CHAPTER 15
For his entire drive home, Hilton had heard nothing but sirens. The moment he left Danitra’s apartment, racing against the deepening orange daylight because he couldn’t stand the idea of remaining with her after dark, his car’s rearview mirror was filled with the red-and-white flashing of sirens. An ambulance was racing behind him, darting between traffic and closing in with its deafening wails before he pulled off the road and wondered, for an awful moment, if it meant to follow him. It drove past.
Then, as soon as he hit southbound 1-95, he got tied up in the snarl of onlookers gazing at a crash clogging the northbound lanes. A minivan was turned on its side, swathed in flashing red lights from emergency vehicles of all sizes. Hilton forced himself to drive past without looking at the crushed van or searching for signs of its unlucky passengers. By the time he had passed it and his lane began to speed up, he realized that his knuckles hurt from clinging so tightly to his steering wheel. His mouth was dry.
Pull it together, brother, he thought to himself. You’re on your way home to your wife and kids. Tonight of all nights, he had to chill out.
For the first time all day, Hilton was wide awake. His mind was in full action, quizzing him: Where had he been? Why hadn’t he called home or the office since he left? Simple. He’d felt burned out, so he canceled his meeting and went for a drive.
One major fuck-up: he’d left his jacket at Danitra’s. Okay, simple again. He’d forgotten it at the office. No problem.
He sniffed himself for Danitra’s scent, which still lingered heavily in his nostrils and made his loins feel tight with the memory of arousal. He glanced down at himself to check for stains, for lipstick, for any sign Dede’s eyes would devour. Clean. Good.
He was all right. He could do this.
As traffic eased and he began making good time, Hilton even ventured a smile at himself in his mirror, remembering Danitras fingernails traveling across his bare spine and her hungry mouth wrapped around him in a way Dede had never mastered, drawing such howls from him that he’d woken her baby up. He was sure he even felt better, much better. So much for the stress Stu had talked about; he’d found the perfect stress relief.
Hilton’s mood changed as soon as he turned onto his dark street and saw a Metro-Dade police car parked at the curb in front of his coral wall, nearly blanketed in shadow. Jamil’s Huffy racing bicycle was abandoned, lying on its side in the driveway behind Dede’s car near the edge of the street. Jamil would never leave his bike out like that.
you never know what the boy could’a been
Something was wrong. This was some swift retribution exacted upon his family to punish him for straying. Like a series of close-up photographs, his mind flashed him images of their bloody carcasses propped up in a grotesque imitation of a family pose on the sofa, and his own blood seemed to thicken in his veins.
Hilton leaped from his car, met by barks of recognition from Charlie, who was behind the fence in the backyard. The barking sounded clipped and urgent, feeding Hilton’s fevered mind.
“Dede?” he cried, flinging the unlocked front door open.
Jamil and Kaya were watching television on the living room sofa and looked up at him, startled. Jamil halted the pencil sketch of a race car he was drawing in midstroke. Kaya was sipping fruit juice through a straw, her legs crossed as he’d imagined her the moment before; but this time, in reality, there was no blood streaming from her empty eye sockets.
“Hi, Daddy,” Jamil said. “I’m sorry I left my bike outside, but Mom got scared and said to come in right now—”
“Where’s your mom?” Hilton asked.
“In the kitchen with Sergeant Gillis,” Kaya said, and glanced up at him pointedly. “She tried to call you.”
Niglets. Hilton barely heard her as a roar of silence rose in his ears. He stood without moving, gazing at his two children whose foreheads protruded slightly like his own, whose eyes reminded him of Nana’s. Jamil’s missing tooth. The sheen of Kaya’s braids. He was seized by the startling sensation, almost a certainty, that he was dreaming.
Jamil snapped him from the trance. “We got a letter from that guy again, Daddy,” he said.
Hickory dickory dock,
Time’s running off the clock,
For a nigger brood,
Their little dog too,
And a judge I’ll make suck my cock.
This time, the note had been delivered via the United States Postal Service into the James family’s black mailbox directly beside their front door. The plain white envelope was typed, with no return address, postmarked from Coral Gables. The single piece of paper folded inside contained only those five lines, centered on the page with care.
Closer, closer each time.
“Sure is a methodical son of a bitch,” Curt said in the kitchen, guzzling a can of Coke. “Man, I don’t know, guys. A letter to the house? I know we’ve filed complaints with Miami PD, but suddenly I’m thinking about the FBI and wondering if maybe we shouldn’t be worried about a letter bomb. Remember the last note, what he said about blowing the house down?”
Dede was wearing a bright yellow suit from work, sitting at the kitchen table with reading glasses she rarely wore. She was sorting through her copy of the computer printout from the state attorney’s office, her list of the hundreds of men and women she’d prosecuted during her career. Dozens of names had already been highlighted and investigated, but she was always examining the list as though she expected one name to suddenly jump out at her.
“I think that’s all nursery rhyme crap,” Dede said, sounding far less shaken than she had after receiving the last threat. She’d become a veteran at fright now, and she’d learned how to nourish herself with it, growing stronger. “Just like this hickory dickory dock nonsense. What are we looking for, a highly educated poet who’s also a munitions expert? I think we’re giving him too much credit, and that’s the problem. We’ve probably already interrogated him and let him slide. I’ll bet he dunks fries at Burger King just like these guys we’ve talked to.”
Hilton stood over the sink, rubbing cold water across his face to absorb the perspiration that had been dripping from his brow since he arrived at home. While his family was here dealing with this maniac, he’d been out fucking one of his former clients. His hands still trembled slightly from his nightmarish vision of finding Dede and the children assembled in a death embrace.
“Suck his cock,” Dede muttered, annoyed. “It’ll be the last time his cock is sucked or anything else, that’s for damn sure.”
Her words, directed at the letter’s author, seared into Hilton’s conscience. Danitra’s mouth had brought him to a panting orgasm less than an hour before, and even now his imagination still paraded images of Danitra’s lips, her tongue, her breasts before his eyes against his will. All of his mental preparations for seeing Dede had been shattered; if she confronted him now, he would be too nervous to lie with any credibility.
“From now on, maybe you’d better not open any letters from folks you don’t know,” Curt said. “Just to be safe. Ain’t that right, Hilton?”
Hilton nodded, still facing the sink while cold droplets from the running water splashed his slacks. “Yeah. Sounds right.”
“Isn’t Charlie trained to sniff out bombs?” Dede asked Curt.
“Sure is, but you don’t want to take that chance, Your Honor.”
“Well, I’ll be damned if I’m not going to open my own mail.”
If Dede was expecting an argument from Hilton tonight, she wouldn’t get it. He remained silent, concentrating on slowing his breathing so he could hold a normal conversation without looking as unsettled as he felt. His neck tingled as though the letter’s author was in the room with them, watching them, and he felt helpless to strike out against him. He was too weak.
Charlie, the alarm, the gun—none of it would be enough. Nothing could stop someone bent on hurting them. And how could he be a man if he wasn’t strong enough to protect his own family?
He had already failed to turn his back on temptation, and it might be that simple to fail again. Hilton felt hollow and useless. He tried to wash the feeling away beneath the stream of running water.
“You with us, Hil?” Curt asked.
Hilton waved toward them and nodded. “I just thought the worst when I drove up and saw the car outside. I’m all right.”
Even without seeing them, Hilton sensed that Curt and Dede must have exchanged a look then. Curt was probably puzzled, and Dede most likely shrugged off her frustration. I don’t know what’s happening to him, her look must have said. He’s cracking up.
“Don’t let him get to you, man. That’s what he wants.”
“I know,” Hilton said, forcing a small smile and dragging himself to the table to sit beside Dede. He met her eyes for a split second, then looked away from their searching and patted her hand. “I’m okay, baby.”
Dede sighed, flipping through the pages on her printout. She was probably plenty worried to see him losing his cool, but she would never question him in front of Curt. She would save that for later, he knew.
“I’m so sick of this searching on and on, not knowing,” Dede said. She muttered something in her mothers first language, Ga, a tongue Dede spoke only in phrases and which Hilton could not understand. “It’s like my mother says . . . How would that translate? ‘An enemy you know is a friend compared to the enemy you don’t.’”
“Maybe this is bigger than us,” Curt said.
“No,” Dede said, sounding as firm as Hilton might. “I don’t want it bigger than us. I don’t want it in the papers. Next thing, someone will be questioning whether I’m fit to serve, if I can be objective. Let’s keep up the questioning, starting with . . . ”—she sighed again, scanning the rows of names— “Lord, who knows? This next row of felonies. Craig Farrell, Lee Eric Frank, Charles Ray Goode, William James Grace . . .”
charles ray
Hilton’s head snapped up, and he leaned over to follow the trail of Dede’s finger across the names. “Wait up,” he said. “What was that name? That Goode name?”
“Charles Ray Goode. Aggravated battery. He got time served and two years’ probation,” Dede read. “I don’t even remember him. I’m not getting a face. I remember Grace, though. He tried to rape a high school girl, and he got out last year—”
“It’s not him,” Hilton said, taking the printout from her fingers so he could peer at the name. His heart was pounding until his body felt unsteady, half from giddiness, half from fear. “This one. Charles Ray Goode. Curt, get this down.”
“I’m getting, I’m getting,” Curt said, reaching for his pad.
“Hil, it looks like the judge practically let him off. Goode didn’t even do any real time.”
“His birthdate is . . .” Hilton paused his reading, his mouth stilled a moment. “. . . March twelfth, 1956.”
“That’s your birthday,” Dede said, surprised.
“How ’bout that?” Curt said, chuckling. “But remember— just ’cause y’all have the same zodiac sign doesn’t mean this is the one we want, Hil.”
“He’s the one,” Hilton said hoarsely. “I don’t know how I know. I just do. Curt, man, I feel like I’d know him if I saw him in a lineup.”
“Good thing one of us does,” Dede said, looking at Hilton with a gentle, worried skepticism.
A rare moment of peace had settled over the house.
Hilton had said his good nights to Jamil and Kaya, taking a moment to sit with them on the sofa and ask them about their lives. He’d had no idea Kaya had been cast in a professional play at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, a musical, nor that she’d told Dede she’d made up her mind to study science instead of drama. He hadn’t known Jamil had qualified for the county’s program for gifted students, and that he’d nearly gotten into a fight at school the week before because a classmate called him a liar. He had his mother’s temper. Hilton listened to them, one arm around each, and marveled at how precious and wonderful their little lives were. Their world was so different from his. What a blessing to be so young, with their lives free of real fear or betrayal or paralyzing sleeplessness, all things that just might come with time.
After sending Kaya and Jamil to bed, Hilton went outside to tie Charlie to the tree in the front yard and then surveyed the property with his shotgun, as he did each night. He searched the shadows where hedges from his neighbors’ yards grew against his back fence, then the shed, the patio, the garage. Everything was silent, free of any signs of tampering. Afterward, he made his way inside, carefully locking all the doors, leaving on all the floodlights until the house was encircled in brightness.
In the hallway, Hilton could see the sharp light from the reading lamp streaming from Dede’s bedroom. He stood with his gun and took a deep breath, then he peered through the doorway. She sat in bed reading a hardbound law journal, writing notes on a legal pad. She looked lovely to him, even with her hair covered by a faded scarf and in her round-frame reading glasses.
“May I come in?” he asked. The bedroom no longer felt like his. Dede nodded but didn’t answer. She closed her book and gazed at him. Hilton rested the gun against the wall near the nightstand, then walked to the closet and began to undress. First, he hung up his white dress shirt. Next, he folded his gray pinstriped slacks on their crease and rested them across a hanger he carefully slid between his other clothes.
“Where’s the rest of that suit? That’s your best,” she said.
“I left it at the office,” he said with ease, too much ease. Before now, he’d never had any opportunities to discover that he was, indeed, an adept liar. He sat at the edge of the bed, near her feet. “I’m sorry I wasn’t at work when you called.”
“Wanda told me about your meeting.”
“I canceled it,” he said without a pause.
“She told me that, too.” Hilton sensed a hidden pain in Dede’s face, but it was impossible to guess its source. There had been so much pain lately.
“Aren’t you going to ask where I was?” Hilton asked. Dede looked at him but stubbornly refused to answer. He kneaded her foot beneath the blanket. “Work has been hard for me, piling up, and I can’t handle it. I took off and drove around. Back roads, mostly. I’m trying to get myself together, Dede.”
When he saw her uncomfortable concern for him reflected in her face, his skin began to burn with guilt. He rubbed his neck, wishing he had the courage to be honest, wishing he’d had the strength to remain true to her, true to himself. “I’m a mess, Dede,” he said, blinking, staring at his lap.
“You said you were going to see Raul.”
“I know.”
Her voice drifted to an urgent hush: “Hilton, it scares me to see you like this. Even Wanda asked me what’s happening to you. I said I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. I try not to think about it, hoping it’ll go away and 111 have my husband back. But it doesn’t. Every day I look at you in the mornings and I can barely remember who you are. Who you were. You’re a man who lives here, you walk with that gun, you’re watching over us all the time like some sort of guardian angel. But other than that, I don’t know you. What’s happened?”
He shook his head, unable to speak.
“Promise me you’ll get help,” Dede said, sitting up, her bleary eyes sweeping over his face. “Promise me.”
“I promise,” he said, barely audibly.
“Should we cancel the party Saturday?”
“No,” he said quickly. “It might be good for us.”
Dede ventured a small smile, patting the mattress beside her. “Come,” she said. “Lie with me. As long as you can, lie here.”
He turned off the light and climbed into bed beside her, and her arms greeted him like a long-sought sanctuary. He could melt in these arms. He rested his head across her chest and felt her breathing, waiting, as heat gathered in the spots where their flesh met. But he couldn’t bring himself to touch her. He didn’t deserve to touch her like a husband, no matter how much he wishe
d he could and how much he knew she wanted him to.
I’m sorry, he mouthed into the darkness.
Finally, after a moment, he heard Dede’s long, wounded sigh of resignation before she kissed one temple and the other. “Sweet dreams,” she said.
CHAPTER 16
Hilton explores the warm, welcoming space between Dede’s legs and parts them, sliding himself on top of her with a steady pressure until her insides swallow him. He breathes a sigh and fervidly burrows his way against her flesh, retreating until he feels the heated ringing at his tip—never further—and then easing back inside until the ringing spreads throughout his loins.
“I’m sorry, Dede,” he says. “Never, never again.”
When she does not answer, he wonders if she is angry. He wonders if she refuses to stir to punish him, or if she is veiling her own pleasure to torment him.
He closes his eyes, his buttocks pinched from strain, and buries himself inside of her again. He kneads her stiff nipples with his fingertips. He can already feel the surge of his seed, a creeping from his testicles through the pulsing length of his organ. Not now, he thinks. This is too soon. A bit longer.
Her grasp around him is more tight now, a second skin lulling him helplessly to the edge of his endurance. Not yet, not yet.
The grip snatches tighter still, so jolting that he pauses in midstroke. It is pain, he realizes. Dede is so parched that he is scraping himself raw inside her. Is he bleeding? The heat he feels is entirely his own; Dede’s flesh has grown cold, and he feels it coiling through his system with a spasm.
Hilton gapes at Dede’s face. The eyes that meet his are so wide they look propped, glazed in a lifeless love stare. When he touches her, the skin does not yield to his fingertips; instead, his hand drags across her flesh. Her body beneath him is stone.
Hilton screams, flinging himself from her and cradling his tender nakedness in a fetal curl on the bed.