Lightning Read Free

said as he braked the Olds to a halt behind Beth’s car. The building they were picketing was, as far as he could determine, without lettering or a sign to indicate what went on inside.
    Beth climbed out of her car and walked back toward Carver. He saw that she was wearing her sunglasses with the large round lenses. She was such a tall and graceful woman that her pregnancy, in its tenth week, was barely noticeable beneath the green blouse she wore loosely over tan slacks.
    The sun was reflected in both lenses of her glasses as she approached the car, then leaned over to speak to Carver through his rolled down window.
    “I’ve been meaning to phone this place and cancel my appointment,” she said. “Since we’re here, I think I’ll go in and cancel it in person.”
    “This place is what?” Carver asked. But he had a pretty good idea. And he knew why Beth had stopped even though she was pressed for time.
    “It’s Women’s Light,” she said. “An abortion clinic.”
    Which explained the lack of a highly visible sign, Carver thought. “It would be easier to phone later from the cottage,” he said.
    She shook her head. “No. I’m here, and it will only take a few minutes to cancel personally.”
    “You were going to drive past it, then you saw the pro-life demonstrators.”
    “I think of them as anti-choice.”
    “Beth—”
    “I don’t want them to scare me away. I’ve got a right to go in that building if I want to without being hassled.”
    “Sure, but you don’t have to go in there at all. Not now or ever.”
    She lowered her glasses on her nose and gazed over their rims at him with serious dark eyes. “You were me, Fred, would you go in there?”
    “No.”
    “Ha! You’d go. You’re the most stubborn, obsessive bastard I know. I don’t like you lying to me, Fred.”
    “I wouldn’t go in there if I was pregnant. That’s God’s honest truth.”
    She stared at him with disdain. “Well now, Fred, I think you’re pretty safe in saying that. Otherwise you wouldn’t say it.”
    He knew she was right. Knew she was going.
    “I’ve got business in there,” she said. “I’m just gonna walk in, cancel my appointment, then walk back out. No trouble. I’ll simply make my point, then leave.”
    There was shouting coming from down the street, in front of Women’s Light. Beth straightened up and turned, and Carver watched through the windshield as a young woman with blond hair got out of a red Jeep with a canvas top and ran the gauntlet of demonstrators. The law prevented them from crossing the street to be close enough to the building to physically block access, but several of them were waving signs angrily and screaming at the woman. A man and a woman in jeans and red T-shirts with black lettering on them ran across the street and tried to stuff some literature into the blond woman’s hand. She tried to avoid them, batting the literature away, then hurried inside through the clinic’s glass double doors. Carver got a glimpse of someone just inside the clinic greeting her. The two demonstrators who’d flaunted the law hurried back to the median. The man was waving his brightly colored, glossy pamphlets in the air as he ran, as if they were the scalps of enemies.
    Beth leaned down again so she was looking at Carver, her dark glasses back in place on the bridge of her nose. “I won’t be long, Fred.”
    “Don’t rise to their bait,” he cautioned.
    “I be cool,” she said jokingly.
    He didn’t like that. A bright and educated woman who’d fought her way out of a Chicago ghetto, she slipped into street jargon only when she was angry and determined.
    He watched her stride past her parked car, then along the sidewalk in the direction of Women’s Light. A few of the demonstrators had noticed the tall, regal figure heading toward the clinic and were either staring at her or telling others of her approach.
    Carver waited a moment, then put the Olds in drive and glided it around the parked