Facing the Future Read Free Page A

like they said they might someday.
    Vicki shook her head as she thought about it. When you’re wrong, you’re wrong, she told herself.
    “What?” Judd asked, startling her.
    “What what?” she said.
    “Out of the corner of my eye, I saw you shaking your head.”
    “I was just thinking,” she said. “How different you and I are from who we thought we were not that long ago.”
    “I was just thinking the same thing.”
    “Are you scared?” Vicki asked, suddenly changing the subject.
    “About this? Today, you mean?”
    “Yeah.”
    “’Course. Aren’t you?”
    “Yeah,” she said, “but it’s kind of fun, and there’s no way I’d miss it. It’s like being in a TV show or a movie—only it’s real.”

    Several minutes later Judd found the street he was looking for and parked three blocks away and around the corner. “We’ve got to hurry,” he said. “Fogarty doesn’t want us to be around here in case LeRoy or Cornelius comes early to check out the area.”

TWO
In Place
    L IONEL had the same fear Judd had, and at about the same time. As he sat at Judd’s house with Ryan, waiting to hear how everything would turn out, he suddenly wondered whether Talia might figure this all out and spill the beans to her brother and LeRoy. She was not a dumb woman.
    Lionel stood quickly. “I gotta get going,” he said.
    “What do you mean?” Ryan said. “You’re not leaving me here alone.”
    “I have to, but just for a little while.”
    “No!”
    “Yes! Now just wait here for me.”
    “Tell me what you’re doing.”
    “If you have to know, I’m going to my house.”
    “What for? What if LeRoy and Cornelius are still there?”
    “They won’t be.”
    “You don’t know that, Lionel. You’re going to spook them!”
    Lionel hesitated. “I think they’ll be gone by now.”
    “You’d better check. Why not call them?”
    Lionel thought a minute. “Good idea,” he said. And he saw Ryan beam. Talia answered the phone. “Hey, Talia,” he said.
    “Lionel?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What’s up?”
    “Thought I’d come and talk to you.”
    “Come on ahead. Nobody here but me.”
    “Really?”
    Now Lionel didn’t know what to do. He hadn’t really wanted to talk to her. He had just wanted to distract her, to keep her from saying anything to LeRoy and Cornelius in case she had realized that they were being set up. It sounded as if she had never given that a thought.
    “Yeah, come on over. I’m real sorry about André. You and your friends think LeRoy killed him.”
    “What do you think, Talia?”
    “I don’t want to think about it. I couldn’t stand it if I thought LeRoy did something like that.”
    “You think LeRoy’s never killed somebody before?”
    “Not unless it was self-defense,” she said. “Anyway, I was in love with André, and LeRoy knew that.”
    “Did André know it?”
    “I hope so.”
    “I don’t think he did,” Lionel said. “You did a good job of hiding it.”
    Now she was crying. “Don’t remind me,” she said. “I was tryin’ to control him, that’s all. I figured if I made everything too easy for him, he would never do the right thing. André was a wild man, you know.”
    “I know.”
    “I wanted him to behave, to act right, to grow up, for me.”
    “He was tryin’, I think. There at the end, I mean. Only somebody murdered him.”
    “Oh, no,” she said. “He just died in that fire, that’s all.”
    “Haven’t you seen the news, Talia? He was found with a bullet hole in his neck, and he wound up bleeding to death. The fire would have killed him, but we pulled him out of there. We knew he was bleeding, but we didn’t know why or where from. If we knew, we might have been able to stop the bleeding and save him.”
    “I’m sorry, Lionel.”
    “That LeRoy did this?”
    “I’m not sayin’ that.”
    “I am. How come you’re alone there anyway?”
    “LeRoy and Connie are in Chicago.”
    “What for?”
    “I don’t know. Some insurance thing.