The Axeman's Jazz

his wife and kids’ fault for nagging and crying. She knew a girl at McGehee’s who hadn’t been out a single afternoon or evening since the ninth grade, when she’d “disgraced the family” by cutting school one day and getting caught. As it happened, her father had been simultaneously involved in a public bribery scandal, but the girl was the one who got blamed for “disgrace.” Skip had grown up herself with a father who never made a mistake that wasn’t followed by “Look what you made me do!”
    Finding someone else to blame was part of being a Southerner, as Cindy Lou had so rudely remarked.
    And so was cruelty. The crack dad had beaten his wife and kids. The McGehee’s girl had been deprived of an adolescence. Skip’s own nice doctor dad usually took a swing at whoever had made him make a mistake. (More interesting, multi-layered punishments were reserved for more serious crimes.)
    So she knew that if Sonny had been blamed for something as large as a death, there was probably cruelty attached to it, cruelty on a scale that would make a war criminal wince. Di’s story had said plenty about his father, about his arrogance, his lack of feeling—in fact, how he’d tried to make it her fault he’d screwed up her surgery. Maybe the whole family was like that.
    After all, they’re all doctors.
    But she banished the unworthy thought.
    The horror of the whole thing, the thing she couldn’t get past, was that whatever had happened, it had happened when he was four years old. She knew Sonny’d killed three people, including a teenager, and had heard him threaten to kill his own girlfriend, but thinking about what he’d been through, her heart went out to him. Not to the real Sonny, the monster he’d become, but to the former Sonny, the toddler who’d been accused of killing—and now was trying to wipe the slate clean by killing a few more people.
    Crazy.
    She saw Cindy Lou pull up. “Come on,” she said to Missy. “Let’s go down. Are you afraid?”
    Missy shook her head.
    She needed Missy to tell Cindy Lou what she knew, but she had a feeling Missy might be able to help—might be one of the few Sonny would talk to. He’d thought he had to kill her, had meant to and tried to, but the irony (and possibly the saving grace) was that he thought he had to kill her because he loved her.
    You always hurt the one you love.
    Yeah, but the point is he does love her
.
    By now, the entire block was sealed off, neighbors having been escorted out of their homes in case there was gunfire. Joe had arrived and wore a worried look. He was wiping perspiration from his face. A hostage negotiator with a megaphone was trying to talk to Sonny. Alex looked as if he’d dipped his face in white powder. As for Sonny, his own face was distorted, ugly—fearful, Skip thought, and that wasn’t good. His hand still held the scalpel, steady as any surgeon’s.
    A man at the end of the block was creating a disturbance, trying to get across police lines. As she and Missy talked to Cindy Lou, she tried to ignore him, but his voice was getting louder and louder. When she heard him say, “That’s my son, dammit!” her stomach did one of its flips. How had Lamar found out?
    But it wasn’t Lamar. Missy heard it too, and without another word ran to him. “Damn you!” she shouted. “Damn you, Robson Gerard! Damn you and your stupid fundamentalist meanness. Damn you for what you did to him!”
    She had her hands raised as if to fight, to scratch at his eyes, perhaps, but she couldn’t get past the policeman he was talking to and ended up flailing at air.
    Skip, walking toward them, heard Robson say, “Young lady, I am not a fundamentalist,” and would have laughed if she’d had any sense of humor left.
    She said, “Missy, this isn’t helping things.” As if word had come down from Mount Sinai, Missy lowered her hands and shut up.
    To the cop Skip said, “Let him in.” And to Robson, “We need to talk.”
    Skip sent word to the hostage negotiator, who asked if there was anyone Sonny wanted to talk to—Missy was there; his dad was there.
    Sonny said no. And that was all he said. He didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to leave, it looked like, just seemed to want an excuse to cut Alex’s throat.
    Cindy Lou, who after all had a couple of graduate degrees in psychology, pulled out all the stops to put Robson at his ease—or relative ease, under the circumstances—and said a powwow was called for, up at Missy’s.