Philadelphia Noir - Carlin Romano [15]
“Funny what a little red paint and a lot of imagination can do, isn’t it?” Corrine replied with a wicked grin.
“But you said you loved me,” Richard said as his facial expression went from hurt to sadness to outright devastation. “You married me.”
“And you married me too, even though you knew the CIA could come after you one day for what you did. You valued your happiness more than you valued my safety, and you never trusted me enough to tell me what happened in Tora Bora, no matter how many times I asked you.”
“I kept that from you to protect you,” he said as a tear rolled down his cheek. “I kept it from you because I loved you. Not that it matters. This was all just another operation for you. The marriage, the house—everything.”
“Marrying you was the only way to get close enough to find the truth,” she said coldly. “We had to know if you were part of a larger cell or if you acted of your own volition. The fact is, I did it for the same reason you helped bin Laden escape in Tora Bora. I love my people, and I wasn’t about to watch you or anyone else hurt them.”
Richard leaped forward and grabbed Miller’s weapon from his hands, but before he could fire, Corrine pulled a gun from the small of her back and pumped three rounds into his chest.
The gun slipped from his fingers as blood bubbled up in his mouth. He looked at Corrine for the last time before closing his eyes and leaning back against the wall.
At that moment, everything went quiet and Richard was afraid. But it wasn’t the numbness in his body or the sensation of blood spilling down his chest that frightened him. It was the silence.
As Richard fought through the depths of unconsciousness to reach back toward life, it was the silence that enveloped him like a shroud, pulling him down into the tomb his life had become.
He was tempted to surrender—to lay his head upon the breast of silence and allow it to rock him to sleep, the way his mother had rocked him as a child. What, after all, did he have to live for? Who would shed tears if death folded him in its arms and held him there forever?
Richard was a scarred man in more ways than one. He wasn’t connected to a home, or to a family, or to a wife. Not anymore. He’d been severed from them all, like the silence was severing him from life. Even now he felt it, sliding up through his ears and into the recesses of his mind. He felt it pouring over his body, slow and thick and sweet, like syrup. It was silence, and as his eyes closed for the last time, Richard reached toward it with his very soul, hoping at last for peace.
SECRET POOL
BY ASALI SOLOMON
West Philadelphia
I learned about the University City Swim Club around the same time things started disappearing from my room. First I noticed that I was missing some jewelry, and then the old plaid Swatch I’d been saving for a future Antiques Road-show. I didn’t say anything to my mother, because they say it’s dangerous to wake a sleepwalker. But then I felt like we were all sleepwalkers when Aja told me about the pool, hiding in plain sight right up on 47th Street in what looked like an alley between Spruce and Pine.
“You don’t know about the University City Swim Club?” she said, pretending shock. It was deep August and I sat on the steps of my mother’s house. Aja was frankly easier to take during the more temperate months, but since my summer job had ended and there were two and a half more weeks before eleventh grade, I often found myself in her company.
Aja Bell and I had been friends of a sort since first grade, when we’d been the only two black girls in the Mentally Gifted program, though there couldn’t have been more than thirty white kids in the whole school. Aja loved MG because there was a group of girls in her regular class who tortured her. Then in sixth grade, I got a scholarship to the Barrett School for Girls and Aja stayed where she was. Now she went to Central High, where she was always chasing these white city kids. It killed her that I went to