“I’m done with these assholes,” I say.
When Helene and Eli are back in the room, she says to them, “You’re all under arrest.”
“What the fuck!” Lonnie says again, but this time in a much higher key. “You said before you walked out of here you’d give us a break if I cooperated.”
“Well, about that, Lonnie,” Helene says. “I lied.”
I stand by the door, enjoying myself as I listen to Helene Mayes read them all their rights, now that she’s finally decided they have some.
When she finishes, she smiles at them one last time.
“And now, boys,” she says, “we are all the way back to where we started.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Lonnie asks.
“Lawyer lawyer lawyer,” Helene says.
She looks as happy as I’ve seen her, still looks happy when she’s walking me out to my pickup.
“Our luck is about to change,” she says. “Big time. I can feel it.”
“’Bout time we started putting some points on the board.”
“I’d forgotten what it feels like to have a hot hand,” she says. “And you know what they tell you when you’ve got a hot hand.”
“Keep shooting.”
“Fuckin’ A,” Helene says.
NINETY-NINE
AT A LITTLE after seven the next morning, Helene having awakened me at five, she and I are standing in front of her car near the end of the short runway at Parsons Regional Airport, watching the small Citation jet slowly taxi to a stop.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” I say.
“Believe it,” she says.
A few minutes later, the door opens and the airstairs come down, and we see the pilot at the top of the stairs reaching into the cabin, then see him reaching out to take the hand of the plane’s only passenger.
A pretty, blond teenaged girl.
Then we watch as Holly Ridenour, hand on the railing, carefully makes her way down the steps, giving a small wave to Helene and me as she does.
“You believe in miracles?” Helene asks me as we walk toward Holly, waving back at her.
I try to answer.
But I can’t speak in the moment.
And am trying my best not to cry.
Six hours or so later, after Holly has spent the morning at County Police with her new lawyer, Diozzi, and the state’s attorney, I’m in my pickup and Holly Ridenour is sitting next to me, hands folded in her lap. She is crying again, jammed up all over again by everything that has happened to her in the last day, and all the days before it.
“I think I did a good job at the station, telling it all to Miz Mayes,” she says.
“She says you absolutely did good,” I say. “No, check that. She says you did great.”
I turn to take another look at her, still trying to process, just for myself, everything this girl had been through, and everything the bastards had done to her from the day they took her.
