Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also By Karin Slaughter
Title Page
Dedication
Monday
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Tuesday
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Wednesday
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Thursday
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Friday
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Saturday
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Sunday
Chapter Thirty
Acknowledgments
Cop Town
Copyright
Blindsighted
Kisscut
A Faint Cold Fear
Indelible
Faithless
Triptych
Skin Privilege
Fractured
Martin Misunderstood
Broken
Fallen
Like a Charm (Ed.)
Read on for the fantastic first chapter of Karin Slaughter’s gripping new thriller, Cop Town
Out Now
MAGGIE LAWSON WAS upstairs in her bedroom when she heard the phone ringing in the kitchen. She checked her watch. There was nothing good about a phone ringing this early in the morning. Sounds from the kitchen echoed up the back stairs: The click of the receiver being lifted from the cradle. The low murmur of her mother’s voice. The sharp snap of the phone cord slapping the floor as she walked back and forth across the kitchen.
The linoleum had been worn away in staggered gray lines from the countless times Delia Lawson had paced the kitchen listening to bad news.
The conversation didn’t last long. Delia hung up the phone. The loud click echoed up to the rafters. Maggie knew every sound the old house made. She had spent a lifetime studying its moods. Even from her room, she could follow her mother’s movements through the kitchen: The refrigerator door opening and closing. A cabinet banging shut. Eggs being cracked into a bowl. Thumb flicking her Bic to light a cigarette.
Maggie knew how this would go. Delia had been playing Bad-News Blackjack for as long as Maggie could remember. She would hold for a while, but then tonight, tomorrow, or maybe even a week from now, Delia would pick a fight with Maggie and the minute Maggie opened her mouth to respond, her mother would lay down her cards: the electric bill was past due, her shifts at the diner had been cut, the car needed a new transmission, and here Maggie was making things worse by talking back and for the love of God, couldn’t she give her mother a break?
Busted. Dealer wins.
Maggie screeched the ironing board closed. She stepped carefully around folded stacks of laundry. She’d been up since five that morning doing the family’s ironing. She was Sisyphus in a bathrobe. They all had uniforms of one kind or another. Lilly wore green-and-blue-checkered skirts and yellow button-down tops to school. Jimmy and Maggie had their dark blue pants and long-sleeved shirts from the Atlanta Police Department. Delia had her green polyester smocks from the diner. And then they all came home and changed into regular clothes, which meant that every day, Maggie was washing and ironing for eight people instead of four.
She only complained when no one could hear her.
There was a scratching sound from Lilly’s room as she dropped the needle on a record. Maggie gritted her teeth. Tapestry. Lilly played the album incessantly.
Not too long ago, Maggie helped Lilly get dressed for school every morning. At night, they would page through Brides magazine and clip out pictures for their dream weddings. That was all before Lilly turned thirteen years old and her life, much like Carole King’s, became an everlasting vision of the ever-changing hue.
She waited for Jimmy to bang on the wall and tell Lilly to turn that crap off, but then she remembered her brother had picked up a night shift. Maggie looked out the window. Jimmy’s car wasn’t in the driveway. Unusually, the neighbor’s work van was gone. She wondered if he was working the night shift, too. And then she chastened herself for wondering, because it was none of her business what her neighbor was doing.
Now seemed as good a time as any to go down for breakfast. Maggie pulled the foam rollers from her hair as she walked down the stairs. She stopped exactly in the middle. The acoustic sweet spot. Tapestry disappeared. There were no sounds from the kitchen. If Maggie timed it right, she could sometimes grab a full minute of silence standing on the stairs. There wouldn’t be another time during her day when she felt so completely alone.
She took a deep breath, then slowly let it out before continuing down.
The old Victorian had been grand at one point, though the house retained no evidence of its former glory. Pieces of siding were gone. Rotted wood hung like bats from the gables. The windows rattled with the slightest breeze. Rain shot a creek through the basement. There was no outlet in the house that didn’t have a black tattoo ghosted around it from bad fuses and shoddy workmanship.
Even though it was winter, the kitchen was humid. No matter the time of year, it always smelled of fried bacon and cigarette smoke. The source of both stood at the stove. Delia’s back was bent as she filled the percolator. When Maggie thought of her mother, she thought of this kitchen—the faded avocado-green appliances, the cracked yellow linoleum on the floor, the burned, black ridges on the laminate countertop where her father rested his cigarettes.
As usual, Delia had been up since before Maggie. No one knew what Delia did in the morning hours. Probably curse God that she’d woken up in the same house with the same problems. There was an unwritten rule that you didn’t go downstairs until you heard eggs being whisked in a bowl. Delia always cooked a big breakfast, a holdover from her Depression childhood, when breakfast might be the only meal of the day.
“Lilly up?” Delia hadn’t turned around, but she knew Maggie was there.
“For now.” Maggie made the same offer she did every morning. “Can I do anything?”
“No.” Delia jabbed the bacon with a fork. “Driveway’s empty next door.”
Maggie glanced out the window, pretending she didn’t already know Lee Grant’s van was not parked in its usual spot.
Delia said, “All we need is for girls to start going in and out of that house at all hours. Again.”
Maggie leaned against the counter. Delia looked exhausted. Even her stringy brown hair couldn’t be bothered to stay pinned on the top of her head. They’d all been picking up extra shifts to pay for Lilly to go to a private school. None of them wanted to see her bussed across town to the ghetto. They had four more years of tuition and textbooks and uniforms before Lilly graduated. Maggie wasn’t sure her mother would last that long.
As a child, Delia had seen her father shoot himself in the head after losing the family business. Her mother had worked herself into an early grave on a sharecropper’s farm. She’d lost both brothers to polio. She must have thought she’d hit pay dirt when she married Hank Lawson. He wore a suit and had a good job and a nice car, and then he’d come home from Okinawa so shell-shocked that he’d been in and out of the state mental hospital ever since.
There wasn’t much that Maggie knew about her father, though he’d obviously tried to build a life between hospital stays. When Lilly was born, he put up the swing set in the backyard. One time, he found some gray paint on sale at the hardware store and worked thirty-six hours straight painting every room in the house the color of an aircraft carrier. On weekends, he mowed the lawn for as long as it took to drink a six-pack of Schlitz, then left the mower wherever the beer ran out. One time when it snowed and Maggie was sick with strep, he brought her some snow in a Tupperware bowl so she could play with it in the bathroom.
“Maggie, for the love of God.” Delia tapped the fork against the frying pan. “Can’t you find something to do?”
Maggie grabbed a stack of plates and silverware off the counter and took them into the dining room. Lilly was already at the table. Her head was bent over a textbook, which Maggie took as a miracle. The last year hadn’t been so much the burgeoning of thirteen-year-old Lilly into womanhood as a running audition for The Exorcist.
Still, Maggie couldn’t give up on her baby sister. “You have a good night?”
“Peachy.” Lilly cupped her fingers across her forehead in a salute to the page. Her hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail. The chestnut brown fell somewhere between Delia’s mousy brown and Maggie’s darker hue.
“Peachy sounds good.” Maggie put a plate by Lilly’s elbow. She bumped her with her thigh. “What’re you studying?” She bumped her again. Then again. When Lilly didn’t respond, she sang the opening lines from “I Feel the Earth Move,” punctuating each pause with a bump.
“Stop it.” Lilly tilted her head down even more. Her nose was practically touching the book.
Maggie leaned over to set the other side of the table. She glanced back at Lilly, who had been staring at the same spot on the page since Maggie walked in.
Maggie said, “Look at me.”
“I’m studying.”
“Look at me.”
“I have a test.”
“I know you stole my makeup again.”
Lilly looked up. Her eyes were lined like Cleopatra’s.
Maggie kept her voice low. “Baby girl, you’re beautiful. You don’t need that stuff.”
Lilly rolled her eyes.
Maggie tried again. “You don’t understand what kind of message wearing makeup at your age sends to boys.”
“I guess you should know.”
Maggie rested her hand on the table. She wondered when her sweet kid sister had learned how to throw daggers.
The kitchen door swung open. Delia’s hands and arms were lined with platters of pancakes, eggs, bacon, and biscuits. “You’ve got two seconds to wash that shit off your face before I get your father’s belt.” Lilly bolted from the room. Delia banged the platters down on the table one by one. “See what you’re teaching her?”
“Why am I—”
“Don’t talk back.” Delia dug a pack of cigarettes out of her apron. “You’re twenty-two years old, Margaret. Why do I feel like I have two teenagers under my roof?”
“Twenty-three,” was all Maggie could say.
Delia lit the cigarette and hissed out smoke between her teeth. “Twenty-three,” she repeated. “I was married with two kids when I was your age.”
Maggie resisted the urge to ask her mother how that had worked out.
Delia picked a speck of tobacco off her tongue. “This women’s lib stuff works for rich girls, but all you’ve got going for you is your face and your figure. You need to take advantage of both before you lose them.”
Maggie smoothed together her lips. She imagined a lost-and-found box in the back of a storeroom with all the missing faces and figures of thirty-year-old women.
“Are you listening to me?”
“Mama.” Maggie kept her tone even. “I like my job.”
“Must be nice to do whatever you like.” Delia pressed the cigarette to her mouth. She inhaled sharply and held the smoke in her lungs. She looked up at the ceiling. She shook her head.
Maggie guessed it was coming sooner than she’d thought. Her mother was shuffling the deck before laying down the Bad-News Card: Why are you throwing away your life? Go to nursing school. Be a Kelly Girl. Get some kind of job where you’ll meet a man who doesn’t think you’re a whore.
Instead, Delia told her, “Don Wesley was killed this morning.”
Maggie’s hand went to her chest. Her heart was a hummingbird trapped beneath her fingers.
Delia said, “Shot in the head. Died two seconds after he got to the hospital.”
“Is Jimmy—”
“If Jimmy was hurt, do you think I’d be standing here talking about Don Wesley?”
Maggie took a mouthful of air, then coughed it back out. The room was filled with smoke and cooking odors. She wanted to open a window but her father had painted them all shut.
“How did it …” Maggie had trouble forming the question. “How did it happen?”
“I’m just the mother. You think they tell me anything?”
“They,” Maggie repeated. Her uncle Terry and his friends. They made Delia look downright forthcoming. Fortunately, there was an easy way around that. Maggie reached inside the stereo console to turn on the radio.
“Don’t,” Delia stopped her. “The news can’t tell us anything except what we already know.”
“What do we know?”
“Drop it, Margaret.” Delia tapped ash into her cupped hand. “Jimmy’s safe. That’s all that matters. And you be nice to him when he gets here.”
“Of course I—”
A car door slammed in the driveway. The windowpanes shook from the sound. Maggie held her breath because it was easier than breathing. Part of her hoped it was their neighbor coming home from work. But then shoes scuffed across the carport, up the back stairs. The kitchen door opened, but didn’t close.
She knew it was her uncle Terry before she saw him. He never shut the back door. The kitchen was a non-room to him, one of those things women needed that men didn’t want to know about, like sanitary napkins and romance novels.
Though the day had barely started, Terry Lawson reeked of alcohol. Maggie could smell it from across the room. He swayed as he stood in the dining room doorway. He was wearing his police sergeant’s uniform, but the shirt was unbuttoned, showing his white undershirt. Tufts of hair stuck up from the collar. He looked like he’d slept in his car with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s trapped between his knees. Which was probably where he was when he heard about Don Wesley on his radio.
Delia said, “Sit down. You look dead on your feet.”
Terry rubbed his jaw as he looked at his niece and sister-in-law. “Jimmy’s on his way. Mack and Bud are looking after him.”
“Is he all right?” Maggie asked.
“Of course he’s all right. Don’t get hysterical.”
Suddenly, Maggie felt the urge to get hysterical. “You should’ve called me.”
“For what?”
Maggie was astounded. Never mind that Jimmy was her brother and Don Wesley was his friend. She was a cop, too. You went to the hospital when another cop was there. You gave blood. You waited for news. You comforted the family. All of this was part of the job. “I should’ve been there.”
“For what?” he repeated. “The nurses fetched us coffee. All you’d do is get in the way.” He nodded at Delia. “I could use a cup, by the way.”
She walked back into the kitchen.
Maggie sat down. She was still reeling from the news. She hated that Terry was the only way she was going to get answers. “How did it happen?”
“Same way it always happens.” Terry dropped into the chair at the head of the table. “Some nigger shot him.”
“Was it the Shooter?”
“Shooter.” He grunted. “Stop talking out of your ass.”
“Uncle Terry!” Lilly ran into the room. She threw her arms around him and kissed his cheek. She always acted a few years younger with Terry.
Maggie told her, “Jimmy’s fine, but Don Wesley was killed this morning.”
Terry patted Lilly’s arm. He gave Maggie a sharp look. “Me and the boys’ll string up the bastard. Don’t you worry.”
“Nobody’s worried.” Delia came back with Terry’s coffee. She put the mug on the table and handed him the newspaper. “Cal and the others are all right?”
“Sure they are. Everybody’s fine.” Terry snapped open the newspaper. The Atlanta Constitution had obviously been put to bed before Don Wesley’s murder. The main story was about structural changes the new black mayor was making at city hall.
Maggie said, “Don makes five victims so far.”
“Maggie.” Delia headed toward the kitchen again. “Don’t bother your uncle.”
She pretended not to hear the warning. “It’s the Shooter.”
Terry shook his head.
“They were obviously ambushed. It has to be—”
“Eat your breakfast,” he said. “You want a ride to work, you need to be ready to go when I am.”
Lilly still had one arm draped around Terry’s shoulders. Her voice sounded impossibly small when she asked, “Is everybody gonna be all right, Uncle Terry?”
“This is still a cop town, sweetheart. The monkeys ain’t runnin’ the zoo.” He patted her bottom. “Come on. Eat.”
Lilly never argued with Terry. She sat down and picked at her breakfast.
Terry snapped the paper as he turned the page. Maggie could only see the top of his head, the square crewcut that showcased his receding hairline. He needed glasses. His forehead wrinkled as he squinted at the football scores.
A loud crackle of static came from the kitchen. Jimmy’s old transistor radio. A newsman’s voice crackled from the tinny speaker. “… reports another officer killed in the line of …” The voice drained away as Delia turned the volume down low.
Maggie knew her mother was right about one thing: they didn’t need the news to tell them what they already knew. In the last three months, four patrol officers had been murdered in the early morning hours near the downtown area of Five Points. They had been in pairs. Nobody patrolled downtown alone. The first two were found in an alley—they’d been forced down on their knees and executed with one bullet each to the head. The other two were found behind the service entrance to the Portman Motel. Same modus operandi. Same lack of leads. No witnesses. No bullet casings. No fingerprints. No suspects.
Around the station, they’d started calling the killer the Atlanta Shooter.
“I put on a fresh pot.” Delia sat down at the table, something she rarely did for long. She was turned in her chair, facing Terry—another thing she rarely did. “Tell me what really happened, Terrance.”
Terrance. The word hung in the air alongside the smoke and bacon grease.
Terry made a show of his reluctance. He sighed. He methodically folded the newspaper. He put it down on the table. He lined it up to the edge. Instead of answering Delia’s question, he made a gun with his hand and put it to the side of his face. Nobody said anything until he pulled the trigger.
Lilly whispered, “Jesus.”
For once, no one corrected her language.
Terry said, “Nothing Jimmy could do. He ran twenty blocks with Don slung over his shoulder. Got to the hospital, but it was too late.”
Maggie thought about her brother running all that way on his bad knee. “Jimmy wasn’t—”
“Jimmy’s fine.” Terry’s voice sounded like he was humoring them. “What he doesn’t need is a bunch of hens squawking around.”
With that, he opened his newspaper again and buried his nose back in the pages.
He hadn’t really answered Delia’s question. He’d just given the highlights, likely the same details you could hear on the radio. Terry knew exactly what he was doing to them. He’d been a Marine during the war. His unit specialized in psychological warfare. He would draw this out just because he could.
Instead of returning to the kitchen, Delia took a packet of Kools from her apron pocket and shook one out. Her hand trembled as she fumbled with her lighter. She looked calmer once she had the cigarette lit. Smoke furled from her nose. Every wrinkle on Delia Lawson’s face came from sucking on cigarettes—the crepe-like lines around her mouth, the sagging jawline, the deep indentation between her eyebrows. Even her hair was streaked with the same smoke gray that came out of her Kools. She was forty-five years old, but on a good day, she looked around sixty. Right now, she looked twice that, like she was already in her grave.
Like Don Wesley would soon be.
Maggie knew her brother’s partner was a grunt just back from Vietnam, unable to do any job that didn’t require him to carry a gun. His people were from lower Alabama. He rented an apartment off Piedmont Avenue. He drove a burgundy-colored Chevelle. He had a girlfriend—a flower-child American Indian who talked about “the man” and didn’t complain when Don hit her because he’d seen so much bad shit in the jungle.
And none of that mattered anymore because he was dead.
Terry banged his mug down on the table. Coffee splashed onto the white tablecloth. “Any of this for me?”
Delia stood up. She took his plate and started loading it with food, though Terry was usually too hungover to eat anything in the morning.
She set the plate in front of him. Her tone had a begging quality when she said, “Terry, please. Just tell me what happened, all right? He’s my boy. I need to know.”
Terry looked at Maggie, then looked down at his half-empty mug.
She allowed herself the luxury of an audible sigh before she went to get the percolator from the stove. As soon as she left the room, Terry started talking.
“Toward the end of their shift, nothing going on. Then they get word there’s a signal forty-four off the Whitehall spike at Five Points. That’s a possible robbery.” He caught Maggie’s eye as she came back into the room, like she hadn’t been behind the wheel of a squad car for five years. “They get there, check the place out. Doors are locked front and back. They give an all clear on the radio. And then …” He shrugged. “Guy comes around the corner, shoots Don in the head, then hightails it. You know the rest. Jimmy did everything he could. It wasn’t enough.”
“Poor Jimmy,” Lilly mumbled.
“Poor nobody,” Terry countered. “Jimmy Lawson can take care of himself. Got it?”
Lilly nodded quickly.
“Mark my words.” Terry stabbed his finger into the newspaper. “This is a race war, plain and simple. You won’t read about it in the paper or hear it on the news. We see it on the streets. It’s just like I said ten years ago. You give ’em a little power, they turn on you like rabid dogs. What we gotta do today is take back that power.”
Maggie leaned her shoulder against the doorjamb. Her eyes threatened to roll back in her head. She’d heard this speech so many times she could recite it along with Terry. He hated everybody—the minorities who were newly in charge of the city and the traitors who had helped put them there. Left to his own devices, Terry and his cronies would dig a pit to China and throw them all in.
“Who called in the forty-four?” Maggie was momentarily surprised by the question until she realized that it came from her own mouth. It was a good question. She repeated it. “Who called in the robbery?”
Terry opened the paper again. He folded it into a sharp crease.
Delia stood up. She touched Maggie’s arm before she went back into the kitchen. Lilly stared at the eggs congealing on her plate. Maggie sat down in the chair her mother had vacated. She poured herself some coffee but had no stomach for it.
The robbery call had sent Jimmy and Don to Five Points. The heart of downtown. The origin for the street addressing system. The site of Atlanta’s first waterworks as well as a red-light district since before the Civil War. Five streets converged there: Peachtree, Whitehall, Decatur, Marietta, and Edgewood. The intersection was near a state university and close to the welfare office where women lined up around the block every day to get their vouchers. Many of them came back at night when all the lights in the skyscrapers were off and the only men around were the ones willing to pay for company.
Maggie could guess what the police response would be to Don’s murder. There would be a city-wide crackdown. The jail would be full every night. Johns would be afraid to venture out. That was bad for business. Everybody bragged about never talking to the cops, but the minute commerce was halted, the snitches came flooding in.
At least that’s how it usually happened. The Shooter cases were different. Each time, the entire force had mobilized to shut down the city, and each time, the momentum had drained away, the snitches had stopped showing up and eventually, the streets had gone back to business as usual as they all waited for the next cop to be murdered.
This wasn’t just fatalistic thinking; the 1970s were proving to be a bad decade for police officers. Atlanta had suffered more losses than most. In the past two years, they’d caught five cop killers, though only one of them had seen the inside of a courtroom. The others had accidents—one guy resisted arrest and ended up in a coma, another woke up in jail with a shiv in his kidney, the other two were checked into Grady Hospital with routine stomach ailments and ended up leaving in body bags.
The fifth one had walked out of the courtroom a free man. There wasn’t a cop in the city who didn’t spit before he told you that story. Combine that with another possible notch in the Atlanta Shooter’s belt and today would be a very bad day for anybody who found themselves on the wrong side of the law.
Terry cleared his throat. He was staring at his empty mug again.
Maggie poured the coffee. She set down the percolator. She straightened her knife and fork. She turned the handle of her mug left, then right.
Terry grunted with disgust. “You got something to say, princess?”
“No,” Maggie said, but then she did. “What about their car?” Jimmy and Don had a cruiser. No one patrolled on foot that time of day. “Why did Jimmy carry him? Why didn’t he just get—”
“Tires were slashed.”
Maggie felt her brow furrow. “The four other cops, were their tires slashed, too?”
“Nope.”
She tried to get the sequence straight in her head. “Someone called in a burglary, then slashed their tires, then shot Don, and didn’t touch Jimmy?”
Terry shook his head, not looking up from the paper. “Leave it to the detectives, sweetheart.”
“But—” Maggie couldn’t let it go. “The Shooter’s changing his M.O.” She had to add, “Or it’s not the Shooter. It’s somebody trying to copy the Shooter.”
Terry shook his head again, but this time it was more like a warning.
Lilly said, “I’m doing a report on the Civil War.”
Maggie asked, “Were they split up when Don was shot?”
Terry sighed. “You don’t leave your partner. Even you oughta know that.”
“So, Jimmy was with Don?”
“’Course he was.”
Lilly said, “Most of the kids are talking to their grandparents, but I—”
Maggie interrupted, “But Jimmy wasn’t shot. He was standing right beside Don, or near him at least.” That was the big difference. In the previous cases, both men were forced to their knees and executed, one right after the other. She asked, “Did Jimmy pull his gun?”
“Jesus Christ!” Terry banged his fist on the table. “Will you shut the hell up so I can read the paper?”
“Terry?” Delia called from the kitchen. “The drain’s clogged again. Do you think you can—”
“In a minute.” He kept his gaze on Maggie. “I wanna know what tough girl here is thinking. You got it figured out, Columbo? You see something guys who’ve been on the job since you were a tickle in your daddy’s ball sac missed?”
Maggie figured if she was going to get hit, it was going to be for a good reason. “In the other Shooter cases, both guys were on their knees. They were shot in the head, execution-style, one after the other. Don was shot. So why wasn’t Jimmy?”
Terry leaned over the table. She could smell the whiskey and sweat bleeding from his pores. “Whatever bullshit thing you’ve got going with your brother stops right now. You hear me?”
Maggie felt the floor shift beneath her. “It’s not that,” she said, and they all knew what “that” was.
“Then what is it?” Terry asked. “Why are you asking all these questions?”
She wanted to tell him that it was because she was a cop, and that the way cops solved crimes was asking questions, but she settled on “Because it doesn’t make sense.”
“Sense.” He snorted. “Since when did you start making sense?”
“He’s here!” Lilly screamed.
They all startled at her sudden outburst. But it was true. Maggie could hear Jimmy’s car pulling into the driveway. The Fairlane’s muffler was nearly rusted off. The exhaust huffed the same grumbly cough as Delia when she got out of bed in the morning.
Maggie tried to stand, but Terry clamped his hand around her arm and forced her back down in her chair.
She knew better than to fight him. All Maggie could do was listen. The sounds were the same as when Terry had arrived: The car door slammed. Shoes scuffed across the carport and up the stairs. The kitchen door was already open, so Jimmy closed it. He lingered for a few seconds. Maggie could imagine the look exchanged between mother and son. Maybe Jimmy nodded at Delia. Maybe he handed her his hat to make her feel useful.
When Jimmy came into the dining room, Maggie recognized that he probably had no idea where his hat was. He wasn’t in uniform. He was wearing green hospital clothes. The shirt was tight across his shoulders. His face was chalk white. His eyes were red-rimmed. His lips were pale below his mustache. There was something haunted about him. Maggie was reminded of the way their father looked when it was time for him to go back to the hospital.
Terry asked, “Mack and Bud take care of you?”
All Jimmy seemed capable of offering was a nod. He rubbed his hand along the back of his neck. He’d done a bad job cleaning himself. There were still dots of dried blood on his neck and face. Maggie saw a clump of dirt in one of his sideburns.
Lilly clutched her chest. Tears filled her eyes.
Terry said, “Don’t—” but it was too late. Lilly ran to Jimmy and threw her arms around his waist. She buried her face in his stomach and started to sob.
“It’s all right.” Jimmy’s voice was gruff. He rubbed Lilly’s back. He kissed the top of her head. “Come on. Upstairs. Don’t be late for school.”
Lilly released him just as quickly as she’d grabbed him, then ran from the room. Her footsteps pounded on the bare wooden stairs. For just a moment, Jimmy looked ready to follow her, but then his shoulders dropped, his chin tilted down, and he stared at the floor.
He said, “I don’t wanna talk about it.”
“And we don’t wanna hear it.” Delia was behind him. She reached her hand up to Jimmy’s shoulder, but stopped herself just shy of touching him. In general, their mother’s only gestures of affection came in the form of grooming. She used her fingers to smooth creases in Lilly’s sweater. She plucked stray hairs off the shoulders of Maggie’s uniform. And now, she picked the clump of dirt out of Jimmy’s sideburn.
Delia looked at the tiny speck on her fingertips, and Maggie could tell from her mother’s expression that it wasn’t dirt. Delia clenched her hand and shoved it into her apron pocket.
She said, “All of you—eat your breakfast before it gets cold. We can’t afford to waste food.”
Jimmy limped around the table and took his usual place. He winced every time he put weight on his left leg. Maggie wanted to help him. She longed to run over just as Lilly had and put her arms around her brother.
But she knew she couldn’t.
“So.” Delia had already fixed Jimmy’s coffee. Now, she loaded up his plate. She used one hand. Her other was still clenched in her apron pocket. “Anybody need anything else?”
“We’re fine.” Terry waved her away.
Delia said, “The eggs are cold. I’ll make more eggs.” She went back into the kitchen.
Maggie stared at her brother because she knew that he would not look back. The faded red spots of blood on his skin reminded her of when he was a pimply teenager. Jimmy had obviously been crying. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen her brother cry. Eight years ago, at least.
She told him, “You missed Tapestry this morning.”
Jimmy grunted as he forked a pile of eggs into his mouth.
She tried again. “I hung your uniforms in your closet.”
Jimmy swallowed loudly. “Too much starch in the collars.”
“I’ll redo them after work. Okay?”
He crammed more eggs into his mouth.
“Just put them back in my room.” Maggie was inexplicably nervous. She couldn’t stop talking. “I’ll do them when I get in from work.”
Terry made a hissing sound to shut her up.
Maggie followed orders this time—not for Terry, but for Jimmy. She was scared she’d say the wrong thing and make it worse for her brother. This wouldn’t be the first time. There was a tightrope between them that started to fray every time one took a step toward the other.
In the silence, she listened to Jimmy chew. He made a wet, mechanical sound. She found herself watching the hinge of his jaw, the way it poked out when he bit down. He was like a construction machine scooping eggs into his mouth, chewing, then scooping in more. There was no expression on his face. His eyes were almost glazed. He stared at a fixed point on the wall opposite his chair.
She knew what he was seeing. Gray plaster with a brown patina from all the cigarette smoke. This was the room Hank Lawson occupied on the rare occasions he lived with his family. The minute he got home, he carried down the TV from Delia’s bedroom and put it on the buffet table. Then he’d chain-smoke and watch the set until the national anthem started playing. Some nights, Maggie would go downstairs to get some water and find her father staring at the American flag waving across a blank background.
Maggie doubted Jimmy was thinking about their father right now. Maybe he was remembering that last football game. His life before a linebacker turned his knee into oatmeal. Maggie had been in the stands alongside everybody else. She’d watched Jimmy saunter onto the field with his usual confidence. He raised his fist. The crowd roared. They chanted his name. He was their golden boy, the hometown kid who was making good. His future was already set. He was going to UGA on somebody else’s dime. He was going to get drafted into the pros, and the next time anybody saw him, Jimmy Lawson would be coming out of a nightclub wearing a mink, with a girl on each arm like Broadway Joe.
Instead, he was sitting at his mother’s dining room table with another man’s blood on his face.
“Here.” Delia swapped out Jimmy’s plate for a fresh one. She added some bacon. Then pancakes. She doused it all with syrup the way he liked.
“Mom.” Jimmy waved her away with his fork. “Enough.”
Delia sat down and lit another cigarette. Maggie tried to eat. The eggs were cold. The grease around the bacon had congealed. Maggie forced it down because she had questions that she knew she would ask if she didn’t stuff food into her mouth.
She couldn’t work out how the shooting had happened. The minute some guy approached Jimmy and Don, especially a colored guy, they would’ve instantly, automatically, pulled their revolvers. It was basic survival. Don had been in Nam long enough to know you didn’t let some fella get the drop on you. And Jimmy had been on the job since he was eighteen.
Maggie glanced at her brother across the table. Maybe he’d panicked. Maybe he’d stood there with Don’s blood all over him and been so seized by fear that he couldn’t do anything but drop to the ground and pray that he wasn’t going to die.
Maggie thought about the clump her mother had picked out of Jimmy’s sideburn. The piece of Don Wesley’s head that was probably in the kitchen garbage on top of the broken eggshells and the plastic package that the bacon came in.
“Time to go.” Terry folded his newspaper. He told Jimmy, “You get some sleep, son. I’ll call you if anything happens.”
Jimmy started shaking his head before Terry finished the sentence. “No way. I’m not sleeping until we catch the bastard.”
“Damn right we’ll get him.” Terry winked at Maggie like it was just him and Jimmy against the world.
Maybe that’s why she asked her brother, “What really happened?”
Terry grabbed Maggie’s knee so hard that the pain took her breath away. She cried out, scratching the back of his hand.
He tightened his grip. “What did I tell you about nagging your brother?”
Pain knifed up and down her leg. Maggie’s lips trembled. She wasn’t going to beg. She couldn’t beg.
“She’ll hear it at the station anyhow.” Jimmy sounded more irritated than concerned. “Come on, Terry. Let her go.”
Terry released his hold.
“Jesus!” Maggie rubbed her knee. She was panting. A shiver ran through her body.
“Stop making a scene.” Delia picked a stray piece of lint off Maggie’s bathrobe. “What happened, Jimmy?”
He shrugged. “Don went down. I got off three shots. The shooter ran. I started to chase him, but I couldn’t leave Don.” As an afterthought, he added, “I didn’t get a good look at him. Colored. Average height. Average build.”
Maggie kept rubbing her knee as she listened. The tendon was pulsing with every heartbeat.
“Cal Vick’s gonna have me sit down with a sketch artist.” Jimmy shrugged. “Not sure what good it’ll do. The alley was dark. It happened fast.”
Delia said, “You’re lucky he didn’t try to shoot you, too.”
“’Course he did,” Jimmy quipped, an edge to his tone. “His gun jammed. He tried to shoot me, but nothing happened. Lucky Lawson, right?” That was the name they’d given him in high school. “That’s me. Lucky guy.”
Terry obviously didn’t like the way this conversation was going. He told Jimmy, “Get yourself cleaned up. I’ll see you at the station.” He made to leave.
Maggie panicked. “You have to give me a ride.”
“Why’s that?”
He knew why. Maggie’s car had been in the shop for a week. “I can’t be late for roll call.”
“Then you’d better hurry.” Terry tapped his folded newspaper against her mouth. “But you keep that slit under your nose closed, you hear?”
Maggie grabbed the plates from the table and limped into the kitchen. Jimmy’s utility belt was on the counter. His gun was in the holster.
Maggie easily heard the conversation in the dining room. Terry was making lewd comments about some new female recruits at the academy. Maggie put the plates in the sink. She ran some water so they wouldn’t glue together before Lilly could wash them.
And then she limped over to Jimmy’s belt.
Carefully, she unsnapped the leather safety strap and slid the revolver from the holster. She checked the cylinder. Fully loaded. No empty casings. Maggie kept the muzzle pointed down as she sniffed along the firing pin, the top strap, and the cylinder end of the barrel.
No smell of burnt copper and sulfur, just the usual tinge of oil and steel.
Maggie slid the gun back into the holster, snapped the strap closed. She grabbed the railing on the stairs to help propel herself up. She could hear Terry and Jimmy talking baseball, wondering how the Braves were going to do without Hank Aaron. The two men had always had an easy rapport. They could talk about anything—at least so long as none of it mattered.
Like the fact that whatever had happened in that alley this morning, Jimmy Lawson hadn’t fired his gun.
SARA LINTON LEANED back in her chair, mumbling a soft ‘Yes, Mama’ into the telephone. She wondered briefly if there would ever come a point in time when she would be too old to be taken over her mother’s knee.
‘Yes, Mama,’ Sara repeated, tapping her pen on the desk. She felt heat coming off her cheeks, and an overwhelming sense of embarrassment took hold.
A soft knock came at the office door, followed by a tentative ‘Dr. Linton?’
Sara suppressed her relief. ‘I need to go,’ she said to her mother, who shot off one last admonishment before hanging up the phone.
Nelly Morgan slid open the door, giving Sara a hard look. As office manager for the Heartsdale Children’s Clinic, Nelly was the closest thing Sara had to a secretary. Nelly had been running the place for as long as Sara could remember, even as far back as when Sara was herself a patient here.
Nelly said, ‘Your cheeks are on fire.’
‘I just got yelled at by my mother.’
Nelly raised an eyebrow. ‘I assume with good reason.’
‘Well,’ Sara said, hoping that would end it.
‘The labs on Jimmy Powell came in,’ Nelly said, still eyeing Sara. ‘And the mail,’ she added, dropping a stack of letters on top of the inbasket. The plastic bowed under the added weight.
Sara sighed as she read over the fax. On a good day, she diagnosed earaches and sore throats. Today, she would have to tell the parents of a twelve-year-old boy that he had acute myeloblastic leukemia.
‘Not good,’ Nelly guessed. She had worked at the clinic long enough to know how to read a lab report.
‘No,’ Sara agreed, rubbing her eyes. ‘Not good at all.’ She sat back in her chair, asking, ‘The Powells are at Disney World, right?’
‘For his birthday,’ Nelly said. ‘They should be back tonight.’
Sara felt a sadness come over her. She had never gotten used to delivering this kind of news.
Nelly offered, ‘I can schedule them for first thing in the morning.’
‘Thanks,’ Sara answered, tucking the report into Jimmy Powell’s chart. She glanced at the clock on the wall as she did this and let out an audible gasp. ‘Is that right?’ she asked, checking the time against her watch. ‘I was supposed to meet Tessa at lunch fifteen minutes ago.’
Nelly checked her own watch. ‘This late in the day? It’s closer to suppertime.’
‘It was the only time I could make it,’ Sara said, gathering charts together. She bumped the in-box and papers fell onto the floor in a heap, cracking the plastic tray.
‘Crap,’ Sara hissed.
Nelly started to help, but Sara stopped her. Aside from the fact that Sara did not like other people cleaning up her messes, if Nelly somehow managed to get down on her knees, it was doubtful she would be able to get back up without considerable assistance.
‘I’ve got it,’ Sara told her, scooping up the whole pile and dropping it on her desk. ‘Was there anything else?’
Nelly flashed a smile. ‘Chief Tolliver’s holding on line three.’
Sara sat back on her heels, a feeling of dread washing over her. She did double duty as the town’s pediatrician and coroner. Jeffrey Tolliver, her ex-husband, was the chief of police. There were only two reasons for him to be calling Sara in the middle of the day, neither of them particularly pleasant.
Sara stood and picked up the phone, giving him the benefit of the doubt. ‘Somebody better be dead.’
Jeffrey’s voice was garbled, and she assumed he was using his cellular phone. ‘Sorry to disappoint you,’ he said, then, ‘I’ve been on hold for ten minutes. What if this had been an emergency?’
Sara started shoving papers into her briefcase. It was an unwritten clinic policy to make Jeffrey jump through hoops of fire before he could speak to Sara on the telephone. She was actually surprised that Nelly remembered to tell Sara he was on the phone.
She glanced at the door, mumbling, ‘I knew I should’ve just left.’
‘What?’ he asked, his voice echoing slightly on the cellular.
‘I said you always send someone if it’s an emergency,’ she lied. ‘Where are you?’
‘At the college,’ he answered. ‘I’m waiting for the deputy dogs.’
He was using their term for the campus security at Grant Tech, the state university at the center of town.
She asked, ‘What is it?’
‘I just wanted to see how you were doing.’
‘Fine,’ she snapped, pulling the papers back out of her briefcase, wondering why she had put them there in the first place. She flipped through some charts, shoving them into the side pocket.
She said, ‘I’m late for lunch with Tess. What did you need?’
He seemed taken aback by her curt tone. ‘You just looked distracted yesterday,’ he said. ‘In church.’
‘I wasn’t distracted,’ she mumbled, flipping through the mail. She stopped at the sight of a postcard, her whole body going rigid. The front of the card showed a picture of Emory University in Atlanta, Sara’s alma mater. Neatly typed on the back beside her address at the children’s clinic were the words, ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’
‘Sara?’
A cold sweat came over her. ‘I need to go.’
‘Sara, I –’
She hung up the phone before Jeffrey could finish his sentence, shoving three more charts into her briefcase along with the postcard. She slipped out the side door without anyone seeing her.
Sunlight beamed down on Sara as she walked into the street. There was a chill in the air that had not been there this morning, and the dark clouds promised rain later on tonight.
A red Thunderbird passed, a small arm hanging out the window.
‘Hey, Dr. Linton,’ a child called.
Sara waved, calling ‘Hey’ back as she crossed the street. Sara switched the briefcase from one hand to the other as she cut across the lawn in front of the college. She took a right onto the sidewalk, heading toward Main Street, and was at the diner in less than five minutes.
Tessa was sitting in a booth on the far wall of the empty diner, eating a hamburger. She did not look pleased.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ Sara offered, walking toward her sister. She tried a smile, but Tessa did not respond in kind.
‘You said two. It’s nearly two-thirty.’
‘I had paperwork,’ Sara explained, tucking her briefcase into the booth. Tessa was a plumber, like their father. While clogged drains were no laughing matter, very seldom did Linton and Daughters get the kind of emergency phone calls that Sara did on a daily basis. Her family could not grasp what a busy day was like for Sara and were constantly irritated by her lateness.
‘I called the morgue at two,’ Tessa informed her, nibbling a french fry. ‘You weren’t there.’
Sara sat down with a groan, running her fingers through her hair. ‘I dropped back by the clinic and Mama called and the time got away from me.’ She stopped, saying what she always said. ‘I’m sorry. I should have called.’ When Tessa did not respond, Sara continued, ‘You can keep being mad at me for the rest of lunch or you can drop it and I’ll buy you a slice of chocolate cream pie.’
‘Red velvet,’ Tessa countered.
‘Deal,’ Sara returned, feeling an inordinate sense of relief. It was bad enough having her mother mad at her.
‘Speaking of calls,’ Tessa began, and Sara knew where she was going even before she asked the question. ‘Hear from Jeffrey?’
Sara raised up, tucking her hand into her front pocket. She pulled out two five-dollar bills. ‘He called before I left the clinic.’
Tessa barked a laugh that filled the restaurant. ‘What did he say?’
‘I cut him off before he could say anything,’ Sara answered, handing her sister the money.
Tessa tucked the fives into the back pocket of her blue jeans. ‘So, Mama called? She was pretty pissed at you.’
‘I’m pretty pissed at me, too,’ Sara said. After being divorced for two years, she still could not let go of her ex-husband. Sara vacillated between hating Jeffrey Tolliver and hating herself because of this. She wanted just one day to go by without thinking about him, without having him in her life. Yesterday, much like today, had not been that day.
Easter Sunday was important to her mother. While Sara was not particularly religious, putting on panty hose one Sunday out of the year was a small price to pay for Cathy Linton’s happiness. Sara had not planned on Jeffrey being at church. She had caught him out of the corner of her eye just after the first hymn. He was sitting three rows behind and to the right of her, and they seemed to notice each other at the same time. Sara had forced herself to look away first.
Sitting there in church, staring at the preacher without hearing a word the man was saying, Sara had felt Jeffrey’s gaze on the back of her neck. There was a heat from the intensity of his stare that caused a warm flush to come over her. Despite the fact that she was sitting in church with her mother on one side of her and Tessa and her father on the other, Sara had felt her body responding to the look Jeffrey had given her. There was something about this time of year that turned her into a completely different person.
She was actually fidgeting in her seat, thinking about Jeffrey touching her, the way his hands felt on her skin, when Cathy Linton jabbed her elbow into Sara’s ribs. Her mother’s expression said she knew exactly what was going through Sara’s mind at that moment and did not like it one bit. Cathy had crossed her arms angrily, her posture indicating she was resigning herself to the fact that Sara would go to hell for thinking about sex at the Primitive Baptist on Easter Sunday.
There was a prayer, then another hymn. After what seemed like an appropriate amount of time, Sara glanced over her shoulder to find Jeffrey again, only to see him with his head bent down to his chest as he slept. This was the problem with Jeffrey Tolliver, the idea of him was much better than the reality.