Crescent City Connection

got two words for you,” he said. “Remember Waco.”
    Cindy Lou nodded. “We’ve got to consider these people a cult. When you’ve got somebody as crazy as Jacomine, you’ve got a lot of blind followers and a guy who thinks he’s God and probably has a headful of chemicals. They don’t mind dying, because they think they’re saving the world. You’re on a mission from God, the FBI’s pretty small potatoes.”
    “Dr. Taylor?”
    He was smiling, his body turned toward Cindy Lou. “Dr. Wootten has a way of cutting through bullshit.”
    “So what you’re advising is—”
    Taylor whirled to face him, turned off his smile, and finished Goerner’s sentence: “Don’t fuck up.”
    The room was starting to smell sour from sweat.
    “And read their minds,” said Cindy Lou.
    Goerner stared at her, looking uncertain, evidently pretty sure she wasn’t making a joke, but unable to explain her words any other way.
    “I hear they make listening devices powerful enough to pick up a conversation in a house across the street. Surely the FBI has some of those babies.”
    “Thanks for your input, Dr. Wootten. I assure you, all legal methods of intelligence gathering will be employed.” Goerner fixed his mouth in a prim line, which Skip took to mean a device was already being installed, probably in a house next door.
    * * *
    Daniel turned over in bed, his body sore, his brain muzzy, his mood somewhere between desperate and hopeless. He recognized in himself the depression that had dogged him at various times throughout his life. Lovelace had it, too; it was genetic, the shrinks said. When it hit, he didn’t even want to get out of bed. That idea he’d had yesterday, the one about throwing himself from a car, still seemed a viable plan—except that he could no longer get access to a car.
    He half wished he’d done it.
    He couldn’t see any good coming from this thing. Somehow it had gotten seriously out of hand. What was kidnapping children about? Lovelace, he could see—she was his own daughter. But why this little black girl? Why endanger her?
    She wasn’t in danger, Daddy said, not for a second, she was gonna be just fine. But Daniel had shot a man trying to get her. He might be just fine eventually—according to the TV news, he probably would, but he’d already had to go through a lot of pain, and there was going to be more. And Darnell Roberts was dead. What was the point of it all?
    He was even starting to wonder if there’d been any point in killing Nolan Bazemore. He had been so proud of that.
    But his father seemed to have gone crazy. Or perhaps had always been crazy. Now Daniel was the first lieutenant of a crazy man, living with a cadre of people who worshiped a crazy man and thought he could do no wrong.
    Daniel thought,
Who am I to doubt?
    But he did. He had spent his life alone, or nearly alone, except for that brief period with Jacqueline, and groups were not his talent.
    He had turned Shavonne over to the sisters, who tried to feed her and take care of her, but all she would do was scream and cry and wet herself. So they taped her mouth and locked her in a room.
    And Daddy called a prayer meeting. Everybody came, all the people from the other side of the house, and all the ones from this side, and the ones who lived outside as well, the entire inner core of The Jury, once an appropriate twelve people; now eleven. They were crammed into Daddy’s living room that he used for an office, sitting around on Home Depot nine-dollar plastic chairs and pillows on the floor.
    First they prayed on general principles, which lasted thirty minutes if it lasted one. And then Daddy said, “We lost a brother today. We were twelve good men and true and our number has shrunk.” Then with no planning at all, they held an impromptu funeral service, which included eulogies to Darnell, with Bible readings, hymns, everything you might have in church—Daddy was a preacher and he treated this like a church service.
    Daniel had to admire him—his skill and his energy—though, after Jacqueline left him, he had stopped believing in God. He was here because he thought his dad wasn’t doing the God thing anymore. He thought this thing was about justice.
    When Darnell had been properly remembered, and Daniel, for one, was near starving, Daddy started in again. “We are in for a siege, seekers of justice. Are y’all up to it?”
    Everyone cheered.
    “We have come to a time in our movement when a blight must be