“I’d like to leave, please.” Minerva turned away, putting her hand over her mouth. The attendant covered the face and slid the body back into its slot, then closed the locker door with a click.
They returned to the front desk, where Minerva filled out a form. When she finished, she sighed and looked at Charlie, then handed the clipboard to the man in the polo shirt. He gestured to the Sports Illustrated guy, who held out his free hand for it. “Is that all?” asked Minerva.
“We’ll call you if we need anything,” the front desk attendant said. “Otherwise, after the autopsy, we’ll contact the funeral home.” He checked to see that he could read what Minerva had written, then nodded sympathetically. “I know how difficult this is. May God be with you.”
“Thank you,” Minerva said.
Charlie was already backing toward the door. Minerva followed. Out in the parking lot, he said, “I’m sorry. That’s so terrible.”
She breathed deeply and muttered, “I hope I don’t end up in there.”
“Me neither.”
“You’re likely to,” Minerva grumbled. “You keep messing with people.”
She marched quickly to the Volvo, rubbing her arms as if warding off a chill, even though it was a hot summer’s night. In the car, she said, “I prayed that they catch those people who did this, but I don’t think anyone even cares. If something happens to you or yours, Mr. Sherman, it’s a big deal because you’re … you know. At least you, of all people, should know. Dirt gets done to a poor black woman, it’s the same as it was a hundred years ago. Well, I needed for you to see her. I didn’t want her to go without a trace, without you noticing or understanding. So now you know.”
“Now I know.”
She looked out the window, then turned back to him. “It’s wrong, the way they make you pay to tell the world your loved one’s gone. That doesn’t seem right. I’ll pay for an obituary notice in the paper. I want people to know she’s gone. They can’t just stuff her in a Dumpster and throw her away. That’s not right. I’m not living in a world like that, no sir. But I may have to let the county bury her. I need to save my money to pay for Takira’s baby. I have to put the living before the dead. Demetrious doesn’t know yet. I guess I’ll have to find somebody else to take me to see him.”
“That would be best.”
“In his own twisted, stupid way, he was trying to help his momma, but he doesn’t know how to do things right. You may not understand it, after the hurt he’s caused, but that makes him worth saving.” In a voice full of heartbreak and hopelessness, she said, “I just don’t know how to do it. Don’t know that I have the strength. They want to kill him with the death penalty, that’s what I’m hearing. That’s not right. It’s not like they ever gave … a damn about the boy that died. Now they claim they do. That’s the biggest lie of all.”
Charlie stared straight ahead as he drove away from the morgue, passing a black car as it entered the lot. His face was expressionless.
“The other night when your wife came on the TV,” Minerva said, her eyes downcast, “He was at my house and saw her standing by that Mercedes, and—I shouldn’t say anything else.”
“I figured it was something like that.” He turned onto Memorial and drove past state offices and the old Archives building.
“I look in your eyes and you seem lost,” Minerva said. “I used to think you did the Lord’s work. Don’t know why. You get showered with money and you just get lonelier. You can’t buy back what you lost. Listen to me.” She shook her head. “I’m sitting here talking and I don’t even know what all you lost.” She looked out the window at men in the projects, drinking from brown paper bags. “Don’t know you at all.”
Perfunctory, pragmatic, and polite. That’s how Charlie wanted to play out this tragic scene, without mentioning that he’d met her daughter, because that certainly wouldn’t help. “Do you need anything from the store before I take you home?”
“No. Thank you.”
They rode quietly the rest of the way to Minerva’s house. When Charlie pulled onto her street, Minerva gave him a wide-eyed look like he’d frightened her.
“What?” he asked. He pulled to the curb and cut the engine.
“There is something strange about you. Once I thought you might be an angel, and then I realized I was being a fool, you were just a man, a selfish man at that, with a small version of the truth. Oh, it was truth. And it was a hammer. All metal and cold. But now I think there’s something behind you, backing you up, a huge dark shadow I can’t see through. I’m not afraid of the devil. And I know you’re not him. You don’t have the power, especially not over me, and you don’t have the tongue for it, either. But tell me, is that who you’re working for? Because the kind of things that have happened don’t just happen. And they are evil. This is … this is some kind of Bible curse. On everybody. You’re not talking.” She paused a beat. “You’re not saying I’m crazy. You do know what I’m talking about, don’t you? In the name of God,” she cried out, her voice taking on a keening quality, “tell me I’m not crazy!”
A moment of silence passed. “You’re not crazy.”
“I can’t tell if you’re good or bad. I can’t figure out your nature. Are you trapped? Did you make some sort of deal?”
He hung his head. “Turns out it was a trick.”
“I’m entitled to more than that.”
“I thought I was, too.” He sighed. “I met a stranger. He doesn’t have a name, and he … I’ve seen him come with a storm.”
“With a storm?”
“Out of nowhere, on a sunny day.”
“Go on.”
“I was given a job. I was going to tell the truth about wrongs that had been done.” He laughed sardonically. “It seemed so right … but no good deed goes unpunished. There’s wreckage everywhere. Boils and pestilence. People killed. Shootings and bombings and lightning strikes. The contract that I signed started out normal, just something from an office-supply store. But then it changed.”
“How?”
“A penalty for failure was written in blood. And then my signature turned to blood. And then the whole thing turned to blood.” Charlie took a deep breath.
“Oh, Lord. I suspected something … but it’s hard to believe.”
“I’m so sorry all of this happened. I was going to kill myself the night this started … and this thing came along.”
“You were going to kill yourself. And then you made a deal when you didn’t have anything left to lose—”
“That’s never the way it is, no matter how we see it. I know that now.”
“All along, you were a dead man walking,” she muttered. “It all makes sense now. Doesn’t make it any easier, though.”
They got out of the car. On the sidewalk to her house, Charlie reached to touch her arm. She pulled away from him and said, “You’re cursed.” She shook her head and surveyed the neighborhood. “It is hard for me to be strong. There’s nothing left but that girl and the child she carries. I’m burying my baby, and her boy’s life is over before it begins. All I have to look forward to is to see my great grandchild being born into a world like this.”
The porch light flashed on and the door opened. Takira came out, her belly as swollen as the full moon overhead. She looked forlornly at Minerva as the old woman trudged up onto the porch.
“Take care of her,” Charlie told the girl.
Minerva embraced Takira. “You and the baby are all I’ve got.”
“Yes ma’am.” Takira returned the hug. “We need each other now.”
“You go inside now,” she told the girl, then spoke to Charlie in her sternest tone. “I don’t care if you are cursed. You need to take back what you wrote about me. I am not that man’s daughter. My father is John Riggins, and he died before I was born.”
“I can’t change what happened.” He thought of Ben and wished he could.
“You changed everything. You laid out a path of destruction like poison breadcrumbs. You ch
anged the past and that changes the present and that changes the future.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t say you’re sorry when you’re not. But now that you’ve said it once, and used my boy for your precious, scientific DNA tests, don’t ever say it again. That man is not my father. He didn’t have anything to do with me. Just leave him out of my life. I don’t want any part of anything he touched. I’m dropping the suit. Let the greedy bastards have it.” She waved her hands in disgust.
“But Minerva—”
“And you’re a greedy bastard, too. That’s why you signed some contract in the first place, one you stuck with. You have no idea what the truth is. And now there’s no way to heal the wounds. There’s no balm that will get rid of the hurt. Not just me. All around.” She held out her arms wide. “I don’t know what I was thinking, talking to you in the first place. You just caught me at a weak moment. It’s best if you stay away from me. Like it does me any good to tell you that.”
“I just want you to know—”
“I am sincerely tired of you wanting me to know things. Goodbye, Mr. Sherman.”
“I want to pay for your daughter’s funeral.”
“No thank you. Your money’s cursed.”
“Just promise me you’ll consider it, and I’ll go.”
“All right, fine. I’ll think about it!” she snapped. “Now, good night, Mr. Sherman! Good night!” She stepped inside the house and slammed the door.
Charlie walked to the car, thinking that God’s bitter curse, which he knew by heart, was coming true: … upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.
How much longer would it go on? Charlie counted out on his fingers. Minerva, Shaundra, and D. And the one to come. Closer to home, Evangeline, Susan, Beck and Ben … and their children, too.
It was true: The deal he’d made had been a trick. The house he’d been hired to tear down was his own. And it was falling in on him, sure enough. He tried to shut that thought out of his mind, but it kept knocking. And maybe the reality was even more terrible, given the way he felt about God. Perhaps he’d started his own curse, and the only hope for Ben was to be Scudder’s son, after all.
He had no doubt to hide behind anymore. The devil, once just a convenient straw man, was now his only hope. After all, if he was indeed working for God, he could do no worse by switching sides. If he wasn’t in hell at this moment—cut off from the wife he’d once loved and stripped of his children, completely alone and publicly reviled, repellent to women, his vision turned to blindness, his only gift the Reaper’s touch—he had but to take one tiny step in any direction, and to hell he’d surely go. And it was a step he’d have to take, for there was no other place left for him.
As he pulled away from Minerva’s house, the moon vanished behind a thick patch of swift-moving clouds, and a moment later, rain splattered the windshield. With the old car’s wipers squeaking and thumping, Charlie turned onto Memorial Drive. He tried to think of something pleasant and calming, but all such thoughts had fled. Instead, he saw Shaundra’s puffy face in the morgue’s pale light and smelled her death, just as he’d heard her die. For he knew now that the terrible screams he’d heard Saturday night could have been nothing else.
He hated Trouble, the deadbeat deceiver, and his boss, that vengeful, unlovable God that tricked desperate fools for fun and prophecy. If he could just do something to end this bloodbath he’d initiated before Beck and Ben were ground up into a pulp along with everyone and everything else he’d touched … but how? He had no answers. He was helpless. Hopeless. Worthless, clueless, useless.
As he drove past Redeemer’s church, a lightning bolt cracked the eastern sky, illuminating a skulking figure bending over a trash barrel near the soup kitchen. Just who Charlie needed to see. Of course. He’d first found Trouble lying by a Dumpster where he’d been scavenging like a carrion feeder. Which should have been the tip-off.
Charlie slammed on the brakes and jerked the steering wheel to the right, skidding into the church’s far entrance, then drove across the gravel lot toward the Hunger Palace, figuring he was back to square one, with nothing left to lose. Time to get a new deal. Or die trying.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The place seemed abandoned. Another window had been boarded up, and the church was dark inside. The lot had sprouted patches of weeds and unruly tufts of grass. Charlie left the headlights on and scrambled out of the Volvo into needles of rain. “I need to talk to you!” he shouted. “You got some explaining to do!”
As Charlie strode purposefully toward a confrontation, the figure turned and shielded his eyes. Another trick: Charlie was certain he’d seen Trouble, but this guy looked like Alice Cooper, with dark eyes and stringy hair. He gave Charlie a cruel, calculating look and stuck two fingers in his mouth, letting loose a piercing whistle.
Charlie stepped back. “My bad. I thought you were—”
His apology was short-circuited by a blow to the back of his head. Charlie staggered and turned to see a wiry man silhouetted in the headlights’ glare, wielding a two-by-four embedded with nails.
The assailant, missing two front teeth, lisped, “You juth been thpiked, bith.”
Charlie lunged and punched him in the face. A second later, the whistler jumped on Charlie’s back and started choking him. Charlie cried out a garbled “Help!” and stumbled backward, crashing into the Hunger Palace’s cement wall. He repeatedly pounded the guy against it. With a groan, his attacker fell off.
Two black men, also small and thin as whippets, rushed to join the fray. One held a length of chain, the other a brick. Charlie stepped forward. The four men closed in around him. “Let me go,” Charlie said. “I’ll give you my money.”
“We’ll get to that,” the whistler grunted, grimacing and holding his side.
“We don’t need you to give it,” said the third. “We’ll take it when we’re through.”
Charlie made a break for the car, laying a shoulder into the brick-wielding man, who struck him on the head. Charlie also took a shin-cracking blow from the chain just as the stringy-haired man again tackled him from behind. Charlie yelled as he stumbled. Another man piled on and the three of them crumpled into a pile a dozen feet from the Volvo.
Charlie managed to roll over and kick one attacker, who smashed the brick in his face, cracking his nose and breaking his glasses. He screamed when a nail on the spiked board punctured his right knee. As he struggled to his feet, the chain lashed the side on his head. Then somebody kicked him in the crotch, causing him to double over. His attackers took a moment to enjoy his discomfort. This gave him a chance to recover slightly. This time, Charlie saw the chain coming—though it was a blur—and grabbed it, jerking his attacker off balance. After he took a hard blow to the back of his head, Charlie no longer had a clear idea of what was happening.
He went down and the hits kept coming. A terrific blow set his left eye on fire with blinding pain. He put his hands over his face to shield it. Then came a kick in the ribs. Another and another and another and another. There was blood in his mouth. He couldn’t see. Above him, they laughed and admired their work, but they weren’t through yet.
“Got a message from your friend,” said the stringy-haired scavenger. “He says, and I quote, ‘Did you think I would let you live after you broke the deal? Forgiveness ain’t my style.’”
“I don’t even know what the deal is,” Charlie whimpered.
“Keeping it all for yourself, you greedy-ass fool.”
“Finish the motherfucker off!”
Blows rained down and Charlie gave up, thinking the end would be a blessing. He mumbled what Beck said when the Halloween candy bag was empty: “All gone.”
Then he heard a child’s voice from the deepest of distances. “Charlie, are you hurt again?”
There was a shuffling of feet around his head. Some great commotion and yelling. “Get her! She’s the one!” Footsteps crunched on gravel.
Bang! A
gunshot rang out, followed by a banshee scream. Then a woman’s voice, also incredibly far off: “Get away from him.” A board clattered to the ground.
“Bitch, we’ll kill your infected ass if you don’t give us the little one.”
Bang! Someone fell beside Charlie and growled, “What the fuck you waitin’ for? Get ’em!”
Bang!
“Get up, Charlie! Get up! Get up!”
Apparently, someone wanted him to get up. Charlie struggled to his feet. He heard a yelp of pain and squinted his right eye to see one of the thugs disappear behind the Hunger Palace. The others had retreated into the shadows, except for the one writhing on the ground, clutching his bleeding leg. As his attacker tried to rise, Charlie recovered his senses enough to grab the two-by-four. He clocked the guy with a clumsy swing. The man crumpled to the ground, hissing softly, like he was deflating. Charlie gave him a kick in the ribs, bringing a cry of pain, then followed with a kick to the head. The man fell silent. “I oughtta kill you,” Charlie said, contenting himself with spitting blood on his assailant.
Charlie wiped his face with his forearm and turned toward the church. With his wits slowed and his vision blurred in one eye and gone in the other, it took him a moment to realize that Tawny was standing in front of him holding a pistol, braced against the corner of the building. Romy stood beside her. He shook his head to clear it, but whatever was stuck in there was stuck in there good. He staggered toward the two of them.
“My God, they fucked you up bad. We need to get out of here.” She kept the gun pointed at the man lying on the ground. When Charlie didn’t answer, she yelled, “Charlie. Charlie! We gotta get out of here! Can you drive?”
She was talking to him. He should say something. “I can try,” he said, but it sounded like someone else talking.
Tawny turned her head and cried out, “Wyatt! Run to the car!”
Charlie thought he saw a pair of fiery eyes glinting at him from behind a junked washing machine by the abandoned laundromat next door. Then he heard a thump as a piece of brick hit the church wall near his head. The boy scampered out, holding a plastic bag. Tawny pushed both children toward the car and grabbed her backpack. “Hurry! Just keep moving!” She shoved her children into the back seat, climbed in after them, and slammed the door. “Go! Go!”
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