Page 33 of Blood Hymn

I walk up beside him. I take my glasses off and put them in my vest pocket. I reach up and unbutton the top button of the white shirt, and then the second, and I draw the gold chain out of my collar with one finger and let the locket fall against my chest where he can see it.

He glances over, irritated. He sees a server. He opens his mouth to send me away.

Then he sees the necklace.

It's like watching a man step off a curb that isn't there. All the color leaves his face at once, from the hairline down, and his mouth stays open and nothing comes out. His eyes go from the locket to the kink in the chain and fix there. I watch him remember it. I watch him feel it in his hands. The phone lowers from his ear. A tiny voice on the other end keeps talking.

He looks up at my face, the swollen eye, the powder cracking over the stitches.

"You," he breathes.

The .38 is in the waistband at the small of my back under the vest. I draw it and put the muzzle against his stomach, just above his belt, and I pull the trigger.

In that gilded cave, it sounds like the end of the world. The quartet stops mid-bar. Somebody downstairs screams. Malcolm folds forward over the gun with a grunt, and I put my free hand flat on his chest and push him back upright against the rail so he has to look at me.

"Her name," I tell him.

He's gasping. His hands have come up to his belly, and red is spreading through his fingers into his white shirt, and his knees are going.

"Say her name."

"I—please⁠—"

"You had your hands on her throat for eleven minutes. You can say her name."

His lips are gray. They move. "Delilah."

"Her whole name."

"Delilah Price." It comes out as a sob. "Delilah Price. I'm sorry. Daddy made me, he said I had to learn, I'm sorry, I'm⁠—"

"No," I tell him. "You're not."

I get my shoulder into his chest and heave. He's big, but he's already falling. The rail catches him at the small of the back and he tips over it like a sack off a truck. His hand grabs at the banner as he goes. HARLOWE FOR STATE SENATE tears loose from the iron with a long ripping sound and follows him down.

He hits the marble thirty feet below in front of three hundred people.

The screaming is total. Glass shatters. Somebody's yelling for a doctor, somebody's yelling for the police, somebody's yelling gun, gun, gun, and the crowd is breaking toward every door at once. On the grand staircase, Guidry's brother is coming up three steps at a time with a pistol out and his face twisted, and he sees me at the rail.

A hand closes on my arm from behind.

"Kitchen," Silas grates in my ear.

He's in a white cook's jacket, and he's got blood on his knuckles that isn't his. He pulls me through a service door I hadn't seen in the paneling behind a potted palm, into a back corridor lit by fluorescent tubes, down a flight of steel stairs, and out through a set of swinging doors into the steam and clatter of the hotel kitchen. Cooks are frozen at their stations, staring at the ceiling. The woman with the headset is shouting into it. We go straight through the middle of them, and nobody tries to stop us, because nobody wants to be the one who does.

The loading dock. The white catering van. The flatbed Ram idling behind it with the driver's door open where Silas left it. He shoves me in across the bench seat, drops in after me, floors it, and we go down the alley with the tailgate banging and out onto Third Street against a red light.

The first siren starts before we've gone four blocks. By the time we're on 71 headed south, there are three, and then five, and they're behind us and ahead of us and coming from the east, and the whole sky over Alexandria is going red and blue. Silas takes the first exit onto a farm road and kills the headlights and drives by the moon through cane fields, turning, turning again, onto gravel, onto dirt, while the sirens swing past on the highway behind us and fade, and swell again, and fade.

Six miles. I count them on the odometer because I can't stop shaking and I need something to hold my eyes.

He pulls off at last onto a turn-row between two cane fields, where the stalks close over the truck on both sides like a tunnel, and cuts the engine.

The silence rings.

I'm still holding the .38. I don't remember deciding to. My hand won't let go of it. Silas reaches over and takes it from me, gently, finger by finger, and sets it on the dash. His hands are shaking too. I've never seen his hands shake.

"You're all right," he tells me.