Boonie watched her do this, wondering if she’d start banging her head on the table, something he often found calming, but she didn’t. Perhaps she should have. It might have helped.
Probably not.
Little Ritchie had to go. There was no getting around it. Two more minutes and he was going to pee his pants, and then what would Poppa think? He was sitting in a tight ball of boy tucked into a triangle-shaped corner of the tent. It was black as night all around, so dark that when he held his hands up in front of his face he couldn’t see them.
For a while there had been flashing lights all over the place, and whenever they’d landed on the tent it would glow all blue and he’d see the big bulky shape of Poppa sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the tent zipper, with that Dan Wesson cradled in his lap and his face tight as a fist.
Poppa was in that state of barely controlled murderous rage that Aunt Delores, who was totally whack, liked to call “the crankie-wankies.”
Poppa was in that state because he was never really out of it and also because these bad guys who had taken over the Bass Pro Shop were making him miss a soccer game between El Tricolor, Mexico’s national team, and their hated rivals, Los Llaneros from Venezuela, a game in which he had a strong financial interest.
As Poppa usually did when he was angry, he had gone as still as the Buddha he had taken Little Ritchie to see on a trip to Thailand. He’d also taken Little Ritchie to a whorehouse on something called the Soy Cowboy in Bangkok to get laid so that, according to Poppa, he wouldn’t grow up to be a pervert like Uncle Manolo, who had once tried to do “funny stuff” with Little Ritchie when they were in Uncle Manolo’s hot tub.
The evening with the Thai girl had been an eye-opening experience for Little Ritchie, but not in the way Poppa would have thought it was.
Her name was Rose and although Little Ritchie had not quite managed to “do it” with Rose, he had come away madly in love and was sending her half of his allowance money every month by PayPal and soon he was going to buy her the plane fare to come and stay in his bedroom with him until he graduated from high school and got a job in Poppa’s business so they could have a family. But right now he had to pee, and it was way past time he told Poppa about it.
“Poppa …?”
He sensed the rustle of Poppa turning in the dark. When Poppa shushed him he got a blast of Poppa’s cigar breath right in the face.
“But I got to pee, Poppa,” he said in an urgent whisper.
“You can’t,” said Poppa in a low, growling hiss. “You got to hold it. Sooner or later, one of these mooks is coming around again, and when he does, I’m taking him out. After that, you can piss.”
Little Ritchie thought that “taking him out” might be trickier than it looked. When the guy had slipped on tippy-toes past the front of the tent, his shadow on the walls had looked as big as that Kodiak bear in the middle of the store. A Kodiak bear holding a shotgun in its paws.
More cigar breath in his face.
Poppa was real close.
“Here,” he said, putting something into Ritchie’s hand. It felt like a water bottle. “Piss into that.”
“I can’t see—”
“Find your piccolo pezzo and stick it in. Nature’ll do the rest. You have to shut up, Ritchie. When the time is right, I’m gonna take the big one—he’s the capo—and then the Chink maricone.”
Little Ritchie was trying and failing to do the thing with the water bottle. He thought it might be better to try to do it standing up. He steeled his bladder against the urge, got to his feet, got everything into position again, and started to let it all go when Poppa shifted his position backwards and Little Ritchie, in an effort not to pee down Poppa’s neck, stepped backwards himself, and when he did that the backs of his knees hit a small tin table loaded with stainless-steel cooking gear that was right behind him and over he went with a loud crash and a tiny tinkle taking a section of the tent down with him and that was it for Poppa, who grabbed him by the shirt and jerked him onto his feet and said, “Fuck this, we’re gonna go take these assholes out right now!”
And out the door he went, in a low crouch, his gun up, his war face on, dragging Little Ritchie along behind him like a kid who had fallen off a horse and had his shoe stuck in the stirrup-thingie.
It didn’t go well.
They had successfully detached the boarded-over vent at the back of the second-floor mechanical room and slipped out into the main hall. They let Coker glide on ahead to get in position.
Coker took a post in the left-hand corner of the upper level—the gun deck, he was calling it—and with the night vision scope he was in a position to cover a wide swath of the store.
Coker did a quick scan with the night vision scope. From a tactical point of view, the upper floor was relatively easy to cover, being largely an open space with few counters other than the gun racks and ammunition displays. It took a careful minute for Coker to establish that Deitz was not on this floor. Chu wasn’t visible either.
He clicked his mike button twice.
Immediately he felt Nick and Beau slipping past him, and he tapped Nick once on the shoulder to say that he was set up and ready.
Then he put his eye back to the scope and started scanning the main floor, which was a whole lot more complicated, a wide-open space jammed with merchandise and display cases and stuffed animals and glass counters loaded with stock.
He moved the scope slowly around the terrain, hoping that Deitz would walk into the lens. If he could find any plausible excuse for it, he was going to put a 5.56-caliber round smack in the middle of the rest of Byron Deitz’s irritating life.
In his scope Coker could see that gigantic Kodiak bear playing King of the World on that stand in the middle of the store.
He took his eyes off the rubber ring and watched as the darker shadow of Nick Kavanaugh literally flowed over the ground just in front of him. The guy moved well. Beau Norlett was now stationary by a water cooler, covering Nick’s advance with his Beretta.
Coker decided that he approved of Beau.
He was young and he worried too much.
Maybe that was because he had a sweet young wife named May and two baby kids. But once he got into action, he did just fine.
Then he heard the clattering sound of something metallic falling, and a sort of hoarse cry, almost a growl. Coker put his eye back on the scope and began to scan the lower room again. The scope picked up movement—a big man was spilling out of a tent—a smaller figure behind him. He jerked his eye away from the scope as the lower floor suddenly lit up in a series of blue-white flashes—heavy-caliber gunshots—two shotgun blasts in return—the booming smack of the muzzle blasts slammed around the enclosed space—big cracking booms—a .44—two deeper explosions—the shotgun again—Nick was now at the top of the stairs—Coker came up fast to cover his descent to the main floor—if he was nuts enough to go down there—and, yes, he was.
Beau looked like he was about to follow Nick, but Coker waved him back—too many targets. Too much random shit was going on. Coker could feel things starting to come apart and he was trying to slow it all down.
Coker could see the large man who had come out of the tent—it wasn’t Deitz. The man was holding a very big revolver and pointing it at something Coker couldn’t identify—Beau was holding his post ten feet to Coker’s right, leaning on the railing, his Beretta trained on the main floor—Nick was going down the stairs—he almost stepped into Coker’s field of fire, so Coker jerked the muzzle up—and now more shots flared up on the main floor—Coker lost the large man with the revolver—had to be Frankie Maranzano—he could see a smaller figure lying prone a few feet from the tent door—this figure was moving—crawling—and he heard a sound like somebody screaming—high and thin—another huge slamming burst and then a sharp metallic clang and Coker felt a big round buzz by his head, a ricochet. He heard it smack into the ceiling behind him.
Coker moved down two steps, trying to bring more of the
main store under his field of fire. He got a scope picture of Frankie Maranzano—he was reloading his Dan Wesson—Nick was down on the main floor—in a crouch—using the counters as cover—snaking through the maze—Coker moved again and reacquired Maranzano, who was now crouched in a position that Nick couldn’t see—Coker reached down, thumbed the TRANSMIT button—
“Nick, I have Frankie Maranzano on your right at the end of that aisle—maybe ten feet from your position.”
Nick stopped, got down on a knee, his Beretta up—Maranzano jerked into motion—he popped up from behind the counter and now he was coming around the corner with his revolver at the ready—Maranzano, without thinking about who he was shooting at, fired a huge round at Nick—he missed—Nick looked as if he was hesitating—he didn’t want to shoot a civilian—Maranzano was shouting at Nick in Italian and Nick was answering—sono polizia—but Maranzano still had that bloody hand cannon up, although he had been warned and that was not good, so Coker put a round into the center of his mass and Frankie Maranzano went down.
From another aisle came the concussive boom of a shotgun, and then a smaller brittle crack beside Coker. Beau was firing at the source of that shotgun blast, the muzzle flare from his Beretta blooming white in Coker’s peripheral vision.
Another shotgun blast, this time flaring big and blue-white, which meant it was aimed right at their position. Coker heard a solid thwack sound and a breathy grunt from Beau. Coker sensed rather than saw him falling backwards.
Nick was on his feet now, stopping briefly to look down at Maranzano as he kicked the .44 away down the aisle. Then he turned the corner, moving fast and low, to take on that damned shotgun.
Coker was moving to help Beau but still trying to keep the rifle on the main floor as he stepped sideways. He heard three quick cracks from Nick’s Beretta—one shotgun blast in return followed by a second—the sound of falling glass—then silence.
Coker scanned the main floor—nobody in clear view—this was terrible ground for a firefight—Nick was somewhere down in that maze but Coker couldn’t find him—he was about to call him on the radio when he heard someone damn big coming up the staircase, shaking the entire frame as he pounded up the risers.
Too heavy to be Nick.
He was hitting the steps like a sledgehammer. Coker could hear his gasping breath. He lifted the rifle and put the scope on the figure climbing up the stairwell.
It was Byron Deitz.
Coker waited.
Deitz got to the second landing and froze as he saw Coker’s outline against the dim light from the corner lamps. He had a shotgun in his hands, held at port arms. A moment later, Nick stepped softly up to the bottom of the stairs, holding his pistol and pointing it at Deitz’s back.
Deitz was trapped on the second-floor landing, Coker above and Nick below.
“Coker,” said Deitz, breathing fast.
“Hello there, Byron. How are you doin’?”
“Well, I’m just fucking jim-dandy, aren’t I? How the fuck are you?”
“Byron,” said Nick, a soft voice out of the darkness at the bottom of the stairs. “It’s over. You don’t have to die here. Drop the shotgun.”
Deitz was still staring up at Coker.
“Byron,” said Nick, putting real steel in his tone. “Put the shotgun down.”
“Nick,” said Deitz, not taking his eyes off Coker’s shadowy figure, “do you know what this asshole up here did? Do you have any fucking idea what he did?”
“One last time,” said Nick. “Put the gun down.”
“Hey,” said Coker, in a teasing tone, “you couldn’t even sell out your own country without stepping on your dick. And now here you are, like a hog on a spit, getting it from both ends. Man. I gotta tell you, watching you operate, it’s fucking embarrassing.”
The words hung in the air like sparks from a fire. Deitz’s mind filled up with red light and he stopped thinking about anything.
Coker, who was closer, saw Deitz’s sudden twist, the muzzle of his shotgun coming up. He and Nick fired at almost the same time, two distinct muzzle cracks, one slightly deeper, the two bright flashes lighting up Deitz for less than a second.
Coker’s round took Deitz in the throat, blowing out the top of his spine and nearly ripping his head off, while Nick’s nine-mill slug smacked into Deitz’s right armpit, drilling right through his lungs and shredding his heart.
Deitz, effectively crucified by two intersecting bullet paths, dead on his feet, pitched backwards, his tailbone striking the railing. He went over the rail, the shotgun in his right hand triggering one last time, the blast hitting the Kodiak bear in the dead center of the body. Deitz landed with a crash of breaking glass on a counter ten feet below.
With a creaking groan the Kodiak began a slow and ponderous fall that seemed to go on forever, but didn’t. It tumbled over onto a display of bows and arrows, rocked once, in that stand-up teeth-baring scary-as-shit Kodiak pose the taxidermist had given him. The actual living Kodiak who used to own this skin had been sitting on his ass in the middle of a mountain meadow in the Grand Tetons, up to his hips in wild wheat and buttercups, quietly downing some overripe chuckleberries, when a Wyoming hunter with a Magnum Express punched a fist-sized hole in his chitlins from a hundred yards out. The stuffed version rocked a couple of times, and then stopped, and everything went quiet.
Coker was kneeling down beside Beau.
“Nick?”
“I’m here, Coker,” said Nick, from the bottom of the staircase, his voice steady but tight. “How’s Beau?”
Coker was already talking urgently into the radio. Beau was looking straight up at one of the dim ceiling spots right above him. His mouth was moving and his cheeks were coated in sweat. Coker put the radio down and called out to Nick.
“Entry wound in the belly, just below his vest. No exit. I’ve already called the medics.”
“Compress it. Tell him I’ll be right there. I got to go see to the civilians. Can you find the damned lights? I can’t see what I’m doing.”
“What about Deitz?”
Nick moved away.
In a moment he called up.
“Deitz is dead.”
“Where’s Andy Chu? He’s not up here.”
Coker was pressing a cloth into the hole in Beau’s belly. Beau grunted from the pressure, tried to sit up, put a bloody hand on Coker’s forearm and squeezed it hard.
He said “May” in a hoarse croak, and passed out. Coker put a finger on Beau’s carotid.
His pulse was rapid but strong.
Coker knew that a gut shot took longer to kill than other wounds, unless it had clipped an artery. But from the sound of it when it hit and the concentrated shape of the entry wound, Coker figured that Deitz had loaded up his shotgun with what hunters called deer slugs, a single solid lead shot instead of the cylinder of lead pellets that made up a normal shotgun load. They were lousy at long range but if you were close enough you could kill a real Kodiak bear with a slug that size.
If Coker was right, there was no way of telling what that slug had done to Norlett’s insides. If he lived, Beau Norlett was never again going to be everything he was.
The store lights snapped on, blinding him for a second. He heard voices down the hall and the sound of pounding feet. Cops and medics were pouring into the upper gun deck. Coker stepped back and let them go to work on Beau. Nick had moved off into the store. In a moment he was on the radio.
“I have Chu. He’s down by the fishing gear with a big hole in his chest. He’s awake and talking. He might make it.”
Coker tapped a medic on the back, told him what Nick had said, got back on the radio as a pair of EMT guys ran down the stairs.
“What about Maranzano?”
A pause.
“Maranzano’s here. Fixed and dilated. Looks like one of your rounds. Center mass. Straight through the heart.”
Coker knew it was a righteous shot, but Maranzano was a civilian and protecting civilians was why they had g
one into the store in the first place. There’d be an after-action PISTOL inquiry.
Coker would have to make damn sure their forensics team found that .44 round that Maranzano had fired at Nick. Nick would back him up on the shooting, but Coker’s career could depend on that round.
“The kid?”
A moment.
Nick was back, his voice slow and heavy.
“He’s here. Got one in the upper thigh.”
“Jesus. One of mine?”
A moment.
“No. Looks like a shotgun round.”
“Any vitals?”
Another moment.
“No. Blew out his femoral. He’s gone.”
Endicott sat back in the comfy leather seat of the Cadillac and watched the video streaming on his iPhone. He was looking at Warren Smoles talking straight into the Fox News camera, going on in his usual style about what he was calling The Galleria Mall Incident. He had pointed out several times that he was calling it that because what had happened here was a lynching just like The Ox-Bow Incident.
Since most of the reporters crowding around him were barely into their thirties and the products of various elite Ivy League universities, with all the monumental cultural ignorance that entails, they didn’t have a freaking clue what the hell he was talking about. But they kept the cameras on him because he gave great video.
He was wearing a light gray suit over a shell-pink oxford shirt with a wide-spread English collar and a watered-silk tie in pale lavender. When he spoke, it was in the rounded and assured tones of a practiced orator, a device that, given the caliber of his audience, effectively obscured the fact that he was utterly and totally full of shit.
Endicott, who had personal experience of the man, watched with grim amusement as Smoles, who had absolutely zero actual knowledge of what had gone on inside the Bass Pro Shop, laid out the sequence of events that had resulted in the deaths of three innocent civilians and the grievous wounding of another at the hands of what he was calling “cowboy killer cops.” He listened to the narrative for a while and then turned the video off.
What he had gleaned from The Smoles Report was directly at odds with what he had been able to intercept on his police scanner, which was good enough to decipher the encrypted chatter between the Niceville PD and the EMT people working the site.
The Homecoming Page 26
