11/22/63

A bullet spanged one of the overhead lights, shattered the bulb, and set it to swaying. Then a bullet tore off the top of the would-be assassin’s head, just as one of Lee’s had torn off the top of Kennedy’s in the world I’d come from. He collapsed onto his barricade of boxes, sending them tumbling to the floor.

Shouts from below. Someone yelling “Man down, I saw him go down!”

Running, ascending footfalls. I sent the.38 spinning toward Lee’s body. I had just enough presence of mind to know that I would be badly beaten, perhaps even killed by the men coming up the stairs if they found me with a gun in my hand. I started to get up, but my knee would no longer hold me. That was probably just as well. I might not have been visible from Elm Street, but if I was, they’d open fire on me. So I crawled to where Sadie lay, supporting my weight on my hands and dragging my left leg behind me like an anchor.

The front of her blouse was soaked with blood, but I could see the hole. It was dead-center in her chest, just above the slope of her breasts. More blood poured from her mouth. She was choking on it. I got my arms under her and lifted her. Her eyes never left mine. They were brilliant in the hazy gloom.

“Jake,” she rasped.

“No, honey, don’t talk.”

She took no notice, though — when had she ever? “Jake, the president!”

“Safe.” I hadn’t actually seen him all in one piece as the limo tore away, but I had seen Lee jerk as he fired his only shot at the street, and that was enough for me. And I would have told Sadie he was safe no matter what.

Her eyes closed, then opened again. The footfalls were very close now, turning from the fifth-floor landing and starting up the final flight. Far below, the crowd was bellowing its excitement and confusion.

“Jake.”

“What, honey?”

She smiled. “How we danced!”

When Bonnie Ray and the others arrived, I was sitting on the floor and holding her. They stampeded past me. How many I don’t know. Four, maybe. Or eight. Or a dozen. I didn’t bother to look at them. I held her, rocking her head against my chest, letting her blood soak into my shirt. Dead. My Sadie. She had fallen into the machine, after all.

I have never been a crying man, but almost any man who’s lost the woman he loves would, don’t you think? Yes. But I didn’t.

Because I knew what had to be done.

PART 6 The Green Card Man

CHAPTER 29

1

I wasn’t exactly arrested, but I was taken into custody and driven to the Dallas police station in a squad car. On the last block of the ride, people — some of them reporters, most of them ordinary citizens — pounded on the windows and peered inside. In a clinical, distant way, I wondered if I would perhaps be dragged from the car and lynched for attempting to murder the president. I didn’t care. What concerned me most was my bloodstained shirt. I wanted it off; I also wanted to wear it forever. It was Sadie’s blood.

Neither of the cops in the front seat asked me any questions. I suppose someone had told them not to. If they had asked any, I wouldn’t have replied. I was thinking. I could do that because the coldness was creeping over me again. I put it on like a suit of armor. I could fix this. I would fix this. But first I had some talking to do.

2

They put me in a room that was as white as ice. There was a table and three hard chairs. I sat in one of them. Outside, telephones rang and a Teletype chattered. People went back and forth talking in loud voices, sometimes shouting, sometimes laughing. The laughter had a hysterical sound. It was how men laugh when they know they’ve had a narrow escape. Dodged a bullet, so to speak. Perhaps Edwin Walker had laughed like that on the night of April tenth, as he talked to reporters and brushed broken glass from his hair.

The same two cops who brought me from the Book Depository searched me and took my things. I asked if I could have my last two packets of Goody’s. The two cops conferred, then tore them open and poured them out on the table, which was engraved with initials and scarred with cigarette burns. One of them wetted a finger, tasted the powder, and nodded. “Do you want water?”

“No.” I scooped up the powder and poured it into my mouth. It was bitter. That was fine with me.

One of the cops left. The other asked for my bloody shirt, which I reluctantly took off and handed over. Then I pointed at him. “I know it’s evidence, but you treat it with respect. The blood on it came from the woman I loved. That might not mean much to you, but it’s also from the woman who helped to stop the murder of President Kennedy, and that should.”

“We only want it for blood-typing.”

“Fine. But it goes on my receipt of personal belongings. I’ll want it back.”

“Sure.”

The cop who’d left came back with a plain white undershirt. It looked like the one Oswald had been wearing — or would have been wearing — in the mugshot taken shortly after his arrest at the Texas Theatre.

3