Wyatt shook a cigarette from the pack. He closed the door, heard his heart thumping against the background silence of an empty room. His painting supplies were on the dresser. He felt foolish hiding his smoking like a teenager. Told himself every night as he lay sleepless in bed: Tomorrow you quit. A whiff of betrayal followed each puff because Opal was so easy to fool. Prior to his relapse, he’d kicked the habit for almost two decades. He had every reason to.
After the shooting.
Wyatt had taken a bullet in his lung. A broken dagger of glass hung in his eye. That hadn’t been the worst of it.
Opal. Opal, his pregnant wife, spread out and dying on the restaurant floor. He saw her blood. The blue and white waitress’s uniform dyed red. Blood on her belly. A hole. Another wound creased her head.
God in Heaven, not Opal.
The shooting wiped out reality. Extreme violence plays tricks on the mind. Physical changes spur psychological alterations. You might experience the event like a movie projected in a dream. Feel yourself existing in and out of the picture. You semidetach, begin to float. Or maybe you freeze like any mammal caught under a claw on the forest floor. Laugh or whimper. Hold your breath and bite down on nothing. This was no movie. You weren’t munching
popcorn and sucking on a Coke in a theater. You were about to die.
Wyatt squatted between two booths.
He could reach out and touch his wife’s leg.
He did. As he found his voice, he whispered her name. She wasn’t responding. She lay in the open. He couldn’t risk dragging her body through a slick of blood to bring her closer. He didn’t want to draw the shooter’s attention.
Bang. Bang. Bang. The guy wearing the fatigues made his way around the lunch counter. Shouts of agony accompanied him.
Screams. Voices pleaded for mercy and found none.
At first, Wyatt thought there were two of them. Two men with guns opening fire on the lunchtime diners. He’d seen them enter the restaurant together. He hadn’t been paying any particular attention. They were a blur moving through the door as he glanced up. Two men walked in side by side. The taller one wore a black raincoat that swept the floor. He entered and turned. Wyatt saw his back. The other was dressed in full fatigues and a military cap with a squared bill, pulled low. He stayed put. The door closed behind them.
Wyatt didn’t spot any weapons.
He didn’t feel any quiver of fear snake up his spine.
He’d been too excited by his own news, stopping in to tell Opal the crib was finished. He even snapped a Polaroid of it. Crib in the foreground, his workbench behind, and sawdust scattered over the garage floor. Opal had been fretting. If the baby came early, and the crib wasn’t ready, then what? Less than a month, she said. Babies don’t follow calendars. So he brought the picture to show her he made the deadline. They would be prepared.
Opal was the first person shot. One second she was smiling and waving the photo around. Calling to the other waitresses working that day. Saying the word “beautiful.” Tears bubbled in the corners of her eyes. The next second she fell to the floor at Wyatt’s feet.
The shooters didn’t say anything. There was a quick burst of activity once people realized what was happening. Then things settled down. And the killers began their work in earnest.
Wyatt resisted the urge to rush them.
The Pie Stop restaurant was shaped like a U. The kitchen was located in the middle. After the killers hit Opal with the opening volley of gunfire, they shifted to the other side of the restaurant, the opposite arm of the U.
From the sound of the reports, only one man was doing the shooting.
If there were two of them, the other might be providing cover. Watching and waiting to see if any heroes decided to show themselves.
Wyatt popped his head up over the edge of a bench.
Fatigues. A rifle barrel swinging from table to table. It looked like a Ruger Mini-14 Ranch Rifle. The magazine was pretty long. Wyatt guessed there might be twenty rounds in there, or more. A lot of killing.
The guy disappeared beyond the kitchen.
Loud pops.
Wyatt crabbed his way forward.
Brass cartridges littered the floor.
The tall man must have had the rifle under his raincoat. But now the guy wearing fatigues was using it.
Where was the tall man? Where was Raincoat?
Wyatt crawled over Opal. He wanted to stay there and shield her. But he couldn’t do that.
The gunmen were his responsibility.
Wyatt knew he had to deal with this deadly situation quickly, decisively. He had to be smart, too. If he stood up and died, then he wasn’t going to help anyone. He was here to defend the townspeople. Off-duty, but armed. He was dressed in jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, and a windbreaker. Yet everyone living in town knew Wyatt was a local cop.
The strangers weren’t expecting him.
The holster was clipped in the small of his back. He drew his weapon.
Innocent people crouched on the floor of the Pie Stop, crying and quaking, trying to flatten their bodies against puddles of drying rainwater and spilled plates of food. Wyatt was their best chance. He couldn’t return fire until he had a better idea of where the two killers were. In the pauses between shots, he heard the rain slashing at the sides of the building. The minute he started shooting back, everything would change. He needed that change to be for the better. He didn’t want to risk making a bad shot, launching a ricochet, or nailing a bystander who had worked up the courage to break for the door.
Bang. Bang.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.
No more time to think. He had to act.
He got an idea.
Wyatt stood in a crouch. He put a bead on the ceiling tiles around the U’s bend. Aiming high. Following the reports of the rifle. Maybe he could flush out Raincoat. Maybe Fatigues would get nervous and dart around the corner. There was no sense in firing repeatedly until he had a clear target. His off-duty .38 held six rounds. He didn’t want to be overeager and find himself reloading. Given the situation, reloading was a joke. Six shots and the game would end. He’d be dead or alive. Victim or hero. The Ruger had more mistakes in its clip than he did in his revolver’s chambers. And the likelihood that Fatigues and Raincoat were carrying other weapons was high. Wyatt was outgunned. No question. But that didn’t mean he was outsmarted.
He fired once.
A ceiling tile jumped its frame. Punched loose. It dangled, and then fell.
That did it.
Fatigues moved around the cash register. The glass case filled with chewing gum and breath mints. The chalkboard marked with the daily specials. The pie carousel twirling its array of sweet desserts. Wyatt saw khaki-clad shoulders. A head without a face,
a hat tight above a patch of shaved skin. Fatigues was walking backward. Killing as he went. He knew trouble had surfaced. But he hadn’t decided what position to take.
Wyatt aimed between his shoulder blades.
“Police! Put the gun down!”
Shoulders started to swivel. The rifle barrel came around.
Wyatt pulled the trigger.
He hit Fatigues high on the right side of his twisted torso. The bullet ripped into shoulder meat. The rifle dropped. Fatigues ducked. Blood dripped down the pie carousel. Wyatt heard the rifle stock clatter to the floor. A grunt of pain, then a curse.
Where was Raincoat?
Wyatt zigzagged, booth to booth. He made up ten feet. Twenty.
“Stay down! Everybody stay down! Police!”
Two family-sized tables separated Wyatt and the killer. The occupants of those tables scurried away. Wyatt peered through a forest of chair legs.
Fatigues lay on his back, fumbling with his belt. He was attempting to draw another weapon, an automatic handgun, but he couldn’t slide it from his waistband. He suffered damage. The hand digging at his belt was trembling, awash with blood.
“Get your hands up! Hands up!”
The killer ignored him.
Wyatt shot him in the knee.
Fatigues rolled away.
Wyatt stood.
His eyes flicked. Left, right. From the front of the restaurant he had a clear view down both arms of the U.
No Raincoat.
Maybe Raincoat hadn’t been with Fatigues at all. Spree shooters typically acted alone. A volcanic personality snapped and wanted revenge. They craved personal apocalypse. Maybe that’s what happened here. Maybe Raincoat was just another unlucky person who picked the wrong place to eat lunch today.
Wyatt edged closer.
Fatigues lying facedown. His arms tucked under him.
“Get your hands up over your head or I will shoot you!”
The left arm came up. The right arm jerked. Bloodstains spread a crimson map on the killer’s jacket. He moaned.
“I can’t—”
“Turn over!”
Nothing.
Wyatt trained his weapon on the back of the guy’s head.
He stuck the tip of his boot under the man’s hipbone, and flipped the stranger over.
This man was no stranger.
Jesse Genz .
Jesse Genz, who gave Wyatt the chickenpox when they were in fifth grade together at Andrew Jackson Elementary. Jesse, who shot hoops with him under a summer moon. Same time, same place, alright ?—the park on Moody Street, down by the river. Jesse would bring the ball. There were no houses down there, just an abundance of much-needed privacy the teenagers craved. They played one-on-one despite the swarms of mosquitoes that descended each night. They talked about girls in their class. They listened to the hypnotic swish-snap of the chain nets. And to each other’s stories.
Jesse.
Who’d left town after the senior prom and joined the army. Who ran into bad times, got an early discharge, and lived, his family said, in sunny California. Rumor was he returned to town last month, though nobody ever saw him. Jesse’s tan belied the messy March weather. His face had thinned. It shrunk to his skull. The flesh circling his eyes looked softly rotten. But the eyes were the same old Jesse. He smiled up at Wyatt.
“You ruined it, friend.”
Before Wyatt could ask what he meant.. .
He felt a hard thump in the back. The hit shoved him forward. Clubbed him to his knees and stole his breath. He and Jesse were face-to-face.
“Uh-oh,” Jesse said. Mockingly, the smile split his mouth wider.
Shot. Wyatt had been shot in the back.
The second man. Raincoat. Loose in the restaurant. Where was he?
\
Wyatt had no time to look.
There was a metal ring on Jesse’s right hand—Jesse was spinning it, around and around. Only it wasn’t really a ring at all. It was a grenade pin.
“Boom,” Jesse said. He balled up his fist and snapped it open, his fingers rigid, shaky. Blood turned his teeth pink. He looked like a man without a sane thought in his head. Mad circuses frolicked behind those eyes.
He must’ve had the hand grenade hooked to his belt.
Wyatt didn’t see the explosive. There hadn’t been any time to search.
He dived for the only cover he could find—the pie carousel.
The bomb went off.
His body rode a wave of heat and noise.
Wyatt felt stinging all over his face.
He was deaf. He was blind. His baby was dead. His wife was dead.
He had one question for Jesse Genz. One he would never hear answered.
“Why?”
Wyatt had always hated hospitals. The smells, the human noise, the long aqua-colored hallways ... now they had become a comfort zone for him. His wife and child were alive down one of those long hallways. Opal rested in a coma. The docs were hopeful. Her brain bleed had stopped. The swelling subsided. The emergency C-section went better than expected.
His son was hungry and crying. Wyatt held him through his breakfast bottle time, and then for a while after. A nurse returned the baby to the nursery.
Wyatt was alone and thinking.
A question bothered him.
He closed his good gray eye. He had a plastic shield and bandages taped to the other half of his face. Scabs furrowed his cheeks. They’d informed him about the extent of his injuries, how there was no saving his eye; enucleation was the medical term— removal of the eyeball. They cleaned the glass out. The socket had to heal; then in a few weeks, they’d take an impression. They would paint his prosthetic eye to match the good one. It would appear almost normal.
The question nagged.
He popped the morphine trigger looped around his bedrail. The painkiller quieted everything. The trees outside his hospital window went from bare branches to leafy green lushness as they waved at him. It seemed to happen slowly and quickly, like time- lapse photography. He could watch it all day.
The question didn’t go away.
It dropped to a murmur.
On his discharge day, they gave Wyatt an eye patch.
Opal was conscious but weak. Her eyelids fluttered. She’d squeeze his hand if he squeezed first. And if he asked her a question, she’d whisper a word or two in response. Then she’d fade. She saved her energy for the baby. Soon they would be home with him. And she would recover. Everyone was so confident.
Wyatt sat with his family until it was time to go.
He was being discharged today.
An aide pushed his wheelchair to the exit. As soon as they reached the automatic doors, he stood on his feet and thanked her.
Outside again.
He’d never spent such a long period of time confined indoors.
Sweat cooled his skin.
He was surprised how big the hospital’s parking area looked once he got out there. The rows of cars merged into an undulating metallic mass. Far away, the highway and its moving traffic trembled. It made him dizzy.
His depth perception was going to be screwed up. They told him it would take time to adjust. Remember, Wyatt, your vision is halved. On the sidewalk, first thing: He looked up to Opal’s window. He shaded his eye from the glare. Was the world always this bright? He blinked until the involuntary tears stopped and he found the correct window.
Of course, no one was looking down.
He’d come back tomorrow.
It had rained recently. The spring air tasted of earth. It was good to feel the sun. He was a young man of twenty-three. He wasn’t supposed to drive in his condition, but his car was still parked over at the Pie Stop. He walked away from the hospital.
The restaurant was closed. Blinds drawn. Police tape marked an X across the doors. He unlocked his car.
Got in.
The interior was stale. A burn flared inside his stitched chest. The bullet, they said, nicked a back rib, punctured his lung, and passed under his rib cage and cleanly through. With so much lead flying around, it was hard to tell when Jesse shot him. Wyatt insisted Jesse didn’t shoot him.
It was the second man.
No, no, he was wrong. One gun. One gunman. The evidence said so. All the slugs they recovered matched either Jesse’s rifle or Wyatt’s revolver.
He was short of breath.
Hadn’t smoked a cigarette in weeks.
He wanted one now. He found a Marlboro pack on the dash. Leaning to light one, he spotted himself in the rearview mirror. Welts flecked his face and throat where glass from the exploded carousel tore into him. They squirmed like pink worms as he sucked in smoke. He rolled down the window and tossed the cigarette. He didn’t start the engine. Just sat there for a while, thinking about how much his life had changed since he last climbed from behind that wheel.
So who was Raincoat?
Where did he go? How come I’m the only one who saw him? He sobbed.
Twenty years without answers.
Sometimes his missing eye ached. The socket became sensitive in cold weather. Typical morning along the Canadian border—the room was frigid. He’d already stripped the twin beds, put plastic over them, and wrapped an old beach towel around the wall- mounted television. Wyatt crushed out his cigarette in an ashtray balanced on the end of one bed. Green letters etched the glass.
RENDEZVO US MO TEL
Under the ashes, two stylized ducks drifted in a pond. A third flew off.
He went to work on the wall.