“Hard to say. Are you maybe thinking whoever scarred your young lady’s face is going to come back and try to finish the job?”
“Something like that.”
“Crazy fella.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
“Sane men will often take a hint,” Mr. Kenopensky said. “Crazy men rarely do. Saw it often back in the sagebrush days, before electric lights and phones. Warn em off, they come back. Beat em up, they hit from ambush—first you, then the one they’re really after. Jug em up in county, they sit and wait to get out. Safest thing to do with crazy men is put em in the penitentiary for a long stretch. Or kill em.”
“That’s what I think, too.”
“Don’t let him back to spoil the rest of her pretty, if that’s what he aims to do. If you care for her as much as you seem to, you’ve got a responsibility.”
I certainly did, although Clayton was no longer the problem. I went back to my little modular apartment, made strong black coffee, and sat down with a legal pad. My plan was a little clearer now, and I wanted to start fleshing in the details.
I doodled instead. Then fell asleep.
When I woke up it was almost midnight and my cheek ached where it had been pressed against the checked oilcloth covering the kitchen table. I looked at what was on my pad. I didn’t know if I’d drawn it before going to sleep or if I had wakened long enough to do it and just couldn’t remember.
It was a gun. Not a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, but a pistol.Mypistol. The one I’d tossed beneath the porch steps at 214 West Neely. It was probably still there. Ihopedit was still there.
I was going to need it.
11
11/19/63 (Tuesday)
Sadie called in the morning and said Deke was a little better, but she intended to make him stay home tomorrow, as well. “Otherwise he’ll just try to come in, and have a setback. But I’ll packmy bag before I leave for school tomorrow morning and head your way as soon as period six is over.”
Period six ended at ten past one. That meant I’d have to be gone from Eden Fallows by four o’clock tomorrow afternoon at the latest. If only I knew where. “I look forward to seeing you.”
“You sound all stiff and funny. Are you having one of your headaches?”
“A little one,” I said. It was true.
“Go lie down with a damp cloth over your eyes.”
“I’ll do that.” I had no intention of doing that.
“Have you thought of anything?”
I had, as a matter of fact. I’d thought that taking Lee’s rifle wasn’t enough. And shooting him at the Paine house was a bad option. Not just because I’d probably be caught, either. Counting Ruth’s two, there were four kids in that house. I might still have tried it if Lee had been walking from a nearby bus stop, but he’d be riding with Buell Frazier, the neighbor who’d gotten him the job at Ruth Paine’s request.
“No,” I said. “Not yet.”
“We’ll think of something. You wait and see.”
12
I drove (still slowly, but with increasing confidence) across town to West Neely, wondering what I’d do if the ground-floor apartment was occupied. Buy a new gun, I supposed… but the .38 Police Special was the one I wanted, if only because I’d had one just like it in Derry, and that mission had been a success.
According to newscaster Frank Blair on theTodayshow, Kennedy had moved on to Miami, where he was greeted by a large crowd ofcubanos.Some held up signs reading VIVA JFK while others carried a banner reading KENNEDY IS A TRAITOR TO OUR CAUSE. If nothing changed, he had seventy-two hours left. Oswald, who had only slightly longer, would be in the BookDepository, perhaps loading cartons into one of the freight elevators, maybe in the break room drinking coffee.
I might be able to get him there—just walk up to him and plug him—but I’d be collared and wrestled to the floor. After the killshot, if I was lucky. Before, if I wasn’t. Either way, the next time I saw Sadie Dunhill it would be through glass reinforced with chickenwire. If I had to give myself up in order to stop Oswald—tosacrifice myself,in hero-speak—I thought I could do that. But I didn’t want it to play out that way. I wanted Sadie and my poundcake, too.
There was a pot barbecue on the lawn at 214 West Neely, and a new rocking chair on the porch, but the shades were drawn and there was no car in the driveway. I parked in front, told myself that bold is beautiful, and mounted the steps. I stood where Marina had stood on April tenth when she came to visit me and knocked as she had knocked. If someone answered the door, I’d be Frank Anderson, canvassing the neighborhood on behalf of theEncyclopaedia Britannica(I was too old forGrit). If the lady of the house expressed an interest, I’d promise to come back with my sample case tomorrow.
No one answered. Maybe the lady of the house also worked. Maybe she was down the block, visiting a neighbor. Maybe she was in the bedroom that had been mine not long ago, sleeping off a drunk. It was mix-nox to me, as we say in the Land of Ago. The place was quiet, that was the important thing, and the sidewalk was deserted. Even Mrs. Alberta Hitchinson, the walker-equipped neighborhood sentry, wasn’t in evidence.
