bulged up in semicircles around his tucked hands.
Cleve glanced from me to Jack and back again, and said, "Reckon ole Jared got lucky."
Immediately the tension eased. Jack slowly looped his arm around me. His fingers bit into my shoulder.
"Well, you were being a gentleman," Darcy said approvingly.
"Now you got your question answered, can I get in my apartment?" Jack said, making an effort to sound amiable. But I could hear the anger pulsing in his voice.
"Sure, man. We're going this very minute," said Darcy, a broad grin on his face that I wanted to wipe right off. I promised myself I would if I got half a chance.
Jack stepped between Darcy and Cleve, put his key in the lock, and turned it as they started down the stairs. He automatically stood back to let me enter first, then shut the door behind us. Jack relocked it and went over to the window to see if his "friends" really left.
Then he swung around to face me, his anger open now and misdirected at me.
"We talked about this," he began. "No one was going to connect us."
"Okay, I'm gone," I said shortly, and started for the door.
"Talk to me," he demanded.
I sighed. "How else could you have gotten out of that?" I asked.
"Well, I... could have told them I'd driven to Little Rock to see my girlfriend."
"And when they said, 'Then why was your car parked here all night?' "
Frustrated, Jack brought his fist down on a little desk by the window. "Dammit, I won't have it!"
I shrugged. No point in all this now. If he was going to act like a jerk, I'd go downstairs and get my mop. I had to work.
When I was on the top stair, he caught me. His good hand clamped down on my shoulder like iron. I stopped dead. I turned very slowly and said to him in my sincerest voice, "How about saying, 'Thanks, Lily, for bailing me out, even though you had to stand there and be leered at for the second time in twelve hours'?"
Jack turned whiter around the mouth than he had been, and his hand dropped from my shoulder.
"And don't you ever, ever restrain me again," I told him, my eyes staring directly into his.
I turned, and with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, I went down the stairs. When I came up with the mop, I stood on the landing for a second, listening. His apartment was silent. I went into Deedra's to work.
So much drama, so early in the morning, left me exhausted. I scarcely registered the unusual order in Deedra's apartment; it was as if she was trying to show she'd changed her social habits by keeping her apartment neater. As I put away her clean underwear, I noted the absence of the pile of naughty pictures of herself she had kept underneath her bras. I expected to feel good about Deedra's changed lifestyle, but instead, I could barely manage to finish my cleaning.
As I dumped the last waste can into a plastic bag, I admitted to myself that even more than tired, I felt sad. It would have been a pleasant treat to have had a morning to think of Jack in the relaxed warmth of good sex, in the glow of - what could I call it? Happiness. But, thanks to his pride - as I saw it - we'd ended on a sour note.
There was a pile of pierced earrings on Deedra's dresser, and I decided to just sit there and pair them up. For a minute or two that was simple and satisfying; after all, they match or they don't. But my restless mind began wandering again.
A pretend robbery during a mysterious meeting at Winthrop Sporting Goods, in the middle of a most inclement night. The blue flyers that had caused so much trouble. The long, heavy black bags that the Winthrop house had been burgled to get - where were they now? The three unsolved murders in tiny Shakespeare. The out-of-place Mookie Preston. The bombing. I couldn't make sense of all the pieces at one time, but the shape of it was wrong. This was no group of fanatics with a coherent manifesto at work; it all seemed very sloppy. For the first time, I considered what Carrie had said about the timing of the bombing. If the goal had been to kill lots of black people, the explosion had come too late. If the goal had been to