Hannibal - Thomas Harris [6]
Ardelia Mapp's date brought her home about 12:45, A.M. after a long drive down from Cape May, and she told him good night at the door. Mapp was in her bathroom when she heard the water running the thud in the pipes as the washing machine advanced its cycle. She went to the back of the house and turned on the lights in the kitchen she shared with Starling. She could see into the laundry room. She could see Starling sitting on the floor, the bandage around.her head.
“Starling! Oh, baby.” Kneeling beside her quickly, “What is it?”
“I got shot through the ear, Ardelia. They fixed it at Walter Reed. Don't turn the light on, okay?”
“Okay. I'll make you something. I haven't heard - we were playing tapes in the car - tell me.”
“John's dead, Ardelia.”
“Not Johnny Brigham!”
Mapp and Starling had both had crushes on Brigham when he was gunnery instructor at the FBI Academy. They had tried to read his tattoo through his shirtsleeve.
Starling nodded and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand like a child. “Evelda Drumgo and some Crips. Evelda shot him. They got Burke too, Marquez Burke from BATF. We all went in together. Evelda was tipped ahead and the TV news got there the same time we did. Evelda was mine. She wouldn't give it up, Ardelia. She wouldn't give it up and she was holding the baby. We shot each other. She's dead.”
Mapp had never seen Starling cry before.
“Ardelia, I killed five people today.”
Mapp sat on the floor beside Starling and put her arm around her. Together they leaned back against the turning washing machine.
“What about Evelda's baby?”
“I got the blood off him, he didn't have any breaks in his skin I could see. The hospital said physically he's all right. They're going to release him to Evelda's mother in a couple of days. You know the last thing Evelda said to me, Ardelia? She said, `Let's swap body fluids, bitch.”
“Let me fix you something,” Mapp said.
“What?” Starling said.
Hannibal
Chapter 3
WITH THE gray dawn came the newspapers and the early network news.
Mapp came over with some muffins when she heard Starling stirring around and they watched together.
CNN and the other networks all bought the copyrighted film from WFULTV's helicopter camera. It was extraordinary footage from directly overhead.
Starling watched once. She had to see that Evelda; shot first. She looked at Mapp and saw anger in her brown face.
Then Starling ran to throw up.
“That's hard to watch,” Starling said when she came back, shakylegged and pale..As usual, Mapp got to the point at once. “Your question is, how do I feel about you killing that African American woman holding that child. This is the answer. She shot you first. I want you to be alive. But Starling, think about who's making this insane policy here. What kind of dumbass thinking put you and Evelda Drumgo together in that sorry place so you could solve the drug problem between you with some damn guns? How smart is that? I hope you'll think about whether you want to be their cat's paw anymore.” Mapp poured some tea for punctuation. “You want me to stay with you? I'll take a personal day.”
“Thanks. You don't need to do that. Call me.”
The National Tattler, prime beneficiary of the tabloid boom in the nineties, put out an extra that was extraordinary even by its own standards. Someone threw it at the house at midmorning. Starling found it when she went to investigate the thump. She was expecting the worst, and she got it:
“DEATH ANGEL: CLARICE STARLING, THE FBI's KILLING MACHINE,” screamed the National Tattler's headline in seventytwopoint Railroad Gothic. The three frontpage photos were: Clarice Starling in fatigues firing a .45-caliber pistol in competition, Evelda Drumgo bent over her baby in the road, her head tilted like that of a Cimabue Madonna, with the brains blown out, and Starling again, putting a brown naked baby on a white cutting board amid knives and fish