Sully looked up and saw a lampshade tumbling out of the hazy blue sky, directly at him.
“Carol? Carol Gerber?”
The whicker was louder, a sound like someone flicking his tongue repeatedly through his pursed lips, a sound like a helicopter five klicks away. Sully looked up and saw a lampshade tumbling out of the hazy blue sky, directly at him. He dodged backward in an instinctive startle reflex, but he had spent his entire school career playing athletic sports of one kind or another, and even as he was pulling back his head he was reaching with his hand. He caught the lampshade quite deftly. On it was a paddleboat churning downriver against a lurid red sunset. WE’RE DOING FINE ON THE MISSISSIPPI was written above the boat in scrolly, old-fashioned letters. Below it, in the same scrolly caps: HOW’S BAYOU?
Where the fuck did this come from? Sully thought, and then the woman who looked like an all-grown-up version of Carol Gerber screamed. Her hands rose as if to adjust the sunglasses propped in her hair and then just hung beside her shoulders, shaking like the hands of a distraught symphony conductor. It was how old mamasan had looked as she came running out of her shitty fucked-up hooch and into the shitty fucked-up street of that shitty fucked-up little ’ville in Dong Ha Province. Blood spilled down over the shoulders of the tennis woman’s white dress, first in spatters, then in a flood. It ran down her tanned upper arms and dripped from her elbows.
