5432852385743

as spotters, pointing up at the sixth-floor window, where a skinny man in a blue shirt was clearly
visible.
I heard a patter of thumps, a sound like hailstones striking mud. Those were the bullets that
missed the window and hit the bricks above or on either side. Many didn’t miss. I saw Lee’s shirt
billow out as if a wind had started to blow inside it—a red one that tore holes in the fabric: one above
the right nipple, one at the sternum, a third where his navel would be. A fourth tore his neck open.
He danced like a doll in the hazy, sawdusty light, and that terrible snarl never left his face. He wasn’t
a man at the end, I tell you; he was something else. Whatever gets into us when we listen to our worst
angels.
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.