Blood Money Read Online Free PDF

darkest time of his life, those hours before the execution he had narrowly avoided at Florida State Prison. This time, however, there was no competing right and left ideology, no clash of capital punishment proponents versus death penalty opponents, no “eye for an eye” versus “Kumbaya.” This crowd was unified in its vitriol, especially at this end of the parking lot. This was where the hard-core Shot Mom haters had set up camp.
    “No blood money!”
    A middle-aged woman, hoarse from hours of shouting, was screaming at Theo. Theo kept walking, but she stayed with him, shaking a poster that delivered the same message in bloodred letters:
    NO BLOOD MONEY FOR SHOT MOM!
    “And for her lawyer, neither!” another woman shouted.
    Theo stopped and fired back a response that these women undoubtedly thought was still part of the black-speak lexicon. “Right on, sistuh.”
    The women continued their chant, and a group behind them picked it up: “No blood money, no blood money, no blood money!”
    The mantra had started a week earlier on the Faith Corso Show , when a guest commentator had reported incorrectly that Jack was in New York City shopping a million-dollar book deal for Sydney. Corso had seized the moment to rally her troops: “We cannot let this happen,” she’d told her viewers. “The injustice of Shot Mom’s acquittal will forever stain the hands of those twelve jurors who ignored the clear evidence of guilt. But if we stand aside and let Shot Mom sign her million-dollar deal with publishers in New York or filmmakers in Hollywood . . . well, then shame on all of us. There truly will be no justice for Emma. So stand up, friends. Stand up with me and say it:
    “No blood money!”
    The glare of the television lights caught Theo’s eye, and again he found himself just a few yards away from the BNN reporter with her camera crew. The live interview of the moment was with an elderly woman from Lake City who had followed Faith Corso’s coverage of the case from the beginning. She was describing the poster that she and her eleven-year-old granddaughter had created to protest Sydney Bennett’s release. It was a collage of headlines and photographs spanning three years of newspaper coverage. Her voice quaked with emotion as she told the reporter about the photograph in the middle of the poster, a five-by-seven headshot of Sydney’s daughter, Emma.
    “We glued on all these pictures this morning with plain old white glue,” the woman said, “and we used the exact same glue on Emma’s picture. But Emma’s is the only one where the glue soaked through the paper and left these red marks. Not a single one of these other pictures have that. You see what I’m talking about?” she asked, pointing.
    “Yes, I do see,” said the reporter. “Let’s get the camera in closer for our viewers.”
    “It looks like tiny red tears on her little cheeks, don’t it?”
    “Remarkable,” the reporter said. “Viewers can draw their own conclusions, but, seeing it with my own eyes, I can only say that this is truly remarkable.”
    “I believe that’s the Lord’s way of telling us that we’re doing the right thing here tonight, and I believe—”
    A shout from across the parking lot halted the interview: “There she is!”
    Theo’s gaze locked onto the commotion in the middle distance, and the BNN reporter signaled her cameraman to zoom onto the building.
    “Hold on, Faith,” said the reporter. “We may have a Shot Mom sighting.”
    Heads turned as random voices carried the news of one sighting after another.
    “It’s her!”
    “There’s Shot Mom!”
    Onlookers jumped up from their lawn chairs and picnic blankets. Demonstrators grabbed their posters and sprinted across the street toward the high-security end of the building. A crowd that, minutes earlier, had been milling around and waiting was suddenly a cohesive ball of energy, catapulted by the Sydney sighting.
    Theo ran, too, not sure what had happened to