by Roger Herst
He gasped in surprise, “I know you. You’re always talking about guns!”
“That’s right. Just like this one here.” The sound that followed was unmistakable, even to Gabby—the hammer of a revolver.
For an instant Gabby thought about remaining hidden. In a few moments the restroom would be empty, and she could walk away. But that would leave Marcel to face a killer alone. Though the dealer had a gun, she possessed a more powerful weapon if she could employ it—the element of surprise. With Marcel’s help, there would be two against one.
She flung open the stall door with so much force that it cracked loudly against the steel partition. An instant later, she lunged forward, launching herself at her opponent to knock her down. She knew that Hillary Jones was at least a decade older than she. She was also heavier and from all appearances not athletic. Gabby should, she calculated, have the advantage.
But Hillary reacted far more quickly than Gabby had hoped. She raised her gun and bludgeoned Gabby’s skull, slowing but not stopping her momentum. The two women collided with a force that upset Hillary’s balance. They fell to the floor in a heap, with Gabby on top, though the black woman was strong enough to force them into a roll. Her revolver discharged with a deafening roar, and the bullet narrowly missed Marcel. It slammed into the cinderblock wall, tearing a deep hole. “You stupid bitch,” Hillary howled. “This is none of your business.”
“Get help! Go! Go!” Gabby cried to Marcel, who was emerging from a state of shock. Hillary was far stronger than she looked, and Gabby had to use both her hands to keep the weapon pointed away from her. This left her adversary with a free hand to drive blows at her body. To stay alive, she needed resist Hillary and gain control of the gun.
Both women struggled for advantage. The gun discharged again, this time shattering a wall-mounted urinal and raining porcelain shrapnel down on them. A sliver struck Marcel’s hand as he attempted to separate the women. A far larger hunk pierced his ear, and blood flowed from a laceration above his eye, impeding his vision. When Gabby cried out a second time for him to get help, he turned and ran from the facility.
With a surge of adrenaline, Gabby succeeded in gaining the top position and smashed Hillary’s fingers into the concrete floor, hoping to dislodge them from the gun’s trigger. She drove the knee of her good leg into the other woman’s groin. It wasn’t enough. Hillary, desperate to escape and enraged, forced them to roll again and gained the superior position. It was only a question of time before the stronger woman would maneuver the gun in Gabby’s direction. She needed to disengage. If she could make it outside, the trees would shelter her until Marcel could bring help.
The opportunity arose when they rolled again, and Hillary’s head struck a galvanized drainpipe under a washbasin. She screamed in pain and momentarily released her grip, allowing Gabby to force her firing hand against the wet concrete. The course surface drew blood from her knuckles, already worn raw. Gabby immediately rocked back onto her knees and separated, scampering on hands and knees through the doorway, expecting to hear shots from behind her. The exit seemed like a long tunnel that enlarged as she scurried through it.
Then cool night air outside soothed her face as she managed to haul herself onto unsteady feet. Half hopping, half staggering, she headed for the nearest stand of trees, but had progressed only a dozen feet before she felt a blow to the back of her head. Her legs buckled beneath her; she tried to regain her balance, but was felled by a second blow. She expected the blast of a pistol to make permanent the blackness that had already begun to envelope her, but her next awareness was of sharp stones from the dirt path cutting into her nose and cheeks as she lay prone on the ground. Her assailant loomed above her. She knew with a sudden, peaceful clarity that her struggle for life was now over, and a new resolve filled her. She would recite the prayer she had long rehearsed for her last breath—the sacred words of the Shema, her declaration of unity with God. But only the first word, Shema, passed her lips. An orphan of the night, it sailed into space. Darkness filled the silence.
From his position among the trees, Joel heard the two shots reverberate in the men’s room, and, shortly after, watched a figure emerge from the entrance and sprint through the infield towards second base. From the form and speed, he calculated that this was no woman in distress. A few moments later a second figure emerged staggering, only to overtaken by another who felled her with two blows to the skull. He was uncertain who was being savaged until he heard the word Shema—a scream, a wail, and a declaration, all in one. To his horror, the pursuer moved stand to over Gabby with both arms outstretched in the classic position for firing a handgun.
At this distance, intervention was impossible. Horace’s Glock might have provided temporary intimidation, but, without ammunition it was an arrowless bow. Even if he’d had ammunition, the distance, combined with uncertain light and an unfamiliar weapon, made the shot difficult for even the most expert marksman. As he stood, an impotent witness to Gabby’s execution, he envisioned her beside the Shabbat candles at Ohav Shalom, introducing her congregants to the warmth of Sabbath peace. He saw her hunched beside the youngsters of KISS, trying to experience something she was trained from childhood to believe was abhorrent. Then, he saw her in O’Reilly’s Pub in Los Angeles, one hand in his, the other lifting his lucky charm to her lips, infusing it with her spirit. Time seemed to stand still, and he saw with perfect clarity the .9 mm bullet he’d carried for years, believing that in some future emergency it would save his life. Not his life, Gabby’s.
He pulled back the barrel of the Glock, exposing the chamber under the shell casing extractor. He extracted the bullet from his trouser pocket, and held it to his lips for an instant, just as he’d seen Gabby do in O’Reilly’s Pub, before jamming it into firing the firing position. The distance to the assailant was daunting and the light nearly impossible. He had never been good with a handgun. All the odds were against him.
The outfield provided nothing to stabilize his hands and the grass was too tall to allow him to lie prone. So, he dropped onto one knee, placing his left leg forward to serve as a shooting stand. He took a deep breath, reminding himself that he’d spent his career in work that required a keen eye and steady hand. These skills could serve him now. He sighted the target and the Glock, manufactured from polymers rather than steel, felt light to the touch. He would have one shot, and he would have to strike the assailant’s head or neck. A shot to the torso might only wound and the gunman could still kill Gabby. Glocks were renowned for their hair-triggers. At this distance, the slightest jerk would send the bullet far wide of the mark.
He leveled the front sight onto the target and made a quick, instinctive series of adjustments. He knew that every moment he delayed increased the risk that the gunman would shoot Gabby first. In that fleeting moment, a fearful tremor rippled from his torso and instantly extended through his arm to the firing finger. His front sight jerked away from the distant gunman, and there was no time to correct it. He needed a miracle and it came to him as a vision. He saw Gabby’s lips touch his amulet.
“For you, love,” he whispered, willing the tremor to pass from his shooting arm. The front sight dropped onto the distant target, and, in that instant, he knew why he had spent a lifetime practicing marksmanship, why he had learned to hunt with a single bullet, and why he had endowed this amulet with so much power. His muscles responded with a confident, even squeeze of the trigger at exactly the right instant.
The Glock’s hammer pounded at the base of the cartridge, exploding the powder, and sending a lead slug into the night. Joel shut his eyes. He feared opening them, but when he finally did the gunman was no longer standing.
After alerting Hillary of intruders, Ersiline North returned to position at the end of the bleachers to wait. She heard the two shots from inside the restroom and assumed initially that Hillary had shot both James Tee and the person who entered after him. Then she saw someone sprint from the restroom and head straight across second base into
the outfield. She was cradling her Beretta 96 and turned to fire, but thought better of it. She would be unlikely to hit anyone moving that fast at night. But Marcel’s flight had distracted her, and she failed to observe Joel move into position behind third base. She saw Hillary strike Gabby down and prepare herself to fire. Joel’s shot from behind third base took Ersiline by surprise.
The shooter was a damn good marksman, she thought, but in a gunfight her own Beretta was a formidable weapon—perhaps the best there was. And there were few as deadly with it as she. Heavy on her feet, she lumbered along a corner of the bleachers near first base to improve her position.
Pistol fire alerted Steve Murray that his friend was in trouble. From his position on the knoll, he watched Hillary fall, then saw Joel run toward someone on the ground. He adjusted his 30/06 to be ready for Joel’s signal. He considered calling out, but decided against it.
Joel knelt beside Gabby and lifted her eyelid to look for dilation of the pupils. There was just enough ambient light from the restrooms to see they were normal in size—a good sign that, despite blows to her skull, there was no concussion. He looked for gunshot wounds but found none. Her pulse was weak but steady.
“I’m with you, Gabby,” he whispered. ”It’s me, Joel. I’m here with you. It’s all over, love. You’re going to be all right. It’s over, love. It’s over.” He brushed her forehead with a tender kiss.
Gently, he lifted her knees to reduce the chance that she’d go into shock. He never saw Ersiline North move along the bleachers or stop and raise her arms into firing position.
“You meddling mothafucker!” she cried, aiming at him.
He turned his head at the very instant she squeezed off five quick rounds. The first bullet zinged past his head with a whining twang, while the second, only a fraction of a second later, snared him in the left shoulder. A third traveled wide, but the fourth pounded into his chest, puncturing the right lung and shattering his spinal cord. His limbs grew weak and his head slumped to the chest. The fifth and last round traveled wide, ending up in the stucco facade of the Fort Stanton Park public toilets.
Ersiline North emerged from the shadows to finish Joel off with a final shot and stepped into Steve’s sites. Logic told him to aim at her torso, but he had never fired at a human being and he couldn’t bring himself to do so now. Her legs made a less lethal, but riskier target. He lifted the muzzle to accommodate for the trajectory. Each second of hesitation required a new set of mental coordinates. He remained calm and professional, establishing a bead on Ersiline’s right leg. Good rifleman that he was, he drew in a lungful of air before releasing half. His pressure on the trigger was so steady that he did not know exactly when it would snap the firing pin. His 30/06 produced a deafening report, far louder than the handguns had, and recoiled against his shoulder with a heavy thud.
A tremor of doubt shattered his confidence; his hunter’s instinct about hitting game abandoned him. He had expected impact of the high-velocity bullet to tumble his target, but it hadn’t. Instead she scrambled toward shelter in the woods. A second bullet, even if he’d had one, would not have helped now.
“Damn,” he muttered. He dropped the rifle onto the passenger’s seat beside him, started the engine, and plowed through the tall outfield grass towards the bodies.
Marcel’s face was streaked with blood and his collar was damp from the wound to his ear. He came upon Gabby’s Jeep just as more shots rang out. Nathaniel Pinkard already had the Jeep’s headlight on and the motor running.
“You look terrible,” Diamond said in greeting. “What happened?”
“We gotta get the rabbi,” Marcel barked, piling into the back seat. He noticed that his teammates had their knives ready for battle. Goofy handed him a Bart Skulkin T-shirt to wipe the blood from his face.
“She said not to come till we heard her call,” Diamond said.
“She can’t call us. You heard the shots, didn’t you? Drive fast and honk the horn loud, Nathaniel. We ain’t got much time!”
Nathaniel sped over the field toward home plate, continually blasting the horn. Steve Murray’s Pathfinder was already near third base, its headlights illuminating the field. Lights from the Jeep augmented them. The boys immediately piled out with their knives drawn. They didn’t recognize Steve, but when they saw him kneeling over Joel they judged him to be a friend.
“There’s a cell phone in my vehicle,” Steve called to Diamond. “You know how to use it?”
“Yeah,” Diamond said, sprinting to the Pathfinder.
“Call 911 and tell them where we are.”
Steve turned to Goofy. “Help me with my friend. He’s hardly breathing. We’ve got to stop the bleeding before he goes into shock.” Together they positioned Joel and began to apply pressure to his chest wound. In the background, Steve could hear Diamond giving directions to the rescue squad.
Marcel folded his jacket under Gabby’s head and knelt beside her, trying to rouse her with his voice. Nathaniel spelled Steve and Goofy, keeping the pressure on Joel’s chest, but Marcel stayed with Gabby, talking to her without pause, his eyes bright with unshed tears. This war had now claimed two of his friends.
It was not until the EMTs had Gabby and Joel in an ambulance and dispatched to Washington Hospital Center that a clear picture of the events began to emerge. A half dozen police cars arrived, their sirens cawing, emergency lights blaring. The boys told the officers what they knew, and Marcel identified Hillary North. Bitterly he explained that she’d spoken at Bart’s memorial service. Steve sat on the grass, his head in his hands, replaying every moment in his mind and berating himself for his hesitation and failure.
Twenty-five minutes later, a police search team discovered Ersiline North in the woods. Steve’s bullet had shattered her ankle. She hobbled into the woods and there, bleeding and short of breath, had tumbled to the earth to await the fate of a wounded stag. Her Beretta had several more rounds of ammunition, but she surrendered without resistance. She’d been afraid of bleeding to death.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
WASHINGTON HOSPITAL CENTER
The doctors placed Gabby’s head in a neck brace and scanned her brain. They prescribed intravenous antibiotics. The first blow she took to the skull had produced a blood clot near the cerebral cortex. The second, to the back of her neck, had resulted in an unsightly dark blue hematoma, but had fortunately not injured the sensitive nerves traveling through the spine. X-rays of her bruised ribs revealed two cracks—an extremely painful but non-threatening condition. Her doctors expected that she would quickly regain consciousness, and that her speech and neuro-muscular coordination would normalize. They were cautiously optimistic, noting that her condition would be more serious had she not been in excellent physical condition before the attack, but wished to monitor her recovery in the hospital.
Joel’s condition was far more serious. He had been placed on a respirator and fell in and out a comatose state. Each time he woke weaker and less coherent. The bullet that had severed his spine had left no hope for a return to normal life.
Marcel also spent the night in the Washington Hospital Center. A plastic surgeon stitched the lacerations on his brow and ear, and administered oral antibiotics. The following morning he was released.
The discovery that a ring of female gun dealers had infiltrated a group of community activists attracted not only local, but national media. Steve Murray and members of the tennis team were interviewed for eyewitness accounts of what had happened. Police Chief Noyas called a press conference to describe the police investigation of the shootings. He emphasized that his force had been tracking members of Mothers against Guns for many months, and that they would have made arrests earlier had there been sufficient evidence for conviction. Chuck, who had even less tolerance for political hypocrisy than he did for evangelical homophobes, bitterly accused the chief and the DCPD Public Relations Department of gross deception. He was sure they hadn’t had a clue until Gabby got involved in the case. He pointed out—to
anyone who would listen—that the Police Department had unwittingly been supplying the gun dealers with confidential information for nearly a year.
Rabbi Gabrielle Lewyn’s story was irresistible. Television crews invaded the hospital for interviews. The hospital was on record as prohibiting this, but Chuck, dissatisfied with the actions that had been taken to protect Gabby’s privacy, suspected they enjoyed the publicity. He resorted to colorful threats and an intimidating glare that would have done his sister proud to have security guards placed on her floor. “One unapproved visitor sneaking through this cordone sanitare,” he growled, nose to nose with the hospital administrator, “and you’ll wish you’d never entered the hospital business. Rabbi Lewyn has a lawyer who will guarantee you and your hospital pay legal bills for the rest of your natural life and that of your institution, whichever comes last. Comprende?”
His threats worked. No one got through the security barrier. As soon as Gabby was able to talk, Police Inspector Garrett Rose asked questions, but backed off because she appeared too weak to talk. Instead of pressing her, he told her that his unit had arrested seven members of MAG and had warrants out for another four. The interview took less than ten minutes. More would come when she was feeling stronger. Her mind was so clouded that she didn’t remember calling Joel on the way to Fort Stanton Park. Consequently, she never asked about him.
Gabby’s family had agreed not to mention Joel, who was two floors below her in the Intensive Care unit. The television mounted on her wall had been disconnected. She was in no condition or mood to read newspapers, and none were delivered to her room. Her sister, Terry, who had flown into Washington from Cleveland, and her father conspired to keep Joel out of the picture.
That decision became more difficult when he fell into a coma from which he did not awaken. After consultation with his family, Joel was removed from life support.
