The machine guns seemed to go on and on, while Maxie clawed at the door until she had no fingernails left, then crying great sobs that came from her belly, she slid to the floor, leaning back against the locked door.
It was while she was crying, when she thought the pain in her would never be healed, that she saw what she at first thought was a mirage. On her right was Lila’s big, overstuffed bag that she carried with her, full of clothes and shoes and heaven knew what else. Sticking out of the corner was a tiny pearl-handled pistol. Once, Lila had said that she carried her own bodyguard with her and when the girls had laughed, Lila had shown them the little two-shot derringer.
Maxie didn’t think about what she was doing. With a movement as lithe as a snake’s, she grabbed the derringer and, still sitting, spun around and fired. Years before, she’d made the mistake of aiming for a man’s head; this time she went for his belly, quickly firing two bullets into the exact center of him.
She wasn’t a doctor and she couldn’t be sure, but from the way Doc’s legs collapsed under him, she thought she hit his spinal cord. While uttering a high-pitched scream, Doc slid from the chair, the .38 dropping from his hand to the floor.
Maxie had no thought for Doc’s gun, for her only thought was to get to Michael. The guns had stopped now, but she still heard screams and moans of both pain and terror.
While Doc looked up at her from the floor with eyes that blazed with pain and hatred, she rummaged in his pockets until she found the door key, then with shaking hands, she unlocked the door.
Doc’s voice made her pause at the doorway, her back to him. “Please,” he whispered. “Please help me.”
For a moment the humanity in her hesitated, but then she kept going, running toward the front of the club.
She was not prepared for what she saw: blood and more blood. People with limbs missing. Lila was lying in a pool of her own blood, half of her face perfectly made up, the other half gone. Maxie saw three other girls, all three of them dead.
Already the place was filling up with hospital people and Maxie knew that in order to get here this fast they had to have been notified before the massacre. Doc’s idea of compassion, she thought bitterly.
Stepping around the people, ignoring the way her shoes stuck to the floor, she searched for Mike—and when she saw him a white-gowned man was pulling a blood-soaked sheet over Michael’s beloved face. Running toward him, the orderly caught her shoulders.
“He’s dead and I don’t think you should look at him. They blew the bottom half of him away.”
Twisting hysterically, Maxie tried to get away from the man and go to Mike.
“Either you calm down or I give you something to knock you out,” the man said. “We have enough to deal with here without the uninjured going crazy on us.”
For a moment Maxie could only stare at him. Uninjured? she thought. She was far from uninjured.
“That’s better,” the man said when Maxie stopped struggling. “Why don’t you go home?”
Go, she thought. That’s what she should do, because if she stayed here she wouldn’t be allowed to live another forty-eight hours. Right now she cared nothing for her own life, but she cared a great deal about Michael’s child that was growing in her womb.
Mechanically, she turned away from the people writhing on the floor, looked away from all the blood and went back to the dressing room. Without so much as a glance at Doc lying on the floor, even though she could feel his eyes on her, she picked up her purse and the bag Half Hand Joe had given her. Somewhere inside her she knew that she should pick up Doc’s gun and kill him, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t put him out of his misery as one would do for a beloved pet; she wanted him to stay alive and suffer as she was going to suffer.
Her eyes straight ahead, she walked out the back door of the club.
36
1991
Samantha awoke as though coming out of a hypnotic trance, and suddenly she was no longer Maxie but herself and it was no longer 1928 but 1991. She had thought Mike was going to train someone to play Doc, but he hadn’t, for in front of her was the diminutive man himself—and he had that knowing little smile on his face. Everything had been played out as it had happened, nothing had changed with the passage of time.
On that night in 1928, Maxie had shot Doc and severed his spinal cord, yet for two years he’d managed to keep secret the fact that he was crippled before he told the world that he had been hurt in a car accident. Maxie had taken away his mobility and she’d taken away all the money Half Hand, acting under Doc’s orders, had stolen from Scalpini. Doc, already eaten with hatred of Maxie for betraying him, made it his life’s quest to kill her and anyone who knew anything about her. In 1964, when he’d seen the photo of Maxie with her granddaughter, apparently happy, he’d nearly gone berserk. His mistake had been in calling her to threaten her. By the time he sent a killer for her, she had already left Louisville.
By 1975, his days of power were on the wane so
he’d sent a man to Louisville to find out if Maxie’s family knew anything about Half Hand’s missing money—his money.
Now, knowing all of this, Samantha found herself standing in front of the shrunken man sitting in his wheelchair—and there was a gun in her hand. At this range, whether the gun was loaded with blanks or live bullets, if she shot him, she’d kill him. Up until now she’d seen him as an old man, but now she saw the man who had mowed down a nightclub full of people to get to the man who’d impregnated “his” girl. She saw the man who, in order to gain control of illegal liquor sales, had killed his own men, blaming it on another mob boss.
“You killed a man who loved you more than he loved his own life,” Samantha whispered, speaking of Half Hand. “You’ve murdered anyone who has ever tried to care about you. Has it been worth it? Now you sit here, an unloved old man, alone and lonely, and there isn’t a person in the world who cares about you. You were crippled by your own greed. Has all the money been worth the pain?”
Doc laughed at her as though she were a simpleton. “You stupid child. You think everyone is like you. Yes, it’s been worth it. I have never been bored a moment in my life. I’ve taken anything I wanted and I’ve won every game I’ve played. There is nothing more to life than that. I have won.”
“My mother—” she whispered.
“She was nothing. Half Hand was nothing. Maxie was nothing except that she almost beat me. I had been told she’d taken a lover but I never knew she was pregnant until I heard from your muscle-bound boyfriend. I knew you weren’t related to me and I never would have seen you if it hadn’t been for the money.”