Evening Street (6 page)

“Why didn't you say you recognized her last night?” Bell asked him.

“Thought I'd let bygones be bygones,” he said. He sounded flustered, ashamed of his ignorance. “No need to make a scene here. No need to bring other folks into our family business. If she didn't want to say knew me, then fine—fine, we'll do it that way.” He sucked in a breath. “But then Tina told me today what she'd found out. About what happens when you just up and stop like that. Abraham was already gonna be in trouble, sure. But it would've been a lot easier on him if Tina hadn't tried to quit on her own.” He gritted his teeth. “There's no hope now. I had some hope—having a child is all about hope, ain't it?—but now there's no hope left. Nothing. Just the pain. The pain he's feeling, every minute of every goddamned day.”

Hinkle was, Bell surmised, inching ever closer to the edge. Despair was hardening in him, making him indifferent to his fate. And a man indifferent to his fate is the most dangerous man in the world.

“Jess,” she said, as soothingly as she could manage, “we'll work this out, okay? We will. Whatever Angie did, she'll have to answer for. I promise you that. But listen to me—if Del dies, then everything changes for you. You'll go to prison for a long, long time. You'll likely never see Abraham again. There'll be nobody left to care about him, nobody left to make sure he's raised right.”

He looked at her, his eyes still smeared over from drunkenness but with one clear truth evident in their depths. “Didn't think of it that way,” he said. “I'm only here for him, you know. That's why I done this. I wanted to show him that I cared.” He shook his head. “I know that don't make no sense—he don't even know I'm here. But later on, when he's old enough to understand, maybe somebody'll tell him. They'll tell him I tried. They'll tell him I cared enough to bust in here to get him some justice. I never meant—” He took a number of deep, heavy breaths and glanced for a moment down at Ryerson. “—I never meant to hurt this fella here. But he moved. I thought he was comin' for me.”

“Jess—” Bell took a step toward him. She had sensed that he might be ready now to give up the shotgun, if she moved slowly and gingerly.

“Get back! Get the hell away from me!”

She was wrong. The shotgun flew up at her face. Hinkle backed up a step and then stopped, panting wildly, fury in his eyes, aiming his weapon at Bell with a definite seriousness of intent.

“You come any closer,” he said, sounding ragged and mean, “and I'll blow your damned head off. Don't care what they do to me. Don't matter no more, anyway. My boy ain't gonna live a normal life, nohow.”

“You can't be sure of that,” Bell countered. Arguing with him was a calculated risk. But coddling and capitulation, she guessed, weren't going to work, and so she was left with only one option: Talk to him candidly, straightforwardly, and hope that the bedrock decency that she'd perceived in him the night before—the earnestness, the love for his child—was a real thing, and that, in the end, it would have some power over his choices, including the ultimate one:

Whether or not to let them live.

*   *   *

Lily's voice rang out. “I can't stabilize him. Blood pressure's dropping,” she said. The urgency in her voice had ratcheted up a few degrees. “For God's sake, Hinkle,” she went on, “you can't just let him—!”

“Shut up. Shut up!” he barked back at her.

His gray, nicked-up hands were so shiny with sweat that they glittered in the overhead lights. His eyes, Bell saw, darted around the room; he didn't know what to do next. He was afraid of losing control of the situation. All he knew how to do was exactly was he was doing: telling the world to stand still, and enforcing the order with a proffered shotgun.

And then, in the half-second of silence that followed in the wake of Hinkle's bitter retort to Lily, there arose a sound like no other sound they'd yet heard since the ordeal began: the thin, high-pitched wail of a baby's cry. It came from the rows of basinets on the far side of the room.

It didn't last long—less than ten seconds. But it seemed to have a galvanizing effect on Jess Hinkle. A ripple of shock ran through his entire body, causing the shotgun to quiver in his hands.

His voice sounded wrung out, twisted and pummeled by emotion. “Is that—is that my boy? Is that Abraham?”

“Could be,” Angie said. “They all sound pretty much alike, though. A sick kid's a sick kid. They're all in distress here. Do you get that? They need a lot of care. And you're keeping us from doing our job. So guess what, Jess? If Abraham's suffering—it's on
you,
mister.”

That was the wrong answer. Before Bell realized what was happening, Hinkle lunged forward. The alcohol made him clumsy on his feet, but he was still strong, and he had surprise on his side. He raked the shotgun barrel across Angie's face. She staggered sideways, falling to her knees and then all the way down, settling on her butt. Blood rushed from a triangular rip in her cheek. She screamed and flailed, trying to piece back the severed flap of skin with her fingers.

“Jess!” Bell said. “Don't—!”

Now he whipped his body around in her direction. She wondered if she was about to get the same treatment.

“I'm tired of listening to that bitch talk about my boy! You hear me?”

“I hear you,” Bell said. Quietly, calmly. “Loud and clear. Just settle down, okay? I don't want anybody else getting hurt. There's no need for that. We'll all just be cool here. Okay?”

He kept the shotgun trained on her face, his own face transfixed in a spasm of hate and fear and uncertainty and something else, too—something Bell couldn't name, some emotion that was an amalgam of so many other emotions, a portion of them unique to him and his psychology and experiences, and thus ultimately unknowable by her. All Bell could say for sure was that he had a shotgun pointed at her face and a wildness coursing through his nerved-up body, a wild despair and a wild sorrow, and that she might be, in the next instant, the target of all that raw and deadly passion, when it was channeled—like a raging river forced into a narrow chasm between the rocks—into the curved index finger now twitching on the trigger.

Bell thought she was going to die. And thus even though only a second passed, it might have been an hour. It might have been a lifetime. She didn't know.

Her body was motionless. Her brain, though, was working so quickly, its contents spinning and diving and rising and then diving again, up and down and all around, that it almost made her woozy. Random pictures popped up into her mind, visual snippets from the past. There were no words; words didn't matter. It was all imagery, image after image, each one vivid and true: There was Carla, beautiful Carla, and the way her daughter smiled at her from the stage on the day of her high school graduation. Bell had driven over to Alexandria from Acker's Gap for the ceremony. She was in the middle of a big trial and so she was late, driving as fast as she could drive through the West Virginia mountains to get there, taking chances, flooring it, twisting the wheel of the Ford Explorer this way and that,
I can't be late,
I CAN'T BE LATE
,
wishing she'd left the courthouse earlier, but she couldn't, not in the middle of a murder trial. She got there just in time, blowing through a red light, going the wrong way down a one-way street, parking illegally, forgetting to lock her car, barreling through the security checkpoint—
My God, are there security checkpoints
EVERYWHERE
now, even at high school graduation ceremonies? Yes, yes, of course there are, and thank God for that
—and then racing up the center aisle and grabbing the first empty seat she saw, the white wooden chairs arranged in long rows on the field of the school's soccer field, and the sunlight so bright on this late spring day, and up on the wooden stage, the principal is reading the names—“Eakins, Edwards, Eichhorn, Elkins”—and there she is, Carla Jean Elkins, eighteen years old, the pleats of the royal blue gown swishing around her ankles, she's walking past the principal, and the principal is handing her the rolled-up scroll—“They don't give you the real thing at the ceremony, Mom,” Carla had explained to her on the phone the night before, forgetting, the way a teenager always did, that her mother had been through the same ceremony herself and knew a few things, “It's fake, because they have to make sure you pass your finals and actually graduate before they give you the real diploma”—and then the principal shakes her hand and then her daughter turns and smiles, and Bell knows, she knows, she knows, that Carla Jean is smiling directly at her. It's just a smile, but it's not just a smile. It's a smile from her little girl.

Bell's made so many mistakes in her life, done so many things wrong, but it doesn't matter, because up there on the stage is her child, and Carla's smiling, she's going to be fine.

A shriek, a piercing one. The picture disappeared.

The sound came from Angie Clark, down on the floor, a few feet away from Lily and Ryerson. Angie pulled her hand away from her face and discovered the amount of blood that was on it, and now she was in a full-blown, top-of-her-lungs panic. Her screams drew Hinkle's attention away from Bell. He turned, and when he did, the shotgun did, too.

Bell's brief moment of visual reverie—the picture she had in her head, when she was convinced she was about to die—was over, but she'd learned something. When she finally did arrive at the last second of her life, a time that might come tonight or might come sixty years from now or anywhere in between, she knew what she'd see: the face of her daughter. She'd just had a sneak peek. The sight of it waited for her, waited for that final moment. It would always be there. No matter what Bell happened to be looking at when she died, the last thing she'd ever see would be Carla's face.

“Shut up, bitch,” Hinkle growled at Angie. “Tired of listening to you.”

Angie's shrieks continued. They had roused several of the infants, and now the room was awash in sounds of distress, from Angie's loud cries to the softer, kittenlike fussings of the babies.

Hinkle took his free hand and pushed it against his forehead. Then he made a fist and hit the side of his head. “Can't take this noise,” he said. “Giving me a headache. Like there's an iron band around my head and it's getting tighter and tighter.”

A cell phone ringtone overlapped with his last sentence. Both his hands were instantly gripping the shotgun once again. Hinkle's eyes narrowed and he scanned the room.

“What the hell's that?” he demanded.

“My cell,” Lily replied. She kept working on Ryerson as she talked. “It's in my pocket. I get a call several times a night from the hospital, from the ER doc on call. She checks in to see how things are going over here.” The cell rang three more times, then stopped.

“What happens if you don't answer?” Hinkle said.

“She'll figure I'm busy and try again.” Lily sat back, hands on her thighs, her rear end resting on her heels. Sweat plastered her short hair to her scalp. Ryerson was still breathing, but just barely. “After a while, if I still don't answer, they'll send somebody to check on us.”

Bell watched Hinkle's face. His brain wasn't operating very fast, but it appeared to be clicking through various scenarios as thoroughly as it could, weighing options, calculating odds. There was a temporary lull in the cries from the basinets, and from Angie, as if Evening Street itself had decided to give him the time and the quiet so that he could think.

“Jess,” Bell said. “One way or another, this all ends tonight. You know that. I'm asking you to do the right thing. I want you to let us call the paramedics so that they can take Del. While he still has a chance.”

“And me, too!” Angie cried out. “I need help, too. I'm bleeding here. Real bad.”

Bell ignored her. “Jess?” she said. “They'll be coming here soon, anyway. This is your chance to show that you never meant any harm here tonight. That things just got out of hand. It could make a difference.” She wouldn't lie to him. He was in serious trouble, and there was no question of any sort of deal. But a small act of decency might be a factor. It might matter. She had nothing else to offer him.

“I want—” He faltered.

“What?” Bell said. “What is it that you want, Jess?”

She was afraid he'd just make another crazy, reckless threat against Angie Clark, or spew forth another nasty curse at her, but he didn't. He didn't even look at the nurse who sat on the floor a few away from him, both hands cupping the bottom half of her face, trembling and whimpering.

Instead, Hinkle's eyes traveled slowly over to the side of the room in which the white basinets were assembled, each one backlit by a rack of monitors.

“I'd like to see my boy,” he said. His voice had shed its threatening edge. It sounded almost curious now, probing, as if he'd even surprised himself with the simplicity of his request.

Lily spoke before Bell had a chance to. “No,” she declared. “No way. You're not going anywhere near those babies. You've already shot one man. And you're drunk. I don't care what we have to do to stop you—you're not touching a child.”

Hinkle gave her a strained, mournful look. “He's my son.”

“I don't care,” Lily said. She was still kneeling, but her voice had the strength behind it of a club-wielding giant who loomed over the room. “You lay a hand on one of those kids—and I'll kill you myself.”

Hinkle was taken aback by her vehemence. “Well,” he said, and he seemed, in the second before he spoke, to have made a decision. “How about this? I hand somebody my shotgun. Can I touch him then? Just once. That's all I'm asking. All I want.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Angie broke in. The hard cackle of her laughter bumped up weirdly against the solemnity of the moment. “You really
are
a dang fool, Jess Hinkle. So whadda you think—you'll give up your gun and then, when you finish singing a lullaby to your little bundle of joy, they'll give you the gun
back
? Oh, Lordy. That's hilarious. That sounds like the kind of pea-brained scheme you'd come up with. Makes me
real
happy that I told Tina to quit the drugs like she did. Sure, I knew what would happen to the baby—and that was the whole
point,
you friggin' moron. I don't want any child of yours running around, causing more trouble. I knew that if she stopped taking the pills when she did, the kid would be way too sick to live. Of course I knew that. And the world will be well rid of it. Just like Tina's well rid of
you.
”