Time's Witness (69 page)

I was in the Trinity vestry, a small room beside the altar where the priests put on their vestments and store the implements of the mass.

Winston Russell stood by the long table in the middle of the room. He had a switchblade in his right hand, and his left arm around Paul Madison's neck.

He was tall, as tall as I am, but built heavier, although since I’d seen him last, prison and hiding-out had trimmed away the bulk and turned the rest to muscle. His arms were sweaty, sunburnt, and scraped raw, his jeans smeared with dirt and dust; sweat trickled from his scalp through his close-cropped reddish hair into his eyes. The eyes were round, large, white-blue as a shark's. When he saw me, he lurched back with a grunt, the tendons of his arms tightening against Paul's neck. The top of Paul's head barely reached Winston's shoulder.

“Okay, Winston. Step away, and let him go!” I braced the .38 revolver on my forearm.

“Mangum!” Winston jerked Paul tight against him, then growled in his low twang. “I got you down there.”

“No, you missed.”

(Later, Etham Foster was to pull the slug from the 30.06 out of the metal padding of the vest, an eighth of an inch from my heart.)

He sneered, “I didn’t miss the cunt you’re calling a cop.”

Hate raced up me so fast and hot my skin burned. Everything in me wanted to kill him. I made myself breathe. “I said, let him go.”

His face purplish, Paul rasped in a choked whisper. “Get out, Cuddy. He doesn’t know what he's doing.”

I said, “Stand still, Paul. This is the man that killed Cooper.
And Willie Slidell. This is Winston Russell. His partner Purley's made a full confession.”

A spasm shook through Winston's body. Then he smiled; he had small even white teeth, and the scariest smile I’ve ever seen. “That blubberhead moron came crying home to you, huh, Mangum?”

“That's right. We’ve got Purley, and we’ve got the money too. Put down the knife. You’re under arrest.”

He laughed out loud.

I was thinking: Paul must have heard the window crash, and rushed in to see what was wrong. Winston had grabbed him, then probably locked the door. So I couldn’t count on anybody else knowing we were in here. Out in the chapel, I could hear shouts, sirens, the noise of running footsteps, but not toward us.

I stepped forward, steadying the gun.

Paul's eyes were much calmer than Winston's, or mine either. He said, “Cuddy, don’t shoot him.”

Winston laughed again. He locked his arm under Paul's chin, then quickly slashed a deep line down his cheek, and another side-ways, cutting a cross in the flesh. Blood splattered all over Paul's face, and dripped down Winston's hand.

I yelled, “You fucking shit!”

Paul's mouth opened wide from the pain, then he tightened it, breathing through his nose. His hands stayed motionless at his sides. His eyes stayed on mine, clear and light. “Cuddy, don’t,” he said quietly. “Let him give himself up.”

“Shut up, faggot!” Winston turned the knife sideways, and slowly slid it across the surface of Paul's throat. A bright red curve of blood followed the blade. Paul panted, but he still didn’t cry out.

Winston kept smiling. “You get the picture, Mangum? Drop the gun right now, or I slit this asshole's throat.” We stared at each other, as he raised the switchblade again, his hand spasming, “
I
mean it, prick!
Don’t fuck with me!”

I nodded. “Okay, Winston.” Without taking my eyes from his, I slowly held out my arm, then tossed the gun on the floor, where he’d have to come around the vestry table to get it. Very fast, he grabbed Paul by the hair, slamming his head down on the table hard, then
he sprang for the gun.

In a smear of blood, Paul slid off the table, dragging with him a red stole with a gold cross. He crumpled to the floor under it.

With the steel muzzle pointed at my head, Winston pocketed the knife while he backed across the room to the broken window. He stepped through it onto the fire-escape landing. “This time I won’t miss,” he snarled, flicking sweat from his eyes. “Right where Bobby got it. Rot in hell, Captain.”

He smiled and pulled the trigger.

It clicked.

Frantic, he squeezed the trigger again, over and over as fast as he could. His eyes whitened.

“Don’t you remember?” I smiled as I moved forward. “I don’t like loaded guns.”

When I lunged for him, he hurled the gun; the butt hit me right above the eye. The pain knocked me down. Scrambling to my feet, I wiped the blood out of my eye, and went after him. Halfway down the fire escape, he jumped to the ground. I jumped straight from the landing. I was about thirty feet behind him through the Trinity cloister, around the soup kitchen, across the long parking lot. I could see him vaulting over the stone wall into the old cemetery. The damn bulletproof vest felt like a heavy lead slab plastered by sweat to my chest. I’d carried heavier, hotter weight farther and faster in the Army, but—it struck me, as I fought for breath—I’d been a teenager then.

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. Jesus Christ! What that sick s.o.b. did to Paul's face….”