At dusk, the moon was at the horizon, immense and orange as the sun. But the graveyard was so thick with old trees I couldn’t see where he’d gone. Still, even when I couldn’t spot him through the waxy magnolias or tilted gravestones, I could hear him. How to listen because you can’t see; that, you never forget from the jungle. How not to make a sound; that you don’t forget either. So I heard him crouch to get his breath back. I heard him slither from stone to stone. Finally, scurrying up a little incline, he tripped on a flat tomb marker, cursed, fell. That's when I hit him from behind, coming at him in midair. His shirt ripped off in my hand, but I got him by the neck and flipped him. His first kick caught me in the knee; when I buckled, he kicked me again, in the chest, where the vest padded me. Grabbing, I twisted his foot, and we tumbled sideways back down the slope. His breath was hot and beery. I felt his fists figure out the bulletproof vest, and dig behind it for my kidneys. I pushed my thumbs into his throat.
Clawing my face, he broke loose, but I tackled him again. Now he was backed against the low iron railing around a large tomb-stone. The carved stone glowed in the orange moon. In a crouch, Winston panted at me through his bared teeth. “Come on, Mangum.”
Crouching too, I gestured at him with hands cupped. “YOU come on, you fuck!”
When I ran at him, he jerked the switchblade from his pocket, slashing out with it. I felt its blade rip open the sleeve of my jacket and tear across my arm. The knife flashed again, burning down the side of my face. “Yeah, Mangum,” he gasped, spraying spit. “Come get some more!”
The inside of my head burst open. I sprang straight at the knife, so fast and crazy it scared him for a second. Long enough for me to get his wrist. The knife stabbed across my thigh while I swung his body over the iron points of the grave railing. My fingers felt his wrist snap, shaking the knife loose. We both went down. Rolling over on him, I cracked my elbow into his nose until I could feel cartilage give way, crushing under my bone. When he kicked free, screaming, I kneed him in the groin, then pulled him back on his feet, and punched my fists into his head. I kept on hitting and hitting, ’til my hands got so slippery with blood they were sliding off his skin. When I let go, he sank slowly into the grass, pink foam bubbling from his lips.
Quivering, I kicked him in the side of the head. “STAND UP!”
He fought to one knee, snarling at me. I yanked him up by the front of his belt. Swaying, he squinted through his bloody eyes to find me, then he spit red gristle at my face. I slugged him again on the side of the head. The pain in my hand shot all the way up to my teeth. Clawing at my legs, he dropped at my feet, and rolled onto his back.
Like water, my legs gave way, and I fell, crawling from him. It felt like something dangerous was happening inside me. Each suck of breath was like another knife stab. Blinded, slippery with my own blood, I tried to pull myself up to my feet. I couldn’t. I knew I had to stop the blood spurting from the knife wounds. I couldn’t. I gave up, let my face slide into the grass. The insides of my eyelids saw brighter and brighter red. Then the dangerous thing soared fast and too strong to stop into my head. Everything was black.
Suddenly loud sirens drilled through my ear. With one hand, I crawled onto my knees. Over the stone wall bordering the cemetery, I saw, in the squint of one eye, a big dark blur flying toward me. It came thrashing under tree branches, rumbling the ground. The blur was a horse. Someone on it shouted, “Cudddddy!” He reined in hard, twisting sideways in the saddle. It looked like one of the patrolmen's horses, but the rider was Justin. Behind me, I heard a gurgling grunt, the thud of fast motion. I saw Winston, staggering in a weave, the knife back in his hand.
Light spat out of Justin's gun. The kerpoww of the shot cracked all around me. I scrambled to my feet and saw Winston drop to the ground, his back arching as if he were in a seizure. His hands dug at his stomach. Justin swung himself off the horse, walked past me, his arm straight out. I could see smoke at the long muzzle. He stood over Winston's flailing body. I heard people far away by the cemetery gates, running toward us, flashlights waving.
My throat burned. “Is he dead?”
Justin looked down, lowered the Smith & Wesson. Then he fired it again. Winston's jaw smashed in. His chest jumped, and was still.
Justin said, “He is now.”
I lurched over to him, and stared at Winston's body. When I could breathe, I coughed out, “You goddamn stupid asshole. You killed him!”
“I don’t care,” he said, and caught me as I swung my fist at his face and fell.
They had trouble holding me down in the ambulance, because they wouldn’t let me go find out what had happened at Trinity. Justin crouched near the stretcher. I kept telling him to get away from me. He kept saying Ralph had everything under control. Nancy and Brookside had already been rushed off to University Hospital. He didn’t know if they were alive. He’d found Paul Madison when he’d run after me and seen the vestry window smashed. Paul would be all right; they’d taken him to the hospital too. The ambulance attendants fighting me onto the stretcher couldn’t tell me anything about Nancy either. Or about how many other people were hurt, or how badly. Or let me use their C.B. to find out for myself. I heard one of them say, “This fucker's a maniac. Christ! You cops do this to him?”
“He's the Hillston police chief,” Justin said.
“Don’t shit me, man. That's a desk job! This man's a mess!”
I tried to stop them from gassing me then, but they did it, and stuck a needle in me. Later I realized it was oxygen and a transfusion they’d given me. I’d gone into shock from blood loss, with heart fibrillations. I came to—fog-headed, lying on a table in the U.H. emergency room, with blood pumping into me from an IV rack. My right hand was in a cast. I managed to force one eye open. A Vietnamese face was leaning over mine. My body jerked upwards. “Take it easy,” the man murmured; then I saw his white coat. And next to him I saw Justin, still splotched with my blood.
“Nancy's alive,” Justin said. He put his hand on my shoulder. “She's all right….But she lost the baby.”
“Aww, God.” I closed my eye. “Is…Brookside…?”
“He's still in O.R. It looks really bad.”
Winston's first shot had hit my vest. Brookside was turning—to shield me—when the second bullet entered his body from the left side, right under the heart. The slug was intact, lodged in the pericardial sac, and they were now performing open-heart surgery, trying to repair the damaged tissue and get the slug out before the heart tore. A team of surgeons had already been in there with him for over two hours.
The third bullet had grazed the skin of Brookside's neck as he fell; the fourth hit Nancy's thick gun belt; deflected, the flank shot struck her in the side, just above the hip crest. The deflection had saved her life, but not that of the fetus. When I came to, Nancy’d just been moved from O.R. to the recovery room. She was still unconscious.
Justin said, “One of the O.R. nurses told me about Brookside. It's a real long shot.” He stood back while the doctor wound tape around my thigh. “They haven’t given up. He's strong, and he's always been a fighter.…You know, everybody thinks it was an assassination attempt on him.”
It hurt a lot to talk. “He thought so…too.”
How could he not think he was the target? But “Watch out,” he’d said, at the sound of the first shot. By instinct, thrown his arm in front of me. You can’t stage what you’ll do. A hero—even by instinct.
Justin was talking. “Well, from what John Emory described, it looks like Andy had faced ’round to you, and if he hadn’t, that shot would have gotten him dead front.”
A nurse came from behind a screen, and called the Vietnamese doctor over. He told me, “Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”
After he left, I asked Justin, “Where's Lee?” He looked at me, puzzled. “Lee? She's here.”
“Where?”
“In the director's office. There's too much press out in the waiting room. Alice is with her. And Paul Madison. Jesu
s Christ! What that sick s.o.b. did to Paul's face….”
“Paul's okay though?”
“Yeah. Not pretty, but okay. And no concussion. He must have a hard head.”
I tried to nod. “Kept telling me to leave…like he was going to reason Winston out of it.”
His arms crossed over the stained jacket. “You walk in with an empty gun, right? And it saves your life. The sort of irony I know appeals to you.”
I was thinking—if I had taken the bullets from my pocket and loaded the gun, would Winston be alive now or would Paul be dead?
“Zeke's upstairs. I want to go see how he's doing, okay?” Justin started to put his hand back on my shoulder, but pulled it away. His eyes darkened to a deeper blue. “Say what you want to say, Captain.”
I squinted up at him. “You know what I want to say, Lieutenant. Russell was already down. Disarmed and down.”
“He was three feet from your back with that knife.” “Not the second shot.”
Justin looked straight at me, his eyes still, then he took a quiet breath. “The second shot was for Nancy. For her baby. He fired on a woman, a pregnant woman.”
“That's your reason.”
“I consider it a good enough one.”
“I know you do. But it isn’t a good enough reason.” “So what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. But as of now, you’re relieved of your duties.”
“Okay.” He touched my shoulder, then left.
Justin didn’t say a lot of things that I figured he was thinking, because I was thinking them. But I didn’t say a lot of things either. He didn’t say this was the second time he’d saved my life. He didn’t say that Winston had murdered Cooper Hall and at least three more people, including an unborn baby, and that others might still die. He didn’t say I should have really believed Winston was going to come after me, instead of half hoping he would try, so I could finally get him, because what I obviously couldn’t conceive was that he could get me. Not a pig like Winston.
Two young doctors came in to “do a little more sewing” on me. I let them, and went on thinking.
In a while, Wes Pendergraph brought a report from Ralph on the attack at the church. Janet Malley had a concussion from a club swung by one of the dozen thugs who’d shown up in the green van. Four of the other picketers had been badly beaten, and a bystander had a separated collarbone. The mounted patrolmen had cracked open the skull of one thug and fractured the ribs of another. Ten other people had been treated for smoke inhalation or minor injuries. Three assailants, who’d fled in the van, had suffered minor injuries when—under pursuit—they’d smashed into a median rail. All twelve of them were now in custody; all proved to have connections to the Carolina Patriots. So, Winston had either known they were planning the attack, or he’d persuaded them to do it as a cover. I thought the latter.
As for my own injuries—as Etham Foster grumbled when he stalked into the emergency room an hour and a half later with our medical examiner, Dick Cohen, slouching behind him—I was luckier than I deserved.
“It was distance saved you, babe, even with that vest.” Etham pressed his large thumb lightly on my breast. “Good as Winston was, he was just a little too far away. And that's the first time in your life you ever wore a vest, isn’t it? Out getting a doughnut!” He studied my arm, then my leg. “You dumb hillbilly. Man throws kerosene on you, puts cyanide in your car, smart as you are, you think you’d pay attention.”
I mumbled, “Like always, you’re right, Dr. D.”
“You look like somebody test-drove a sewing machine all over you.”
Dick Cohen gave his credentials and asked the Vietnamese doctor what the “damage was.” The worst had been blood loss from the three knife wounds; I now had seven pints donated by strangers in me. Plus I had fourteen stitches along my hairline, three under my lip, five above my eye, and thirty-some more on my forearm and thigh. Several bones were broken in my right hand. The rest was only “contusions, bruises, lacerations, some possible permanent loss of muscle tone in the left arm, and possible minor impairment of the left eardrum.”
“Doesn’t sound too bad,” said Etham. “He's got the weekend off anyhow.”
Cohen scratched his neck. “Bare knuckles against a psycho with a switchblade, cheesh! Next time, Mangum, why don’t you wait for a backup like you tell everybody else to?”
Etham's immense hand turned my head gently as he looked at the sutures. “Ralph said to tell you he feels ‘like shit’ about not checking that steeple. What I want to know is who told Russell you were going to be there. I figure he’d been waiting up on that landing two, three hours.”
Justin walked back into the room then. “Nancy's concious. But she broke up pretty badly when Zeke told her.”
Dick Cohen made a spitting noise. “Yeah, I heard the kids lost their baby. That's a tough one.”
Justin frowned. “They tried to make Zeke leave her room. They found out that was a mistake with a six-foot-seven Cherokee.”
We were quiet for a while, then Cohen asked Justin, “You hear anything about Andrew Brookside?”
“He's still in O.R., but the bullet's out. There’re over fifty reporters and television cameras out in the lobby. The mayor's out there. Jack Molina—”
I said, “Who's talking for us?”
“Nobody yet.”
I asked, “Can I get up?”
The Vietnamese doctor said, “We’re going to move you to a room in a minute. In the morning, you can get up.”
“Can I leave?”
“When you can walk, you can leave,” was his answer.
I told Etham Foster I’d like him to make a statement for HPD, to stress all the precautions we’d taken, and that all the assailants had been arrested, and—he stopped me. “I know what to say.”
Dick Cohen was rubbing his knuckles in his eyes. “You grits are too much for me. I gotta get back to Brooklyn. Buffalo Bill here riding up on his fuckin’ horse? A fuckin’ horse.”
Justin said quietly, “I knew the layout. A car couldn’t get through. It was the fastest way to get to him.”
Cohen lifted both shoulders. “Of course. What else.”
Etham glanced at Justin, then at me. “I guess we’re all lucky that Savile was as fast as he was. And as accurate. That was your three fifty-seven, wasn’t it, Savile, not Mangum's?” He slid a revolver from his Windbreaker pocket, racked it open. “I found this one on the floor in the church.” He spun the chamber. “This one hasn’t been fired. In fact, hasn’t been loaded. Which is careless.” Walking over to the sodden red mound of my clothes on the counter, where they’d been stacked after the nurse cut them off me, Etham picked up my shoulder holster, and slipped the revolver in it. Then he lifted the bloody vest, looked at it carefully, pinched out the crushed bullet. “Close,” he said.
Pulling out his black notebook, Cohen shook it open and flipped through the pages. “Checked the prelim autopsy on the Russell stiff. One three fifty-seven slug in the abdomen, and the same through his jugular. But the man had been beaten to a frigging pulp. Major subdural hematoma. I’m talking critically ruptured blood vessels in his fuckin’ head. Must have been a bull. To come back at you with a knife, after that! Got a couple of ribs splintering his lung! Incredible. Cheesh, Mangum, what’d you do, run a semi over him?”
Etham was looking at me. “For a fellow too peaceful to carry a gun, you’re a man of pretty violent impulses. Not easy to kill a man with your bare hands. Ugly too.”
Cohen yawned. “So that's Winston Russell, huh? Sort of inhuman. A walking corpse, torn up like that, and still it takes two from a three fifty-seven to stop him. Un-fuckin’-believable.” He picked up his black bag. “So, Chief, how do we write this thing up?”
I looked away from Etham. Looked past Justin. Looked at the fluorescent circle of light above my head. Nobody said anything. Cohen cleared his throat, and waited.
I said, “Write it up that the suspect was slain while resisting arrest.”
Cohen pushed the notebook into his jacket pocket. “By the officer in pursuit?”
“Yes.”
chapter 26
Hair in a white tangle, Isaac Rosethorn came lumbering at a lop-sided trot around the corner of the corridor where an orderly was wheeling me to my room. Isaac's distraught eyes were fixed straight ahead as he ran right past us. When I called out to him, he spun around, and with horrible wheezing snorts leaned over my wheel-chair, tripping against it as it kept moving. His collar points poked sideways, his shirt flopped out of his wrinkled pants, his socks bunched around his ankles. “Ah, ah, ah, my dear Slim!” He glanced over me quickly, stared at my eyes, then—to the amused surprise of the young black orderly—he kissed me on the top of the head. “Look at you, look at you. I could weep.”
“You could weep?” I whispered. Isaac's deep sighs caromed down the long sterile hall while he patted my hair at a stumbling jog.
Talking, the old lawyer sat by the bed in the dark, talking, until I fell asleep. Alice had called him at the Piedmont, so he’d been told what had happened at Trinity. And he’d heard more details from Bubba Percy in the lobby. I wasn’t surprised that one of the first things he said after the nurse gave up trying to make him leave was that he was deeply upset to hear that Winston Russell was dead.
“You damn old man,” I muttered, groggy, “all you care about is your damn subpoenas.”
“No.” I felt the breath of his sigh pass near my hand. “No. I care because I don’t believe in killing. For any reason. And I feel sad for…anyone who has to carry that.”
“Everybody carries something.”
He patted my leg. “Want to talk about it?”
“I don’t know.…”
He sat back, waiting. After a while, I asked him how badly he’d needed whatever he could have forced out of Winston at the trial. He said, not much; that between us, he really didn’t believe he needed much of anybody but George himself.
Time's Witness Page 54