He pulls the trigger.
This time the gun bucks in his hands and the gunshot is much quieter, almost only a fraction of the first, or at least it seems that way because his ears are still ringing from the first shot, and maybe it’s quieter anyway because it’s a different type of bullet. The barrel pulls up into the drop cloth and pulls it up off the ground. With the world reacting below him, he again spends a second determining what has gone wrong, and quickly decides nothing has, that he’s lost balance because of the platform he’s lying on.
He repositions the gun and sees Melissa hasn’t been hit. He has one shot left. Her or Joe. Well, Joe’s already been hit, and if luck is on Raphael’s side and not on Joe’s, then that fucker is going to bleed to death in the parking lot. So he chooses Melissa. He pulls the trigger in the exact same way he pulled the damn thing all those times out where he buried the lawyers and shot the shit out of defenseless tin cans, and this time the gun bucks so wildly it’s wrenched from his hands. He hears his finger break. Feels it even more. He rolls off the bench and hits the floor, his shoulder taking the impact.
He doesn’t understand . . .
And he’s out of time now. And out of bullets.
He gets to his feet. He’s already been here longer than he should have. A look out the gap in the drop cloth shows a cop helping Melissa and Joe toward the ambulance and Schroder bursting through the back door into the parking lot. He doesn’t know how much time has gone. Fifteen seconds, maybe. Too long, definitely.
He doesn’t bother putting the gun back into the ceiling. He peels the latex gloves off and it hurts his finger like crazy. He stuffs them into his pocket. He pulls off the earmuffs and tosses them onto the floor, then realizes that’s stupid, that his fingerprints are going to be on them. Fuck. He’s pulled his gloves off too early. Has he touched any of this stuff without gloves? Maybe. When he assembled the gun. When he fired it the other day. When he came here Saturday night. Was he wearing gloves then? He thinks he was, but suddenly he’s not so sure.
He doesn’t have time to wipe down the gun. He looks around. Looks at the paint. Looks at the gun. It’ll work. He pulls his gloves back on, then twenty seconds later he’s heading down the stairs.
Chapter Sixty-Two
All hell is breaking loose.
Joe Middleton is on the ground. There’s blood over the front of him. His blood. He’s writhing in agony. Kent has taken cover behind Schroder’s car. Two of the armed officers have also taken cover behind different cars. They’re hunkered down trying to figure out where they’re being shot from and by how many people. One of them is talking quickly into a radio. A paramedic starts doing her best to drag Joe out of the line of fire and toward the ambulance. The security guard is staying low, making his way back toward the courthouse. People in the street are shouting and ducking down and covering their heads with their arms and placards, no more two, four, six, eight from anybody.
Schroder spends two seconds taking it all in. The way everybody is hiding tells him the direction the gunfire is coming from. There’s an office building across the road. He looks up and sees an open window with a curtain behind it. He stays low and moves over to his car and squats down next to Kent.
“What the—” he says.
“One shot,” she says, holding a pistol in her hands. “Office building over the road. I saw muzzle fire. Middleton is down.”
“Why was he back out—”
“Doesn’t matter right now,” she says. “All that matters is some fucker is shooting at us.”
“At us? Or at him?” he asks.
“Why don’t you put your head up and find out?”
“If it’s only the one shot then it suggests it’s not us being shot at,” he says, but even so, rather than putting his head up, he leans down and looks under the car. The paramedic is still dragging Joe toward the ambulance. She’s the only one in the open. He can see her feet and legs and her arms and he has a view of the top of her head as she angles down to pull Joe along. He doesn’t know why the hell she would risk her life for Joe, then decides she can’t know who it is she’s trying to save. Or perhaps she’s running on instinct. It’s her nature to save people. Either way, she’s making a huge mistake.
“She’s going to get herself killed,” Schroder says.
“Who?” Kent asks. “The paramedic?”
“Yeah.”
Kent lifts her head and looks through the windows of the car. “What the fuck is she doing?”
“I’ll get her,” Schroder says.
“The hell you will,” Kent says, and grabs his tie and pulls him back down. “You’re a sitting duck if you go out there. I’ll go. At least I’m wearing a vest.”
She starts to get up. Just then Jack runs across the parking lot. He puts his arm around the paramedic to pull her into cover, but she doesn’t let go of Joe, and Jack ends up dragging them both toward the ambulance.
“We need to get into that building,” Schroder says.
“No,” Kent says. “You stay here. Backup is—” The ambulance starts up. The sirens come on. “That’s one fearless paramedic,” Kent says, without looking up. It speeds toward the gate, which is still closed, but doesn’t slow down.
Schroder pokes his head up. Sees the paramedic through the side window. Sees her face. Sees the ambulance heading for the fence. Sees that the people on the street can see what’s about to happen and are diving out of the way.
“Oh fuck,” he says.
“What is it?”
He stands up, but nobody takes a shot at him. That’s because the shooting has stopped.
“That was Melissa,” he says. “The driver, it was Melissa. Come on,” he says, climbing into his car, “let’s go.”
Chapter Sixty-Three
The ambulance crashes through the fence and the impact jars through my body. It’s been a few days of hell, with vomiting and shitting and getting banged-up knees, and now I’ve been shot and now I’m in an ambulance that’s probably going to tip over or crash into a truck.
I roll toward the left wall as Melissa turns right. The pain is the second worst pain I’ve ever felt. It feels like somebody has punched their fist into my chest and clutched their fingers around whatever they could find and yanked it out, then set fire to what was left. The ambulance is swerving all over the road. Stuff is falling off the shelves. I’m lying on the floor in blood and surrounded by all the things that can help me, but I don’t know how to use any of them. There’s a dead woman by my feet. She’s half covered by a sheet, and the half exposed shows she’s wearing the same uniform Melissa is wearing, and the dead woman is actually covering what appears to be another dead person—this one a man, and the man is mostly naked. The woman has one arm and one leg flopping against the floor.
The ambulance straightens and there are thuds as it bounces into people. There’s lots of screaming and yelling and it feels like I’m slap-bang in the middle of an action movie. Melissa is talking to herself, telling people to get the hell out of the way, people who can’t hear her, and she has to keep swerving and tapping her foot on the brake. She has the sirens on, but we’re not traveling that fast.
When I try to sit up I can’t. I know I’ve been shot, but it’s a hard concept to grab hold of. Shot? I’ve never been shot before—but of course that’s not true. I shot myself a year ago, though that wasn’t really being shot—that was having my face plowed by a bullet. Shot? Not compared to this.
I give sitting up another go, and this attempt is better than the first, and I can see out the front window. I put my hand over the wound, then study the blood on the palm of my hand, then press it back to my shoulder. I want to say something to Melissa, but I don’t know what. Plus she’s focusing on driving. Focusing hard. Some people have dropped their signs and some of those signs she runs over, they crunch under the wheels like bones in a dog. A leprechaun bounces off the side of the ambulance, so do two zombies and one Marilyn Monroe. They fall into the distance, dazed and confused—all of them targets for whoever is going to follow us. I have no idea why people are dressed the way they are. I glance to our right as we go through the intersection, and I can see the front of the courthouse and the decoy cars from this morning. They’re locked in by the swarming people, angry people rocking the cars and banging their fists on the windows because word hasn’t gotten to them that I’m not in there. Only these people are dressed like normal people, they’re in jeans and shirts and dresses and jackets—none of them with masks or Hollywood outfits, but many of them carrying signs. The armed officers can’t move. They can’t open fire. No doubt they want to climb onto the roofs of their cars and spray bullets into the air—or perhaps they’re even angry enough to spray them into the crowd so they can part it like the Red Sea so they can follow us. In which case they ought to ask the guy dressed as Moses who is carrying two large old-model iPads made out of cardboard, each the size of a torso. On each tablet are the commandments, only they’ve been modified and I have time to read just Thou shall rock out with thy cock out before a guy dressed in a cowboy outfit complete with gorilla mask appears from the sea of people, jumps onto him, and they both disappear below the tide line.