Alex Cross's Trial

indentation.

    And then…

    I let go of him. He would kill me if he could, but I couldn’t kill him.

    He fell into the mud. Somehow I had opened a big cut on his cheek just above his mouth. Blood oozed out. I began unwinding the whipcord from my ankles.

    I stood over him, breathing hard. “You’ve cut your face, Phineas. Ask Doc if he’s got any wintergreen for that.”

    Chapter 134

    IN THE BACKYARD I FOUND the old checker players from Hemple’s store tying up Byram Chaney, the retired teacher in whose wagon I’d been taken to the Klan rally. That rally and the lynching that followed seemed to have taken place a hundred years ago.

    I heard an odd glunk ing sound behind me and turned to see two men with kerosene cans working their way along the side of Abraham’s house, splashing fuel on the foundation.

    The one nearest me was the renowned legislator Senator Richard Nottingham, Elizabeth’s husband. The military jacket he wore for this night’s action was too small for him; the fabric gaped open around the buttons.

    “Bring a match to that fuel,” I called out, “and I’ll shoot you dead. Be my pleasure.”

    The other man was bent over, facing away from me. He whirled and pulled a handgun. To my horror, it was Jacob Gill.

    “Drop your gun, Ben,” he said. “I would shoot you dead too.”

    Around us swirled a madness of yelling, fighting, and dust, screaming, cursing, and gunfire. Yet at that moment it felt as if Jacob and I were facing off all alone in the middle of a giant, empty room.

    “Why, Ben?” he croaked. “Why’d you have to come back and ruin our nice little town?”

    Chapter 135

    JACOB JUST KEPT walking toward me.

    Finally, my face hovered inches from his, so close I could smell whiskey and bacon grease on his breath. His face was covered with stubble, the skin on his nose peppered with gin blossoms.

    I lashed out and grabbed his gun hand and twisted it hard until the weapon dropped. Jacob had always been smaller, but he could whip me at least half the time when we were boys. He was wiry and strong, and not afraid to fight dirty. I remembered the venom he could turn on our enemies when we got together in a schoolyard scrap.

    “Goddamn you, Ben!” he yelled. Then I saw he had a knife. I took his arm and held it with all my strength. It felt as if we stayed that way for hours, grappling, neither of us gaining an advantage, the razor edge suspended between us. My arms ached.

    I looked Jacob in the eye. “Jacob!” I yelled at him. “It’s me, goddamn it! It’s Ben!”

    But his eyes were bulging with rage, one hand now gripping my throat, the other inching closer with the blade. If he killed me here, amid all this noise and insanity, no one would ever know it was Jacob who’d done the deed. I would just be Ben Corbett, another victim in another senseless attack in a small town.

    And then I knew that was not how it was going to happen. I was not going to die here, at the hand of Jacob Gill. That knowledge gave me strength, just enough to jerk his arm sideways and break his hold on the knife.

    I kicked Jacob hard and wrenched the knife away. I got on him, kneeling on his chest with the blade an inch from his neck. I could have slit his throat right then, but instead I poked the knife into his Adam’s apple, hard enough to draw blood. Jacob’s eyes widened. God, I knew those eyes.

    “You gonna kill me, Ben?” he said.

    I flung the knife away and heard it crash into the bushes beside the smokehouse. Then I got up. There were no words for this. So I turned and walked away from the man who had once been my best friend in the world.

    Chapter 136

    WHILE I WAS FIGHTING JACOB, the rest of the fracas had begun to die down.

    I watched Sam Sanders, owner of the general store, jump off his horse and run away into the darkness. I saw two other White Raiders flee in his wake, one of them limping badly.

    “We’ll come back for you, niggers,” one yelled as he ran.

    “You ain’t won. You just think you won,” another called.

    A flurry of hoofbeats, and the Raiders were gone.

    Colored people were scattered all over the yard, nursing wounds. Four white men lay trussed up in the dirt in front of Abraham’s house. I remembered Abraham talking about the earth running red with blood—and I saw blood, tiny rivers of it, here on his home ground.

    On the porch near the tied-up men, Aunt Henry was dressing the leg wound of Lincoln Alexander Stephens, another of the original White Raiders who’d come calling