by Nick Petrie
“I’m going up.” Lewis took out his phone and veered right. “Stay on comms.”
“Roger that.” As Peter went left, eyes searching the crowd, his phone rang and he put it to his ear.
“Top of the stairs, peeking past the corner now.” Even through the cell connection, Lewis’s low voice sounded like motor oil, slippery and dark.
“Moving clockwise below you.” Peter eased between a woman in a pink blazer and a skinny hipster in a bowling shirt. His eyes searched the crowd of diners and shoppers for a red hat and rain jacket, but saw nothing. The kitchen shop had thick wooden cutting boards, and Peter almost took one for a shield or a club, but decided against it. With one hand on the phone, he needed his remaining hand free. To the left of the Middle Eastern deli was another entrance, but he saw only new people coming in. He turned right and kept moving through the market. The cowboy straw felt strange on his head, but it was a good reminder not to look up for cameras.
“All clear at the tables,” Lewis said. “Going to check the bathrooms and the market office.” The guy with the gun wouldn’t be the first shooter needing to take a hot greasy adrenaline dump. Peter knew plenty of Marines who’d stunk up the latrines before going outside the wire. Or else the guy wanted a private place to amp himself up for mass murder, or maybe just one last solitary minute to try to reason with the voices screaming in his head.
Peter kept moving down the aisle, trying unsuccessfully to thread his way through lazy clusters of men and women dressed for work, talking to each other and the workers behind the counters. Way too many people.
The second floor was much less crowded, and Peter knew Lewis would be moving faster. He didn’t have to deal with people who couldn’t decide between an espresso truffle and a sea salt caramel.
Lewis said, “At the bathrooms now.”
Over the phone, Peter heard the quality of the sound change as Lewis entered the small space with its hard surfaces. Then a loud bang. Not the sharp crack of a firearm, but the dull metallic rattle of a stall door slamming open.
“Damn, my bad.” Lewis’s voice was distant, the phone down from his mouth. “Sorry, brother, I thought it was stuck.” A low chuckle, and the sound changed again as he stepped back into the open. “All clear in the can ’cept for a pissed-off UPS driver taking a moment. Okay, I’m looking through the glass at the market office, everything normal there. Now I’m at the railing, looking down. I got you, but no red hat.”
Peter had reached the middle of the figure eight. The aisle below him was a traffic jam, but the aisle that crossed the figure eight was relatively open. He took the open path at the wine bar, scanned the center exit to the street, then looked left and right down the aisles. “I don’t see him. Anything?”
“Nothing. I’m moving back toward the stairs, I’ll get a long view that way.”
“Maybe he took off his fucking hat.”
“Didn’t take off that bright red coat, though,” Lewis said. “We’d have heard the screams.”
Peter saw an opening and jogged past the polished wood of the wine bar toward the Brew City stall at the bottom of the eight. June had recently given him one of their more stylish T-shirts, trying to up his clothing game. No sign of the guy with the gun.
Down the tail of the tadpole now, head on a swivel, Peter slipped through the clotted crowd at the soup place. At the end was the St. Paul Fish Company, where a giant inflatable crab stood guard over the oyster bar and bubbling tanks of live lobsters.
No red cap or jacket.
Still no police, either. What was taking them so long?
More than anything, he didn’t want June to come after them. It would be just like her to follow the story into a goddamn firefight. They weren’t so different, Peter and June.
“Lewis?”
“I got nothing. Maybe he went out that first exit at the top. Maybe this is just a trial run. Or maybe he’s headed for downtown.”
Peter turned and looked back over the throngs of people. He was tall enough to see over the heads of most of them. “Maybe he stopped moving.” Peter reversed course. “Look to your left, down by the salad and sandwich place.” Peter had skipped that crowded leg of the figure eight. The popular shop across from the parking lot entrance was busy enough to clog the aisle during the lunch rush. “See anything?”
“No. Wait. I can’t see the doors, but I just caught got a flash of red walking out of sight.”
The white static soared. “On my way.” Peter pushed his way past a South Asian couple browsing at the meat counter. “Excuse me,” he said. “Sorry.” He rounded the corner to the exit and found himself blocked by a curved line of chattering schoolchildren headed into the market, holding hands in a chain with their teachers at each end. Through the wide glass doors, he saw a big yellow bus double-parked with more kids climbing down to line up on the walkway.
Right beside them, the guy with the gun. His face invisible behind the glossy beard and sunglasses.
“Lewis, I see him. He’s outside. Get down here.”
But the chain of children had caught Peter in an open loop, and he couldn’t move forward. He smiled at two girls, one in braided black pigtails, the other with a thin yellow scarf in an ornate knot, eight or nine years old at most. “Hi there. Can you please let me through?”
The girl in the pigtails gave Peter major side-eye. “Mrs. Grundl,” she said. “Mrs. Grundl!”
The teacher, red-faced and clearly focused on managing her students, turned to Peter. “Excuse me,” she said. “Don’t talk to my children.”
“Ma’am, I just need to get through,” Peter said. “I’m stuck. Please.”
Mrs. Grundl was ten or fifteen years older than Peter. “Sir, these are children and you’re on camera.” She pointed toward a black dome mounted overhead. “Behave yourself.” Behind him, the South Asian couple had turned to watch, at the same time blocking Peter’s rear escape route from the string of curious children who were now all staring at him.
Outside, the guy with the gun stood at an angle to the glass doors. His right hand gripped the shoulder of a bald man in a cream-colored suit. His left hand was on the zipper of his half-open rain jacket. His head turned to survey the children swirling around him, not nervous but clearly calculating. His plan had hit the fan, and he was revising on the fly.
Peter said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, this is an emergency.”
She put her free hand on her hip and glared. “Oh, really. What kind of emergency?”
“Trust me, you don’t want to know.” Peter raised his foot to high-step over the girls’ linked arms. They shrieked and released each other’s hands, the line split apart, and Peter stepped through.
Mrs. Grundl opened her mouth to speak. Peter beat her to it.
“Ma’am, there’s a situation in the parking lot.” He pointed down the tadpole tail toward the far exit. “Get your kids out of here now and call 911.”
Then he reached a long arm into the nearby produce stall and grabbed three fat apples in one wide, knuckly hand. He still had his phone to his ear. “I’m going to the parking lot,” he told Lewis. “There’s a busload of kids. Get them someplace safe.” He jammed the phone into his back pocket and strode toward the glass doors.
Outside, the teachers were still gathering the unruly children.
The guy with the gun was gone.
3
Peter jogged down the walkway into the parking lot and looked left and right. He saw plenty of people headed away from him, toward downtown or their cars, but none of them wore a red cap and jacket.
He jogged past the school bus, hoping it had blocked his view. Nothing. His right hand held all three apples. With the freeway like a high ceiling overhead, sound echoed strangely.
The bus driver leaned out his window, blowing smoke from a slim e-cigarette. He wore a wispy mustache and a Brewers jersey, with a Brewers tattoo pe
eking out from under the sleeve. “You lose track of somebody?”
“A guy with a red baseball hat and jacket,” Peter said. “Beard and sunglasses. You see him?”
“That Cardinals-cap-wearing motherfucker?” For some fans, it wasn’t enough to love a team. They also wanted someone to hate. With his e-cig, the bus driver pointed toward the end of the divider between the parking lot and the market’s loading dock. “Went over that way with some other guy.”
Peter was on the move before the bus driver finished talking.
The divider began as a six-foot brick wall that transitioned to a three-foot metal fence lined with an assortment of vinyl sheds and short shipping containers used as auxiliary storage. Behind it, the first vehicle lane was wide and flat, designed for vans and smaller box trucks. On the far side of a concrete freeway pylon, the second two lanes were a true loading dock with a parking ramp descending to put the semi-trailer decks at the same level as the market’s apron.
Peter rounded the fence and the outermost container. The farthest loading bay held a big white Freightliner, its trailer tucked tight against the platform. The middle bay was empty but for a haphazard stack of empty pallets waiting for pickup. In the flat bay, a few dozen feet out from the dock, someone had parked a white Isuzu box truck, nose-out.
On the far side of the Isuzu’s square glass-filled cab, Peter caught a vanishing glimpse of red.
Taking one of the apples in his left hand, he slowed to peek around the front corner of the Isuzu. He saw a red sleeve, gesticulating. On the freeway above them, tires hit the expansion joints with resonant staccato booms. He crept down the side of the truck until he could see two men standing in the empty space behind it, maybe five feet apart. The guy in the Cardinals jacket had his backpack slung sideways off one shoulder and his gun out, held one-handed and pointed directly at the chest of a man in a cream-colored suit.
The weapon had the distinctive long curved magazine and wooden handguard of a vintage AK-74, some close-quarters eastern bloc variant with a steel-frame shoulder stock folded up under the barrel. With the stock folded, it would be difficult to aim, a truly indiscriminate killing machine.
The man in the suit, hands jangling out from his sides, was backed against a rickety picnic table that filled a gap between two storage sheds. His shaved head gleamed with panic sweat, his face rigid with fear. Behind him, Peter saw the parking lot and the tangle of schoolchildren just beginning to form a line.
Peter knew that this was the moment June was afraid of. That he would find himself in this position, caught between self-preservation and the need to act. They both knew which impulse would win.
Not that Peter wanted to be here. He’d been shot before, and hadn’t enjoyed it. He definitely didn’t want to get killed. June would never forgive him.
The guy jabbed the gun toward the other man’s chest, said something Peter couldn’t quite hear, then held out his free hand in demand. The man in the suit dipped into his pocket and brought out his phone.
The guy with the gun said something else. The man in the suit did something to his phone and held it out again.
The gunman leaned in to take the phone, then backed off and glanced down at it, his thumb flying across the screen for a few seconds. Then he dropped the phone into his side-slung pack and took hold of the rifle’s handguard with his free hand, to better control the muzzle’s tendency to fly upward from recoil while firing.
Behind the man in the suit was a busload of schoolkids. Behind Peter was a parking lot full of empty cars and the wide concrete pylon that carried the freeway overhead.
He wasn’t going to get a better chance.
He cocked his arm, took a single step forward, and threw his first apple.
* * *
—
Peter had played catcher on his high school team, liking the intensity and focus the position required. With his Recon platoon, he’d organized pickup games between deployments, but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d held a baseball.
He’d aimed for the gunman’s center mass, just trying to get him to change his focus. With the way the guy held the AK, low and close like Scarface rather than raised to his shoulder like a trained shooter, Peter figured the odds of the guy finding a specific target to be somewhere south of zero. But if he fired into the gap between the containers, especially on full auto, he’d injure or kill at least one person, probably more.
From forty feet, Peter missed the guy completely. The apple flew past his shoulder and splattered off the loading dock wall.
The guy’s head snapped around, his face hidden behind the shiny beard and sunglasses, and the muzzle of the gun followed.
Peter was already moving forward, his second apple raised in his left hand. He locked on to his target, dropped his elbow, and threw right at the guy’s head with a nice follow-through. The apple hit him square on the chest. It wasn’t a regulation Rawlings, but the fat honeycrisp still punched like a fist.
The gunman rocked back a step, then caught himself and raised the rifle in line with his sunglasses, his mouth set hard inside the glossy snarl of beard.
Still accelerating, too late to change plans, Peter fired his last apple like a rocket to second, the start of a double play. He’d always been better in motion. The honeycrisp glanced off the guy’s cheekbone, knocking his hat up and his sunglasses sideways.
It wasn’t the hard hit Peter wanted, but the guy jerked his head away in instinctive response. His skewed glasses would limit his vision.
He pulled the trigger anyway.
4
Everything slowed down.
The AK clattered with each round, the muzzle flash a bright orange flare. On full automatic, it took real training and practice to control a decent weapon like an M4, let alone a stamped-metal spray-and-pray vintage AK with the shoulder stock folded.
Peter dove to the ground as the barrel rose. He felt the rounds part the air above him as he rolled to his feet and converted that forward motion into a sprint. He knew he was too far away. He saw the gunman release the trigger and bump his sunglasses into place with the back of his wrist, coolly resetting himself. Peter wondered abstractly where the bullets had gone, how many innocents wounded or dead.
Then he was airborne, arms wide for maximum capture, but the gunman had somehow slipped sideways. Peter didn’t even get a hand on him. All he managed was the tip of a finger hooked inside the sunglasses before a slim, strong hand scooped up Peter’s ankle and flipped him, flying ass over teakettle to land hard on the concrete, flat on his back.
He lay momentarily stunned, all breath knocked away, waiting for a bullet. The gunman was somewhere behind him.
The moment hung there, suspended. The smell of spent powder in the air. The strange ringing silence that came after gunshots.
Until the children in the parking lot began to scream.
Peter rolled over looking for the shooter and saw Lewis appear in the gap between the storage sheds. With a predatory grace, he leaped the low fence and landed atop the rickety picnic table, which yawed wildly beneath his weight. Rather than try to stabilize himself, Lewis just bent his knees and kept his momentum, flying over the fetal form of the man in the suit to land in a three-point stance as if he’d planned it that way all along.
But the gunman had hit reverse and already doubled the distance between them, past the freeway pylon and headed toward the Freightliner with the AK now aimed directly at Lewis’s chest. “Stop,” he said.
With no alternative, Lewis caught himself.
The gunman’s eyes flicked from Lewis to Peter and back. His pupils were enormous but his hands were steady. “Move and you’re dead.”
His voice was rough and strange, like he had something stuck in his throat. With the Cardinals cap bumped upward and his sunglasses gone, his upper face was fine-boned and delicate above the thick beard, at odds with the voice and
the ballistic vest under the open jacket.
By now, the gunman had drifted all the way back to the semi’s trailer, the chassis frame level with his chest. On the other side of the fence, shouts and cries of fear and panic.
Then, without seeming to move at all, the gunman slung the AK under his arm, elbowed the open, side-slung pack around to his back, and floated under the low semi-trailer like a leaf on the wind. Peter blinked and the guy was gone. The only sign he’d ever been there was the stolen phone, fallen from the pack.
Lewis knelt beside Peter. “You hit?”
“Embarrassed.” Peter pushed himself up. “You coming?”
He ran left toward the nose of the Freightliner. He wasn’t going to follow the gunman under the trailer, where any pursuer would be an easy target. Lewis headed toward the loading dock and the back of the rig.
Peter peeked past the front bumper and saw a red-coated figure run between two parked cars into traffic, where he sideslipped across the low hood of a startled sedan, the backpack airborne like a balloon on a string. Lewis came around the trailer end. Peter ran forward, waving Lewis on.
They sprinted into the street and skirted the now-honking sedan to see the gunman stopped at a parking meter, where he threw his leg over a funky-looking bicycle. It had wide knobby tires and an angular black frame with long silver boxes strapped to the bars.
The gunman tugged down his cap, zipped the gun under the red jacket, and pulled the pack onto his second shoulder. Then he smiled at them through that beard and flipped a switch on the handlebars. The bike leaped forward, accelerated across St. Paul, and flew down the wrong side of Broadway faster than any man could run. The guy barely touched the pedals.
They stopped chasing after three blocks, although they’d lost sight of the gunman long before that. Peter had no idea if he’d turned a corner or simply vanished around the curve of the earth.
Breathing hard, hands on his knees, Lewis said, “What the fuck was that?”
