He was.
“Hole-in-the-Wall,” Alan said.
“We’ll need a warrant. Know any judges who are early risers?”
“As a matter of fact I do,” he said.
A year ago he’d slept with her. Janet never knew.
Now, she thought, it’s got to be now.
Ahead of her on the stairs Emil was hauling Marion down, cursing and fighting him all the way but Janet knew his strength firsthand and knew it wasn’t going to do her a damn bit of good. Billy was smiling, having a fine old time with all this, laughing and poking her with his index finger from behind. Ray ignored him but seemed to consider Marion with something like regret.
In one way or another each of them was focused on Marion. She stopped and turned.
“Micah Harpe,” she said. “Big.”
He looked puzzled. How would this woman know his name? So did the black guard behind him.
“Yeah?”
“Two things. My name’s Janet Morris. Does that ring a bell?”
“You been on the bands all night. I know who you are.”
“You don’t understand. I’m a lawyer. I represent your brother. And our defense is based solely on you, Mr. Harpe. We’re saying it was you who killed George and Lilian Willis and not Little. That’s the first thing.”
She was talking for her life now and she knew it. She also knew learning of her defense strategy wasn’t going to make him happy.
“I’m interested. The second?”
“I read your rap sheet. The attempted murder, the one in prison.”
“Uh-huh.”
She glanced down the stairs. The others had reached the bottom and Emil was staring hard at them, suspicion knotting his brow.
“The man was your cellmate. He’d been there just three days. You beat him into a coma. Why?”
“I didn’t like him.”
The guard was smiling.
“You didn’t like him because he’d murdered his wife and children. His children. You seemed to feel very strongly about that.”
“Nobody on the inside likes a baby-killer. Maybe me less than most. So what?”
“What if I told you what you haven’t heard on the police bands yet?”
She looked over her shoulder. Emil had handed Marion off to Ray now and was climbing back up the stairs. He was already halfway there.
“What if I told you I just saw these people shoot a four- or five-year-old girl to death in her parents’ car, just to steal the car ? Would you still let them walk on out of here? Because that’s what they did. A man, a woman, a teenage girl and a five-year-old child, Mr. Harpe.”
She was aware of Emil right behind her now and knew he’d heard that last part but she didn’t give a good goddamn what or how much he’d heard and her anger was real when she whirled on him.
“ Tell him!” she said.
Emil looked too damn surprised to answer.
“That true?” said Harpe.
Emil just looked at him.
“You a pimp and a baby-killer, asshole?”
Then suddenly his confusion seemed to resolve itself. He threw his arm around her neck and yanked her off the stair she was on and slid the gun out of his belt and jabbed the barrel to her forehead, his breath hot and sour against her face.
“ Fucking bitch!”
The guard behind them raised his rifle.
“Go ahead,” said Harpe. “Shoot her. And then I guess you’re gonna shoot your way outa here, right?”
She glanced down at Billy and saw him draw Marion’s. 22. Harpe saw it too.
“Looks like you are,” he said. “You are one bunch of stupid people, you know that?”
“Back off!”
He slammed her forehead with the gun barrel. His arm was choking her. She saw stars and tried not to fall.
“Back off, goddammit!”
He hit her again, harder this time, exactly where she’d hit the windshield hours ago so that she was bleeding again, yet even through the bright spreading pool of pain she could feel him trembling, fear or anger or both, and that drove her own anger, keeping her afloat above the pain. She was aware of all the people watching them below and that the place had gone practically silent, that somebody had finally killed the chaos they’d been listening to all night. So that the third time he hit her it thundered in her ears like a single blow on a drumhead.
“ You want a dead lawyer here? I’ll damn well give her to you! ” Emil screamed.
“You already did that, remember?”
“What?”
“I said you already did. You’re damaging your own merchandise. Fool.”
And that was true enough. She could feel the warm blood crawling down her cheek. Emil didn’t seem to understand.
She did, though. Hope seemed suddenly to fly away down those stairs.
“Did I say what you did or didn’t do changes anything?” Harpe said. “Mr. Thaw says to try Harrison, I try Harrison. You get it now, you ignorant sonovabitch?”
Then he did get it finally and lowered the gun and let go of her and she fell to her knees against the stair. Harpe held out his hand. Emil hesitated and then handed him his pistol. Then turned to Billy downstairs.
“Put it away, Bill.”
“I don’t have any accord with this man,” Billy said. The gun was pointed directly at Harpe.
“The man don’t like you either. Put it away.”
“It’s all right,” said Harpe. “Let him hold it if he wants. Don’t matter.”
He nodded. Just once. And suddenly the room exploded in gunfire, all of it pouring across the floor at Billy, at least a dozen guns at once, Ray and Marion pitched flat-out beside him with their hands covering their heads as Billy danced and twitched like some boneless thing erupting flesh and blood, muzzles flashing and bullets tearing into him from every which way keeping him on his feet until he dropped like a sodden sack, the gun still clenched in his bloody right hand.
She smelled cordite thick and vile for the second time that night and thought of the little girl again. She felt nothing at all for Billy-not even satisfaction. It was no surprise to her at all.
She looked at Emil. His face was white, his mouth slack. Without his own gun he seemed smaller, diminished down to just another weak aimless man. Harpe moved on past them down the stairs, saying nothing to either of them, past Marion and Ray peeling themselves up off the floor and past Billy’s pooling blood, and Emil stooped and helped her up and they followed, Emil’s legs just as unsteady as her own, she thought, the guard a step behind them. Followed him as he moved through the crowd and gunsmoke like a walking boulder or some living, breathing god past a biker leg-wounded in the crossfire, patting him on the shoulder, the man grinning at that, followed him to the back of the room where he opened a door and led them down to more stairs and darkness.
Billy was there one moment and not there the next and that was the way of it, the way it always was, Emil thought, for the cop and for that family back there and for all the others, nothing too fucking astounding about that, nothing to worry a man particularly. So he had to figure it was the fucking room and what was going on in it that was troublesome, the dark of the room and the long moving shadows against the rough stone walls as they came off the stairs, the room dark except for some candles and a flickering fireplace way down at the end. So the room was bothering him? The fucking room?
Or maybe it was the fucking altar?
Because that’s what it was all right, a goddamn altar, three long wide slabs of what looked like solid granite- these assholes and these rich bitches gathered around it a bunch of weirdo zombies going about their business crowded around the altar toward the back, the word RISE painted across the ceiling, some dumb-ass pentagram thing on the wall behind them just like in the horror movies, diamond necklaces and formal ties showing above black robes, diamond earrings and Rolex watches, no bikers or Nazis in this neck of the woods, no sir, all these rich-fuck weirdo zombies moving along one by one, washing their hands and faces out of a great big copper bowl and toweling dry and throwing the towels in the fireplace.