Due Process (Joe Dillard #9)(68)

“You don’t need to thank me,” I said. “He didn’t do anything wrong.”

“That’s just it. He didn’t do anything wrong, but if it hadn’t been for you, he could have wound up in prison for the rest of his life.”

“Well, instead he’s going to finish up the school year and head off to law school. The best thing you can do, all of you, is put this behind you. I’m not saying forget it because you won’t, but put it behind you, hold your heads up, and move on with your lives. Are you going to be in town for a couple of days?”

“We’ll probably leave tomorrow.”

“Stop by the office early and we’ll rehash some things. I’ll tell you what went on in the judge’s chambers.”

“We’ll be there,” he said, and we all turned and walked toward the door.

It happened before I could get out the front door.

It happened so quickly there was nothing I could do.

I was in the back of the group. Kevin’s family went out, followed by Kevin, then Charlie. Jack was a few feet behind her, and I was behind him. As soon as Kevin cleared the doorway, I saw a woman move out quickly from behind a pillar to my right and run straight toward him. A flash of steel caught the sunlight as she raised a large knife over her head. I opened my mouth to yell a warning, but it was too late. Kevin had already turned to his left, following his family to their car. Charlie spotted her, and she threw herself between the attacker and Kevin. The knife came down, and Charlie reached up and tried to block it. I saw the knife bury itself deeply into Charlie’s left forearm, and she yelled out in pain. Sheila withdrew the knife and raised it again just as Jack realized what was happening. Before I could get through the door, and before Sheila could make another strike, Jack had bull-rushed Sheila, lifted her onto his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, and slammed her onto the concrete sidewalk so hard I could hear her skull crack. She lay motionless on the walk, her eyes open, seemingly staring at the sky above. The move Jack used on her was one I’d taught him many years earlier. I’d seen him use it before, but never on a woman, and never with such devastating effect. He was so strong, and apparently had experienced such a rush of adrenaline, that Sheila looked like a rag doll.

I rushed through the door to Charlie, who was standing with a gaping wound in her arm. I walked her over to a concrete column and sat her on the ground. A bailiff came rushing over, his pistol drawn.

“Get us some medics,” I said. “Hurry!”

Jack stood over Sheila for a few seconds, seemingly in a daze. He finally came out of it and moved quickly to Charlie and me.

“Charlie, I’m so sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t get to her.”

I took my tie off and began wrapping it tightly around Charlie’s arm. I was terrified. The wound was oozing dark blood. It was right in the middle of the underside of her forearm, about four inches up from the base of her hand, and I was afraid the knife may have struck either or both of the radial or ulnar arteries. If it had severed them or opened them up, she could bleed to death.

The medics showed up in less than a minute. I stood back and got out of their way. Two of them immediately went to work on Charlie, while two more went to work on Sheila Self.

“I killed her,” Jack said. “I think I killed her.”

“Take it easy,” I said. “You did what you had to do.”

The medics slowed the bleeding from Charlie’s arm fairly quickly. I didn’t notice any blood spraying; it wasn’t gushing, which, to me, meant no artery had been sliced or severed. She did have a nasty gash, though, and they immediately set about cleaning and dressing the wound. A few minutes later, they loaded her into an ambulance. Jack climbed in with her, and they drove off to the Johnson City Medical Center.

I stayed and watched while they worked on Sheila. They tried to stop the ever-widening pool of blood oozing from her skull. She went into cardiac arrest shortly after I began watching, and they were unsuccessful in reviving her. They finally stopped working on her fifteen minutes after they started and covered her body with a sheet.

Sheila Self, the woman who had set all of the wheels in motion at the direction of Erlene Barlowe, was dead, and my son had killed her. I knew there wouldn’t be legal repercussions—he had killed her in defense of another—but I also knew Jack. Psychologically, he would be in for a long, rough road ahead.





THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17

We gathered at our house that evening. Lilly had been following the case on the news and I spoke to her on the phone for an hour. Charlie spent a couple of hours in the Emergency Room at the hospital before they let her go. I went by briefly. It was like a scene from a war movie in there with bullet-riddled bodies being carted in and wheeled off to surgery.

We stayed glued to the news. They were reporting that thirteen of the sixteen men who opened fire on each other and the police had been shot and killed. The police were identifying bodies and notifying next of kin. Only two police officers, besides Leon, were wounded. One received a superficial wound when his neck was barely grazed by a bullet. Another inch toward his neck and he would have likely been dead. The other was struck in the knee when a bullet somehow found its way through a tiny gap in his body armor. He was in stable condition at the hospital.

Around 11:00 p.m., a face flashed across the television screen that gave me pause. It was the black man who had come to our office and threatened me with the Clint Eastwood hand cannon. They reported that his name was originally Jamie Lynn Greenlee, from Atlanta. He’d done a lengthy prison term for selling crack cocaine and shooting another dealer. At some point along the way, he converted to Islam and changed his name to Kareem Abdul Mohammed. He was a member of the New Black Panther Party, they said.