Ed’s T-shirt was sticky with his own blood, still dripping off the ledge of his lips. His nose was broken, which he knew because he’d taken more than one basketball to the face in his lifetime. He felt warm bricks at his back and found his bearings in the kitchen against the foot of the wood-fired stove.
“You will be punished at the hand of God for rape and the death of an unborn child,” Jack said. “A life for a life.”
The pronouncement sent a chill through Ed’s skull that shocked his consciousness. He was going to die today, like this, sitting rag-doll-like on the floor of a bakery. His left arm, useless, wilted on the concrete and sent waves of nausea through his belly when he breathed. He focused on the light pouring from the empty storeroom. It took the edge off the unbelievable hurt.
Opposite him, Jack sat with his back against the wall between the sink and the prep table, legs spread out before him in a V, the revolver ready at his thigh. Ed couldn’t look directly at it without being overcome by tremors. The kitchen was dusky like twilight, like the premature end of a life.
A foxhole prayer with a flaming torch tied to its tail ran through the trenches of his mind, wordless and frantic.
Jack’s dried blood from Ed’s head-butt coated his own upper lip, and Ed’s scalp recalled the sensation of taking a hit to the man’s teeth. The bruise prompted strange associations in Ed’s mind about their blood mixing with Coach Henderson’s on the slick bakery floor the way Julie Mansfield’s had mixed with his mother’s when she slipped on the street.
“Your nose is broken too,” Ed said, frightened by the silence. He shifted his aching neck and felt the corners of his eyes like a knife to his sinuses. “We have that in common.”
“It’s not much,” Jack said.
Faint noises reached him from outside. A dull hum of human conversation. Radios crackling. Car doors closing. The sounds of Jack’s impending punishment.
Jack, Ed thought, heard the sounds of backup and support.
“God forgives sins,” Ed said.
“Not yours.”
“Why not?”
“You think God has some obligation to you?”
Ed started to shake his head, but the stabbing behind his eyes stopped him. “No obligation. Just a promise. Is God going to forgive you?”
Jack shifted the revolver an inch or two. “For what?”
“Anything you want forgiveness for.”
“Don’t have anything.”
A few heavy seconds passed. Jack shifted from the V-sit to a crouch. “You’re sorry about that, aren’t you? You’re sorry that my soul isn’t black like yours.” Jack moved toward Ed. He stayed out of sight of anyone in the dining room, or of any sharpshooter positioned at the shattered window, and dropped to his knees between Ed’s spread-eagled feet. Jack’s finger stayed inside the revolver’s trigger ring while he talked with hand motions. “You’re sorry, because if God had any cause to condemn me, you might think you could claim to be my equal, chosen by the Lord to administer his justice.”
Ed’s heartbeat knocked harder against the bullet wound in his arm. There was no reasoning with a lunatic, but silence felt like agreement. “No. I meant—”
“You’re not anything like me, boy.”
“We are alike, but not in the way you think!”
“Now you know how I think.”
“I know you want to kill me,” Ed said.
“Yes! Oh, yes! Since the day I learned what you did. But I’m a patient man. I wait for the divinely appointed time. Twelve thirty!”
“So why did you start shooting Coach so early?”
“Nolan Henderson isn’t relevant to any discussion about you and me. Are we cut from the same cloth or not?”
“We are!” Ed shouted. “Because I want to kill you too! God help me, I do. It’s what’s here.” He thumped his heart with his good hand. “And it’s no different from the way you feel about me. I know it. But I’m not going to act on it, am I? I’m not going to sit here and make up some story about God wanting you dead so that I can do what I want.”
Jack looked at the gun and smiled with only half of his mouth. “I doubt you have my self-control, Ed, my spiritual discipline.”
“I have more. I have so much more.”
“Let’s see about that, why don’t we?” Jack pressed the barrel against Ed’s forehead. Ed closed his eyes. He took shallow breaths and had no sense of how long Jack stayed this way, the metal mouth imprinting a cold round O in Ed’s skin. “No, no,” Jack murmured. “It’s just not time, saith the Lord. Your turn!”
Jack lifted Ed’s right arm from its supportive position and spun the revolver on his finger, then clapped the weapon into Ed’s hand. “Do you know how to hold one of these?” Jack asked. “Not so different from the Glock, and you were good enough with that. Good enough for this purpose anyway.”
The tremors from Ed’s fingers moved up his arm and into his neck and into his jaw, which seemed to vibrate as Jack sandwiched Ed’s grip with both of his own hands and then leaned into the gun, resting his own brow on the barrel.
“Hold it steady now, or you’ll miss.”
“I’m not going to shoot you.”
“Then God will be disappointed in you. Ready? It’s all you, boy.” And Jack took his hands away from Ed’s and raised his arms out to the sides.
“Why?” Ed whispered.
“Because I have faith that God favors me, and he’ll spare my life. But not yours.”
Audrey’s head was pounding from the noise of the rotors and from the realization that Julie wouldn’t be speaking with Jack. She’d become so hysterical when the medics arrived to transport her that she’d had to be sedated. The other women, wedged in tightly on a bench designed for only two people, didn’t speak on the anxious flight back to the hospital.
The cabin was bright with sharp high-noon sunlight. It was 12:15, and within minutes the helicopter left the snow behind. Audrey stared down at the carpet of fog that was breaking up in smoky patches. She began to weep, and the crying was her own this time. The grief belonged to no one else.
Diane took Audrey’s hand.
Her tears fell onto the cell phone in her lap. The police had made all the calls, but Audrey hoped for one more chance to reach her men. It was impossible to know what Jack would do now, if he’d believe his own colleagues’ word that Julie lived.
Diane picked up the phone and wiped it dry with the cuff of her sleeve. The pressure of her swiping woke the screen and revealed all Audrey’s applications. She studied the little icons for a moment. Then she touched one. The screen became a monitor.
“It’s a camera?” she mouthed to Audrey.
Audrey nodded. Diane gave her the phone and pointed to Julie. “Show Jack!” she said loudly.
It wouldn’t satisfy Jack’s demands—at this point, nothing would. A photo of Julie sleeping might be worth little more than a photo of Julie dead. But Audrey snapped a grainy, slightly blurry picture of Julie on her gurney and sent it to Captain Wilson.
The act planted a seed of hope in her mind. She tried to water it for the remaining minutes of the flight.
A police cruiser was waiting at the hospital helipad. Julie was first off, and taken directly indoors. Miralee trailed behind her, head down, without saying good-bye. Diane helped Audrey down and then shielded her from the whipping air as they crouched and met the officers who’d come for them.
They ducked into the backseat and slammed the doors.
“Your husband’s out,” the one driving said right away.
Audrey’s heart split in two. Thank God! “And Ed?”
His hesitation brought a wave of fear over Audrey’s head. “Don’t lose faith yet,” he told her.
It was going to take much more than a photograph to convince Jack to spare her son’s life. Audrey pulled the Hall family’s pendant out of her pocket and turned it over in her fingers.
“We’ll show him that,” Diane said, looking at the diamond.
Audrey let the chain pool in her lap, and she set the stone on top. “This necklace hasn’t saved anyone yet.” She scooped it up and held it out to Diane. “In fact, it’s yours. I didn’t even ask.”
Diane folded Audrey’s fingers closed over the jewelry and pushed her hand back. “It’s my mother’s, and Julie’s, and mine, and yours. With a legacy like that, who knows what it might speak to Jack?”
“It’s just a stone on a chain.”
“That’s like you saying you’re just a baker’s wife. Look at what you did today.”
“I didn’t do it.”
“Is that your way of saying God did it? Through you?”
Audrey offered a tiny smile.
“I’d like to see what else he can do,” Diane said.
The ride to the bakery lasted only five minutes. The streets were blockaded as they were the morning of Audrey’s accident, but this time sunshine illuminated the scene, and a crowd of bystanders had collected in the park and at the storefronts near the intersection. People were taking pictures. And drinking coffee. The female officer who’d taken Audrey’s bloody clothes moved a barricade to let the cruiser through.
Audrey saw Geoff with Captain Wilson and jumped out of the sedan before it came to a complete stop. Geoff saw her at the same time, and they reached each other in seconds.
His arms around her waist filled her with hope; his breath in her hair was peace. She squeezed his neck and whispered, “Where’s our son?”
“Playing hero,” Geoff said, and when he drew back from Audrey his eyes were wet. He pointed toward the crowd gathered at the mouth of the park behind them. “He got all of us out.”
Audrey saw Diane moving toward Estrella, who was surrounded by her husband and grandsons. Estrella lifted her hand, waving Diane to join them. Julie’s student Leslie sat on the curb hugging the bedraggled alley cat. Someone was applying a bandage to the cat’s rear foot.
“Coach is at the hospital,” Geoff said. “Wilson’s getting ready to send a team in.”
“What’s Jack saying?”
“Nothing. I’m going to go talk to him, Audrey.”
Audrey looked at her feet. “What can you say that Wilson and his guys can’t?”
“Lots of things. I’m a pastor.”
“What are you going to say?”
“I’m going to beg him to save Ed’s life.”
Audrey shook her head in frustration and felt tears rising again. “I couldn’t bring Jack what he wants.”
“No one can, Audrey. No one.”
She groped at straws. “There’s a picture of Julie—”
“Wilson showed me.”
“And there’s this.” She cupped Geoff’s hand and set the pendant in his palm. “It’s something Julie took with her. Maybe Jack will . . .” She didn’t know what she was trying to say.
Geoff wrapped his arms around her again. She rested her ear over his heart and he prayed, “Lord, bring me and my son back to this woman you gave us.” He kissed her on the top of her head.
Audrey stood alone in the center of Sunflower and Main while someone took Geoff to don a bulletproof vest. She didn’t understand why Geoff’s going in was necessary, why Wilson would allow it. Not even God was getting through to Jack.
“Your husband ees loco.” Estrella stood at Audrey’s elbow.
“Just the right amount of crazy for God to work with,” Diane said behind them both.
Audrey hoped so. She prayed so. Hearing her friends say it aloud made it seem possible.