CHAPTER SIX

The broken glass wasn’t from the front doors this time. It poured down from a light pod to one side of the store, over the coffee shop.

“I’d advise staying away from the doughnuts,” I murmured to Gina. I pulled her down, inside the O of the customer service counter.

At the front, Heck shouted out to the police, “DON’T GET ANY IDEAS ABOUT BUSTIN’ IN. I’ll TALK TO YOU WHEN I’M GOOD AND READY.”

This time Heck had taken the silencer off. He’d fired the shot as a warning to the police to stay back.

“When will he be good and ready?” Gina whispered back despairingly. In spite of the heat she was shivering.

I massaged my forehead. “That’s an interesting point. If Heck was planning to hunker down for a while, he wouldn’t have aimed at the coffee shop ceiling. Unless he’s into snacking on glass fragments, he’s just ruined the only food source around here. Which makes me think … ”

I paused. As a matter of fact it was hard to think with my head still pounding.

Gina rummaged in her purse and came up with a small container of Tylenol. “Here. This’ll make you feel better.”

“I get it. You cause and cure headaches.” I knocked back a couple, almost choking on them because they were so dry. Too bad I didn’t have a nice tall glass of lemonade to wash them down.

There were lots of too bads in life. Being taken hostage by a gunman was right up there.

I explained to Gina, “Heck must be pretty sure he’s gonna get out of here soon. Otherwise he would have aimed away from the food supply.”

Gina shook her head in frustration. Her hoop earrings bounced. “That doesn’t mean anything. Heck’s a nutter. He can’t reason things out. He’s barely in control of himself. Look what he did to Rick.”

The policewoman was answering Heck – if you could call what they were having a conversation – through her megaphone. “WE KNOW SOMEONE’S INJURED IN THERE. WE HAVE AMBULANCES STANDING BY TO – ”

“NOBODY’S INJURED,” Heck shouted back.

Well, that was true. If you were dead you weren’t injured anymore.

Heck yelled on, “WE CAN SETTLE THIS LIKE YOU SAY. WE’LL TALK … IN A WHILE. JUST LEMME THINK THINGS THROUGH.”

“What’s Heck up to?” I muttered. “Buying time won’t help him. Totally aside from robbery and hostage-taking, he’s just killed someone. And Rafferty’s is surrounded. There’s no way out.”

That phrase again – no way out.

For Heck, maybe.

But I was going to find a way out. There was too much waiting for me in life outside the store. Like my dream of becoming a professional actor. And maybe convincing Gina that I wasn’t a thief, after all.

And, I decided suddenly, being decent instead of surly to my stepdad, even if he was loud and boastful. He’d like that. My mom sure would.

Gina went on, “Heck isn’t rational. He must think he can shoot his way out, using Mr. Rafferty as a shield.”

“What a Wild-West mind you have, kid.” The pills were starting to take effect and I was feeling better. As in, the bashing in my head was now down to a dull roar. I managed a grin at her.

It must’ve been a wobbly one, because Gina looked anxious. “We better concentrate on getting you out of here and to a doctor.”

On getting me out – when she was just as much at risk. That made me feel better, too.

“But how to get out?” Gina then fretted, twisting one of her hoop earrings. “Heck would see us trying to sneak out the front.”

I listened for noise at the front of the store. Mr. Rafferty was whimpering. Possibly to shut the sound of it out, Heck was humming his off-key tune at maximum volume. Grating as it was, at least it let me know his location.

I asked, “What about the side? In a place this size, you’d think there’d be a side door.”

“I dunno.” She was near tears again. “It’s not like I pay attention to the layout of the place. I don’t even like working here. The hours are long and the customers get impatient cuz we’re understaffed. But I need the job to save up for college. Jon keeps saying that if I just wait … ”

She blinked her eyes clear of the tears and frowned. “What’s so funny?”

I was beaming at her. “What you just said about not knowing the layout. You reminded me of something.”

I pulled the folded-up store blueprints out of my back pocket.

Kneeling, we spread them out on the floor. “There’s a side door,” Gina said, landing a navy-nail-polished fingertip near the northwest corner of the plans. “Just past the cameras. I’d noticed a locked door at the back of the camera department before, but I didn’t think about it.”

Her eager expression sagged. “A locked door. Great.”

I wasn’t enthused about it, either. But, locked or not, this was our way out.

“What kind of lock was on the door, do you remember?” I asked.

“Um.” She frowned, trying to remember. “A doorknob lock.”

“That’s all? It can’t be an outside exit, then.” I leaned close to squint at the blueprints. The details were so small, and the printing so spidery, that my vision started bouncing around again.

I focused hard till the lines and squiggles settled back into place. “The door you’re talking about leads to some kind of control room,” I said.

Then I paused, remembering the sound I’d heard from the back of the camera department: Jon, shutting a door.

He’d been coming from the control room. He’d just finished shutting down Rafferty’s power.

If you accepted that he had the smarts to do that.

Where was Jon now? I scanned the ceiling. I didn’t see any shadows over the light pods. With luck, Jon was still prowling above the offices, at the back of the store. There, if he looked down, he wouldn’t see me.

With luck. Right. Of all the products at Rafferty’s, that particular one was in pretty scarce supply.

I shoved Jon out of my mind. On the blueprints, I pointed at the outside wall of the control room. “An emergency exit. If we could just get there … ”

“Through a locked door,” Gina reminded me dryly.

I waggled my eyebrows at her. “That’s where the Gina Manetas all-purpose axe will come in handy. We’ll chop our way through.”

“But Heck will hear,” Gina objected.

“So, we chop fast.” I twisted the end of a pretend mustache. “Everything is timing, m’dear; everything is timing.”

“Another acting quote?” she asked, half-amused, half-exasperated.

“You bet. From my all-wise drama teacher, Mr. Bunbury. For example, he says you can do as much with silences as with – ”

As with dialogue, I’d been about to say, but the real-life silence around us stopped me.

There were no sounds echoing to us from the front of the store. No whimpering by Mr. Rafferty; no humming from Heck.

The silence prickled on to my skin.

Gina started to speak. I pressed a finger to my lips, sssshhhhhhh.

I rose till I was eye level with the top of the customer-service counter. I looked around.

Heck was advancing through the CD department toward the cell phone display. Rifle raised, he stepped slowly and smoothly, a panther on the scent.

In planning our escape, we’d forgotten to whisper. Heck had heard our voices. He was coming for us.

A thought hit me like a punch in the guts: Heck’s not out of control. He’s not crazy. He figured out one or both of us would head for electronics.

I sank to the floor again. Afraid Gina would scream or start crying, I placed my hand over her mouth. “Heck’s twenty yards away,” I hissed. “We gotta crawl out of here. Follow me.”

Her eyes widened. She nodded.

We crept around a huge rectangular case of DVDs as Heck reached the cell-phone customer-service counter. He was grinning, and the nylon distorted his features grotesquely.

He pointed his rifle down over the counter.

We drew back behind the DVDs. Gina had turned a sickly shade of pale. She sat down, shut her eyes, and rested her head against a shelf holding some black-and-white DVDs. I noticed the title: These Desperate Hours. Pretty appropriate, considering. But I didn’t think she could take any more of my funnyman remarks right now.

“We have to move,” I whispered. “We have to get to that side door.”

Without opening her eyes, Gina shook her head. “I didn’t bring the axe.”

We had seconds to spare, if that. I gripped her hand till her eyes sprang open at the pain. “We gotta go. We can detour through hardware and grab another axe.”

Gina’s eyelids fluttered shut again. Had she fainted?

Despairingly I glanced behind me, to the aisles beyond the DVD department. Dozens of aisles, all providing shelter if I ran toward them now.

But leaving Gina here on her own was out.

“Gina,” I hissed.

Then, close by, from the other side of the DVD display, I heard the now-all-too-familiar off-key humming.

Heck was almost upon us.