Matt hit the deck on instinct.
Cries and muffled sobs echoed all around him, where only moments before conversations and laughter had provided a counter to the Musak pouring over the loudspeaker.
That soft, jazzy beat made a bizarre counterpoint to the punctuation of repeated gunfire now.
Maylords was under siege.
His not to wonder why. His but to do or die . . . and people could have died already.
He’d been visiting the vignettes, looking for Janice, working his way back to the central entrance.
His cheek rested on salmon-colored plush carpeting. A testered Colonial-style bed loomed above him.
So did the darkness of a Las Vegas night outside the showroom window.
As he watched, the glass shattered like spun sugar. A celadon vase on the nearby dresser blossomed into flying pieces.
Temple. Where was she?
Matt elbow-crawled onto the central path of cool stone and lay there for a moment to listen.
Danny Dove’s commanding cry, “Hit the lights,” struck him with relief. That was the first line of defense. He bet cell phones were hitting 911 all over the store.
He didn’t carry one. Mr. Behind-the-Times. From now on he would, an urban guerrilla armed with technology instead of a personal firearm.
But . . . where was Temple?
He crawled over the glass-gritty floor, aware that she had last been called to the reception area.
“Stay down, people!” another voice ordered. Deeper and darker than Danny Dove’s, but no less commanding.
Temple took her role as public relations rep responsible for everything running smoothly like some updated quest in the Philip Marlowe school. Matt knew she wouldn’t be taking this attack lying down.
She’d respond to Danny Dove’s call with every theatrical instinct in her soul. She’d be trying to get to the lights, to shut them down, to end this ugly act and make the store into a dark enigma instead of an overlit shooting gallery.
He put his forearm over his eyes, both to see better against the glaring lighting system above the scene and to defray the bits of glass and food that were raining down in an unholy hail on them all.
He crawled past downed couples tangled like fallen mannequins in the vignettes, muttering into cell phones pulled from pockets and purses.
He glimpsed a glint of silver on the move as he neared the central area, low and erratic, but visible to him . . . and therefore visible to the shooter.
Matt pushed up into a crouch and went zigzagging through the empty rooms, past prone bodies hopefully only playing dead and dialing for their lives.
“The employee lounge,” someone bellowed. He recognized Janice’s voice, coming from far across the central space.
Lights. Employee lounge. At the back? He hadn’t seen it in the front, didn’t make sense in the front, and the bit of moving quicksilver had been heading deeper into the store. . . .
Matt dodged from ottoman to desk legs to bedskirt to decimated buffet table, aware of people lying everywhere.
He skittered like a beetle, edged like a roach.
The occasional gun report shattered something precious, and hopefully, not sentient.
The shots were interspersed with sobs and moans.
Who knew how many had been hit?
He could have been still facedown like most of them. Waiting for the nightmare to end. Except . . . he saw a bigger nightmare. A flash of silver and red suddenly splashed like well-veined shrimp across the entrance atrium.
Matt heard something scream at his heel, and pushed forward. Chips of shattered travertine spit into his calves.
He dove under the looming orange body of the Murano, eyeing the undercarriage, then crawled past and through, working back into the darker parts of the store. Into the interior shadows, where the light panel lay.
In the distance, he heard the wail of oncoming sirens, still far, far away.
A glimpse of ground-level silver fluttered like a startled dove past a Barcelona chair. Matt lunged after it, hearing a bullet ping off the chair’s stainless-steel frame.
The bastard was aiming . . . aiming at movement. At Temple.
He was outrunning the bullets, catching up, overtaking.
Matt dove for the only moving element ahead of him.
And . . . the lights went out.