What You Want to See

by Kristen Lepionka

  A groan went up among the people in the waiting area. “Oh hell no,” somebody near me muttered.

  Cell phones began to light up, everyone’s faces lit from below like people telling ghost stories by a campfire. I joined the back of a group headed toward the Town Street exit and pushed outside. The traffic signal at Town and Third was dead. The streetlights, too. The cloudy, late-twilight sky was the color of wet cement. The rain had slowed to a sprinkle, but far-off thunder still rumbled. The street was filling in now, a stream of people walking south on Third as if an event at the theater had just let out when the power died. There was an air of disbelief on the street. I walked to the corner of Town and Third and looked up and down the block and took a few steps, and then I froze.

  A dark figure leaned out of the bus-only driveway and looked up and down the block, as I had, then ducked back inside the fence, then stepped out, facing in my direction.

  But he wasn’t looking at me.

  He was looking at something behind me.

  I stepped backward until I was pressed up against the brick wall of the building and looked to my right, squinting in the near-dark.

  Vincent Pomp.

  The figure by the driveway was Nate.

  They both had their guns drawn, and I was right in between them.

  I covered my mouth with my hand. It didn’t seem like either of them had seen me. But they certainly had seen each other.

  No one spoke.

  I was barely breathing.

  Then Nate turned slightly and took off running across the street, firing off two shots in the general direction of both Pomp and me as he dodged between cars. The shots both went into the brick wall. Pomp ran after Nate amid the shriek of braking cars and the scatter and gasp of pedestrians. Nate ran down the throat of the underground-garage entrance, Pomp close behind. I nearly collided with the elder Pomp son as I ran the opposite way on Third—toward the oncoming crowd of theatergoers—and our eyes met, but despite the recognition that flashed in his, he kept running after his father.

  I hurried across the street too, waving my arms. “Don’t go into the garage,” I shouted at the southbound traffic. I could see the edge of the Statehouse lawn up ahead. There had to be police there, I thought. “Go towards the Statehouse.”

  A woman driving a RAV4 with its windows down rolled them up, like I was the danger. Finally, red and blue lights started swirling from up the street and a cruiser squealed to a stop at the entrance to the park. Two uniforms got out and looked at me like they thought I might be the danger too. “There’s an active shooter in the garage,” I said, pointing south toward the ramp. There wasn’t time to explain. “I saw three people at least, all with guns.”

  They exchanged glances, but then two more shots boomed around the block.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Everybody down! Everybody down!”

  One of the uniforms ducked back into the cruiser and reversed into the street, effectively blocking off the traffic. The other spoke into his mic in urgent tones. More sirens lit up a few blocks away. The people on the street scattered in every direction—into the hotel, between the stopped cars, back toward the theater, over toward the bus station. I ran into the center of the mass of people, urging them back and away from the whole area. A twenty-something woman—dressed for a night out and drunk already—slurred to her friend, “What’s going on? Fireworks? We can’t get to the car because of fireworks?”

  “We can get into the garage through the hotel,” the friend said, “don’t worry.”

  My stomach flip-flopped. She was right. The garage connected to the hulking Capitol Square building, which connected to the hotel, the theater, maybe more.

  I ran up the block and flagged down a kid in a lime-green valet windbreaker who was on his way back to his post. “I need your help,” I told him. “Get hotel security. They need to shut down access to the hotel, including the garage, okay? Nobody in. There are men with guns in the garage.”

  He stared at me. “Are you a cop?”

  I showed him my gun, which was apparently proof enough. Nodding, he grabbed a walkie-talkie from the valet stand and headed inside the hotel. I walked back along the edge of the park. There were still people hanging out, maybe expecting a fireworks display too. “You guys need to clear the area,” I announced as I walked, my voice shaky to my own ears, “go out to High Street and head towards the Statehouse, okay?”

  Against a chorus of huh and what, another trio of police cars converged on the area, lights swirling.

  I intercepted a family with three small kids as they rounded the corner out of the tunnel that led over to the Statehouse.

  “No, the park is closed, go over to the Statehouse. That way.” I pointed. “Hurry. Please. Tell anyone you see not to come down here.”

  I pushed open the back entrance to the building and called Sanko’s phone again. This time, Tom finally answered. “The power is out downtown, and Nate and Vincent Pomp are in the garage under the Commons,” I said, “and I’ve heard four shots already—”

  “Roxane, where are you?”

  It was cool and dark and very quiet inside, insulated from the chaos outside but also somehow scarier, because I was that much closer to whatever was happening down there. “I’m in the Capitol Square building, in the back where the shops are. I’m not in the garage. Tom, there are people everywhere, and the garage is connected to all these buildings—I’m just trying to keep people from going down there. They have no idea. Everything is pitch black.”

  Through the windows I could barely see cops halfway down the park with flashlights, clearing people away from the entrances to the garage. I unholstered my gun and crept slowly along the wall, bumping into a table almost immediately. I winced at the loud sound; being stealthy lasted about a minute. But I didn’t hear anything else, no other signs of life. The businesses were all closed at this hour, their glass doors locked tight. Out on State Street, police lights swirled and horns honked, nobody understanding. My wet shoes squeaked on the tile floor as I made my way farther into the space.

  “We’re three minutes out, maybe less,” Tom was saying, “we’re coming from Broad Street. Will you please stay where you are this time? Please?”

  “Yes,” I said, meaning to do exactly that.

  But then I heard someone else’s footsteps on the terra-cotta tile.

  I dropped into a crouch behind a trash can in the center of the row of shops and pressed my phone to my chest to muffle the light from its screen. I kept my breathing soft and even and didn’t move a muscle, not even when I heard those footsteps echoing toward me.

  Heavy footsteps.

  He bumped into the same table I had and swore at it softly.

  The footsteps zigzagged across the hall, and he jiggled some doorknobs.

  I heard Tom’s voice, tinny and muffled against my shirt.

  I ground my teeth together and wished more than anything that I’d just kept moving toward State Street. But I hadn’t, and so here I was. I squeezed my eyes shut, willed the footsteps to stop.

  About eight feet away from me, they did. Then pale white light lit up the hallway, just for a second. I didn’t dare to pop my head out for a look. Instead I listened as hard as I could: heavy breathing, like someone who had just run a great distance.

  The flashlight or phone screen or whatever it was flipped off, and the space plunged back into darkness.

  And the footsteps kept approaching me.

  One, two.

  Somehow the quality of the darkness above me changed, and I knew that he was standing right in front of the trash can. He stood very still, impossibly silent. I was afraid to move even the few inches I’d need to move in order to see if he was looking at me, or just standing there oblivious to my presence.

  Then, soundlessly, the muzzle of a gun pressed into my temple, hard. “Where is she?” Nate Harlow said.

  Every muscle of my body contracted, as if I could shrink from view via sheer isometrics. I didn’t say a word
.

  Nate grabbed my arm and yanked me upright. My phone slipped out of my grasp and skittered away down the tiles screen-up, still connected to Tom. Nate twisted my revolver out of my hand, snapped open the cylinder, and shook it; the six rounds clanged onto the floor and scattered. He squinted in the darkness at the gun. “Piece of shit,” he said.

  He tossed it down the hallway in the direction he’d come from.

  “Now. Where. Is. She. Tell me what you did with her.”

  “With who, Nate?”

  His voice was strained and desperate. “With Leila! With Leila. Jesus Christ. Where is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You just couldn’t stay out of it. My business.”

  “Speak for yourself,” I said, “you went to my mother’s house—”

  Abruptly, he hushed me, clamping a hand over my mouth. The doors from the park opened slowly. Nate pulled me against the glass wall of one of the shops. His fingers dug into my skin. At first there was no sound, just a mounting tension in the air. Whoever had entered bumped into the same table and knocked it over.

  The next sound was my gun sliding across the linoleum as someone stumbled over it.

  My phone was too far away to reach, its screen still lit up, still connected to the call.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, though it didn’t make much of a difference whether they were open or not in this darkness.

  I heard the cylinder of my gun snap out and in. “Does this mean you’re bone dry, Harlow?” Vincent Pomp said.

  Without hesitation Nate moved his gun away from my temple and fired two shots in the direction of Pomp’s voice. The sound boomed around the corridor, punctuated with the treble of breaking glass as a bullet struck one of the shop windows. The door facing State Street swung open, a cry of “Police!” interrupted with more gunfire.

  “Nobody moves,” Nate barked, “nobody comes in here. I’ll shoot her if anybody else comes in here.”

  The door at the other end opened too, and Nate dragged me away from the wall to shoot three times down there. I lost my balance and fell, and Nate caught me by the hair. I cried out as he yanked me across the hall and into a slight alcove made by the doorway of a store.

  The darkness was disorienting, my brain showing me shapes that weren’t actually there in front of me. I touched my scalp, expecting blood but not finding any. The State Street doors were still open, a few uniformed cops visible in the flashing police lights from the street behind them. The other end of the hallway was silent and dark, Vincent Pomp either hiding or dead.

  I plunged my hands in my pockets, looking for anything that could function as a weapon: a receipt, two quarters, and my keys. I had a Swiss army knife on the keychain, though it was old and more like a nail file than a knife. Still, maybe it could do some damage. I ran my fingers over it, starting what I could remember of the rosary in my head.

  “Hey, Nate?” a familiar voice called from the State Street doors.

  Tom.

  I pressed a hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t scream.

  Nate said, “I told you, nobody comes in here.”

  “No, I know, I know,” Tom said. “I’m just here in the doorway. Nobody’s coming in.”

  Nate was quiet.

  “You can call me Tom.”

  Silence.

  “Right now, Nate, things could go a lot of different ways, right? Nothing’s set in stone. You can still change the outcome here.”

  Nate lifted the gun from my head again and fired at the ceiling, where something shattered and pinged back down to the floor. “Shut up,” he snapped. Then he jammed the gun back against my skull.

  On the park side of the corridor, a stunned grunt was followed by a slumping sound.

  “You son of a bitch,” Vincent Pomp yelled, and he shot once toward the doorway Nate and I were in. “Simon. Simon. Where are you—”

  “I’m okay,” Simon Pomp said weakly. “It’s not that bad.”

  It sounded a little bit bad.

  I reached the first decade on my Swiss army rosary as Nate pressed the gun harder into my head.

  “You shot my other son, now,” Pomp said. “What the fuck did I ever do to you?”

  “Fuck you. This is all your fault. Listen, I have demands. Okay? I have demands. You’re supposed to listen to my demands, right? Are you listening?”

  “Yes, Nate, I’m listening,” Tom said.

  “First of all, I want everyone to back up, I want a fifty-yard perimeter around this place.”

  Impossible, especially considering the fact that the street was gridlocked with cars. But Tom said, “Okay, that’s easy, I’ll work on that.”

  “Next, I want Leila here, now.”

  A tense silence followed.

  “Where can I find her?”

  “You tell me, asshole.”

  Then Pomp yelled from the other side of the hallway, “Leila is gone, kid. She sold you out. She sold you out yesterday.”

  Nate fired two shots in that direction. Another silence. I dug hard at the edge of my Swiss army knife, still trying to free its blade.

  Tom spoke next. “You miss her, huh? You’re close with her.”

  Nate kept the gun on me as he leaned into the hallway. “Yeah. That’s it. I miss her. So nobody’s leaving until you bring her here.”

  “That’s the thing though,” Pomp said, “she’s gone. She got on a bus. To Cleveland.”

  “No. We were going south. Huntington. She had the money. From the antiques.”

  “She lied, bud. You’re never going to see her again.”

  Some of the pressure from Nate’s gun let up, but it didn’t seem like a conscious choice. He was getting fidgety, physically anxious. He paced the width of the doorway, the hand with the gun moving loosely around my head.

  “It sounds like you just need to talk with her, clear all this up,” Tom said, “right?”

  I could tell what he was doing: trying to find a common ground with this lunatic, get him to relax, establish empathy, eventually create a rapport. But Nate only seemed more keyed-up, not less. It didn’t help that Pomp did not have the same objective as Tom.

  “She’s gone,” Pomp said. “Jesus, this is pathetic. Nobody loves you, kid. Not Leila, not your mommy. Did you know she was afraid of you? She told me, she said when you went to jail, she was relieved.”

  “Don’t talk about her. She’d still be alive if it wasn’t for you.”

  Nate fired across the hall, shattering another window. Kernels of safety glass showered the corridor and momentarily caught the light from the police cars on State Street. In that split second, I could make out a human shape crouching along the glass wall to my right while Nate paced, agitated as hell, to my left. Pomp? I squinted in the dark until the face came into view: not Pomp, but his bodyguard, Bo.

  The darkness had been so complete that I hadn’t even realized he was in here. And, more importantly, neither had Nate.

  Bo raised a finger to his lips, and I nodded.

  “How do you figure?” Pomp called.

  “If you would’ve just taken care of her while I was gone. She wouldn’t have wound up with him. He was obsessed. Obsessed with her, and he killed her.”

  Pomp chuckled. “And here I thought you killed your mommy.”

  So did I.

  “I would never hurt her. Never. All of this was for her. To get what she deserved. She earned that house. My father’s house. For putting up with that whole fucked-up family for all those years. It was all going to be hers when he died. But they were so horrible to us. They took what was hers. Ours.”

  “Mr. Pomp,” Tom called, “what do you say about letting Nate and me work this out?”

  “Like I care about him getting it worked out. He killed my daughter. My Tessa. She was nineteen years old. Nineteen years old. He shot both of my sons. Simon, you doing okay over there?”

  “I’m hanging in,” the younger
Pomp said, his voice weaker this time.

  “We’re gonna get you some help, okay? As soon as I put a bullet in this asshole’s forehead.”

  Tom said, “We can get help for your son right now. We just need the guns to go down on the ground.”

  In reply, Pomp fired at the ceiling this time. A chunk of plaster came down with the bullet. I finally got the knife open in my pocket and slowly slid it out and showed it to Bo. He nodded and made a gesture I couldn’t follow.

  “I just need you all to back up, like I said.” Nate stepped out of the doorway, his foot only inches from Bo’s hand. “Okay? No more psychology bullshit until that happens.”

  He stepped back into the doorway, still oblivious to Bo.

  But also still waving the gun in my general direction.

  Once Nate resumed pacing, I craned my neck so I could make out the shadow of Bo’s face again. He pointed at my hand—at the knife. Then pointed at the back of his own knee, pantomiming a stabbing motion. Then a nod at Nate.

  I pointed at my chest, wishing telepathy were real. He was asking me to stab Nate in the back of the knee?

  Another nod.

  It seemed like my other choice was to wait until Bo made a move himself, which might or might not take my personal well-being into consideration.

  I couldn’t believe I was about to cooperate with a demi-gangster.

  But I nodded back.

  “I don’t see anyone fucking moving!” Nate screamed. “Get the fuck out of here.”

  He stepped out into the hall and fired at State Street, where the civilians were, the cops. Where Tom was.

  Suddenly, a deep hum sounded in the building. As the lights began to flicker on, I took my Swiss army knife and jammed it into Nate’s popliteal as hard as I could. He yelled in pain, the knee buckling and sending him sideways to the floor. Bo rolled forward and landed with an elbow on Nate’s wrist, which made a sickening crunch and pop of bones.

  The gun landed on the tiles.

  I pulled myself out of the doorway and grabbed it, released the clip.

  It was empty.

  The doors on State Street opened and the hallway flooded with cops. I saw Tom among them, his face ashy as he met my eye.