Most of the detention center’s windows had been dark since nightfall, but lights were still shining in the ground-floor lobby, the release point for inmates in the system. A pair of corrections officers stood guard, and all appeared quiet on the other side of the glass doors. It was completely unlike the spectacle on Seventh Avenue and the park directly across the street.
“Ho-lee shit,” Theo muttered.
The night air was thick with humidity, the mercury still in the high eighties, and all those bare arms and legs were a veritable feast for hungry mosquitoes. People were milling about, walking with no particular destination in mind, just wanting to be there for “the moment.” It was as if the beaches had closed, happy hour was over, and an armada of sunburned tourists had wandered over to the jail for free entertainment. Parents with their young children. High-school kids on their bicycles. College students with rum-filled go-cups in hand. Vendors selling boiled peanuts and bottled water. Drivers on the elevated stretch of expressway above it all honked their horns as they passed the detention center, as if it were New Year’s Eve or the Super Bowl. One young man stood outside the center with a homemade sign that was sure to get him on television: MARRY ME, SYDNEY.
“Snuggies,” a vendor called out, “get your hand-stitched snuggies.”
Theo did a double take. ROT IN HELL, SYDNEY was the stitched message. Theo had been joking on the Faith Corso Show, but this entrepreneur had stolen his idea and run with it.
The bright lights of a camera crew caught his attention. A BNN reporter had staked out a position on the sidewalk just a few feet behind him. She was interviewing the young man with the handheld marriage proposal, earnestly trying to find out what would make him want to spend the rest of his life with Sydney Bennett.
“Well, uhm, she’s really hot,” he said, reaching up inside the John Deere cap to scratch his head. “Obviously she, uh, likes to party. And did I say she’s hot?”
Theo’s phone vibrated. He stepped away from the small gathering around the television crew and checked the text message. It was from Jack.
“Hang,” it read.
They had worked out a system back at the hotel. The release could happen any time between midnight and two A.M. Such a broad window of time made it impractical for Theo to sit in the SUV with the motor running. The agreement was that Jack would update Theo by text every fifteen minutes. “Hang” meant nothing was happening. When it was time to bring the SUV around, the message would read “Greenlight.”
Theo slid his phone into his pocket. He had at least another fifteen minutes to kill, probably more. He continued down the sidewalk, beyond the detention center’s main entrance, toward the more secure wing that butted up against the elevated expressway. Razor ribbon topped a high chain-link fence that extended beneath the overpass, and the streetlamps cast the yellowish glow of high-security vapor lights. Theo was sweating, but he suddenly felt goose bumps. The dark prison walls, the guard towers and ribbon wire, the vigil keepers outside the chain-link fence-it was eerily reminiscent of the darkest time of his life, those hours before the execution he had narrowly avoided at Florida State Prison. This time, however, there was no competing right and left ideology, no clash of capital punishment proponents versus death penalty opponents, no “eye for an eye” versus “Kumbaya.” This crowd was unified in its vitriol, especially at this end of the parking lot. This was where the hard-core Shot Mom haters had set up camp.
“No blood money!”
A middle-aged woman, hoarse from hours of shouting, was screaming at Theo. Theo kept walking, but she stayed with him, shaking a poster that delivered the same message in bloodred letters:
NO BLOOD MONEY FOR SHOT MOM!
“And for her lawyer, neither!” another woman shouted.
Theo stopped and fired back a response that these women undoubtedly thought was still part of the black-speak lexicon. “Right on, sistuh.”
The women continued their chant, and a group behind them picked it up: “No blood money, no blood money, no blood money!”
The mantra had started a week earlier on the Faith Corso Show, when a guest commentator had reported incorrectly that Jack was in New York City shopping a million-dollar book deal for Sydney. Corso had seized the moment to rally her troops: “We cannot let this happen,” she’d told her viewers. “The injustice of Shot Mom’s acquittal will forever stain the hands of those twelve jurors who ignored the clear evidence of guilt. But if we stand aside and let Shot Mom sign her million-dollar deal with publishers in New York or filmmakers in Hollywood. . well, then shame on all of us. There truly will be no justice for Emma. So stand up, friends. Stand up with me and say it:
“No blood money!”
The glare of the television lights caught Theo’s eye, and again he found himself just a few yards away from the BNN reporter with her camera crew. The live interview of the moment was with an elderly woman from Lake City who had followed Faith Corso’s coverage of the case from the beginning. She was describing the poster that she and her eleven-year-old granddaughter had created to protest Sydney Bennett’s release. It was a collage of headlines and photographs spanning three years of newspaper coverage. Her voice quaked with emotion as she told the reporter about the photograph in the middle of the poster, a five-by-seven headshot of Sydney’s daughter, Emma.
“We glued on all these pictures this morning with plain old white glue,” the woman said, “and we used the exact same glue on Emma’s picture. But Emma’s is the only one where the glue soaked through the paper and left these red marks. Not a single one of these other pictures have that. You see what I’m talking about?” she asked, pointing.
“Yes, I do see,” said the reporter. “Let’s get the camera in closer for our viewers.”
“It looks like tiny red tears on her little cheeks, don’t it?”
“Remarkable,” the reporter said. “Viewers can draw their own conclusions, but, seeing it with my own eyes, I can only say that this is truly remarkable.”
“I believe that’s the Lord’s way of telling us that we’re doing the right thing here tonight, and I believe-”
A shout from across the parking lot halted the interview: “There she is!”
Theo’s gaze locked onto the commotion in the middle distance, and the BNN reporter signaled her cameraman to zoom onto the building.
“Hold on, Faith,” said the reporter. “We may have a Shot Mom sighting.”
Heads turned as random voices carried the news of one sighting after another.
“It’s her!”
“There’s Shot Mom!”
Onlookers jumped up from their lawn chairs and picnic blankets. Demonstrators grabbed their posters and sprinted across the street toward the high-security end of the building. A crowd that, minutes earlier, had been milling around and waiting was suddenly a cohesive ball of energy, catapulted by the Sydney sighting.
Theo ran, too, not sure what had happened to Jack’s plan, wondering if he had missed the “Greenlight” message. He checked his iPhone, but the display showed NO SERVICE. The Sydney sighting had overloaded the system, but word of mouth was spreading all around him.
“I see her!”
“Yeah, that’s her!”
Theo tried to get closer, but it was human gridlock ahead of him. Demonstrators blocked the sidewalk and the exit to the parking lot, but he was tall enough to see over most of the people in front of him. The most vocal and aggressive in the crowd, the tip of the human spear, had surrounded a young woman whose white blouse made her an easy mark in the darkness. People shook their fists and brandished their posters, shouting at her. She shouted back, but that only seemed to unify the mob.