Not her voice, but the voice of a friend.
She stops outside a shop where fortunes are read and the Tarot is told. In its dirty window she thinks she sees the reflection of someone standing beside her, a white man with a smiling, boyish face and a tumble of blond hair on his forehead. She glances around, but there’s no one there. It was just her imagination. She looks back down at the screen of the game console. In the shade of the fortune-telling shop’s awning, the swimming fish are bright and clear again. Back and forth they go, every now and then obliterated by a bright blue flash. Barbara looks back the way she came and sees a gleaming black truck rolling toward her along the boulevard, moving fast and weaving from lane to lane. It’s the kind with oversized tires, the kind the boys at school call a Bigfoot or a Gangsta Large.
“If you’re going to do it, you better get to it.”
It’s as if someone really is standing beside her. Someone who understands. And the voice is right. Barbara has never considered suicide before, but at this moment the idea seems perfectly rational.
“You don’t even need to leave a note,” her friend says. She can see his reflection in the window again. Ghostly. “The fact that you did it down here will be your letter to the world.”
True.
“You know too much about yourself now to go on living,” her friend points out as she returns her gaze to the swimming fish. “You know too much, and all of it is bad.” Then it hastens to add, “Which isn’t to say you’re a horrible person.”
She thinks, No, not horrible, just useless.
Blackish.
The truck is coming. The Gangsta Large. As Jerome Robinson’s sister steps toward the curb, ready to meet it, her face lights in an eager smile.
7
Dr. Felix Babineau is wearing a thousand-dollar suit beneath the white coat that goes flying out behind him as he strides down the hallway of the Bucket, but he now needs a shave worse than ever and his usually elegant white hair is in disarray. He ignores a cluster of nurses who are standing by the duty desk and talking in low, agitated tones.
Nurse Wilmer approaches him. “Dr. Babineau, have you heard—”
He doesn’t even look at her, and Norma has to sidestep quickly to keep from being bowled over. She looks after him in surprise.
Babineau takes the red DO NOT DISTURB card he always keeps in the pocket of his exam coat, hangs it on the doorknob of Room 217, and goes in. Brady Hartsfield does not look up. All of his attention is fixed on the game console in his lap, where the fish swim back and forth. There is no music; he has muted the sound.
Often when he enters this room, Felix Babineau disappears and Dr. Z takes his place. Not today. Dr. Z is just another version of Brady, after all—a projection—and today Brady is too busy to project.
His memories of trying to blow up the Mingo Auditorium during the ’Round Here concert are still jumbled, but one thing has been clear since he woke up: the face of the last person he saw before the lights went out. It was Barbara Robinson, the sister of Hodges’s nigger lawnboy. She was sitting almost directly across the aisle from Brady. Now she’s here, swimming with the fish they share on their two screens. Brady got Scapelli, the sadistic cunt who twisted his nipple. Now he will take care of the Robinson bitch. Her death will hurt her big brother, but that’s not the most important thing. It will put a dagger in the old detective’s heart. That’s the most important thing.
The most delicious thing.
He comforts her, tells her she’s not a horrible person. It helps to get her moving. Something is coming down MLK, he can’t be sure what it is because a down-deep part of her is still fighting him, but it’s big. Big enough to do the job.
“Brady, listen to me. Z-Boy called.” Z-Boy’s actual name is Brooks, but Brady refuses to call him that anymore. “He’s been watching, as you instructed. That cop . . . ex-cop, whatever he is—”
“Shut up.” Not raising his head, his hair tumbled across his brow. In the strong sunlight he looks closer to twenty than thirty.
Babineau, who is used to being heard and who still has not entirely grasped his new subordinate status, pays no attention. “Hodges was on Hilltop Court yesterday, first at the Ellerton house and then snooping around the one across the street where—”
“I said shut up!”
“Brooks saw him get on a Number 5 bus, which means he’s probably coming here! And if he’s coming here, he knows!”