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I reached the fifth-floor landing and made the last turn, my mouth open to scoop in air, my shirt a drenched rag against my heaving chest. Stinging sweat ran into my eyes and I blinked it away.
Three book cartons stamped ROADS TO EVERYWHERE and 4th AND 5th GRADE
READERS blocked the stairs to the sixth floor. I stood on my right leg and slammed the foot of the crutch into one of them, sending it spi
I squeezed through the gap I created. To do so I had to put my full weight on my left leg for a second. It gave a howl of pain. I groaned and grabbed at the railing to keep from spilling forward onto the stairs. Looked at my watch. It said twelve twenty-eight, but what if it was slow? The crowd was roaring.
“Jake . . . for God’s sake hurry . . .” Sadie, still on the stairs to the fifth-floor landing.
I started up the last flight, and the sound of the crowd began to drain away into a great silence. By the time I reached the top, there was nothing but the rasp of my breath and the burning hammerstrokes of my overtaxed heart.
14
The sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository was a shadowy square dotted with islands of stacked book cartons. The overhead lights were burning where the floor was being replaced. They were off on the side where Lee Harvey Oswald pla
Behind the barricade, in the sunlight, a man with a gun stood at the window. He was stooped, peering out. The window was open. A light breeze was ruffling his hair and the collar of his shirt.
He began to raise the rifle.
I broke into a shambling run, slaloming around the stacked cartons, digging in my coat pocket for the .38.
“Lee!” I shouted. “Stop, you son of a bitch!” He turned his head and looked at me, eyes wide, mouth hung open. For a moment he was just Lee—the guy who had laughed and played with Junie in the bath, the one who sometimes hugged his wife and kissed her upturned face—and then his thin and somehow prissy mouth wrinkled into a snarl that showed his upper teeth. When that happened, he changed into something monstrous. I doubt you believe that, but I swear it’s true. He stopped being a man and became the daemonic ghost that would haunt America from this day on, perverting its power and spoiling its every good intent.
If I let it.
The noise of the crowd rushed in again, thousands of people applauding and cheering and yelling their brains out. I heard them and Lee did, too. He knew what it meant: now or never. He whirled back to the window and socked the rifle’s butt-plate against his shoulder.
I had the pistol, the same one I’d used to kill Frank Du
I fired. My shot went high and only exploded splinters from the top of the window frame, but it was enough to save John Ke
There were screams and bewildered shouts from below us. Lee turned toward me again, his face a mask of rage, hate, and disappointment. He raised his rifle again, and this time it wouldn’t be the President of the United States he’d be aiming at. He worked the bolt— clack-clack—and I fired at him again. Although I was three-quarters of the way across the room, less than twenty-five feet away, I missed again. I saw the side of his shirt twitch, but that was all.
My crutch struck a stack of boxes. I tottered to the left, flailing with my gun-hand for balance, but there was no chance of that. For just a moment I thought of how, on the day I’d met her, Sadie had literally fallen into my arms. I knew what was going to happen. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it harmonizes, and what it usually makes is the devil’s music. This time I was the one who stumbled, and that was the crucial difference.
I could no longer hear her on the stairs . . . but I could still hear her rapid footfalls.
“Sadie, down!” I shouted, but it was lost in the bark of Oswald’s rifle.
I heard the bullet pass above me. I heard her cry out.
Then there was more gunfire, this time from outside. The presidential limo had taken off, driving toward the Triple Underpass at breakneck speed, the two couples inside ducking and holding onto each other. But the security car had pulled up on the far side of Elm Street near Dealey Plaza.
The cops on the motorcycles had stopped in the middle of the street, and at least four dozen people were acting as spotters, pointing up at the sixth-floor window, where a ski
I heard a patter of thumps, a sound like hailstones striking mud. Those were the bullets that missed the window and hit the bricks above or on either side. Many didn’t miss. I saw Lee’s shirt billow out as if a wind had started to blow inside it—a red one that tore holes in the fabric: one above the right nipple, one at the sternum, a third where his navel would be. A fourth tore his neck open. He danced like a doll in the hazy, sawdusty light, and that terrible snarl never left his face. He wasn’t a man at the end, I tell you; he was something else. Whatever gets into us when we listen to our worst angels.
A bullet spanged one of the overhead lights, shattered the bulb, and set it to swaying. Then a bullet tore off the top of the would-be assassin’s head, just as one of Lee’s had torn off the top of Ke
Shouts from below. Someone yelling “Man down, I saw him go down!” Ru