by Candice Fox
‘Don’t even bother,’ Kerry said before Celine could open her mouth, holding up her good hand. ‘I know exactly what you’re going to say.’
‘You do, huh?’ Celine asked.
‘Yeah.’ Kerry smoothed back her hair, which was still clotted with dirt at the end of her ponytail. ‘There’s been about three versions of you in here already through the night. Good cops trying to tell me they understand me, they feel sorry for me, they want to help me. Problem is, none of you can. It’s too late now.’
‘First of all, I’m not a cop,’ Celine said. ‘And second of all, it’s not too late. Whatever Schmitz’s plan is, there’s still time for you to tell us what it is and save lives, Kerry.’
‘I’ve killed,’ Kerry said. The teenager picked at a bandage around her finger. ‘That guy from the wildlife park? The one who picked up the bag from the locker? That was me. I killed that guy. I wasn’t keeping lookout. I painted the straps of the bag with the stuff that they gave me. The poison, whatever it was. All the good cops who have come in here, the lawyers, they’ve all tried to tell me they can go easy and charge me with just being a lookout, someone Burke put in position to make sure the target went down. But I’m admitting it. I did it.’ The girl tapped her chest with one finger. ‘I want to be a part of the story when it’s told.’
‘Tell me what the story is,’ Celine said. ‘Tell me how it ends.’
‘Forget it.’ Kerry smiled. ‘You’ll know in less than an hour.’
Celine shook her head, overwhelmed with sadness suddenly. The girl in the bed just stared at her impassively, unable to fathom the depth of what Celine was feeling.
‘Don’t take it personally,’ the girl said. ‘You tried to protect me in the forest. I remember it was you. And I’m grateful. I’m not doing this because of you. I’m doing this because I’m trying to make the world a better place.’
‘The Camp,’ Celine said. ‘It was their sniper who shot at you. Do you understand that? They knew Trinity and I were going to chase you down, and they wanted to make sure you were taken out so you couldn’t reveal—’
The girl held up a hand, closed her eyes.
‘These people aren’t your friends. They have no loyalty to you.’
‘We’re all loyal to the cause,’ Kerry said. ‘That’s what matters.’
Celine’s phone buzzed in her pocket. She picked it up and stared at the screen. Then she covered her mouth with a trembling hand.
‘What?’
‘Oh, god,’ Celine said.
‘What? What is it?’
Celine stood, her eyes locked to her phone.
‘He did it,’ she said. Her words came in fitful starts, rushing out of her with horror. ‘He . . . He did it. Oh, Jesus, no.’
‘Let me see.’ Kerry reached for the phone with her good hand.
‘Two massive explosions,’ Celine read. ‘One inside, one outside the Saint Joan of Arc Church. Emergency response teams estimating several dozen killed.’
Kerry’s face was a mask of confusion. She reached again for the phone.
‘That . . . That wasn’t the plan,’ she murmured. Celine let the phone go. ‘The plan was the kids at the rink.’
Kerry looked at the phone, the lit screen, the small green bar showing the alarm Celine had set to go off only seconds earlier, now counting off a snooze timer. Kerry’s mouth turned downwards and her small, mean eyes flicked towards Celine.
‘What rink?’ Celine asked.
Kradle dropped onto the sand, crawled to Mullins and grabbed his head, his body working of its own accord while his mind tried to catch up to what had just happened. The first gold beams of morning light made the blood on the sand look purple. Keeps was watching him, his finger still on the trigger, his head cocked slightly and his eyes searching the scene before him as if he was trying to preserve every detail of this moment for future reflection, the gallery viewer assessing a painting: Kradle Over Fallen Man.
‘Take a few more seconds,’ Keeps said. ‘Then we gotta go.’
‘Who . . .’ Kradle managed. His hands were soaked in the blood of the murdered man. ‘Who . . .’
‘I’m Walter Keeper. Friend of Celine’s. Well, I was.’ Keeps shrugged. ‘I’m the kind of guy whose identity changes quickly. Like a chameleon, I guess. Right now I’m prepping to become Mister Millionaire.’
Kradle was hardly hearing the words. Fury was unfolding inside him, the ache of knowing that his last chance of proving his innocence was leaking away before his eyes, while the chance to have his vengeance was already gone.
‘Second ago I was a killer,’ Keeps continued, almost to himself. ‘It’s not the first time. Usually I don’t mind it, but I wanted to avoid it this time if I could. But I couldn’t have this guy going on about the phone call I made to him, pretending to be the police, telling him to get into the bed, that you were coming, that we needed to set a trap for you. Too complicated. And the police don’t like to be impersonated, in my experience.’
Kradle’s hands were balling into fists.
‘Look, man, I did you a favour,’ Keeps said. ‘I know what the guy did to your family, and that’s fucked up. We both know you weren’t going to kill him. Now you can go back to Pronghorn and know everything got tied up neatly, even if you didn’t do it.’
Kradle rose to his feet. He turned in the sand. Keeps raised the gun and pointed it at his chest.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Keeps said. ‘Don’t be stupid! Don’t be stupid!’
Kradle kept coming. Keeps shot him in the upper chest. He kept coming.
‘No, no, no, no!’ Keeps wailed.
Kradle seized him by the throat with one hand and knocked the gun out of his fist with the other. He smashed his body down into the sand, making his head bounce, squeezing hard, the smaller man gripping desperately at Kradle’s hands and neck. His nails tore and bit into Kradle’s skin, but no pain registered. There was only a deep, heavy silence pressing down on him, making it impossible to break the force of his hands, his arms, his weight coming down on Keeps. The smaller man kicked and flailed, got traction in the sand, somehow, twisted around, elbowed Kradle in the face and scrabbled away. Kradle walked while the other man crawled, gasping for air, towards the house. He didn’t get far. Kradle slammed his boot down on the man’s back, flattening him against the dirt, then kneeled by his head as Keeps coughed and gasped for air.
‘This was the wrong fight to get involved in,’ Kradle said.
‘Yeah. Yeah. I see that now,’ Keeps rasped. He spat blood on the sand. ‘Please, please, man. Please just—’
Kradle punched him in the back of the head. Keeps went limp against the dirt, his unconscious breath shallow and rattling.
Keeps was a dead weight as Kradle lifted him and slung him over his shoulder. He walked back through the gate into Mullins’s yard, up the porch stairs to the sliding door. He pushed it open and went inside, moving without direction, knowing only that he had to do something with the man he carried, the only man who could testify to his not having murdered Gary Mullins out there in the desert. Because while losing his opportunity to punish Mullins for his family’s deaths, either with murder or with jail time, was cruel enough, Kradle knew serving time for the act would only be worse. He couldn’t bear it. Not the sight of Pronghorn on the horizon, nor the feel of its walls enveloping him again, the sound of its clanging gate and buzzing alarms. He fancied he could smell now, in his despair, the other men on the row. His brothers awaiting death. Kradle had no plan. He simply walked across the living room towards the hall with Keeps hanging over his shoulder.
‘Reach for the sky, inmate,’ a voice said.
Kradle turned towards the kitchen, the big windows and the curtains patterned with cheerful lemons.
Warden Grace Slanter was standing there with a bolt-action rifle in her hands, the long black nose of the weapon steady as a rock and pointed right at Kradle’s head. The warden was wearing dusty jeans and a flannel shirt, boots caked in desert sand.
‘People keep telling me that,’ he said. ‘How’d you know I was here?’
‘I got a text,’ Slanter said.
‘Okay,’ Kradle said. He didn’t understand. But it didn’t seem to matter. None of it mattered. His shirt was slowly darkening with blood, and his shoulder hurt. He rubbed the hole just under his collarbone and knew there was bad pain, but not death, on the horizon.
‘I saw what happened.’ Grace Slanter took her aim off Kradle for a second, flicked the gun towards the windows. ‘All of it. Saw you decide not to kill that man out there. Saw that guy you’re carrying do it instead.’
Kradle gripped the back of Keeps’s legs, hefting him higher on his good shoulder.
‘If you could maybe memorise that,’ Kradle said, ‘say it again when you’re asked, I’d be very grateful.’
‘No problem.’
‘Anything I can do in return?’ Kradle asked.
‘Yeah,’ Grace said. With one hand holding the rifle on Kradle, she took a pair of handcuffs from the back of her belt and tossed them at Kradle’s feet. ‘Put those on him and carry him out to the truck. When we get there, I’ll give you your very own set.’
CHAPTER 45
Burke stood before the stage, watching the little girls being led out and arranged on the platforms. There were twelve of them, mostly blondes, each wearing a satin baby-doll-style dress trimmed in white faux fur. Frilly socks and halos made from wire and white feathers. Around him, people were gathering slowly, some of them clearly the parents of the girls, waving and blowing kisses and giving thumbs-ups. Willis had studied the Christmas morning carolling event that had played out on this exact spot a year earlier, taking segments from the local news and what footage he could acquire online to give a timeline that was as precise as possible. It was 8.42 am. With all the jostling and arranging and cajoling necessary to get the girls in position on the stage, the announcer had come out to introduce them and get the first song underway by about 9.03 am. Burke wanted the ice rink and the standing area for the audience to be at maximum capacity before he started firing.
He walked back to the truck and, before getting in, glanced down the street to where Willis and Clara would be waiting with the getaway car. He could just see a slice of the front left headlight of the white van, the faithful old vehicle that had seen them from Pronghorn to Vegas, and which would take the whole team safely out of the vicinity of the massacre once it was time to flee. He wondered if the vehicle would end up in a museum someday, along with the rifle, debris from the snow cone truck.
A little girl in the front row of the carolling ensemble was looking at Burke. He raised a hand and waved, and she giggled and hid her face.
‘I’m sorry,’ he mouthed. Because he was sorry for what he was about to do, genuinely miserable, aching in his very bones about it. That it had come to this was not personally his fault – it was a product of hundreds of years of weakness, of the white man laying down his weapons when he should have taken arms, of listening and bending when he should have remained steadfast, of denying plain realities that were present for all to see. That these little girls should have to be sacrificed so that the world could evolve into a new order was a tragedy, but some futures had to be born out of blood. Innocent blood. The most innocent of all innocent, and purest of all pure. It wasn’t going to be easy. But it had to be done.
Burke walked back to the food truck and opened the rear doors, slipped inside, and found Silvia waiting there. He picked up the rifle bag and unzipped it, glancing again at his watch.
‘Almost time,’ he said.
Celine gripped the handle above the window and the edge of the centre console of Trinity’s car, jamming her feet against the sides of the footwell as Trinity smashed the vehicle over a speed bump at the exit to the parking lot of the Mesa View hospital.
‘What if it’s not the Planet Hollywood ice rink?’ Celine groaned as the car skidded sideways, zooming blindly through an intersection packed with cars. ‘What if it’s a rollerskating rink? What if it’s some other—’
‘It needs to be this one,’ Trinity said. ‘We need to be right about this.’
‘Because she said kids,’ Celine said.
‘Yes,’ Trinity said. ‘If we’re wrong—’
‘We’re not wrong,’ Celine insisted.
The two women sat rigid in their seats as they turned onto the highway. Trinity slammed on the brakes as a wall of traffic rose before them.
Burke flicked the safety selector on the rifle to fire, put a hand on the handle of the rear door of the food truck and looked back one last time at Silvia, who was standing with her fingernails clawing the edge of the serving counter, her jaw flexed tight.
On the wind, he heard the announcer introducing the choir of little girls. He waited until he could hear the first bars of a carol, smiled as he recognised the tune. ‘White Christmas’. Perfect.
‘Here we go.’ Burke smiled.
Silvia could only give a hard nod.
Burke pushed the handle and shoved against the door.
It didn’t open.
He heard a vehicle pull alongside the truck on the opposite side to the serving counter, and the sickening sound of metal grinding metal as another food truck scraped against the counter side, wedging itself tightly against the vehicle so that both serving windows were aligned. Burke stepped back and saw that the kitchen area of a bright yellow truck was now perfectly matched and mirrored with their own, a Black man in a bright yellow shirt standing there with his arms folded. Through the windscreen, Burke saw the truck ahead of them backing up. They were sandwiched between four food trucks, boxed in on all sides.
‘Bitch!’ The man in the yellow shirt leaned on his counter and pointed at Silvia, standing behind hers. ‘Me and a few of my friends got together. We thought we’d come over here and encourage you to apologise for what you said to me and—’
Burke stepped up beside Silvia, raised the rifle and sprayed gunfire through the serving window. The man in the yellow shirt ducked faster than Burke’s eyes could follow. He put a foot on the shelf under the serving counter, grabbed the edge of the window and hauled himself up. Outside the truck, he could already hear screams, shouts of confusion at the sound of gunfire. He could only hope the little girls weren’t shuffled off the stage before he could get a few of them.
He tucked his rifle under his arm, pulled down his mask, and raised the goggles over his eyes. He was ready. Game on.
Burke pushed up through the gap between the trucks and placed the rifle on the roof of the truck. He climbed onto the roof of the yellow truck, stepped to its edge and looked out over the scene before him.
It was just as he’d imagined it. Men and women running for their lives, the flow of people bottlenecking at the natural barriers made by the line of tightly parked trucks and washing up against the wooden partitions that marked out the edge of the Planet Hollywood hotel – human waves of panic. People were trying to find shelter in and around the stage. The inner cordon made by the ice rink was causing terrified families to cower at the edges, no idea where the shooting was coming from, a couple still skittering and stumbling out on the white plain, ripe to be picked off. While some little girls were being dragged off the platform on the stage, a good handful were still standing there, frozen in confusion, their feathered halos bobbing on wires above their heads.
Burke lifted his rifle and aimed at the stage.
His finger had not yet come off the trigger guard and onto the trigger itself when he heard a voice cutting through the screaming, and looked down to see a woman with a bandaged neck dropping to one knee on the grass before the ice rink.
Trinity fired. Burke felt this the bullet smash into his thigh. The bullet that blasted through his cheekbone and into his skull was like a punch, a whump that knocked his head back, made the truck beneath his feet feel as if it were a boat rocking on a turbulent sea.
He fell off t
he truck and landed on the road. The truck that had boxed in his truck from behind had fled when the firing started, leaving the back door free. Burke saw Silvia’s shoes as she dropped onto the ground, turned and tried to sprint away. A second pair of shoes appeared, blocking her.
‘Not so fast, bitch!’
Burke looked up in time to see Celine Osbourne punch Silvia in the face so hard she hit the ground and bounced onto her side. But that couldn’t have been right. His jailer from Pronghorn could not be here now, cutting off the escape of his comrade. All that must have been fantasy.
So too, he assumed, the distant vision of the white van doing a three-point turn in the street, almost mowing down a mother running with one of the little angel-girls in her arms, as it roared away into the morning. Burke knew his teammates would not abandon them. It must have been the lies of his slowly failing mind, the last desperate pictures of a brain with a bullet lodged in it.
Burke gripped at the asphalt, felt darkness closing out the sounds of people running, crying, screaming.
They were nice sounds to die to.
CHAPTER 46
From the prison van that had driven John Kradle to Pronghorn Correctional Facility for the very first time, he had been able to see exactly zero per cent of its exterior. Chained to a ringbolt on a steel bench, he had stared at the floor for the entire trip, resisting the attempts at conversation made by the correctional officer lumped with the responsibility of riding in the back with him.
From where he sat now, in Grace Slanter’s truck, Kradle watched as the small hill fell away and the road to the facility opened before them. It was the same road travelled by the bus full of family members of guards only days earlier. He shuffled a little in his seat, his palms flat against the backrest, the chain between his cuffs stretched taut. Grace Slanter had wrapped his shoulder tightly with tea towels she found in the Mullins house before they left for Pronghorn, but the wound felt warm and Kradle knew that the adrenaline that was keeping the pain away was almost used up.
