He screamed as she rolled him, but at least the hot fluid drained from his throat, and he got one good breath. He spat out some more blood, and then she let him down onto his back again.

“Don’t let them get you like this,” she said, sobbing. “Not after all you’ve done.”

To Henry’s amazement, Lou Ann looked skyward and began to pray, appealing directly to Jesus in a voice that sounded as though it would break any moment. He wanted to give her a message for Sherry, but no words would come. His stomach and sides were wet. His balls, too. They must have hit an artery, he thought. Or I pissed myself …

“My files!” he cried suddenly, trying to rise from the asphalt. “Did they get my files?”

“Whoa, big fella,” Lou Ann said, gently pressing him back to the ground. “You’ve got a lot of stories to write yet. The ambulance is nearly here.”

“Keys,” Henry whispered. “Ya’ll need my keys.”

Tears poured from Lou Ann’s eyes, and her chin quivered like a child’s. She cradled his head in her hands. Henry wanted to tell her not to worry, but all he could do was gasp for air.

The wail of a siren rode to him on the night air. The wail rose in pitch, then became a horn, a solo saxophone, bobbing on the current of Ray Charles’s piano, the last show Ray had played at Haney’s Big House. Out of that divine music swelled the earthy yet ethereal voice of Swan Norris, singing alone in a blue spotlight, her timbre dark and true as Billie Holiday’s, giving voice to ineffable suffering: “… blood on the leaves,” she sang. “… blood at the root.”

“Hear that siren, Henry?” Lou Ann asked, palpable relief in her voice. “They’re almost here. It’s not your time yet.” She wiped his brow with the tail of her blouse.

As a wind of reverent applause swelled around Swan, Henry’s mind flickered, then winked out.

CHAPTER 44

ANNIE AND I are doing our “homework” together in the den. She’s working on a paper about Benjamin Franklin, while I pretend to work on the proposal for the restoration of the Forks of the Road slave market site. Jewel’s smuggled preliminary autopsy report sits beside me, and the lines I’m writing in my notebook have more to do with criminology than history. Even so, having this shared time with my daughter is one benefit of being mayor that I never anticipated. In my previous jobs—writing novels and preparing capital murder prosecutions—I had to be alone while I worked, but being mayor doesn’t require nearly so much concentration. In fact, the job has been done by men with less intellectual power than my daughter has at age eleven.