dead?”
“I’m so sorry, Grace, really. He—”
She screamed. I’d never heard a sound like that in my life. I held the phone away from my ear and listened to her wail.
It seemed to go on forever. I clutched the receiver, my forehead resting against the wall, my breath shallow.
Finally, the sound faded.
“Bill?”
“Grace, I can stay if you want me to,” I said, even though I didn’t want to. “I can get him transferred home, I can—”
“No,” she said.
“It’s probably the easiest—”
“You’ve done enough,” she said, and hung up.
FIFTY-NINE
By two that afternoon, Jimmy, Malcolm, and I were on the road home. I drove. I was operating on adrenaline, but I didn’t care.
I wanted to get as far away from New York as possible.
We talked a little about Daniel, but mostly we rode in silence.
All I’d wanted to do when I left Chicago was find Daniel, to give peace to his mother. Instead, I had given her heartache.
I was smart enough to know that Daniel was the one responsible for his mother’s heartbreak.
But I also knew that if I hadn’t acted, if I hadn’t reported the dynamite, someone else might be dead. Or a lot of someones. That had been a risk I had been unwilling to take.
Daniel did teach me one thing: he had shown me something I had left unfinished.
Just inside the Pennsylvania border, I stopped the van at a gas station. While Jimmy and Malcolm used the restroom, I went to the pay phone.
I dialed a number that was so ingrained in my memory I didn’t even have to look as I spun the rotary wheel. Even the clicks were familiar.
And the hello, from a rich, warm female voice, made me shake when I heard it.
“Mom?” I said.
“Smokey? Smokey!” She shouted into the kitchen, yelling at my dad to pick up the extension.
I could picture her in the hallway, holding the phone tight to her chest.
“We’ve been so worried about you, baby,” she said. “Are you all right?”
“Didn’t Henry Davis contact you from Memphis last year?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “He told us exactly what you did, how you saved that little boy. But he didn’t know how long you’d be gone. Are you back now, Smokey? We missed you so much.”
“No, Mom,” I said. “I’m not back. I can’t talk very long—”
I heard a click as my adopt
ed father picked up the phone.
“Smokey?”
“Yeah, Dad,” I said.
“It’s so good to hear you.”
“It’s good to hear you, too. But as I was saying to Mom, I can’t talk long. I’m sure your phone is bugged.”
“Me, too,” my father said. “We’ve been having all sorts of troubles with it — weird clicks, voices, hang-ups. You’re still in trouble, son?”
“I’m not in trouble,” I said. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. I’m fine. Everyone — everyone involved is fine. But we’re being safe. We’re staying low.”
“Oh, Smokey, this isn’t what we wanted for you,” my mother said.
“I know,” I said. “But it’s okay. I’m learning some things, and I wanted to tell you something quickly.”
Jimmy had returned to the car. Malcolm was inside, buying some gum. Jimmy frowned at me. He didn’t understand why I was on the phone.
“I wanted to tell you,” I said, “that I’m beginning to understand the sacrifices you made, taking in a damaged little boy who had just lost his parents—”
“Smokey,” my mother said.
“—and,” I said, “I wanted you to know that all the lessons — the good lessons you taught me, about responsibility and taking things day to day and about family, I’m putting them to use.”
“Are you all right, son?” my father asked. “Physically, I mean.”
“Yes,” I said. “Are you?”
“We’ve been worried,” he said, “but our health is fine.”
“If you need me,” I said, “leave a message with Shelby Bowler. He’s an attorney in Memphis.”
“He knows how to reach you?” My father asked.
“Yes.” Shelby had instructions to contact Andrew McMillan, Laura’s attorney. Drew would contact me. I had set this up last December, after I’d been injured. That put two layers of attorney-client privilege between me and the authorities. “Only use it in emergencies.”
“We will, son,” my father said.
“I have to go,” I said. “I stayed on too long. But I wanted to tell you that I love you. I’m sorry if this call causes you to get a visit from the FBI.”
“It’s all right,” my mother said. “They’ve been here before. We don’t know a damn thing. Except that you’re all right.”
And I could hear the smile in her voice.
It carried me long after I hung up, long after we left that little gas station in Pennsylvania.
The drive to Chicago seemed to take forever. On one long stretch of highway in Ohio, Malcolm told us his news.
He was going to the draft board. He was going to enlist.
I wasn’t sure I would have made that choice. Not with this war. Not after what I’d been through with Gwen, with Jervis.
“If this is about getting into college,” I said, “there are other ways. We can find something.”
“That’s not it,” Malcolm said.
“Then what is it?” I asked.
Malcolm looked straight ahead, at the road filled with cars. “It’s the right thing. If Daniel had done the right thing, he’d be alive now.”
“It’s not the same,” I said. “You’re going to a very dangerous place.”
Malcolm shrugged. “It’s my civic responsibility.”
“Malcolm, this is a little different—”
“You know I’m right,” he said. “If not me, then someone else’ll go.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But I don’t know that someone else.”
He looked at me then. His dark eyes were more open than I had ever seen them. “You’re the one who always talks about living up to your responsibilities, no matter how tough they are. That’s all I’m going to do. I can’t live with myself otherwise.”
He had turned my own words on me. I didn’t like how it felt. But I didn’t try to argue with him anymore. He knew the risks, and he was taking them. It was his life to live, his choice to make.
I simply wished I could keep him from it — and I was smart enough to know that I couldn’t.
We were silent much of the rest of the trip. But Jimmy grew happier and happier the closer we got to Chicago. He didn’t realize how much had changed.
I was feeling nothing. I was empty, just like I had when I returned from Korea. Dislocated, distant, at a loss without really knowing why.
I was returning from a different war and, like the first, I didn’t entirely comprehend it.
The only thing I knew was that in some very fundamental ways, we had all lost.
About Kris Nelscott
Kris Nelscott is an open pen name used by award-winning bestselling writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch, which she uses for historical mysteries.
The first Smokey Dalton novel, A Dangerous Road, won the Herodotus Award for Best Historical Mystery and was short-listed for the Edgar Award for Best Novel; the second, Smoke-Filled Rooms, was a PNBA Book Award finalist; and the third, Thin Walls, was one of the Chicago Tribune’s best mysteries of the year.
Kirkus chose Days of Rage as one of the top ten mysteries of the year. Entertainment Weekly says her equals are Walter Mosley and Raymond Chandler. Booklist calls the Smokey Dalton books “a high-class crime series” and Salon says “Kris Nelscott can lay claim to the strongest series of detective novels now being written by an American author.”
The Smokey Dalton Series in order:
Novels
Dangerous Road
Smoke-Filled Rooms
Thin Walls
Stone Cribs
War At Home
Days of Rage
The Day After (Upcoming)
Short Stories
Guarding Lacey
Family Affair
War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel Page 37