The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [144]
Michael Liu’s pupils were black bull’s-eyes ringed in red from crying. His cheeks were bowed from lack of sleep, his nose raw from rubbing, and his clothes were stiff with old sweat. His black shoes were scuffed after weeks of not having the strength to lift them even half an inch off the pavement. He was holding a black gun, shakily, at arm’s length. Mr. Liu looked unsurprised to see Reggie there. “You haven’t returned my calls,” he said.
Gold was on the floor, too, bleeding from his leg. He looked startled but not panicked. In fact, he seemed in Reggie’s brief glance to look vindicated, almost as if he’d been expecting something to happen that night, if not this.
“You know he killed her,” Mr. Liu said to Reggie. “You defended him anyway.”
Lifting his bloodied left hand away from his body in submission, Reggie asked himself if he had suspected all along that Michael Liu was capable of a solution this drastic, and he realized the answer should have been yes. He had watched the man become smaller in the courtroom pews every day of the defense presentation and Reggie knew well that a proud man in a shrinking body is always wound too tight.
A thin extension of the man’s accusing hand, the gun vibrated at Reggie as Michael Liu fidgeted with the grip. A heat rash erupted across visible patches of Mr. Liu’s skin. “When I was a child, I asked my mother how God could allow all the evil in the world. Do you know what she told me?”
Reggie didn’t answer, but he glanced briefly again at Solomon Gold, who was alert but ice still. The pain was tolerable if Reggie didn’t move his arm, and his head was starting to clear, along with the ringing in his ears. Just as he would in a courtroom, he considered every possible action and outcome—freeze, lean forward, lean backward, a verbal challenge, an apology. Like Gold, he decided to remain still and, for now, silent.
Michael Liu continued to focus on Reggie, “She told me that God allows evil to exist so that good men may confront it.” He jerked the pistol suddenly, as if it were a hammer meeting an imaginary nail. This time, Reggie jumped. “If he asked you today, Mr. Vallentine, would you be able to tell God that you have faced evil and won? Or would you be forced to admit instead that you have succumbed to it?”
Reggie tried to will saliva into his sticky, dry mouth. The tremors in Mr. Liu’s hand almost reached the point of seizure. He was a desperate man, a man who had had the most cherished thing in his life ripped from him in an instant and then was forced to become a helpless observer while lawyers picked at his open wound for months afterward. Gold’s acquittal had been a terminal diagnosis for Michael Liu. He would never heal, never move on, never stop grieving. The insane urge that lured him to this house, the voice that whispered in his ear to bring this gun and to point it at Reggie, who had been the public face of his anguish, would persist for the rest of his life. Reggie Vallentine would always prosper from having been Gold’s lawyer and Michael Liu would always suffer from having been Erica’s father. That was what Michael Liu must have been thinking when he shot Reggie first instead of Gold.
Or maybe he had just decided to kill Solomon last.
Reggie managed to prop himself up against a leg of the chair behind him. “You’re right, Mr. Liu. Everything you say is exactly right. If you think that shooting me is going to bring you satisfaction, then you should do it. But fifteen minutes from now, would you rather be on your way home to your family or on your way to a long prison sentence for murder? What would Mrs. Liu want right now? Or your son, Derek? Would they really want to lose a husband and father in addition to a daughter and sister?”
Tears pooled in the wells of Michael Liu’s eyes. Reggie knew how to keep score in a debate and he figured if he could just prolong this moment, this intense and horrible