Mean Woman Blues

move or I’ll blow your fucking head off.” She couldn’t really be hearing that.
    Someone grabbed her, stuck a gun in her back, pulled her hands behind her. She felt cold metal on her wrists.
    Some of the men were pointing their guns inanely at the television. Others swarmed the house, opening doors, stomping…
    Her captor marched her into the street, where her neighbors had started to gather. They shoved her into a car. “All right, where is he?”
    She was light-headed. Her heart thumped. She was crying. “Where is who?” she screamed.
    One of the soldiers— feds, she knew, but they looked like soldiers— walked up to the car, and said, “It’s clear.”
    “Where’s your husband?” her captor asked.
    “My husband? He’s at work,” she said stupidly. “Why? What’s this about?”
    The man who’d cuffed her read her her rights.
    They drove her to the federal building, took her inside, took off the handcuffs, and left her in a room, alone. She was too numb even to cry.
    After a long while, two men came into the room, with a woman, a tall woman with wild, curly hair. They didn’t bother to introduce themselves. The woman looked familiar.
    One of the men said, “Mrs. David Wright?”
    She knew she didn’t have to answer, but maybe things would go easier if she did. Still, she was furious. “That’s a matter of record,” she snapped.
    “Very well. We’d like to ask you some questions, Mrs. Wright. Before we start I’m going to read you your rights.”
    “Somebody already did.”
    “We’re going to do it again.”
    Oh, God, she didn’t want to listen again. She could ask for a lawyer right away and end the session, but she was out of her mind with anxiety— absolutely couldn’t sit there till a lawyer arrived. When the second man had finished, she snapped again, “Would you mind telling me what this is all about?”
    “Sure. It’s about harboring a fugitive.”
    “What fugitive? What are you talking about? We’ve never even had a houseguest.”
    One of the men spoke kindly. He was a rumpled man, a little soft-looking, not what she imagined an FBI agent would look like. “Are you aware that your husband uses an alias?”
    “You mean Mr. Right? The name he uses on television?”
    The other man sneered.
    “No, David Wright. Are you aware of his other name?”
    “What other name?”
    “Errol,” the nice one said.
    “Errol? Errol Wright?”
    “Errol Jacomine.”
    “Errol Jacomine?” She came suddenly alert. “I know who that is. That’s the guy from New Orleans who… uh…” She couldn’t think what he’d done, exactly. “Wait a minute! Isn’t he a serial killer or something?” She looked at the woman, and saw on her face a look of such misery, such tragedy, that she had to look away. She knew that it was for her. It was not the woman’s misery; it was hers. The woman was suffering on her account. And at that moment she began to grasp what had happened to her.
    She needed to say it: “You think that my husband is Errol Jacomine?” She was aware that Jacomine had never been caught.
    The woman looked as if she were about to cry.
    “How long have you known him?”
    She shrugged self-consciously, suddenly feeling stupid and gullible. “Almost a year. We were married two months ago. We met on his show.” The words seemed to march out of her mouth on their own, like some strange little parade. Two months with a perfect stranger? She looked at the woman’s face and she thought about the night he hit her, the way his eyes had narrowed, become mean little slits. Animal eyes. At the time, she’d thought,
This is a stranger.
Thought it, and at the same time not allowed herself to think it.
    She looked at the woman’s face, and she knew that the face didn’t lie. “Omigod,” she said. “Omigod.”
    Remember to breathe
, she told herself.
    “I don’t know his people. He said he was the last of his family.” And then a ray of hope shot through her. “No, wait. He has pictures. Of him and Rosemarie Owens’s husband… I forget his first name. He can’t be Errol Jacomine; he was in Dallas all that time… when… uh… He can’t be Errol Jacomine. He knows people.”
    “What people?”
    She searched her memory. “Rosemarie! She’s a very well-known woman in town. My family knows her. He was in her crowd.”
    “Shit!” someone said, one of the men, maybe both of them.
    Karen was remembering that she and David had been to Owens’s house, the two of them, and