When they got closer, Jon was able to take a good look at one of the screens, and could tell by the text at the bottom that the public announcement by the Mayor and Gareth Render was about to be broadcast. A room with glass walls that looked vaguely familiar to Jon was filled with reporters and cameras, as they waited for the two power brokers to step up to the currently empty podium.
“Isn’t that—?” said a man who greeted Hegde and Dixon, and pointed at Jon.
“Yes,” Hegde answered, “this is Detective Phillips, and he is voluntarily in our custody. Jon, this is one of our men, Malachi Croft. What’s going on, Mal?”
“Well,” the man said nervously, “we were all told just before the sun came out, by the Mayor’s office, to relax because the Dayfall scare was all a hoax, the science was bogus, etc. But in the last hour we’ve been getting some reports from around the city about unrest and violence, and then we got the word to evacuate, so everyone out here was really tense for a while. It was really weird, and I have to admit I got a little scared. But then the tension seemed to ease a bit when the press conference came on…. Now everyone here’s preoccupied with that.”
He gestured in the direction of the screen at the south end of the park, toward which he was facing, and Jon and the others turned to look. The Mayor and Render hadn’t started talking yet, but from some more of the words at the bottom of the screen Jon was able to tell why the room seemed familiar to him. It was the big living room in Render’s condo at the top of One Madison, where Jon and Halladay had visited the Gotham Security boss. Jon guessed that the Mayor, who was completely in the driver’s seat right now, had chosen that location for the announcement because of the threat to the Flatiron, but also probably to make a statement and stick it to Render by humbling him in his own residence.
Jon looked beyond the top left side of the big screen at the very tall and thin skyscraper itself, and noticed that the sun was just to its left, and a little more than halfway up its height. The skinny shadow of One Madison stretched across the street running in front of it and the southern tip of the park. But because there were no other very tall buildings immediately behind it, and because there weren’t as many trees in the park as there had once been, most of the police and civilians in the center of it were standing in direct sunlight.
Jon was accustomed to seeing the sun, of course, because the total darkness of nuclear night had not reached as far as his home area in Pennsylvania. But he had to admit, as he looked around at the crowd, and down at his own slightly shaking hands, that there did seem to be something weird going on in the atmosphere. There could have been tension in the crowd merely from the evacuation threat, and in him because of the handcuffs and being around so many cops, but the feeling didn’t seem to be that easily explained. And maybe there would have been more fear and panic happening if there weren’t so many police there, making people feel safe.
Jon looked back at the screen and saw that Mayor King was now behind the small lecture stand that had been placed in front of the glass wall in the condo. Gareth Render took up a spot just behind her and to her left, looking more like a subservient minion than the proud man who had wanted to replace her. And behind both of them was the clock tower of the MetLife Building, shining with its first sunlight in more than ten years.
The Mayor wasted no time, but began speaking directly about how Render had agreed to back out of the referendum and why there was no reason to fear Dayfall. The apocalyptic theories about it had been proven to be false, she said, and there had already been several hours of daylight this morning without incident.
“Not what I’m hearing,” Croft commented to all three of them, holding up his radio. Jon wondered if the Mayor didn’t know about the reports yet, or was simply ignoring or minimizing them.
But no one would find out, at least not from her, because at that moment several loud cracks and the shattering of glass could be heard both from the TV screen and from the tops of the buildings behind it. On the screen Jon could see the Mayor going down in a spray of blood, the transparent wall behind her breached by several bullets. Then he looked up and could see that the shattered glass was on the side of the penthouse that faced the MetLife tower, so the shots had probably come from the archways just under the big clock.
A loud wave of shocked gasps surged through the crowd in the park, and the tension suddenly became much more palpable than before. But no one moved yet, because on the TV screen Gareth Render could now be seen standing upright in front of all the panicked members of the press, who were pressed against the floor or clinging to one another in an effort to protect themselves.
Jon immediately thought, as did many of the others watching, that the Gotham boss had brazenly ordered the Mayor’s assassination, and was now about to declare himself the Dictator of Manhattan.
But then Jon noticed that the look on Render’s face was not triumph or madness, but bewilderment. The graying older man turned around to face the tower from which the sniper’s rounds had come, and spread his hands as if say, Why?
Then half his head disappeared as several more shots rang out, and his big body toppled to the floor next to the Mayor’s.
And then all hell broke loose in the park, and in the rest of the city.
32
More shocked gasps from the civilians quickly turned into panic as it now seemed that no one could keep them safe. Some clutched at and huddled with their loved ones, others impulsively ran for the shelter of shade or a building, and still others started demanding explanations or help from the police in the Square.
Many of the cops instinctively pulled out their sidearms and started scanning the park, especially when civilians approached them. Jon noticed a few of them fixing their eyes on him and moving in his direction. He looked at Hegde and Dixon in a plea for his own protection, holding his cuffed hands out in front of him. But the normally laid back, even lackadaisical pair of detectives had their own guns lifted halfway and pointed in Jon’s direction. And they both had a wild-eyed look that Jon had never seen on their faces before.
“What did you do?!” Dixon shouted at him.
“Me? What?!” Jon shouted back, waving his cuffed hands, which were shaking a lot more now. “It’s Gant! He obviously he didn’t want to be sidelined, or leave the city. Despite the best efforts of his old friend to protect him. He’s the villain here…. We need to find him and take him in!”
As he blurted this out, Jon watched as the two or three cops who had recognized him and moved in his direction had trouble navigating the panicked crowd that surrounded them. One of them was confronted by an angry couple and had to deal with them, and another was knocked off his feet by a family of three, holding hands and frantically trying to find their other child. A third cop managed to make it to their little group, and now stood in a tense pose behind Jon with his gun pointed at Jon’s back.
“Whoa, hold on,” the officer named Malachi Croft said, stepping closer to Jon with his hands up and his gun still in its holster. He seemed to be a lot more rational than the others, and confirmed it when he said, “Put those away and let’s talk.”
A gunshot suddenly rang out not far from them, all the cops around Jon ducked, and the noise and chaos multiplied intensely in the park.