The Between (12 page)

The bailiff hadn’t seen anyone, and the secretary had left at six. Dede called her at home, and she said she didn’t remember seeing a letter or its carrier before she left.

“Baby, do you want some water or a Coke or something?” Hilton called during a pause in her discussion.

“There’s coffee,” offered Jerry, the white-haired analyst, whose accent was more reminiscent of Brooklyn than of Miami. Practically everyone in the city was a transplant from somewhere else.

“I’m okay,” Dede said, but she didn’t sound or look okay. Her eyes were red, her voice was nearly gone, and she was kneading her fingers under Jerry’s desk.

Watching her, Hilton felt so angry he imagined himself choking the letter’s author to death bare-handed. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered, and Curt patted his back.

“So what are we looking for here, case-wise?” Jerry asked Dede. “We’ve pulled files for all the major crimes you’ve been on since ’90. What else do we need?”

“Everything,” Dede said firmly. “Every case.”

“Every case? You were here twelve years. When you started, you were on fifty-odd cases a week.”

“I only want the cases that went to trial,” Dede said.

“No,” Hilton spoke up urgently. “Plead-outs, too. Anyone who did any kind of time.”

Jerry whistled, scribbling on his yellow legal pad. “What I’ll need to do is write a computer program. I’ll key cases using your name. That’s easiest. So tell me what I’m looking for.”

“Every case, misdemeanors and up. Convictions and acquittals. Men and women. Whites and Hispanics. We don’t need to look at blacks. Hilton? Do we?”

“It’s a white male,” Hilton said, stepping closer to her.

“I want to look at everyone,” Dede said in that same tired, scraping voice. “Can you group them according to their expected release dates, major crimes first, white males first? I’ll just prioritize them.”

“Sweetheart, I can do anything you want,” Jerry said.

Dede’s eyes were anxious. “How long on this, Jerry?”

“I can have a written request on the state attorney’s desk Monday morning. I need permission to run a program like this.”

“I’ll call her at home for you right now,” Dede said.

Jerry smiled back at her warmly, cocking his head to peer closely into her eyes. “Dede, I know you’re shook up, but listen to me. I’ve been here fifteen years. I’ve heard guys screaming you-motherfucker-this and I’ll-rip-your-balls-off-that right in the courtroom. Sure, they’re pissed at the person trying to send them up. You know how it goes. And judges get it worse than ASAs. But not once has anyone followed through, or even tried. Not once.”

“I know,” Dede said, nodding with closed eyes.

But there’s always a first time, Hilton thought to himself. He stood behind Dede and began to rub her shoulders, then rested his chin atop her soft Afro. “We’ll get him, baby,” he promised.

Wall made of coral. Hilton didn’t want to panic Dede, but he thought of something he knew he would have to share with Curt as soon as they were alone. He’d smelled an overpowering stench of urine on the front porch the week before; they all had. Dede thought a neighborhood dog or cat had tried to claim their house as territory, but now Hilton understood the urine had been human. The racist bastard had pissed on their porch, probably while they slept, only a few feet from Jamil’s bedroom window. Maybe he’d wanted them to know he’d been there.

“You two going home tonight?” Curt asked.

Dede didn’t answer. Hilton rubbed Dede’s shoulders harder, to fortify her. “Nobody’s chasing us away from our home,” he said.

“Great fucking way to start the new year,” Jerry sighed.

When Dede and Hilton pulled up to their house at nearly nine o’clock with Curt trailing in his Metro Police car, a blue-striped white Miami Police car was already parked at the curbside with the drivers side door open, a faint light illuminating the faces of a black woman and blond-haired man inside. As Hilton climbed out of his car and Dede snapped off her Audi’s headlights, he could hear the beeps and squawks from the parked car’s police radio. He sat with Dede on the coral wall while Curt and his police cousins exchanged words. No one unusual in sight, they said. All quiet.

The cold night air seized Hilton and made him shiver with the utter unreality of it all, seeing the police car parked beside the covered aluminum garbage can that sat at his curb each Friday night and had sat there long before this madman began stalking his family. This simply couldn’t be.

Hilton invited Curt inside, ostensibly for hot cocoa, but under the pretense of admiring the way they’d decorated in the year since his last visit, Curt casually surveyed the house. Curt wasn’t Hilton’s closest friend, but he knew about wiring and had helped him install lights and an electric garage-door opener (which was rarely used, since the garage was buried in clutter) in exchange for beer and laughs some time back. They were both Alpha men, both sons from middle-class families, both committed to hard work to try to make life in Miami better for black people. Curt was obsessed with protecting the innocent, and Hilton wanted to save lost souls. That combination and chemistry worked between them. Even if Curt did hate the Dolphins.

Curt commented on their closet space while he peeked behind clothes, then he moved on to peer out through the sliding glass door at their patio. He glanced inside each bedroom. By the time he sat to drink his cocoa in the living room, every light in the house was on. For the first time in hours, Hilton felt safe and back in control.

When Dede excused herself to call her mothers house from the kitchen, Hilton told Curt about the urine on the porch. Curt laughed, wiping cocoa from his moustache. “Well, white folks been pissing on us all these years. No sense stopping now, I guess.”

“I’m telling you, man,” Hilton said.

“You need a twelve-gauge. That’ll really give the SOB something to wet his pants about.”

“That’s what Dede was just saying. She wants a gun.”

“And I told you about that security dog my cousin is getting rid of, right? He had some K9 training, but he didn’t cut it. He’s antisocial but smart as hell. And loyal to whoever’s got the bag of Gravy Train.”

“That’s what counts. Lemme know when we can look at him.”

After Curt left with a promise to call the next afternoon, Hilton sat on the living room couch while Dede stretched out with her shoes off and lay across the length of the couch to rest her head on the soft of his thigh. He draped his arm across her shoulder, rubbing her forearm gently. He’d put a Marvin Gaye CD on the stereo, but they weren’t hearing the music. All they heard was the silence of Kaya’s and Jamil’s absence. It seemed an invisible intruder had entered their home.

For a long time they did not speak. Hilton couldn’t remember why they had argued at breakfast, and he had forgotten all of the work on his desk that had seemed so urgent right before Dede’s call. Only this mattered now, and it would probably be like this for a long time to come.

“My first weeks on the bench . . . I’m already so overwhelmed, like I have to prove something because people are just waiting for me to mess up,” Dede sighed. “Now this. Why is this happening now?” She sounded like a little girl.

Hilton had no answer, and he didn’t try to make one up.

“How did he find out where I live?” Dede wondered aloud.

“Jesus, Dede, what do you think? Real estate records, driving records, voter registration. The damn newspaper published your birthdate in that profile, remember? With a name and a birthdate, there’s a hell of a lot people can find out.”

He sounded callous, even to himself, but he couldn’t disguise his frustration. She’d never taken the threats seriously enough. He wished she’d been more careful when she talked to the reporter, that she’d used her head. Hell, the story even mentioned that they lived near Coral Gables, and mentioned Kaya and Jamil by name. It was a wonder it had taken the son of a bitch this long to find them.

“We have to tell the kids,” Dede said, her voice nearly lost again. “It’s time now.”

“Tomorrow. When they get back,” Hilton said.

She exhaled deeply, and he felt her head rise and fall on his lap. “I’m so numb, so drained. I think I’m going to bed.”

“It is getting late.”

She tugged at his pant leg. “Will you come with me?”

Hilton paused a millisecond too long before answering, and his silence seemed eternal. “Sure I will. Give me a few minutes.”

She released his pants with a yank and pulled herself to her feet abruptly, walking toward the hallway. “I just thought, after all this, it would be nice for my husband to hold me. I’m not going to force you,” she said.

“Now what’s that supposed to mean?” Hilton asked. He didn’t have the energy to stand and walk after her. He wasn’t in the mood for a tantrum, so he let his head rest on the sofa back and he stared up at the countless patterns etched in the popcorn ceiling. They hadn’t made love in ages, but he hoped that was far from her mind tonight. Sex would be a chore now, not a comfort. “I said I’d come. I’m coming.”

She paused in the hallway’s track lighting and faced him.

“Will you stay the night, or do you plan to slip out at two
A.M.
and sit in front of the television?”

“Oh, Jesus . . .”

“Just answer me. I don’t want you there if you plan to get up. That wakes me up. I know exactly when you leave.”

Hilton’s temper flared. He could feel Dede’s yearning for a healing hand even from across the room, and he was yearning too, but her selfishness made him angry. “You know I can’t sleep. I’m supposed to lie there awake all night?”

“Just forget it, Hilton. I’m not going to beg my own husband to spend the night with me.” Her voice cracked at the end, betraying the approach of tears, but he didn’t move to follow her into the bedroom. No, she would have to cry, then. She was the one who chose not to understand. She didn’t know what it meant to have the dreams. To her, sleep was an escape; he snorted out loud, imagining such a thing. She didn’t know how lucky she was.

The sound of her sob, muffled through the wall, surprised him with its depth and intensity. He felt guilty, cruel. After a night like tonight, was it really so selfish for her to want him there with her? Was it really such a sacrifice? His thoughts were growing muddled. Dede was right in what she’d been saying about him; he was changing, in small pieces. He was losing himself.

“Baby, I said I’m coming to bed, okay?” he said, sounding overly gentle. But when he tried to open their bedroom door, he found it locked.

Hilton walked through the house, turning off light after light until only one lamp in the living room threw a pale yellow glow across their white leather furniture and scuffed wooden floor. He sat a moment listening to Dede’s sobs from the back of the house, his eyes stinging each time he heard her solitary pain pitch to a wail. Then he found the remote control and switched on the television set. Ten-thirty. It was time for “The Jeffersons.”

Dede’s cries fill up all of the space around him and create space of their own, woven from threads of pain, despair, desperation. She sounds as though she has been pierced in half, peering at death’s face. She needs him. They all need him.

“Dede, I’m sorry,” he says. “Where are you?”

In an instant when his mind is overrun by images and sounds, he is plucked from the living room and finds himself standing in the middle of a busy highway in the overpowering light of day, making him shield his face with his palm. He recognizes a Chevron gas station and a Lexus dealership and knows he is standing between lanes on South Dixie Highway in a sea of shining cars. Gridlock. Sunlight bounces from chrome all around him in a bright glow. The drivers are pounding their horns, but he can hear Dede’s cries inside the noise, calling to him. She is screaming his name in a chilling rote, repeating it like it’s the only word she knows.

He tries to search for her face through the windshields, but all of the cars’ windows are charred black; he can’t see inside even when he presses his face to them. He tries to open the car door of a black Audi that looks like hers, but the handle flips out of his hand uselessly, locked. The next car is also locked, and the next. None of the drivers respond when he taps on the windows. The car horns blare in his ears.

“. . . Head-on crash . . . Did someone call for help? . . . whole front end is smashed . . . There’s children . . . Jesus, where’s Rescue? . . . Woman’s screaming her head off. . . driver is history, a goner
. . .”

No, he’s not supposed to be here wandering on the roadway, Hilton realizes. He has to turn away, go back. But back where? He hears Dede’s screams rising again, then falling in a near-hoarse hysteria, calling his name between sobs. Again, he tries to open a car door that won’t yield to him. The lines of cars are endless, bumpers touching and nudging, three lanes in each direction as far as he can see. He should not be here. But where does he belong? Where is Dede?

Her screams make him shiver. Those screams tell him she is beyond comforting, beyond consolation or salves. He only wants to see her. He continues his search beneath the heat that makes his feet drag across the asphalt and forces him to gasp to breathe. The carbon monoxide from the cars, heavy in the air, is choking him. He is drowsy. Sleep.

Up ahead, towering above the smaller cars, he sees the grill of a worn, ancient black hearse with headlights beating defiantly into the sunlight. All of its windows are black too, but he begins to run toward it because he knows he has seen this hearse before.

He can hear Dede’s screams more loudly as he nears the awful hearse with its phantom driver. He is not the only one running toward it, he sees. Doors from cars on all sides of the hearse are being flung open, with people he knows and yet does not know jumping from their cars to follow Dede’s screams. A player is offside against the Colts, a radio announcer is saying. The Dolphins. From a radio, he hears a violent wave of boos.

“. . . omigod, omigod, omigod . . . I’ve got a cellular in the car. . . Get them out
. . .”