Troubled Waters (33 page)

The splotches on my skin and blouse were blood. Ted's blood. And his brains.

I retched. I gulped acid, then retched again. I leaned away from the head splattered like a Halloween pumpkin and emptied my stomach contents on the grass.

I became aware of Ron saying something from behind me. I turned. “Oh, God, Ron, he's—”

I swallowed sour, bitter fluid. “He's—his head—”

“Get a grip, Cass.” My brother's voice was incredibly calm. His face was pale, but he didn't look faint or sick.

There was an animal bellow. A wild man ran up, a big ugly weapon held aloft in both hands. Zack ran to Ted's body and gave it a vicious kick with his pointed cowboy boots. Then he rolled it over and thrust the gun into Ted's stomach. He poked the body with the barrel six or seven times, jabbing the metal into soft, dead flesh.

“Oh, my God. What's he doing?” I turned to Ron. “Stop him. He's—”

“He's checking the body for booby traps,” Ron replied. “In 'Nam, the Cong used to plant bombs in dead bodies.”

“He's not in 'Nam!”

But he was. Zack was back in the bad boonies. His eyes were wild; he jerked his head from side to side as if the enemy could be found crouching behind the carefully pruned yew trees.

Suddenly, he gave a deep, animal grunt and shifted on his feet, bracing himself. He hoisted the gun and pointed it at my chest.

“Chu hoi,”
he shouted. “
Chu hoi
, you goddamn gook bastard.
Chu hoi
.”

“Cass.” My brother's voice was sharp, insistent. “Raise your hands in the air and say
chu hoi
.”

I did. My hands shook, but I lifted my arms. My legs were about to give way, but I managed to stay standing. The gun that had just blown Ted Havlicek's head off was now pointed directly at my heart.

“Chu hoi,”
I said in a strange, small voice.

Something changed in Zack's eyes. He came back, slowly but visibly, from 'Nam. Clarity settled over his big features. He looked down at the rifle and lifted it high over his head, then threw it as far as he could. He bellowed as it sailed over the bushes, landing in a clearing.

He squatted. He went down on his haunches, the soles of his feet planted squarely on the ground. I'd never seen an American squat like that. He rocked back and forth, mumbling in a language I took to be Vietnamese.

Neighbors were beginning to gather at the houses down the road. What the hell were we going to tell them? One part of my mind tried to work while the other gave way to sheer hysteria. There was no way I could look at the bleeding lump of flesh on Rap's front lawn.

In the distance, a siren sounded. My knees refused to hold me up any longer. I stumbled toward Rap's porch and sank down on the concrete. “How did Zack get here?”

“I signaled him.” Ron's tension had melted. He sagged in the chair, only his stiff body brace keeping him from complete collapse.

“But Ted took your medallion.”

“I have a phone hooked onto the side of the chair,” Ron said. “It's on a business band. All I have to do is press the green button and it sends to base, which is Zack. So I knew he'd come, I just didn't know when.”

Zack drew a harsh, ragged breath. It turned into a profound sob, a cry of the soul. I crawled over to him, wrapped my arms around him and cradled his huge bulk in my arms as best I could. He emanated a powerful male animal smell, composed of sweat and fear and adrenaline.

At first, I rocked while he cried, but then my own tears flowed. I cried for Kenny, for Ted, for Ron in his body-prison, for Zack, for the pain of Vietnam. For Jan. Finally for Jan's lost years and Ron's lost marriage. And for me. God knows why, but all tears seem in the end to be for oneself.

Zack's sobs became less animal. I pulled away and wiped my face with a dirty hand. “I need a drink,” I muttered.

Zack's huge hand enveloped mine. He squeezed hard and said, “No, you don't.”

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-E
IGHT

“I mean, it was kind of an impulse thing,” Ron said. “It seemed right at the time. But, hell, it's been fourteen years. I don't know her anymore.” He lowered his eyes, then raised them again, meeting mine with a look of pure anguish. “I'm not sure I knew her then. How can we start over as if the last fourteen years never happened?”

We sat in the hospital cafeteria. Several grueling hours had passed since the police drove up to Rap's house and found a very dead body, a man in a wheelchair, a distraught Vietnam veteran, and a near-hysterical lawyer. Somehow we'd explained enough to get Zack to the V.A. hospital and Ron and me released. It helped a lot that the gun in Ted's waistband hadn't been registered. It helped even more that Luke Stoddard vouched for Ron and me by telephone. The V.A. admitted Zack for observation and Ron would be sleeping at Toledo Hospital until his attendant was released.

I sighed and leaned my elbows on the cold Formica table. I was bone-tired and sick at heart. Sick of blood and violence and betrayal. I wanted to go home.

“She needs you more than you need her,” I said, trying to focus on Ron instead of the image that haunted me: Ted's twisted glasses, lying in a pool of blood. “That's not a bad start.”

“You mean, now that she's disabled and needs physical therapy.” His tone was as bitter as I'd ever heard it. He was usually so upbeat, so unwilling to give in to the darker emotions.

“That is not what I mean and you know it. Or you should know it.” My voice was raw. “Jan's been alone so long. She needs a home. She needs a husband.” I had a tiny moment's wondering whether I was really talking about Jan. Was there a portion of my feminist, independent soul that would have liked to be loved the way Jan was so obviously loved? It didn't help my mood to realize that the piped music in the cafeteria was playing a particularly saccharine Carpenters tune.

Ron's set, intent face relaxed into a smile. “Well, let's go see my wife.” Was it my imagination, or did his voice linger just a little on the last two words? Words he'd probably given up hope of ever saying in public.

We took the oversized elevator, which was crowded with nurses and doctors and visitors and one smiling elderly man walking with his IV. I pushed the chair down gleaming corridors, past the nurses' station and the sunrooms.

Jan was out of the ICU. She was in a regular private room. I had a quick lawyer-thought: Would whatever insurance she had from Wal-Mart cover her now that she was really someone else?

I pushed open the door and saw Father Jerry in one chair, Harve Sobel in another, and Dana sitting on the wide windowsill.

“Better not let Dr. Singh see this,” I said. “He'd throw at least three of us out.”

“I was just telling Jan,” Harve said in his smoker's voice, “that Ronald Reagan is no longer president. She considered it good news.”

Jan sat almost upright, her bandaged head propped by pillows instead of braced. Her face was more yellow than purple now, but her cheeks had more color than I'd seen before.

A vase of blood-red roses rested on the wheeled bed table. I cocked my head toward it and raised an eyebrow. “Wes,” Dana said with a disdainful wave of her hand.

Father Jerry pointed to the
Blade
. Tomorrow's paper, I was sure, would contain a carefully doctored account of the bizarre shooting on the Lost Peninsula, but today's headline said that Wes Tannock had slipped twelve points in the polls since it was revealed that he'd accepted a campaign contribution from “alleged manufacturers of counterfeit airplane parts.”

“Nice of him,” I said noncommittally.

“The anemones are from Tarky,” Dana said. A smaller vase with a mix of red, purple, and orange flowers rested next to her on the windowsill.

“The
Blade
says he's going to open his own political consulting firm,” she went on. “Like anyone's going to hire him after Wes gets through trashing him.” She shook her head. “I almost feel sorry for Tark the Shark. I guess I feel sorry for anyone who got taken by my beloved ex-husband.”

“Speaking of Rap,” I said, “is he really in Michigan? I was afraid for a minute that Ted killed him.”

Dana gave a sound somewhere between a grunt and a laugh. “No such luck. He's up in Monroe doing some deal with sound equipment for a political rally.”

Father Jerry cleared his throat. “I heard on the news that a group of anthropologists went down to Honduras and dug up a lot of bodies. They think one of them was Joaquín Baltasar.”

“Waaa-keeen,” Jan echoed. “Ooooor Waaakeeen.”

“Yeah. Poor Joaquín.” Ron's voice tried to sound sad, but the smile on his face rejoiced in Jan's comprehensibility.

“All she needs is about five more consonants,” I murmured.

Dr. Singh swept into the room, followed by a short, dark-skinned woman in a white coat. “I thought since you were so much better,” he said to Jan, “that I should introduce you to the best plastic surgeon in this hospital. She will take charge of restoring your face.”

The young woman stepped forward, held out her hand, and said, “I'm Dr. Ysabel Navarro.”

Belita
. Little Belita of the round brown face and laughing eyes. Little Belita, whose solemn child-face I had last seen on a bunch of pastel flyers I was about to distribute at the county fair.

The breath rushed out of my body. I wanted to jump up and hug her, all five feet of her, but then I wondered whether she'd know me. Did she have any memory at all of the Amigos Unidos day care center? I glanced at Father Jerry. He gave a tiny shake of his head. Not now, he seemed to say. Wait.

Sounds drifted in from the corridor. The clanking of meal trays, the chatter of passers-by, the canned music. The tune caught my ear; it was a “lite” version of Simon and Garfunkle's “Bridge over Troubled Water.”

The words came back to me as I rested my head against the cool white wall. “When you're weary, feeling down. When evening falls so hard.”

Belita was our bridge over the troubled waters of the past. We'd done it for her—or at least we believed we were doing it for her. Calling attention to the fact that one child injured in the fields by deadly poison was one too many. Acting as if she was important, not just a migrant kid who could be thrown away, left to a dead-end future.

And her future hadn't been dead-end. Somehow she'd climbed out of the limitations of her background and gone to medical school. Something good had come out of that summer after all.

I was still shaken by Ted's death. Still fragile. That was the only explanation for the tears that I couldn't seem to stop. They slid silently down my face as Belita took Jan through the steps of her proposed surgical plan.

There were other Belitas out there. I felt it as the song swelled to its climax. “Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down.” Other children had made it out of poverty, thanks to Head Start. Other families had found decent housing, thanks to Legal Services. Other kids had been trained for careers thanks to the Job Corps.

We hadn't ended poverty, but we'd made a dent. And even a tiny dent was better than complacent acceptance of the unacceptable.

After Belita and Dr. Singh left the room, Jan turned to Ron. She held out her hand and grasped his. She murmured something I didn't quite catch, something that sounded like “honeymoon city.”

But that didn't make sense.

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CHAPTER ONE

Innocence is a bitch. Innocent clients haunt you till the day you die. No matter that you've done your best; your guy's serving time for something he didn't do, and it's all your fault. If you were half the lawyer you think you are, you'd have convinced the jury to let him go.

Fortunately, I hadn't had all that many innocent clients in the course of my practice.

Keith Jernigan was one of them.

I was on my way to the Appellate Division to argue for his freedom, scuffing my feet in golden-brown sycamore leaves and gazing at the pure blue sky through feathery Japanese maple leaves against neat brick town houses. It was a perfect fall day, crisp and bright as a fresh-picked apple, but I didn't care about the play of sunlight on the brownstones or the bronze chrysanthemums in ornate planters next to intricate wrought-iron gates. All I cared about was whether I could convince a majority of the appellate judges that a gross miscarriage of justice had taken place.

Because if I couldn't—

Because if I couldn't, a guy who called me the Trojan princess, who sent me letters with my first name spelled out in Greek, who sent me cards at Christmas and on my birthday, who had the sharpest wit and the sweetest smile I'd ever seen, a guy who had absolutely completely totally not committed the crime for which he was serving time—that guy was going to rot in jail for seven more years and I'd lose whatever tiny shred of faith I had left in the criminal justice system.