Lousiana Hotshot

flowing out of him, flowing toward her in a thick, sticky ribbon, she knew she’d seen it before. She understood why the flashbacks were so terrifying. If the stream of blood touched her, she would die. She’d felt it today in Algiers, and she felt it that other time, God knew where it was, just
that
it was. She’d felt the same inconceivable terror when she shot her father.
    * * *
    Eddie’s dream was too loud, too chaotic; he’d as soon be awake for all the rest he was getting. His son Anthony was in it, looking handsome, heavier, more grown-up— more manly, truth be told— than he had a decade ago. Audrey and Angela were there as well, Angie wearing that eternal black of hers, looking pinched and pale. Something about her was way off. Her confidence was gone. Fear was coming out of her pores like sweat. She seemed small and dried-up and not herself at all.
    The other person there was his new assistant, Talba Wallis, and she was worse off than Angie. Her rich brown skin seemed to have turned gray. She looked like an animal someone had beaten. She was telling some crazy story about a police shootout, except that, in the weird way dreams twist things, she was telling it as if she’d been there, had actually done the shooting.
    Anthony was trying to calm her. “Far be it from me to tell a lady she didn’t save a gentleman’s ass, but you probably missed him by a mile. The cops shot too, you know— -it stands to reason a trained marksman’s the one who actually hit the mark.”
    She seemed meek and subdued, like she was halfway somewhere else. Like she’d just lost a relative. Except that the person they were talking about wasn’t a relative. Whoever it was had apparently been holding Anthony prisoner and Ms. Wallis was claiming to have rescued him, only she didn’t seem real proud of it.
    “How’d you get there?” she said. “What in hell happened?” She sounded agitated and furious, more or less her usual state. He wondered if Ms. Wallis was ever going to settle down.
    “The thing was,” he said, “I saw the car before I ever saw the kid. That big old Lincoln Navigator you told me about. It just stood to reason and sure enough, a black dude was driving, looked kind of like a toad.
    “Looked
like a toad, but he was acting more like a hawk. Just lurking there in that big old black car. Then the kid comes out. I knew her right away from her picture. She’d be cute if she ever smiled, you know that? And she gets in the car with someone else— with some other kids, I mean. I guess it was the carpool person. And he follows. The Lincoln follows. Man, my heart was thumping!”
    Ms. Wallis said, “You should have called me on the cell phone.”
    “Yeah, well, I tried.”
    “Mine was on,” she said. “Did you have the wrong number or something?”
    “It was my dad’s phone, remember? I guess he forgot to charge it up. I tried to plug it in but— I don’t know— it was hard enough trying to follow all those cars… I couldn’t seem to do two things at once. And then things started happening so fast I had to keep moving.
    “The carpool mom took her home, and she got out and ran in. Then Toes pulls up in the driveway, and rings the doorbell. By the time I could get the car parked and get out, he was banging on the door and saying he had to talk to her. I came up behind him and he turned around and…”
    He seemed to be groping for words, but Ms. Wallis wouldn’t cut him any slack. “Well? And what?” Pushy as ever.
    “I did something kind of stupid. I said I was a cop. And the guy tried to kill me!” Anthony was outraged. Eddie didn’t really know his son these days, but if he had to guess, he wouldn’t expect him to be too worldly-wise. Sounded like he’d have been right.
    It seemed the guy had jumped him or something, and then the person inside, a kid, panicked and opened the door. And that was it— the Toad had a lot more experience and a lot more meanness in him than either Anthony or the kid. He pulled a gun on ‘em, bundled ‘em into his car, and made Anthony drive somewhere else. And that would have been all they wrote if it hadn’t been for Ms. Wallis— or so
her
story went.
    Goddam! What a bunch of crazy fools he had in his life. It wasn’t a good dream to begin with, but it suddenly got out of control.
    Angie shrieked, “What the hell was that?”
    Audrey sounded like some hysteric at a funeral: “Eddie! Oh, my Eddie, my Eddie. My
Eddie!”
    Anthony just said,