“She okay?” Brady barked.
“No, she ain’t!” the man snapped. “Some bastard knocked her out of her wheelchair in the panic.”
“Murph,” Brady said, “help him get her out of here—”
“I got her, dammit!” the man said. “You go get that crazy terrorist on stage! Goddamn ISIS, I bet, gonna blow us all up.”
Brady and Peterson drew their guns and slipped through a set of double doors one after the other into the auditorium. Brady’s stomach turned upside-down at the sight of what awaited them, and his first thought was that a bomb had gone off after all. Bodies lay everywhere—in the aisles, draped over the benches, perhaps a dozen. A middle-aged man sprawled on his back, a pool of coagulating blood expanding slowly around him. A regal-looking Asian with a clump of salt-and-pepper hair and skull missing, revealing a wedge of brain. A pretty young woman in a one-shoulder red gown, a delicate hand stretched out before her, as if grasping at some invisible lifeline. Suddenly the hand spasmed, an eye opened. But it stared at nothing—dumb, like a butchered animal.
Fighting back nausea, Brady focused on the stage at the front of the room, where, lit up by the spotlights like the star of the show, the perp responsible for the mayhem stood. He was aiming a pistol at the balcony level, shouting at an out-of-sight woman, who was shouting back.
In all his time on the force, Brady had never fired his service revolver. Now, however, he widened his stance, thumbed back the hammer of the Model 28, and squeezed the trigger, praying to hell he hit the son of a bitch.
***
A bullet whizzed past Luke’s head so close he felt the displaced air. A second one struck him in the left leg. Grunting, he flopped to his stomach.
He spotted the pair of cops at the entrance and squeezed off several rounds, one of which took out the cop on the right. Then the slide on the semi-automatic locked back with a sharp click.
“Fuck,” he mumbled. He rolled off the front of the stage and slumped behind the first row of seats. He took a spare magazine from his pocket, which he’d found in the 7-Eleven vigilante’s back office, and swapped it for the spent one, seating it with a smack from the heel of his palm. He racked the slide, chambering a fresh round, and peered over the seats.
The cop was gone.
***
While gunshots boomed back and forth below, Charlotte was staring at Tony in amazement as he pushed himself to his feet.
“You can move!” she said, fearing he’d been paralyzed.
Tony, looking pale and shaky, took her hand. “Come on—when he’s distracted.”
Ducking low, shoving chairs aside, they made their way toward the balcony level exit.
***
“You still there, hotshot?” Luke called.
“Drop your weapon, asshole!” shouted the cop, who had apparently taken cover behind the last row of seats. “This place will be crawling with police in two minutes!”
Suddenly there was a commotion on the balcony level as Charlotte and the dickhead made a break for the exit. Luke was a decent marksman, and had he been standing he could have picked them off. As it was, however, he didn’t have a chance. He would have to intercept them in the lobby, but the fucking cop was between him and it—
He noticed the abandoned wheelchair. It was tipped over in the aisle close to where the cop was laying low. It had one of those portable oxygen tanks attached to it that people with emphysema used.
Luke aimed the SIG at the tank and unloaded the fifteen-round magazine until one of the rounds penetrated the pressurized cylinder.
With a whoosh like a fighter jet flying low overhead, a brilliant violet-and-yellow explosion consumed the auditorium.
***
The blast tossed Brady several feet through the air. He hit the ground hard and sucked back a hot, harsh breath of air. His ears were ringing and he couldn’t see anything but searing light. He rolled himself onto his side and smelled singed hair and cooked skin. When his vision cleared he groaned in horror. The right sleeve of his uniform had been burned away, revealing pig-smooth skin already turning a mushy, blistering pink. But worse than this was his right leg, which was missing below the knee and squirting blood.
Then the perp was standing above him, silhouetted against devil-orange flames. He pointed a black matte pistol at Brady’s face.
“Please…” Brady croaked. “I got kids…”
“More than I got,” the man said, and fired.
***
Charlotte and Tony had reached the staircase with the divided, symmetrical flights leading to the lobby when a tremendous explosion shook the building, knocking them to their knees.
“What the hell was that?” Charlotte gasped. “Does he have fucking grenades?”
She leapt back to her feet, though Tony remained on his knees.
“Come on, Tony!” she said.
“I can’t.”
“Come on!” She helped him to his feet.
The auditorium door banged open below them. A second later Luke limped into the carpeted lobby.
He saw them and fired the gun.
“Up!” Charlotte said, and they fled up the short set of steps to the second floor, stopping before a ten-foot-tall mirror with an ornate gilded frame. On either side of it were doorways with decorative molding. She and Tony went through the one on the right, though it turned out both led to the same large drawing room with tall windows and antique furnishings.
“That way!” she said, pointing to another doorway at the far end of the room.
“You go,” Tony said. “I can’t…”
“You have to!”
“Go!” He shook free from her and stumbled to a table draped with a white tablecloth. He collapsed behind it.
“You can’t stay there! He’ll find you!”
“Go!”
***
Ignoring the burning pain in his leg, Luke limped up the right flight of steps. At the half-landing he stuck his head through the door to the balcony level, to make sure Charlotte and the dickhead hadn’t returned there. They hadn’t. The entire auditorium had become a scorching inferno.
He continued up to the second floor. As soon as he entered the large room off the hallway he saw Charlotte. She was standing in a doorway to his right, almost as if she had been waiting for him.
He raised the pistol and fired.
***
A gunshot popped, but Charlotte had been ready for it and dashed up a narrow stairway to the third floor. She came to a hallway lined with three doors. She ran past the first two and tried the third. Unlocked! She ducked inside, slammed the door closed, and found herself in a dark, stuffy room filled with old furniture.
And nowhere to go.
***
The first two rooms Luke passed had been empty—which meant Charlotte was in the last one. He gripped the door handle. The door didn’t budge. He drove his shoulder into it and got it open an inch or so. The bitch had shoved a desk in front of it. Two more shoulders, however, and he was able to slip into the room—just as Charlotte disappeared out a dormer window.
***
Charlotte tried her best to ignore the shot of vertigo that threatened to send her tumbling three stories to her death. She wasn’t close enough to the edge of the roof to see the theater patrons milling about on the street below, but she could hear them, some shouting, some crying, the pandemonium mixing with approaching police sirens.
Scrambling on all fours, a strong wind blowing at her back, she climbed the steep pitch of the gable roof and pulled herself over the ridgeline a moment before another gunshot popped.
In her haste, however, she lost her balance and tumbled down the leeward side of the roof until it broke horizontally.
Charlotte felt herself falling through air and couldn’t fathom that she was about to die. When she struck the ground a couple seconds later, she couldn’t believe the fall had been so short. She also couldn’t believe she was alive. But then she realized she hadn’t fallen forty feet the ground, only
ten or so, to the flat roof of the auditorium.
A moment later Luke landed beside her. She started kicking him with all her strength, shrieking at him to leave her alone. For a wild moment she thought she might overpower him when he backhanded her across the face, then clawed on top of her. Her cheek smarting, her eyes watering, she tried to crawl free, but he was too heavy. He wrapped his arms around her upper body and hissed in her ear, “It’s over, Char. It’s fucking over.”
Grunting, favoring one leg, he lurched to his feet, lifting her with him, and carried her toward the edge of the roof.
She twisted and squirmed, but he was impossibly strong. “Luke! Don’t!”
“Where did the dickhead go?” he rasped.
“Luke! Please! Don’t do this! I can help you! I’ll get you the best doctors!”
“Too late for that now, Char.”
They passed a bank of air conditioners and were less than ten feet from the edge of the roof.
Charlotte kept twisting and kicking futilely and felt something hard press into the small of her back.
The gun!
She slipped her hand behind her, fit it over the gun’s cold metal grip, and pulled the trigger. The gunshot was deafening. Luke cried out and released her. She stumbled away, still gripping the gun.
Doubled over, holding either his groin or his inner thigh, he lurched toward her, a monster that wouldn’t die.
Screaming, Charlotte pulled the trigger over and over and over, and she kept pulling it even when the gun had ceased firing bullets and Luke was lying on his chest, unmoving, bleeding out.
EPILOGUE
It was December 13, the last day of finals before the Christmas break. Charlotte was walking home from the university along North Lexington, her head down against the icy mountain wind.
She’d spotted the guy following her two blocks back, when she randomly glanced over her shoulder, something she’d been doing a lot lately.
She’d crossed the street. He’d crossed it too.
Now she came to a red traffic light at Walnut Street. She glanced over her shoulder again.
He was twenty feet back.
It wasn’t Luke, of course. Luke was dead. It wasn’t a nameless stalker either. It was just some guy walking home from the university, who’d happened to cross the street shortly after she did.
Nevertheless, it was easier to tell herself this than believe it.
He stopped next to her. He wore an olive bomber jacket and a knit hat. His eyes were a frosty blue, his cheeks red from the cold.
“Charlotte, right?” he said, grinning crookedly at her. “I’m in your marketing class.”
“Hi,” she said. The light changed to green. She began walking.
He kept pace beside her. “I’m Bill.”
She smiled.
“I, uh, I know about what happened,” he said. “You know, a couple months ago. Well, everyone does, right? But I’m sorry. That’s sucks, you know. That guy…”
“I don’t like talking about it.”
“Yeah, I know, of course. So, you live up this way?”
“No,” she said, which was true. She’d already passed the turnoff to her house a ways back.
“So where you going?”
She pointed to the Lexington Avenue Brewery a little ways ahead.
“The LAB?”
“Yup.”
“Good beer there.”
“It’s a brewery.”
“You, uh, meeting someone?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Ah, okay,” he said awkwardly. “Well, see you in class, right?”
He cut across Lexington while she continued to the brewery. Inside, she didn’t see Tony anywhere and sat by herself at a two-person table.
She checked her phone. Tony hadn’t messaged her. She turned the phone over in her hands a couple times distractedly. She hadn’t planned on getting a drink, but now she waved the waitress over and ordered a margarita.
She frowned to herself. She’d been doing pretty good today not thinking about Luke and Charleston. Now, thanks to Bill, it was all fresh in her mind’s eye.
Fourteen people had died at the Dock Street Theater. The massacre made headlines all over the country, but what gave the story legs and kept it in circulation to this day was Luke himself, and the slow fuse that led to the powder keg, namely his mental health. This was due in part to the suicide note found in his pocket, which had been addressed to his commanding officer, the medical examiner who’d failed to diagnose his PTSD, and “all you other shitheads (you know who you are).” The message was short, only six words: “You break it, you fix it.”
Inevitably questions were raised. Why had someone as psychologically traumatized as Luke been released back into the public? Had he been purposely misdiagnosed? If so, were such misdiagnoses standard practice? Was there a massive cover up going on, a way for a cash-strapped military to save billions of dollars in disability pay?
It’s been a PR nightmare for the Pentagon, and a number of top military hawks had been forced to resign, including the head of the Department of Veteran Affairs.
Currently there was an ongoing Congressional investigation into the matter.
Gooseflesh marbled Charlotte’s skin as she pictured Luke in his coffin six-feet underground, a big dead grin on his face.
The front door to the bar opened and Tony entered. She waved him over.
“Hey,” he said, kissing her on the cheek with ice cube lips. “Feels like the end of days out there.”
The waitress delivered her margarita, and he ordered a pint of beer.
“Any media requests today?” he said, and she knew he was only half joking.
“Just some guy in my marketing class telling me about how what happened in Charleston sucked.”
“Sucked?”
“His word.”
“You need a disguise. Maybe those glasses with the mustache attached.”
Charlotte felt an abrupt burst of affection toward Tony. Although he had lost Ben and Amy and Jenny, he had been a rock these past couple months, and she didn’t know what she would have done had she lost him—and she almost had. An MRI scan revealed that Luke’s bullet had skated the base of Tony’s temporal fossa, a shallow depression along the side of the skull, and a neurosurgeon needed to perform a procedure called debridement to remove the bullet, bone fragments, and scalp tissue. That Tony didn’t end up blind, paralyzed, or a vegetable was a miracle. If fact, his only observable side effects were a skewed sense of balance for a couple days and a small scar.
“Listen, Tony,” she said, taking his hand. “I think I need to get out of here.”
“Sure,” he said. “We can go to my place, watch a movie.”
“I mean Asheville.”
He stared at her, surprised.
She said, “It’s too close to Charleston, too many memories.”
“Where would you go? Back to New York?”
“No, I’m done with winters. I’m thinking maybe LA.”
“What about your degree?”
“I’ll finish it at UCLA or somewhere.”
“Oh,” he said, and he looked devastated.
She squeezed his hand. “I don’t mean just me, Tony. Us. I want you to come with me.”
He brightened, but seemed far from enthusiastic. “I don’t know how easy all that will be, Char. I have student loans and—”
“I have money.”
He frowned. “You have money?”
She nodded.
“Did you just knock over a bank?”
“My parents were well off,” she told him. “My dad owned some factories in China. They left me a trust fund in their will. I received it last year when I turned twenty-one.”
“What kind of trust fund?”
“One with a lot of money in it.”
“How much?”
“Enough,” she said simply.
He looked skeptical. “You use coupons at the supermarket, Char.”
“My grand
parents were thrifty. It’s how they raised me.”
Tony sat back. “So if you have this big trust fund,” he said, apparently still not convinced she wasn’t having him on, “why the hell are you doing a degree in hospitality management?”
“You don’t remember, do you?”
“Remember what?”
“I told you I’m going to open my own restaurant.” Grinning, she produced from her handbag a real estate listing of a Sunset Boulevard restaurant she’d printed off the internet. “I’ve been talking to the agent, and I’m thinking of submitting an offer. I’ll hire someone to run it while we finish our degrees and get the hang of the whole management side of things. So—what do you think?”
Tony shook his head silently for a few seconds, then said, “Wow, Char, I mean, Christ. Wow.”
“Wow in a good way?”
His grin matched hers. “In the best way. Only thing is,” he added, “you got to change the joint’s name. I mean, Sunset Pizzeria and Pasta? It sounds like a retirement village.”
“I’ll leave that to you then—something with an Italian feel.”
“I got one already.” He paused dramatically. “Tony’s Pizza.”
“Heck no,” she said, laughing.
“Charlotte’s Pies?”
She groaned. “That’s not even Italian. Maybe we’ll stick with Sunset Pizzeria and Pasta after all.”
“You’re the boss, Char,” he said, leaning across the table to kiss her on the lips. “Whatever you want.”
***
Standing at the bathroom urinal Tony shook, zipped, then went to the sink. While washing his hands he caught his reflection in the mirror and gasped. His skin was gray and peeling. His eyes were bloodshot and sightless. Clumps of his hair were missing in places. Where the bullet had struck him in the left side of the head, and where there should only have been a small scar, was a hole oozing blood and maggots.
Dark Hearts: Four Novellas of Dark Suspense Page 19
