He closed the door and locked it, even though he knew it offered them absolutely no protection from whoever the people were who had been waiting for him outside. They were gone, for now, but Jay knew they would return, and he would be ready.
Chapter 7
Marie was still sleeping soundly when Winston slipped out of bed the next morning. After getting dressed, he fought the urge to open Colleen’s door to peer in at her while she slept. He told himself that he’d decided not to open her door because he was afraid of waking her, but he secretly knew that he was afraid of seeing a woman who would leave home again instead of a little girl who might just stay forever.
The night before, he’d gone to sleep with worry strapped to him like a dynamite vest, each of the worries packaged like a tiny bomb that he either had to snuff out or face the possibility of it blowing a hole through his heart while his mind wrestled itself toward sleep. He thought about his time in Korea, thought about how—although he’d seen no live combat—he was always aware and afraid of the possibility of something being tossed his way. How would he have responded? Would he have run? Thrown himself on top of it? Picked it up and tossed it back? Later, he would hear of guys in Vietnam launching their bodies on top of hand grenades that had been thrown by villagers—women and children who hated the soldiers as much as their fathers and husbands did. He imagined those men’s hollowed-out bodies, their forever unseeing and unblinking eyes, and he thought of Ed Bellamy during his time in that country. He knew that Bellamy had been a marine, but he did not know in what capacity he had served.
Winston had closed his eyes, pictured Ed Bellamy as a young man, alone in a rice paddy as a helicopter hovers overhead, the winds from its rotors bending the limbs of trees and fluttering Bellamy’s flak jacket. In this vision, Ed Bellamy is even younger than the son who’d be found dead on a runway all these years later. Winston thought of Rodney Bellamy as just a child, and he knew that he saw the man as such because he’d been in school with Colleen, whom he would always see as a child no matter how old she grew to be.
And in thinking of Colleen, Winston was forced to finger another tightly packed package of explosive. When he’d first laid eyes on her at the airport, the weight of her sadness had overwhelmed him, but unlike Marie’s sadness, which caused him to withdraw, Colleen’s grief pulled him closer, and the closer he got the more he realized he could not defuse Colleen’s bombs because he could not even defuse his own.
Downstairs in the kitchen, Winston brewed a pot of coffee as the world lightened outside, and then he stood and stared out the windows toward the waterway while he drank his first cup of the day. Little more than twenty-four hours had passed since he had stood there wondering what he would find at the airport, and he could not believe all that had happened. The airplane. Bellamy’s body on the runway. Glenn’s stumbling upon him and nearly getting shot. The sudden phone call from Colleen that had surprised him more than anything he could have discovered at the airport in the middle of the night. And now here he was, setting off on another errand that would inevitably surprise him just as much as the others: an FBI agent from Florida who could supposedly fix and fly the airplane, a man Rollins had said was named Tom Groom, was expecting Winston to pick him up at the Wilmington airport. And Groom would be staying with him and Marie in what suddenly felt to Winston like a full house.
He’d tried his best to hide his frustration with Rollins over the phone last night. It was true that the hotels had closed up shop for the winter, but he knew other arrangements could’ve been made, and there were better options than having a stranger stay with him and Marie. This option was just the cheapest and the least disruptive to the day-to-day operations of the FBI’s Wilmington field office. Winston was certain that Marie was excited by the idea of having someone stay with them, but he was afraid that it—along with Colleen’s visit—would take a toll on her, although she’d never show it, especially not in front of a guest.
After leaving the island, Winston drove past the airport, and he could see a cruiser parked on the runway, the airplane still sitting sideways not far away from it. He knew Glenn had been out there for most of the night, but he couldn’t remember which deputy had relieved him, meaning he couldn’t picture the face of the deputy who was now probably fighting sleep, his head lolling against the driver’s-side window as the sun climbed in the sky.
As he drove north on Highway 133, Winston’s mind was quiet for the first time since the airplane had come in and woken him from sleep, and that meant it was open to things he did not want to think about or recall. He’d been fighting it, but Rodney Bellamy’s murder had been on the edge of every thought Winston had had since he’d found Rodney’s body. While the fact of Rodney’s murder was enough to send explosive jolts of panic through him, it was the imagined moment of Rodney’s murder—the moment at which Rodney knew he would be killed—that was haunting Winston. Had Rodney known he would die the moment he saw a gun pointed at him? Had he thought of his wife’s face or spoken the name of his baby boy?
In all his years of police work, Winston had never had the experience of believing that his own death was imminent, and the one time he had taken a life he had not considered the possibilities of what that man was thinking. It had all happened so fast—at least he wanted to believe that was the case; he wanted to believe that the man had not had time to think of his wife or his children or the set of circumstances that had landed him behind the counter in the pharmacy on Franklin Boulevard back in Gastonia, his pistol held on the pharmacist and the young girl who worked the register, Winston’s pistol pointed at the man’s chest from where Winston stood on the other side of the counter.
But there had been time enough after it was over for Winston to think of everything panic had not allowed him to consider. The man’s name; it was James Dixon. He’d been thirty-one years old, married, with two young children. No record of arrests or convictions. He’d been laid off, but for years he’d worked as a mechanic at the Firestone Mill and lived in the Black section of the mill village, and a few days after his funeral, that was where Winston had driven, parking his car up the road from Dixon’s house and wondering what he’d expected to gain from being in such proximity to the dead man’s home.
The first time Winston had sat in his car near Dixon’s house, he’d sat behind the wheel clutching an envelope stuffed with nearly five hundred dollars, which was as much money as he could afford to offer without making things tough for him and Marie and Colleen. He’d also sat there with both an explanation and an apology prepared to deliver to Dixon’s wife. He couldn’t understand her grief, and he was awfully, inexplicably sorry for it. He just saw the gun in her husband’s hand. How could he have known it was unloaded? It had all happened so fast, and there was not time to notice that the magazine was missing, that the pistol was so rusted as to have been incapable of firing. Winston could not possibly have asked about Dixon’s job or his family or his desperation or what that thirty-seven dollars in the till would mean to them.
That day, while Winston sat in the car, a little boy no older than six or seven had stepped out the front door of the mill shack with a child’s slingshot in his hand. He’d walked to the edge of the yard and stopped to pick up bits of gravel that he loaded into his toy. He aimed for a tree in the middle of the yard, and from inside his car, Winston could hear the slap of the rocks each time one smacked against the tree’s trunk. Soon, a woman came outside, a young baby on her hip, and she said something to the boy. The boy turned to go in, and the woman looked up the street and saw Winston. Had she known who he was, what he had done? Her eyes settled on his for a moment, and then she turned and followed her son inside the house.