I HAVE NEVER been a quitter in my entire life, never tried to do anything but face my responsibilities and duties head-on. But sitting in another cab twenty minutes after Rawlins vanished back onto the dance floor at the club, I felt like telling the driver to take me to National Airport or Union Station instead of home.
I wanted to flee, get a new identity, and hide out on a South Sea island, do anything except go home to tell Bree, Nana Mama, and the kids what Rawlins had said. There’d been no guns. I’d been deluded at best, downright evil at worst. In either case, I was going to federal prison, probably for life.
I shut my eyes, trying to remember the entire incident, clearly seeing the gun in Watkins’s hand, and in Virginia Winslow’s, and Leonard Diggs’s. It made me sick to my stomach when I thought of the videos, clearly showing no guns before I shot.
How in God’s name was that possible?
I thought back again, trying to remember every instant, and recalled that I’d felt odd, light-headed when Kimiko Binx and I arrived at the factory. Inside the factory, I’d felt … giddy? Why would I have been giddy? There were people with guns trying to kill me and I’d been … elated?
Maybe Rawlins was right. Maybe I did need to see a shrink, or at least someone who might understand what I was going through, someone like …
“Driver,” I said. “Change of plans. Take me downtown.”
He dropped me on a corner not far from the courthouse. I walked north several blocks to a familiar street with lights blazing in some of the town houses and big dumpsters out in front of the ones that were dark.
There were a few lights on in one of the duplexes, which did and didn’t surprise me. Bernie Aaliyah had been fixing up the place.
As I climbed the stairs to the porch and the front door, my mind fled back to the last time I’d been here. I remembered being outside Tess Aaliyah’s bedroom door, hearing the gunshot, and jumping back in shock and despair. And poor Bernie Aaliyah pounding on the door, begging the silence for an answer, some hope.
I shook off the memory, hesitated, and then knocked. A few moments later, the dead bolts were thrown and the door opened.
“Dr. Cross?”
“I wonder if I could talk to you.”
“I’m doing good since we last spoke,” Tess said, and she smiled. “We have another meeting set, don’t we?”
“This time it’s not about you,” I said.
“Oh,” she said, and frowned. “Well, then, of course, please come in.”
CHAPTER
61
I FOLLOWED HER inside, remarking to myself how good she looked after only a month off the various interacting drugs that had helped put her behind a locked door with her backup pistol talking about rats, and her father and I outside thinking suicide.
It turned out that the construction projects up and down the street had disturbed the neighborhood’s urban rat population and caused a migration. Tess had seen rats twice in her closet upstairs earlier that day. After her fight with her dad, and in a semidelusional state due to the drugs, she decided she’d clean out the closet, put cracke
rs and birdseed in a pile, and then sit back and wait for a shot. It was why she’d insisted on talking quietly. She’d been hunting.
After Tess shot the rat, the ringing in her ears was so loud that for several long, agonizing moments, she didn’t hear her father pounding on the door. Then she’d opened the door and looked at us with bloodshot, drug-puzzled eyes, as if she couldn’t imagine what we were so upset about.
It had taken several hours to convince Tess to enter a psychiatric facility in Virginia so she could be properly evaluated. But she eventually agreed and spent a week there getting clean and undergoing tests. She’d gone into the psych ward taking a multi-pill cocktail and left on a single drug for depression. The doctors said that in her effort to forget, she was lucky she hadn’t done permanent brain damage.
“You want a beer?” Tess said. “Dad left some.”
“Water if you’ve got it,” I said.
“Coming up,” she said and got me some chilled from the fridge.
I sat in Bernie Aaliyah’s favorite chair. Tess gave me my water, curled her feet under her on the couch, and said, “Thank you again for helping me, Alex. You were the only one who saw I was a danger to myself.”
“I’m glad you agreed to get help,” I said. “Which is why I came to see you.”
“Okay?”
“Have you been following my trial?”