5432852385743

knee, sighed with relief, then turned my attention to the ugly brick cube of the Book Depository. The
windows overlooking Houston and Elm Streets glittered in the chilly afternoon sun. We know a secret,
they said. We’re going to be famous, especially the one on the southeast corner of the sixth floor. We’re going to
be famous, and you can’t stop us. A sense of stupid menace surrounded the building. And was it just me
who thought so? I watched several people cross Elm to pass the building on the other side and thought
not. Lee was inside that cube right now, and I was sure he was thinking many of the things I was
thinking. Can I do this? Will I do this? Is it my destiny?
Robert’s not your brother anymore, I thought. Now I’m your brother, Lee, your brother of the gun. You just
don’t know it.
Behind the Depository, in the trainyard, an engine hooted. A flock of band-tailed pigeons took
wing. They momentarily whirled above the Hertz sign on the roof of the Depository, then wheeled
away toward Fort Worth.
If I killed him before the twenty-second, Kennedy would be saved but I’d almost certainly wind up
in jail or a psychiatric hospital for twenty or thirty years. But if I killed him on the twenty-second?
Perhaps as he assembled his rifle?
Waiting until so late in the game would be a terrible risk, and one I’d tried with all my might to
avoid, but I thought it could be done and was now probably my best chance. It would be safer with a
partner to help me run my game, but there was only Sadie, and I wouldn’t involve her. Not even, I
realized bleakly, if it meant that Kennedy had to die or I had to go to prison. She had been hurt
enough.
I began making my slow way back to the hotel to get my car. I took one final glance back at the
Book Depository over my shoulder. It was looking at me. I had no doubt of it. And of course it was
going to end there, I’d been foolish to imagine anything else. I had been driven toward that brick hulk
like a cow down a slaughterhouse chute.
14
11/20/63 (Wednesday)
I started awake at dawn from some unremembered dream, my heart beating hard.
She knows.
Knows what?
That you’ve been lying to her about all the things you claim not to remember.
“No,” I said. My voice was rusty with sleep.
Yes. She was careful to say she was leaving after period six, because she doesn’t want you to know she’s
planning to leave much sooner. She doesn’t want you to know until she shows up. In fact, she might be on the
road already. You’ll be halfway through your morning therapy session, and in she’ll breeze.
I didn’t want to believe this, but it felt like a foregone conclusion.
So where was I going to go? As I sat there on the bed in that Wednesday morning’s first light, that
also seemed like a foregone conclusion. It was as if my subconscious mind had known all along. The
past has resonance, it echoes.
But first I had one more chore to perform on my used typewriter. An unpleasant one.
15