My Sister's Keeper (34 page)

As the police moved past our booth, someone in the next stall screamed and a scuffle broke out. One cop leaped into our booth, his large shoes kicking and stomping me while he grappled with the suspect in the next booth until they managed to get him to the floor and cuff him. My chest was clinched so tightly, I could hardly breathe. Sweat poured off me.

A moment later, they stomped out a back door dragging the naked man kicking and screaming with them. When they’d gone, I exhaled and waited for my nerves to calm before flipping my shirt back onto my shoulders and thanking the woman for her help.

“
My pleasure,” she trilled, her voice deep and throaty blowing smoke from a long slender cigarette into my face.

I zigzagged back to the front of the building, tucked my shirttail into my pants, zipped my fly, and stumbled out into the crowd on the street—and the cool, refreshing night air.

ACROSS TOWN, MARTHA INCHED back into the recesses of a row of bushes and switched the safety off on a can of pepper spray as two teenage youths headed up the sidewalk toward her. Laying her index finger on the trigger, she sat motionless in the shadows as they passed within inches of her, then waited for them to get well down the block before resuming her trek. Several blocks farther, she turned toward the river.

As the warehouse came into view, the palms of her hands grew damp. Concentrating on the upper floor of the abandoned building, she failed to notice the car following her from a block away with its lights off. Nor did she notice the driver park and get out when she maneuvered into a hidden berth not far from the spot where she’d parked on the night of her accident.

Pulling a pair of binoculars from under her coat, she raised them to her eyes, located the window in them, and saw that the room was dark. She lowered the angle of the lenses and scanned along the bottom of the warehouse as a sharp pain ripped through her right leg from her hip to her ankle. Gritting her teeth, she shifted her weight onto her left hip.

Movement in the shadows behind the warehouse drew her attention.
What is that?
Rolling the wheel with her finger, she brought a silhouette into sharp focus just as it disappeared behind the corner of the building.
My God, there’s someone back there!

Martha pushed back to the sidewalk, looked up and down the street, and rolled toward the warehouse for a better look behind the building.

Again something moved back there.

Slipping into a thicket off the sidewalk, she drew the binoculars to her eyes, focused on a light moving about behind the building, and realized she’d been watching a boat maneuvering on the river beyond the warehouse.
Rats!
Taking a deep breath, she glanced back at the window and jolted upright in her seat. Above and to the left of the window from where she’d been pushed—in the room at the top of the stairs was a faint glow of bluish light.

Her body tensed and her breathing grew shallow as she pulled the cell phone from her coat pocket and dialed Sam Jones.

“
Sam, it’s Martha.”

He hesitated. “Martha?”

“
Baimbridge,” she muttered, her right leg twisting painfully outward.

“
Yes. Martha, how’ve you been?”

She massaged her thigh as she spoke. “I’m sitting across from the warehouse right this second and—”

“
What warehouse?”

“
What warehouse do you think, Sam?”

He sighed. “I’m sorry. There’s a lot going on tonight. The
railroad
warehouse, of course.”

“
Sam, there was a light in the top window of that warehouse just a second ago. I saw it.” He did not answer. “Did you hear me?”

“
Yes, I heard you.”

“
I saw a light coming from that room, Sam! Can you come and check it out?”

“
It’s been three years, Martha. Aren’t you ever going to let it go?”

“
Please, Sam. Come check it out. You owe me that.”

After a brief pause he gave in. “Okay. I’ll be right there.”

“
Thank you, Sam.”

“
Sure.”

With the binoculars still to her eyes, Martha closed the phone and dropped it back into her coat pocket. Behind her, a twig snapped. Lowering the binoculars, she held her breath and listened, looking up and down the sidewalk, hearing only the beat of her heart and the sounds of the city. Grasping the wheels of her chair, she moved one forward and the other backward to rotate the chair, but the chair resisted. Looking over the side, she saw that an exposed root had snagged in the spokes of the left wheel. She tried to roll backward, forward, to the left, and to the right, but the root held. Leaning, she grasped the two-inch thick tentacle and twisted it upward straining to free it from the wheel.

The root flexed, but not enough. She leaned farther, took hold of it with both hands, jerked a bit more of it free from the ground, then curled the loose end up out of the spokes. As she held it back and tried to move the chair, a man’s shoe stepped on the root jamming it back into the wheel.

Startled, Martha’s heart jumped into her throat as she fumbled to locate the pepper spray in her pocket.

“
Need a little help, Miss Baimbridge?” the man muttered, his hands deep in his overcoat pockets.

Realizing it was Scott McGillikin standing before her, she pretended to relax. “Jeez! You scared the devil out of me!”

“
Looks like you’re hung up on a root,” he said grasping the two handles on the back of the chair, lifting it off the ground, shifting it to the right freeing the wheel. “You should be more careful. This is a dangerous neighborhood to be in at night.”

With her heart racing, she tried to sound calm. “You never quite get used to the limitations.”

“
No, I wouldn’t think so.”

Scott turned the chair around, rolled it out onto the sidewalk, and headed up the street away from the warehouse.

Martha placed her hands on the wheels and tried to take control. “I’ll be fine now, Mr. McGillikin. Thank you.”

Scott ignored her efforts and continued to push the chair before him as he walked along. “Have you ever thought about being in the movies, Miss Baimbridge?” His voice was calm, almost musical.

She attempted again to grip the wheels, to slow the chair. “Please, I can handle it from here.”

“
A smart girl like you with a cute figure like yours? Crippled or not, I’m sure I could get you a job in the movies.”

As the chair abruptly gained speed, Martha gripped the side rails and took inventory.
What do I have?
Pepper spray, cell phone, and a pair of binoculars. S
lipping her right hand into her coat pocket, she closed her fingers around the spray. “What kind of movies, Mr. McGillikin? Porn? Or should I call you
Mr. Bonner
?”

A chuckle gurgled up from deep in his throat. “Bonner?” His pace quickened. “I don’t believe I know anyone named Bonner.”

She laid a finger on the trigger of the pepper spray. “Scott McGillikin is
dead
. He died in an accident up north. You were there.”

“
Well, well.” Scott snickered. “Aren’t you the brilliant little investigator?” Lengthening his stride, he turned a corner onto a dark, tree-lined sidewalk that dropped steeply toward a busy four-lane intersection a block away. An eight-foot tall ivy-covered brick wall ran the entire length of the block. Sensing the danger ahead, Martha looked back just as a patrol car crossed the intersection behind her.
Sam?

“
Heeeelp!”
she screamed. “Somebody! Help me!” A gloved fist whacked the back of her head stunning her momentarily. Whipping the canister out of her pocket, she twisted to her left, pressed the trigger, and aimed the stream of irritant directly into Scott’s face.

He recoiled, then lunged at her slapping blindly at her head and shoulders, ripping the spray out of her hand, whacking the back of a gloved hand across her mouth. “You little bitch!” Flinging the canister over the wall, he gripped the chair and yanked it sharply to the left, charged forward, and rammed it hard into the wall slamming Martha head-first into the bricks, shattering a lens in the binoculars and ripping away a piece of one eyebrow.

Laying on the ground racked with pain and fear, she grabbed hold of the chair and used it to fight him off, keeping it between the two of them. “Somebody
pleeease!
Help meeeeeee!”

Ripping the chair out of her grip, Scott one-armed her back into the seat and, with tears streaming from his stinging eyes, galloped toward the intersection below—the chair jangling as it bounced over broken sections of sidewalk lifted by the roots of century-old oaks. Struggling to hold on, Martha reached into her pocket, thumbed the phone open, and pressed the “send” button knowing it would redial Sam’s cell phone automatically. But the right wheel struck a raised section of cement flipping the chair up on its side, wobbling, threatening to topple over. Martha’s reflexes whipped her hand from the pocket to grasp hold, and the phone went tumbling off into the grass.

“
Please! Somebody help me!”

Careening toward the busy intersection, Martha twisted to her left, locked an arm around his, and bit down on his sleeve. Failing to get his arm free, Scott smashed his other elbow against the top of her head three, four, five times. Still she held on, her teeth closing through his flesh. Grappling to get loose, Scott fell back dragging the chair to a halt, grabbed the binocular strap wrapped around Martha’s neck, and yanked it tight cutting off her air supply.

Panicked and fighting for breath, she lunged over the side of the chair toppling to the ground, writhing to get her fingers under the strap, gasping for oxygen. Twisting the strap tighter, Scott dragged her across the ground until the strap broke and she rolled free, blood spraying from her mouth as she coughed and screamed.
“Please! Somebody! Help!”

Martha had never backed down from anyone in her life and as he lifted her off the ground and tossed her back onto the chair, she punched and clawed at his head, digging her nails into his skin.
“Scott McGillikin’s trying to kill me!”

Exhausted, he slapped a hand over her mouth, circled the chair, and pushed on toward the streaming traffic. And again Martha locked onto his arm. But this time, he wrenched his hand from the glove and punched the side of her head with his bare knuckles.

Capturing his arm again, she sank her teeth into his bare skin ripping a chunk out of his arm. Jerking and twisting to free himself, Scott stumbled to his knees dragging the chair to a stop just before the end of the wall. An eighteen-wheel tractor-trailer rumbled past blasting Martha with a powerful gust of wind.

“
Hey!” she screamed waving at oncoming traffic. “
Somebody! Help me!”
But the traffic was moving too fast and the chair was hidden by the darkness and the wall.

Striking a demobilizing blow to the side of Martha’s jaw, he yanked his left arm free. As her head snapped back, her eyes caught the refraction of headlights in the
aqua
stone of the ring that sailed off his left hand and—for the second time in her life—she saw a
blue
flash and the letters “N3.”

Regaining her senses, she lunged at him grasping the tail of his coat.
“It was you!”
she cried leaning over the back of the chair.
“I found you, you friggin’ bastard!”

Falling to the ground, Scott kicked at her face, set his feet against the back of the chair, and in one powerful thrust, launched her off the sidewalk and into the intersection.

For an instant, Martha was back on that ledge, dropping away in slow motion, seeing the gloating in his eyes as she floated off.

The chair bounced over the curb into the path of a red Chevelle that swerved over the curb—its brakes squealing—to avoid hitting her, but the man in the yellow rental truck hauling his shattered life to a storage bin on the other end of town had nowhere to go. He stomped the brakes and turned the wheel, but the truck was too heavy and could not be stopped. The fully-loaded vehicle slammed into her wheelchair and—like Pélé kicking a soccer ball—sent her careening into the third lane where a bus returning alcoholics to the Wilmington Treatment Center from an AA meeting at St. James Episcopal Church struck the wheelchair head on.

47

A
S I PULLED UP TO MY PARENT’S HOUSE, I saw my mother flailing about the front yard flanked by two policemen and two neighbors attempting to console her. My first thoughts were that something had happened to Dad. I left the engine running and jumped out. “What happened?”

Mother surged toward me screaming and crying, but her cries concealed her words. I took hold of her hands. “What? Slow down.”

She tried to say something, but instead collapsed against me, her weight sending both of us against the side of the car.