Page 139 of Never Flinch

I drove to the Mingo. I parked in the service area beside a white van. I went to the door. The bald man, the tour manager, said we all love Barbara. He said she sings, she dances, she plays the tambo on the beat, she writes poems… what can’t she do? He said a star is born.What does that mean? Whatcanit mean? Holly knocks her knuckles on the side of her head. “What am I missing?”

In the large third-floor dressing room of the Mingo, Betty Brady is asleep on the couch and dreaming of her childhood in Georgia: bare feet, red dirt, a dime bottle of Co’-Cola.

Arriving at the Garden City Plaza Hotel, Alberta Wing surveys the growing number of pro-life protestors on the far side of the street and wonders how many of the neatly groomed white women in that crowd would be willing to give birth to a stone-blind baby amid the trash and discarded liquor bottles behind the Dilly Delight Smokehouse in Selma, Alabama. Before setting to work on the dress Betty will wear tomorrow night, she lets out the sequined bellbottoms her old friend and homegirl will wear to sing the National Anthem in a few hours.Your booty gets much bigger, you won’t be able to get it through the door, she thinks, and laughs. She puts the bellbottoms on a hanger along with the starry sash Betty means to wear around her middle. Once the song is sung, Bets will duck into her dressing room—a little cubicle set aside for her in the equipment shed—and put on some jeans and a hoodie, which Alberta also puts on a hanger. She thinks of the white Program Director’s guilty expression when he looked at the grocery bag, and wonders what he had in there. She has to laugh.

At Happy, John Ackerly is ready to turn things over to his stand-in, Ginger Brackley. Across the broken backbar mirror he’s tacked a checked tablecloth and written on it with a Sharpie: WE HAD A SLIGHT ACCIDENT. “I’m doing this for you, so you better get her autograph for me,” Ginger says, and John says he’ll try.

In his apartment, Jerome puts on his best black pants, a nice blue cotton shirt, a thin gold chain, and black hightop Converse sneakers (a bold touch). He puts some shea in his hair—just a bit—and is ready two hours early, but too excited to even think about writing or researching Army of God churches. He tries Barbara, but her phone boinks immediately to do not disturb. When invited to leave a message, he tells her to turn her damn phone back on because he wants to meet her at the game.

In the Holman Hockey Rink, two bound women wait on hands and knees as the minutes crawl by.

Behind the snackbar, Chrissy is also waiting. She knows who the kidnapper is. The media even has a name for him: the Surrogate JurorKiller. Sportcoat Man is also God’s servant, although he doesn’t know it. If he comes back with Kate McKay, this can end. Chrissy thinks she might even be able to get away. Surely it’s not wrong to hope.

9

3:50 PM.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away—actually the Gibson driveway in the early 1990s—Daddy would flick a hockey puck at his little Trigger, who would be dressed in a child-sized Buckeye Bullets uniform, complete with goaltender’s helmet… and Daddy would flick ithard.If Mommy saw, she’d shout out the kitchen window,You stop that, Daniel!Called him Dan or Danny most of the time, Daniel only when she was mad at him. Which happened more and more often. Once she wasgone, there was nobody to make Daddy stop. Practice was hell, and hell went on.Practice makes perfect, Daddy would say, and every time Trig shrank from the puck, Daddy would yell,Don’t flinch! Don’t you flinch, Trigger! You’re a goaltender just like Cujo, just like Curtis Joseph, so don’t you flinch!And when Trig couldn’t help it, Daddy would give him a look of disgust and say,Get after it, Useless. That’s another goal for the bad guys.And Trig would have to go out in the street to get the puck.

“Don’t flinch,” he murmurs to himself as he takes Corrie Anderson’s phone from the grocery bag. “Don’t you flinch.”

If the McKay woman calls the cops… or tells her skinny little bodyguard, who will probablyconvinceher to call the cops… everything will collapse. No way around it. But there is a certain grim irony in what he’s about to do, which he appreciates. Making the Duffrey jurors feel guilty was only a pretext (he realizes that now), and probably useless, but now everything depends on more convincing, and inducing a very real sense of guilt. He thinks:Only guilt can make this work.

The puck is flying. It may hit him in the mouth, but he will not flinch.

He makes the call.

10

3:55 PM.

Kate has her phone silenced, with three exceptions: Holly, Corrie, and her mother. Her ringtone wakes her from paper-thin sleep and a dream of plucking daisy petals with her mother as a child:loves me, loves me not. Kate gropes for the phone, thinking,It’s Mom, she’s worse. As long as she’s not dead.Roselle McKay, so young and beautiful in her dream, is now elderly and bald and sick from a combination of chemo and radiation.

Kate struggles to a sitting position and sees it’s not Mom, which is a relief. It’s Corrie. But when she answers, it’s not Corrie who speaks to her.

“Hello, Ms. McKay.” A strange male voice. “You need to listen to me very careful—”

“Where’s Corrie? Why have you got her phone? Is she all right?”

“Shut up and listen.”

Politicians and pundits across America could testify on how hard it is to silence Kate McKay, but the imperative in those four words—thesavageimperative—does it.

“I have your Ms. Anderson. She’s tied up and gagged but unhurt and alive. Whether or not she remains alive depends entirely on you.”

“What—”

“Shut up. Listen to me.”

“It’s you, isn’t it? Christopher Stewart.”

“Ms. McKay, I can’t waste time telling you to shut up, so the next time you get off the subject at hand, I’m going to put a bullet in Ms. Anderson’s knee and she’ll never walk straight again even if she lives. Do you understand me?”

For once in her life Kate has no idea what to say, but Holly (were she there) would recognize the deer-in-the-headlights expression Kate was wearing when the man holding the baseball bat came at her.

With what might be a certain dry humor (how grotesque), her caller says, “If you understand, you can say yes.”

“Yes.”

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