throughout the department store. Everywhere I looked, the aisles were busy; the sale had pulled in shoppers from all over Maravilla County.
I knelt beside the gunman and stripped off his ski mask. His nose was broken, bleeding; breath bubbled in the blood. His right eye would probably swell entirely shut. A welt had already begun to form on his forehead.
He wasn’t Simon Varner. Before me lay Bern Eckles, the deputy who had been at the barbecue, who had been invited because the chief and Karla Porter had been trying to match him up with Lysette Rains.
BOB ROBERTSON HAD NOT ONE COLLABORATOR but two. Maybe more. They probably called themselves a coven, unless that was only for witches. One more, and they could have a satanic combo, provide their own music for Black Mass, buy group health insurance, get a block discount at Disneyland.
At the chief’s barbecue, I’d seen no bodachs around Bern Eckles. Their presence had tipped me to Robertson’s nature but not to either of his co-conspirators—which now began to seem intentional. As if they had become aware of my gift. As if they had ... manipulated me.
After turning Eckles on his side to ensure that he wouldn’t choke on his own blood and saliva, I searched for something to tie his hands and feet.
I didn’t expect him to regain consciousness within the next ten minutes. When he finally did come around, he would be crawling and puking and begging for painkillers, in no condition to snatch up the assault rifle and return to his mission.
Nevertheless, I disabled two security-room phones and quickly used their cords to bind his hands behind his back and to shackle his ankles. I yanked the knots tight and didn’t worry unduly about inhibiting his circulation.
Eckles and Varner were the newest officers on the Pico Mundo Police Department. They had applied and signed up only a month or two apart.
Smart money would take the proposition that they had known each other before they arrived in Pico Mundo. Varner had been hired first and had paved the way for Eckles.
Robertson had moved to Pico Mundo from San Diego and purchased the house in Camp’s End ahead of his two collaborators. If my memory could be trusted, Varner had previously been a police officer in the San Diego area if not in the city itself.
I didn’t know in what jurisdiction Bern Eckles served before he had signed up with the PMPD. Greater San Diego would be a better bet than Juneau, Alaska.
The three of them had targeted Pico Mundo for reasons impossible to guess. They had planned long and carefully.
When I had gone to the barbecue, suggesting that a background profile on Bob Robertson might be a good idea, the chief had enlisted Eckles’s assistance. At that instant, Robertson had been marked for death.
Indeed, he must have been murdered within half an hour. No doubt Eckles had telephoned Varner from the chief’s house, and Varner had pulled the trigger on their mutual friend. Perhaps Simon Varner and Robertson had been together when Varner got Eckles’s call.
With Eckles securely tied, I unzipped the front of his jumpsuit far enough to confirm that under it he wore his police uniform.
He had come into the security room in his blues and badge. The guards would have greeted him without suspicion.
Evidently he’d carried the assault rifle and the jumpsuit in a suitcase. A two-suiter lay open and empty on the floor. Samsonite.
The plan had most likely been to go on a shooting spree in the department store and then, as the police arrived, to find a private place to strip out of the jumpsuit and the ski mask. Abandoning the assault rifle, Eckles could mingle with his fellow officers as though responding to the same call that they had received.
The why of it wasn’t as easy to understand as the how.
Some people said that God talked to them. Others heard the devil whispering in their heads. Maybe one of these guys thought Satan had told him to shoot up Green Moon Mall.
Or maybe they were just doing it for fun. A lark. Their religion is tolerant of extreme forms of recreation. Boys will be boys, after all, and sociopathic boys will be sociopathic.
Simon Varner remained on the loose. Maybe he and Eckles had not come to the mall alone. I had no idea how many might be in a coven.
Using one of the working phones, I called 911, reported three murders, and without answering any questions, put the phone down, leaving it off the hook. The police would come, and a SWAT team. Three minutes, four. Maybe five.
That wouldn’t be fast enough. Varner would be blasting away at shoppers before they arrived.
The baseball bat hadn’t cracked. Good wood.
As effective as the bat had been with Eckles, I couldn’t expect to be lucky enough to surprise Varner in the same way. Regardless of my fear of guns, I needed a better weapon than a Louisville Slugger.
On a counter in front of the security monitors lay the pistol that Eckles had used to kill the guards. On inspection, I found that four rounds remained in the ten-shot magazine.
As much as I wanted to avoid looking at them, the dead men on the floor commanded my attention. I hate violence. I hate injustice more. I just want to be a fry cook, but the world demands more from me than eggs and pancakes.
I unscrewed the silencer, tossed it aside. Pulled my T-shirt out of my jeans. Tucked the pistol under my waistband.
Without success, I tried not to think of my mother with the gun under her chin, against her breast. I tried not to remember what the muzzle of that pistol had felt like when she pressed it against my eye and told me to look for the brass of the bullet at the bottom of that narrow bore of darkness.
The T-shirt hid the weapon but not perfectly. Shoppers would be too preoccupied finding bargains and salesclerks would be too busy serving shoppers to notice the bulge.
Cautiously, I opened the door barely wide enough to slip out of the security room, and closed it behind me. A man was walking away from me, in the direction I needed to go, and I followed him, wishing that he would hurry.
He turned right, through the swinging doors to the receiving room, and I ran past elevators reserved for company employees to a door labeled STAIRS. I took them two at a time.
Somewhere ahead, Simon Varner. Sweet face. Sleepy eyes. POD on his left forearm.
At the first floor of the department store, I left the stairs and pushed through a door into a stockroom.
A pretty redhead was busy pulling small boxes off the packed shelves. She said, “Hey,” in a friendly way.
“Hey,” I said back at her, and I went out of the stockroom onto the sales floor.
The sporting-goods department. Bustling. Men, a few women, a lot of teenagers. The kids were checking out Rollerblades, skateboards.
Beyond the sporting goods were aisles of athletic shoes. Beyond the shoes, men’s sportswear.
People,
