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"I mean that literally," I told him. "Better not tell me, unless they're after you."
"What will you do, Lily," he asked, putting his arms around me as I stood, "what will you do, when they come after me?"
I smiled. "I'll fight," I said.
Chapter Seven
Getting Jack to his apartment, though it was just a few yards away, was quite a challenge. At least it was his day off, and his shoulder would have a chance to rest before he had to show up at Winthrop Sporting Goods. It would have looked better if he could have worked out at Body Time this morning, but it was beyond even someone as determined as Jack Leeds. He was hurting.
I gave him my last hoarded pain pill to take when he got home. He stowed it in his pocket. Then, when nothing was passing on Track Street, he ducked out my kitchen door and into my car. I backed out and drove out of my driveway and into the Garden Apartments driveway, going all the way to the rear parking area. When I was closest to the door, so close it would be hard to see from the rear windows of the top apartments, Jack jumped out and went inside. I pulled into Marcus Jefferson's former space and followed him in, to provide myself with a reason for entering the apartment parking lot. Even to me, this seemed a bit overly careful, but Jack had just given me a look to reinforce his admonishment that "these people" were very dangerous.
So I climbed the stairs to work in Deedra's apartment, which was absolutely normal and gave me a bona fide reason to enter the building at this hour. I carried my caddy of cleaning materials up the stairs, expecting Jack would already be in his apartment and trying to get his clothes off to bathe, without upsetting his wound. I'd offered to help, but he wanted my day to run absolutely normally.
Far from being empty, the landing was full of men and suspicion. Darcy and the bullish Cleve Ragland were waiting in front of Jack's door. They were having a face-off with Jack, who was standing with his keys in his hand.
"... don't have to tell anyone where I spend the night," Jack was saying, and there was a cold edge to his voice that meant business.
He hadn't wanted us to be publicly associated. For that matter, neither had I. I should unlock Deedra's apartment and trot back downstairs to get my mop, leaving Jack to stonewall his way through this. That was what he'd want me to do.
"Hey again, Lily," Darcy said, surprise evident in his voice. He looked bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but Cleve was showing signs of wear and tear. He hadn't shaved, and maybe had slept in his clothes.
"You keep long hours, Darcy," I replied, depositing my caddy at Deedra's door and joining the little group. Jack glared at me.
"We just come by here to see if Jared was all right," Darcy said, and his flat blue eyes swung back to Jack. "We rung him last night after the robbery and got no answer."
"And I was telling you," Jack said just as coldly, "that what I do on my time off is my business."
I approached Jack from his left, put my arm around him, blocking the wounded side in case they tried clapping him on the shoulder.
"Our business," I corrected him, looking steadily at Darcy.
"Whoo-ee," Darcy said, sticking his hands in his own jean pockets as if he didn't know what to do with them. His heavy coat bulged up in semicircles around his tucked hands.
Cleve glanced from me to Jack and back again, and said, "Reckon ole Jared got lucky."
Immediately the tension eased. Jack slowly looped his arm around me. His fingers bit into my shoulder.
"Well, you were being a gentleman," Darcy said approvingly.
"Now you got your question answered, can I get in my apartment?" Jack said, making an effort to sound amiable. But I could hear the anger pulsing in his voice.
"Sure, man. We're going this very minute," said Darcy, a broad grin on his face that I wanted to wipe right off. I promised myself I would if I got half a chance.
Jack stepped between Darcy and Cleve, put his key in the lock, and turned it as they started down the stairs. He automatically stood back to let me enter first, then shut the door behind us. Jack relocked it and went over to the window to see if his "friends" really left.
Then he swung around to face me, his anger open now and misdirected at me.
"We talked about this," he began. "No one was going to co
"Okay, I'm gone," I said shortly, and started for the door.
"Talk to me," he demanded.
I sighed. "How else could you have gotten out of that?" I asked.
"Well, I... could have told them I'd driven to Little Rock to see my girlfriend."
"And when they said, ‘Then why was your car parked here all night?' "
Frustrated, Jack brought his fist down on a little desk by the window. "Dammit, I won't have it!"
I shrugged. No point in all this now. If he was going to act like a jerk, I'd go downstairs and get my mop. I had to work.
When I was on the top stair, he caught me. His good hand clamped down on my shoulder like iron. I stopped dead. I turned very slowly and said to him in my sincerest voice, "How about saying, ‘Thanks, Lily, for bailing me out, even though you had to stand there and be leered at for the second time in twelve hours'?"
Jack turned whiter around the mouth than he had been, and his hand dropped from my shoulder.
"And don't you ever, ever restrain me again," I told him, my eyes staring directly into his.
I turned, and with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, I went down the stairs. When I came up with the mop, I stood on the landing for a second, listening. His apartment was silent. I went into Deedra's to work.
So much drama, so early in the morning, left me exhausted. I scarcely registered the unusual order in Deedra's apartment; it was as if she was trying to show she'd changed her social habits by keeping her apartment neater. As I put away her clean underwear, I noted the absence of the pile of naughty pictures of herself she had kept underneath her bras. I expected to feel good about Deedra's changed lifestyle, but instead, I could barely manage to finish my cleaning.
As I dumped the last waste can into a plastic bag, I admitted to myself that even more than tired, I felt sad. It would have been a pleasant treat to have had a morning to think of Jack in the relaxed warmth of good sex, in the glow of—what could I call it? Happiness. But, thanks to his pride—as I saw it—we'd ended on a sour note.
There was a pile of pierced earrings on Deedra's dresser, and I decided to just sit there and pair them up. For a minute or two that was simple and satisfying; after all, they match or they don't. But my restless mind began wandering again.
A pretend robbery during a mysterious meeting at Winthrop Sporting Goods, in the middle of a most inclement night. The blue flyers that had caused so much trouble. The long, heavy black bags that the Winthrop house had been burgled to get—where were they now? The three unsolved murders in tiny Shakespeare. The out-of-place Mookie Preston. The bombing. I couldn't make sense of all the pieces at one time, but the shape of it was wrong. This was no group of fanatics with a coherent manifesto at work; it all seemed very sloppy. For the first time, I considered what Carrie had said about the timing of the bombing. If the goal had been to kill lots of black people, the explosion had come too late. If the goal had been to "merely" terrorize the black community, the explosion had come too early. The deaths in the church had enraged the African-American people of Shakespeare. Whoever had planted the bomb did not represent white supremacy, but white stupidity.
As I locked Deedra's apartment—scorning to even cross the landing and listen at Jack's door—and descended the stairs to drive to Mookie Preston's modest rental, I thought about the unexpected, normally concealed aspects of the people around me, the part I was seeing the past few days. It was like seeing their skeleton beneath their outer flesh.