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“Because it was a girl’s,” I said.
Sadie turned to me. Her cheeks were flushed except for the scar, which stood out in a white snarl.
“What?”
Suddenly I was hammering on the glass. “Bonnie!” I shouted. “Hey, Bonnie Ray! Let us in! We know
Lee! Lee! LEE OSWALD!”
He registered the name and crossed the lobby in a maddeningly slow amble.
“I didn’t know that scrawny l’il sumbitch had any friends,” Bonnie Ray Williams said as he opened
the door, then stepped aside as we rushed inside. “He probably in the break room, watchin for the
president with the rest of—”
“Listen to me,” I said. “I’m not his friend and he’s not in the break room. He’s on the sixth floor. I
think he means to shoot President Kennedy.”
The big man laughed merrily. He dropped his cigarette to the floor and crushed it out with a
workboot. “That little pissant wouldn’t have the guts to drown a litter o’ kittens in a sack. All he do is
sit in the corner and read books.”
“I tell you—”
“I’m goan on up to two. If you want to come with me, you’re welcome, I guess. But don’t be talkin
any more nonsense about Leela. That’s what we call him, Leela. Shoot the president! Lor!” He waved
his hand and ambled away.
I thought, You belong in Derry, Bonnie Ray. They specialize in not seeing what’s right in front of them.
“Stairs,” I told Sadie.
“The elevator would be—”
The end of any chance we might have left was what it would be.
“It would get stuck between floors. Stairs.”
I took her hand and pulled her toward them. The staircase was a narrow gullet with wooden risers
swaybacked from years of traffic. There was a rusty iron railing on the left. At the foot, Sadie turned to
me. “Give me the gun.”
“No.”
“You’ll never make it in time. I will. Give me the gun.”
I almost gave it up. It wasn’t that I felt I deserved to keep it; now that the actual watershed
moment had come, it didn’t matter who stopped Oswald as long as someone did. But we were only a
step away from the roaring machine of the past, and I was damned if I’d risk Sadie taking that last
step ahead of me, only to be sucked into its whirling belts and blades.
I smiled, then leaned forward and kissed her. “Race you,” I said, and started up the stairs. Over my
shoulder I called, “If I fall asleep, he’s all yours!”
13
“You folks crazy,” I heard Bonnie Ray Williams say in a mildly remonstrative tone of voice. Then
there was the light thud of footsteps as Sadie followed me. I crutched on the right—no longer leaning
on it but almost vaulting on it—and hauled at the railing on the left. The gun in my sport coat pocket
swung and thudded against my hip. My knee was bellowing. I let it yell.
When I hit the second-floor landing, I snuck a look at my watch. It was twelve twenty-five. No;
twenty-six. I could hear the roar of the crowd still approaching, a wave about to break. The motorcade
had passed the intersections of Main and Ervay, Main and Akard, Main and Field. In two minutes—
three at most—it would reach Houston Street, turn right, and roll past the old Dallas courthouse at