But that's where it stayed-in the thought process. The impotence remained, compounding his anger. He turned toward the cash register, humiliated, presenting her with his back. "You fucking bastards."
The sound of the till springing open matched the electronic ding of someone crossing the threshold of the store's far entrance-the one near the hot dog machine behind the girl.
Despite it being summertime, the man entering had the hood of his sweatshirt pulled partly over his face.
They were a team.
Seeing his nightmare brought back to life threw Arnie into a second reversal. Yielding to fear and fury combined, he pulled his gun from under his shirt, swiveled to face the girl, who was looking over her shoulder at the man in the hood, and fired.
The explosion was huge, deafening Arnie, reverberating off the walls, dropping the girl like a pile of clothes to the floor, and sending the hooded man staggering back in alarm against the door behind him.
His hood slipped from his face as his head smacked against the glass, and Arnie, his gun now trained on him, his finger tight on the trigger, saw a wide-eyed, pimply teenager he knew well from past transactions.
They stared at each other for a long, very quiet moment before the teenager finally managed to stammer, "Oh, shit. Please don't."
Arnie saw him raise his empty hands in surrender and finally lowered the gun, the realization of what he'd just done settling on him like a fog.
Crumpled and silent on the floor, the girl began leaking a dark puddle of blood.
* * *
Joe Gunther didn't bother showing his badge to the Brattleboro patrolman guarding the convenience store entrance. They knew one another. Gunther had once been his superior.
"Hey, Larry. Who's running this?"
"The detective's inside. How'd you hear about it? We barely got here."
Gunther smiled. "Scanner. Hard to break old habits."
The patrolman opened the door for him, and Gunther stepped from a cool summer darkness filled with flashing red and blue strobes into the store's harsh fluorescent lighting, suggestive of an operating room.
Or a morgue.
A tall young man with an oddly hesitant manner rose from behind the counter. His face broke into a broad smile as he recognized the new arrival.
"Lieutenant. Good to see you. God, it's been a while. I didn't think the VBI went in for things like this."
He stuck out a hand, realized it was sheathed in a latex glove, and began struggling to remove it.
Joe Gunther quickly grasped him by the forearm in greeting. "It's okay, Ron. It's not worth the hassle to put it back on."
He didn't bother correcting the other man on his outdated rank. Gunther hadn't been a lieutenant in several years. It was "Special Agent" now, a burdensome title he still found absurd, but one that the political birth mothers of the new Vermont Bureau of Investigation had chosen in a typical effort to impose profundity where it could only be earned over time. "And I'm not here officially-just offering help if it's needed. You okay with my dropping by?"
Ron Klesczewski shook his head in amazement. "You kidding? Just like old times. Not that we need help. This is more like the inevitable finally happening."
"I just heard it was a shooting."
Klesczewski invited Gunther to look over the far edge of the counter at the wide pool of drying blood now spread from one edge of the narrow space to the other. It was smeared and covered with lug-soled boot prints, he presumed from the ambulance crew he'd also heard summoned on the scanner. If not for the slaughterhouse color, it might have looked like the aftermath of a playful struggle in a mud bath.
"Storekeeper shot a nineteen-year-old woman. She's still alive-barely. He used a.357. Real cannon. I don't think he had any idea what he was doing."
Gunther tilted his chin toward a carving knife lying at the edge of the crimson mess. "That hers?"
Klesczewski nodded and glanced at the small notepad in his hand. "Arnold Weller's the owner. He says he's been robbed twice recently, once at gunpoint, once by a guy with a hammer. He bought the gun out of frustration. Said he wouldn't have shot her if he hadn't thought the other guy was involved, but I'm not so sure."
Gunther looked at him briefly without comment. Klesczewski answered the implied question. "Some teenage kid walked in just as these two were facing off. He had his sweatshirt hood down low over his face-it's a fad right now, plus it's a little on the cool side. Arnie swore he thought he was a bad guy, why, I don't know."
"The kid was clueless?" Gunther asked.
"Oh, yeah. Went to the hospital, too. He could barely talk, he was so shaken up. Like I said, the whole thing was just waiting to happen-more and more dopers doing more and more rip-offs. Storekeepers getting cranked by the week. Matter of time before somebody killed somebody. Maybe this one was itching for an opportunity, maybe he was just frazzled to the limit."
Despite the nature of the conversation, Gunther suppressed a smile at his young colleague's seasoned attitude. Ron Klesczewski had been a fresh-faced detective when Gunther had run the Brattleboro squad a few years back. He'd been given command of it upon Joe's departure only because Gunther had taken the most obvious successor along with him to his new job. A natural with paperwork and computers, Klesczewski had been slow gaining self-confidence otherwise, although things had obviously improved now that he was top dog. Gunther's amusement was in adjusting the new to his memories of the old.
"She was on drugs?" he asked.
Klesczewski shrugged. "Blood tests'll probably tell us before she will-assuming she survives. But she has the look, all the way down to the fresh track marks in her arm."
Gunther gazed once more at the gore covering the linoleum behind the counter-a body's lifeblood diluted with the root cause of its own destruction. Ron Klesczewski was perfectly correct about the inevitability of Brattleboro's increasing dilemma, but he could just as easily have extended it to include the entire state. While bent on pushing the same old romantic, fuzzy image of cows and maple syrup and grizzled farmers muttering, "Ah-yup," Vermont was in fact facing a heroin epidemic. Almost one hundred fatal overdoses had been racked up in the past ten years, and countless more reversed in hospitals and ambulances. Small potatoes compared to Boston or New York, but not so negligible on a per capita basis, in a state of a half million residents. And it was climbing fast. The state police drug task force, which used to count heroin busts in the single digits five years back, was now spending 50 percent of its time on these cases alone.
"What's her name?" he asked, almost as an afterthought.
Klesczewski again consulted his notes. "Laurie Davis."
Gunther became very still, catching his younger colleague's attention.
"You okay? You know her?"
"She a blonde?" Gunther asked.
Klesczewski began rummaging around in a box he'd placed on the counter. "Hang on. I think I can do better than that."
He extracted a plastic evidence envelope with a driver's license captured within it. Gunther held it at an angle under the bleak lighting to better see the small photo.
"And this was definitely her?" he asked.
Klesczewski nodded. "She's got more meat on her there. I have crime scene photos in the digital camera if you don't mind the small screen."
Gunther shook his head and returned the envelope to him, feeling tired and mournful. "Doesn't matter. I know her."
* * *
Two hours later, Joe was staring at the coffee machine in a hallway off the waiting room at Brattleboro's Memorial Hospital, wondering if more coffee at this time of night would qualify as suicide by insomnia.
"Don't do it," came a woman's voice from behind him, as if his thoughts had been blinking on and off above his head.