Shakespeare's Champion

What if I couldn't save Jack by myself? Whom could I call?



Carrie was a noncombatant. Raphael had a wife and family, and without putting it to myself clearly in words, I knew a black man's involvement would escalate whatever was happening into a war.



If I went in and was captured, too, who would help?



Then I thought of someone.



I remembered the number and punched it in on Jack's phone.



"Mookie," I said when she answered. "I need you to come. Bring the rifle."



"Where?"



"Winthrop's. They've got - my man." I was beyond trying to explain who Jack was. "He's a detective. He's been taping them."



"Where'll I meet you?" She sounded cool.



"Let's go in over the back fence. I live right behind the Home Supply store."



"I know. I'm coming." She put her phone down.



This was the woman I'd cautioned about leaving town yesterday, and now I was urging her to put herself into danger on my say-so. But I didn't have time to worry about irony. I ran down the stairs, leaving Jack's door wide open. It wouldn't hurt for someone else to become alarmed. I ran to my place, let myself in. I pulled off my coat, found a heavy dark sweatshirt, and yanked it down over my T-shirts. I found Jack's forgotten watch cap. I pulled it over my light hair. No gloves, I needed my hands. I untied my high-tops and pulled on dark boots, laced them tight. I would have darkened my face if I could have thought of something to do it with. I came out of my front door as Mookie pulled in. She leaped out of the car with the rifle in one hand.



"What's your weapon?" she asked.



I raised my hands.



"Cool," she said, and we began to run for the tracks without further conversation. From the high point of the railroad, we surveyed the back lot of the Sporting Goods store. There were lights on in the store. The back lot was always lit, but there were pools of darkness, too.



"Let's go," my companion said. She seemed quite happy and relaxed. She required not one word of explanation, which was refreshing, since I wasn't sure I could manage anything coherent. We jogged down the embankment. I was about to take a run at the fence and accept the barbed wire at the top, but Mookie pulled wire cutters from a pocket in her dark jumpsuit. This was no fashion model garment, but a padded, heavy, dark workman's jumpsuit with many pockets. Mookie had a knit cap pulled over her hair, too. She went to work with the wire cutters, while I looked around us for any signs of detection.



Nothing moved but us.



Finally the opening was large enough and we scrambled through it, Mookie first. Again, nothing happened. We moved into a pool of darkness and crouched there behind a gleaming new four-wheeler. Mookie pointed at our next goal, a boat. We had to cross through some light, but made the boat safely. We waited.



In this run-and-wait fashion we worked our way from the rear of the lot to the back of the store. There was a customer door at ground level and a loading dock with a set of four steps going up to it. From the dock there was an employee door leading inside to the huge storeroom. The customer door was dark. I was willing to bet it was heavily locked.



They'd left someone on guard at the loading bay door. It was the pimply boy from the Home Supply store, and he was shifting from foot to foot in the cold, which I no longer felt. He had a rifle, too. Mookie whispered, "Can you take him out silently?"



I nodded. I'd never attacked anyone like this, someone who hadn't attacked me first, but before that thought could lodge firmly in my consciousness and weaken me, I focused on his rifle. If he had it, I had to assume he was willing to use it.



The boy turned to peer through the window in the employee door, and sneezed. Under cover of that noise, I leaped silently up the steps, came up behind him, snaked my arms around him to grip the rifle, and pulled it up against his throat. He struggled against me but I was determined to silence him.



He weakened. He grew limp. Mookie helped me lower him to the concrete platform. She pulled a scarf from one of her pockets and tied it around his mouth and bound his hands behind him with another. She took his rifle and held it out to me. I shook my head. She placed it down against the base of the loading dock, out of sight. She evidently thought he was alive and worth binding, so I didn't ask. I didn't want to know now if I'd killed him.



I wondered if they'd come to check on him. I stood sideways to the little head-high window reinforced with diamond-patterned wire, and looked through into the lighted storeroom. I could just see movement past a wall of boxes and racks, but I couldn't tell what was happening.



"Cover inside," I whispered to Mookie. "Go left when we go in."



She nodded. I took a deep breath, turned the knob, praying that it would not make a noise. To me, the twist of the metal was loud as cymbals, but no one appeared at the gap in the boxes to investigate. I pulled the door open and Mookie went in low, rifle at the ready. No one shot her. No one shouted. I went in after a second, dropped to a squat right inside the door, letting it ease shut against me.



Mookie was crouched behind a chest-deep pile of stenciled boxes. An array of huge metal shelves, all labeled and aligned, loomed ahead of us. To our right, across the aisle left open for passage to the back door, was a rack of camouflage jumpsuits in the colder, grayer, green and black of winter camo. There were more rows of shelves in front of the rack.



I could hear voices now, the raucous laughter of men high on their testosterone. In the middle of the laughter there was a cut-off yelp. Jack.



I was ready to kill now. I worked my hands, getting the stiffness and cold out of them. Mookie eyed me with some doubt.



"Which man is yours?" she asked almost inaudibly.



"The one who yelled," I told her. Her eyes widened. "He's got long black hair." She would need to know which one was Jack.



"We'll work our way up there, see what happens," she breathed.



That was as good a plan as any. We ducked around the boxes and concealed ourselves behind the next row of shelves.



We could see through the gaps in the stacked goods. Darcy was there, Jim was there, and Cleve Ragland, Tom David Meicklejohn. About who I'd expected. There was at least one person I couldn't see; I noticed the men turn to their right a few times, addressing a remark to whoever sat there.



They were torturing Jack.



As we worked our way to the front of the storage area, I saw more and more. I saw too much. Jack was tied to a chair, a wooden one on rollers. His arms were tied to the chair arms. He had the beginning of a black eye, and a cut on one cheek, maybe from when they'd grabbed him in his apartment. They'd taken off his shirt. They'd pulled the bandage off his bullet wound. Darcy had a hunting knife, and Cleve had devised his own little implement by heating an arrowhead with a lighter and putting it on Jack's skin. Jim Box looked nauseated. Tom David was watching, and though he did not look sick, he did not look happy, either. His eyes flickered toward whoever was seated out of sight, and back to Jack.



Darcy turned away from cutting Jack right under the nipple. The knife glistened with blood. I would kill him first, I thought, so consumed by the thought that I could not reason, could not plan what I should do. I had forgotten Mookie's existence until she nudged me. She pointed a slim finger to a man sitting on his haunches in the shadow of a shelving unit, a man I hadn't seen before, and I thought I would vomit. I recognized the pale floppy hair instantly. Bobo. Darcy said something to him.



Bobo raised his face to look at Darcy, and I saw tears on his face.



"I gotta ask you, boy, where you went just a while ago," Darcy said genially. He raised the knife so the light caught the part of the blade that was not red. Bobo stood up. His shoulders squared.



"I'm hoping you didn't betray your family by telling anyone what we'd caught here," Darcy said, waiting for Bobo to answer.



When the silence dragged on, everyone turned to look at Bobo, even Jim Box. Jack was taking advantage of the respite by closing his eyes. I saw his hands working under the tight cord around his wrists. He was biting his lower lip. There were a dozen cuts and burns on his chest, and they'd reopened the bullet wound. Streaks of blood clotted his chest hair.



"Did you go tell that blond bitch?" Darcy asked, quietly. "You tell that gal her little bedmate was in trouble here?"



Bobo didn't speak. He stared at Darcy, his blue eyes narrowed with turmoil. Something hardened in his face as I watched.



"I hope she does come looking," Cleve said suddenly. "We get to reenact her worst nightmare."



Darcy looked at Cleve in some surprise. Then he realized what Cleve meant. He laughed, his head thrown back, the overhead light scouring his face of any sign of humanity.



Jack's eyes were open now, all right. He was looking at Cleve with a brand new nightmare for Cleve in his eyes. Cleve looked down, flinched. Then he seemed to recall that he was in charge.



"We can give her a real good time right here," he told Jack. "You can watch, Bobo. Learn how it's done."



Tom David's eyes were slitted in distaste. He was looking at his coconspirators as if he'd just learned something about them that he didn't like. Bobo's face said he couldn't believe what he'd heard. He was waiting for some other explanation of the words to occur to him.



"This is going to be a pleasure," Mookie said in my ear. She pulled a knife from one of her pockets, handed it to me.



"I cover you, you cut him free," she said. "We get out the best way we can."



I nodded.



"Or maybe I'll kill them all," she said, to herself.



"They killed Darnell?"



"Yeah, I do believe. My mother got some calls after Darnell's death, anonymous, nasty really explicit about Darnell's injuries. They came from this store. She has caller ID," Mookie whispered. "Dumb shitasses didn't even think about a black woman having caller ID. Get ready."



She stepped out then, her rifle up at her shoulder.



"Okay, assholes," she said. "Down on the floor."



They all froze, Darcy in the act of bending over to put the knife to Jack's chest again; Cleve had the arrow in one hand, the lighter in the other. Beyond them, Tom David was still leaning against the wall, his arms crossed on his chest. Jim Box was beside him. Bobo, who'd been close to the door into the store, turned and stepped through it, and the clunk as the heavy door closed behind him made Cleve jump.



In that flicker of time, Darcy threw the knife at Mookie and dived to his right. Mookie fired and ducked to her right. Her bullet hit Jim Box, who'd been beyond Darcy; I glimpsed a red flower blossoming on his chest. And the knife missed her, but got me. I felt the sudden cold where my shirt sliced open, felt the pressure, but I was running for Jack. Cleve charged me, his thick chest and heavy chin making him look like an angry bull. I stepped aside as he came to me, and I extended my arm. It caught him in the throat. His head stayed still, but his feet kept on going. When the rest of his body didn't follow, they flew up in the air, and down he went. His head thudded against the concrete floor. And I heard the clunk of the door again. Someone else had fled into the store.



I knelt by the chair, cutting at the cords binding Jack. I was awkward about it, but Mookie's knife was sharp. I heard a rush of feet, light and quick, and then the pow! of the rifle.



Mookie passing by, doing God knows what damage. I thought I heard the door again.



I could pay attention to nothing else while I was using the knife, and when I'd sawed through the second set of bonds and I could look up, everything had changed.



I saw no one, at least no one moving.



Cleve was down for good. I felt a flash of satisfaction. Jim Box had vanished, but there were drops of blood on the floor where he'd been standing. I saw there was a chair in the shadows, across from Jack's. It was empty.



Jack whispered, "Help me up."



I jumped to my feet, held out my hands. To my horror, I could not meet Jack's eyes; that seemed worse, much worse, than what I'd done to Cleve Ragland. Jack made an awful sound of pain as he pulled himself up on me. There was a discarded brown coat, Bobo's, lying on a nearby shelf. I grabbed it. I had in mind fleeing through the rear door, trying to make it through the back lot and hole in the fence to my house, calling - someone. Fleetingly, I thought of the FBI men, who might still be at the motel where they'd been camped since the bombing.



"Put this on," I said urgently, holding out the coat to Jack. I was thinking of the bitter cold, Jack's wounds, shock, God knows what.



I kept lookout while Jack tried to manage, but in the end I had to help him. I was so intent on maneuvering Jack's left arm into the sleeve that I did not know anyone was behind me until Jack's face gave me a second's warning. Just as Jack began to move, something slammed against my shoulder. I shrieked involuntarily, knocked to my right, off my feet. I slammed my head into the shelves and fell to the floor hard enough to knock the breath from my lungs. I couldn't move. I stared up at the bright lights of the storeroom, high above me. I could see tall dark Jim Box, his shirt soaked with blood. He gripped an oar, holding it like a baseball bat, and he was swinging it back. He was going to hit me in the head, and there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it.



Jack went mad. He launched himself at Jim, wrenched the oar from him, and slammed it into Jim's head. Jim went over like a felled tree, without a sound. Jack stood over him, his blood-spattered chest heaving, wanting Jim to move, wanting to strike again.



But Jim didn't move.



With a rush the air came back into my lungs. I moaned, not only from the pain but from black despair. We were both hurt now, weak. How many more were in the building? Where was Mookie? Had they killed her?



Jack stood over me with the oar. Gradually some of the madness seeped from his face and he crouched beside me.