Starling advancing on the Cadillac. Movement in the back of the car. Movement in the Cadillac. The car rocking. The baby screaming in there. Gunfire and the back window shattered and fell in.
Starling held up her arm and yelled without turning around. “HOLD IT. Hold your fire. Watch the door. Behind me. Watch the fish house door.”
“Evelda.” Movement in the back of the car. The baby screaming in there. “Evelda, put your hands out the window.”
Evelda Drumgo was coming out now. The baby was screaming. “Macarena” pounding on the speakers in the fish market. Evelda was out and walking toward Starling, her fine head down, her arms wrapped around the baby.
Burke twitched on the ground between them. Smaller twitches now that he had about bled out. “Macarena” jerked along with Burke. Someone, moving low, scuttled to him and, lying beside him, got pressure on the wound.
Starling had her weapon pointed at the ground in front of Evelda. “Evelda, show me your hands, come on, please, show me your hands.”
A lump in the blanket. Evelda, with her braids and dark Egyptian eyes, raised her head and looked at Starling.
“Well, it’s you, Starling,” she said.
“Evelda, don’t do this. Think about the baby.”
“Let’s swap body fluids, bitch.”
The blanket fluttered, air slammed. Starling shot Evelda Drumgo through the upper lip and the back of her head blew out.
Starling was somehow sitting down with a terrible stinging in the side of her head and the breath driven out of her. Evelda sat in the road too, collapsed forward over her legs, blood gouting out of her mouth and over the baby, its cries muffled by her body. Starling crawled over to her and plucked at the slick buckles of the baby harness. She pulled the balisong out of Evelda’s bra, flicked it open without looking at it and cut the harness off the baby. The baby was slick and red, hard for Starling to hold.
Starling, holding it, raised her eyes in anguish. She could see the water spraying in the air from the fish market and she ran over there carrying the bloody child. She swept away the knives and fish guts and put the child on the cutting board and turned the strong hand-spray on him, this dark child lying on a white cutting board amid the knives and fish guts and the shark’s head beside him, being washed of HIV positive blood, Starling’s own blood falling on him, washing away with Evelda’s blood in a common stream exactly salty as the sea.
Water flying, a mocking rainbow of God’s Promise in the spray, sparkling banner over the work of His blind hammer. No holes in this man-child that Starling could see. On the speakers “Macarena” pounding, a strobe light going off and off and off until Hare dragged the photographer away.
CHAPTER
2
A CUL-DE-SAC in a working-class neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia, a little after midnight. It is a warm fall night after a rain. The air moves uneasily ahead of a cold front. In the smell of wet earth and leaves, a cricket is playing a tune. He falls silent as a big vibration reaches him, the muffled boom of a 5.0-liter Mustang with steel tube headers turning into the cul-de-sac, followed by a federal marshal’s car. The two cars pull into the driveway of a neat duplex and stop. The Mustang shudders a little at idle. When the engine goes silent, the cricket waits a moment and resumes his tune, his last before the frost, his last ever.
A federal marshal in uniform gets out of the driver’s seat of the Mustang. He comes around the car and opens the passenger door for Clarice Starling. She gets out. A white headband holds a bandage over her ear. Red-orange Betadine stains her neck above the green surgical blouse she wears instead of a shirt.
She carries her personal effects in a plastic zip-lock bag—some mints and keys, her identification as a Special Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a speed-loader containing five rounds of ammunition, a small can of Mace. With the bag she carries a belt and empty holster.
The marshal hands her the car keys.
“Thank you, Bobby.”
“You want me and Pharon to come in and sit with you awhile? Would you rather I get Sandra? She waits up for me. I’ll bring her over a little while, you need some company …”
“No, I’ll just go in now. Ardelia will be home after a while. Thank you, Bobby.”
The marshal gets in the waiting car with his partner and when he sees Starling safely inside the house, the federal car leaves.
The laundry room in Starling’s house is warm and smells of fabric softener. The washing machine and clothes dryer hoses are clamped in place with plastic handcuff strips. Starling puts down her personal effects on top of the washing machine. The car keys make a loud clank on the metal top. She takes a load of wash out of the washing machine and stuffs it into the dryer. She takes off her fatigue pants and throws them in the washer and the surgical greens and her bloodstained bra and turns on the machine. She is wearing socks and underpants and a .38 Special with a shrouded hammer in an ankle holster. There are livid bruises on her back and ribs and an abrasion on her elbow. Her right eye and cheek are puffed.
The washing machine is warming and starting to slosh. Starling wraps herself in a big beach towel and pads into the living room. She comes back with two inches of Jack Daniel’s neat in a tumbler. She sits down on the rubber mat before the washing machine and leans back against it in the dark as the warm machine throbs and sloshes. She sits on the floor with her face turned up and sobs a few dry sobs before the tears come. Scalding tears on her cheeks, down her face.
Ardelia Mapp’s date brought her home about 12:45 A.M. after a long drive down from Cape May, and she told him good night at the door. Mapp was in her bathroom when she heard the water running, the thud in the pipes as the washing machine advanced its cycle.
She went to the back of the house and turned on the lights in the kitchen she shared with Starling. She could see into the laundry room. She could see Starling sitting on the floor, the bandage around her head.
“Starling! Oh, baby.” Kneeling beside her quickly. “What is it?”
“I got shot through the ear, Ardelia. They fixed it at Walter Reed. Don’t turn the light on, okay?”