Charlaine Harris - Shakespeare’s Champion

Blackness.

“Wake up, honey. I have to check you.” No.

“Open your eyes, Lily. It’s me, Carrie.” No. “Lily!”

I slitted my eyes. “That’s better.” Blinding light. “Don’t moan. It’s just-necessary.”

Back to sleep. Nice period of darkness and silence. Then, “Wake up, Lily!”

The next day was agony. My head ached, a condition that bore no more relationship to a normal headache than a stomachache bore to appendicitis. My ribs were notched and gouged and the skin above them a bloody mess stitched together like a crazy quilt. The wound in my thigh, though not serious, added its own note to my symphony of pain, as did the slice in my arm.

I was in a private room, courtesy of Howell Winthrop, Jr., Carrie told me when I demanded to go home. When I realized someone else was paying for it, I decided to rest while I could. He was paying for Jack’s room next door, too. Jack came in during that horrible morning, when even the medication that made me mentally dull could not smother the hurt.

When I saw him in the doorway, tears began oozing from the corners of my eyes, running down the side of my face to soak my pillow.

“I didn’t mean to have that effect on you,” he said. His voice was husky, but stronger.

I raised a hand, and he shuffled slowly to the bed and wrapped his own around it. His hand felt warm and hard and steady.

“You should sit,” I said, and my own voice sounded distant and thick.

“Got you drugged, huh?”

“Yes.” Nodding hurt more than speaking. “How’d they get you, Jack?”

“They found the bug,” he said simply. “Jim spilled a Coke in the lounge, and in the process of mopping up the mess, he found it. Jim called old Mr. Winthrop. He advised them to watch from concealment and see who came to extract the tape; and that was me. They had to consult with each other for a while. They decided they could find out who hired me if they put me through the wringer. Cleve and Jim thought all along it was Howell, but the others voted for something federal. They thought Mookie was federal, too. They thought about going to get her, bring her along to join the party. Said she’d been in the store too much to be natural. Lucky for me they didn’t. Why did you think of calling her? Who the hell is she?”

I tried to explain Mookie to him without revealing any of her secrets. I am not sure I managed, but Jack knew I worked for her, that she had a personal stake in uncovering our fledgling white supremacy group, and that I had known she could shoot. Jack held my hand for some time, rubbing it gently as he thought, and then suddenly he said, “When he knocked you down, when you hit the shelf and the floor-and I swear to God, Lily, you bounced-I thought he’d killed you.”

“You went crazy,” I observed.

He smiled a little. “Yes, I did. When you could stand, and you could walk-sort of-I knew you’d be okay. Probably. And after a look at Tom David, I knew he wasn’t a threat to you…”

“So you left.”

“Hunting.” He was not apologetic. He’d had to pursue the man who had degraded him. I, of all people, could understand that.

“Who’s dead?” Carrie had refused to talk about it.

“Tom David. Jim Box.”

“That’s all?”

“I wanted Darcy to die, but I didn’t hit him that final time that would have settled it. His jaw is broken, though. The cops were there by then, for one thing.” Jack sank into the chair, and thoughtfully punched the button to lower my bed so I could see him more easily.

“How come?”

“Bobo called them, when he went into the store after all the shooting started. And he was trying to find his grandfather. The old man had armed himself, and Bobo managed to track him down just in time.”

I remembered Bobo’s face as he’d lifted his grandfather and carried him off. A few more tears oozed down my face. I wanted to know what would happen to old Mr. Winthrop, but it could wait. Roasting in hell came to mind as fitting. “Mookie’s alive?” I had belatedly realized her name was not on the dead list.

Jack closed his eyes. “She’s just hanging on. She wants to talk to you.”

“Oh, no.” I felt so washed out, and washed up, I couldn’t stand the thought of one more confession. “She’s really not going to make it?”

“The arrow went right through. You saw.”

“I was hoping I made it up.” I looked away, at the curtained window.

Jack kept holding my hand, waiting for me to make up my mind.

“So Cleve didn’t die?” I was stalling.

“He has a fractured skull. Much worse than your concussion.”

“Not possible. Okay, get a nurse or two to load me in a chair.”

After a lip-biting interval, I was being pushed into Mookie’s room. There were blinking machines, and a constant low hum, and Mookie was hooked into more tubes than I had ever imagined a human being could be. Her color was ashen, and her lips had lost color. Lanette was in the corner of the room, her hands over her face, rocking back and forth in a straight chair. Her firstborn child was dying, and she had already lost her second.

The nurse went to stand out of earshot, and I raised my hand, with great effort, to touch Mookie Preston, that odd and lonely and brave woman.

“Mookie, I’m here-Lily,” I said.

“Lily. You lived,” she said very slowly, and her eyes never opened.

“Thanks to you.” If I had gone in there by myself, I would have died horribly and slowly. By asking her to go with me, I had set her death in motion.

“Don’t be sorry,” she said. Her voice was slow, and soft, but the words were distinct. “I got to kill some of them, the ones that killed my brother.”

I sighed softly. I had been thinking, while in my haze of pain and drugs. “Did you kill someone else?” I whispered.

“Yes.” She dragged out the word painfully.

“Len Elgin?”

“Yes.”

“He was involved in Darnell’s death.”

“Yes. I talked to him before I shot him. He was my… father.”

I should not remind Mookie of Len Elgin. I should say something else to Mookie Preston, something good. She was on her way to meet her Maker, and I could not send her out thinking of the deaths she had caused.

She spoke again. Her eyes opened and fastened on mine. “Don’t tell.”

I understood after a moment, even through the drugs. “Don’t tell about Len,” I said, to be sure.

“Don’t tell,” she repeated.

This was my punishment for leading this woman to her death. I would know the truth, but could not reveal it. No matter what happened to Len Elgin’s extramarital lover, Erica Moore, and her husband Booth. No matter what suspicions attached to Mary Lee Elgin.

“I won’t tell,” I said, accepting it. I was so doped up it seemed logical and appropriate.

“Mama,” she said.

“Lanette,” I called, and she leaped up from her chair and came to the bed. I motioned to the nurse who was waiting in the doorway, and she came to take me back to my room.

I think Mookie died before I got there.

After three days, I went home. The doctor herself drove me.

This homecoming-from-the-hospital routine-the stale house, the life untouched while I was gone-was getting old. I didn’t want to get hurt anymore. I didn’t want pain. I needed to work, to have order, to have emotional quiet.

What I had was pain and phone calls from Jack.

He’d had to talk to many many people: local, state, federal. Most of that I had been spared because of my concussion, the second I’d had in a month, but I’d had my share of interviews. Some questions I just hadn’t been able to answer. Like: Why had I called Mookie Preston? The answer, because I thought she could help me kill the men who had Jack, just wasn’t palatable. So I had lied, just a little. I said that I’d called Mookie when I discovered Jack was gone-I figured they could find that out somehow from the phone company-and that she’d agreed to accompany me to Winthrop Sporting Goods because I was so distraught. Yes, I knew what Jack was doing, so I suspected where he’d been taken and who had taken him.