Hannibal Read Free Page B

to a grinding stop against them.
    Starling was walking toward the Cadillac now. A shooter still sat in the back window, his eyes wild and hands pushing against the car roof, his chest compressed between the Cadillac and a parked car. His gun slid off the roof. Empty hands appeared out of the near back window. A man in a blue bandana do-rag got out, hands up, and ran. Starling ignored him.
    Gunfire from her right and the runner pitched forward, sliding on his face, and tried to crawl under a car. Helicopter blades blatting above her.
    Someone yelling in the fish market, “Stay down. Stay down.” People under the counters and water at the abandoned cleaning table showering into the air.
    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