Gurney pulled out his Beretta and fired.
Chapter 61. Perfect Chaos
After the pistol’s sharp report, as the slight black-clad figure fell to the ground, the first sound Gurney was aware of was Madeleine’s cry of anguish.
She was standing no more than twenty feet away, evidently on her way back from the corrals. Her expression reflected not only the natural shock of witnessing a shooting, but the dreadful incomprehensibility of her husband being the shooter and the victim being, to all appearances, a child. Hand to her mouth, she seemed frozen in place, as if the effort to make sense of what she was seeing occupied her so completely that no motion was possible.
Other people on the concourse were in a state of confusion, some backing away, some angling for a better view, asking one another what had happened.
Shouting “Police!” several times, Gurney pulled out his wallet and flipped it open with his free hand, raising it over his head to display his NYPD credentials and reduce the possibility of an armed citizen intervening.
As he was approaching the body on the ground to confirm the neutralization of any danger and to check vital signs, a harsh voice behind him broke through the anxious jabbering of the onlookers. “Hold it right there!”
He stopped immediately. That tone was one he’d heard too many times on the job—a brittle layer of anger enclosing a jittery attitude. The safest path was to do absolutely nothing except comply with all instructions quickly and accurately.
An obvious cop in plain clothes came up on Gurney’s right side, gripped his right forearm tightly, and removed the pistol from his hand. At the same time, someone behind him took the wallet from his raised left hand.
A few moments later, presumably after examining the ID, the edgy voice announced, “Goddamn—the man we’ve been looking for.” Gurney recognized it now as the voice of the uniformed cop moonlighting in the fair security operation.
He walked around in front of Gurney, looked at him, looked down at the body on the ground, looked back at Gurney. “What the hell is this? You shot this kid?”
“He’s not a kid. He’s the fugitive I told you about at the gate.” He was speaking loudly and clearly, wanting as many witnesses to his description of the situation as possible. “You better check his vitals. The wound should be between the right shoulder and right pleural cavity. Have the EMT check ASAP for arterial bleeding.”
“Who the fuck are you?” The cop looked down at the body again. Bewilderment was creeping into his hostility without diminishing it. “He’s a kid. No weapon. Why’d you shoot him?”
“He’s not a kid. His name is Petros Panikos. You need to contact BCI in Sasparilla and FBI Regional in Albany. He was the hit man in the Carl Spalter murder.”
“Hit man? Him? You fucking kidding me? Why’d you shoot him?”
Gurney gave him the only acceptable legal answer. It also happened to be true. “Because I believed my life was in imminent danger.”
“From who? From what?”
“If you take his hands out of his pockets, you’ll find a weapon in one of them.”
“Is that a fact?” He looked around for the plainclothes guy, who seemed to be concluding a triage dispute with someone on his walkie-talkie. “Dwayne? Hey, Dwayne! You want to pull the boy’s hands out of his pockets? So we can see what he’s got? Man here says you’re gonna find a gun.”
Dwayne said a few final words into the walkie-talkie, clipped it back on his belt. “Yes, sir. No problem.” He knelt by the body. Black Hoodie’s eyes were still open. He appeared to be conscious. “You got a gun, boy?”
There was no response.
“We don’t want nobody to get hurt now, right? So I’m just going to check here, see if maybe you have a gun here you might’ve forgot.” As he patted the front pocket area of the thick black sweatshirt, he frowned. “Feels like you might have something in there, boy. You want to tell me what it is, so nobody gets hurt?”
Black Hoodie’s eyes were on Dwayne’s face now, but he said nothing. Dwayne reached into both pockets simultaneously, grasped the concealed hands, and slowly pulled them both out into the light.
The left hand was empty. The right hand held an incongruously girlish pink cell phone.
The uniformed cop gave Gurney an exaggerated look of mock sympathy. “Oooh, that’s not good. You went and shot that little boy because he had a phone in his pocket. A harmless little phone. That’s not good at all. We got a serious ‘imminent danger’ question here. Hey, Dwayne, check the kid’s vitals, get a call in for the EMTs.” He looked back at Gurney, shaking his head. “Not good, mister, not good at all.”
“He’s carrying. I’m sure of it. You need to do a closer check.”
“Sure of it? How the hell could you be sure of it?”
“You work inner-city homicide for twenty-plus years, you get a good sense for who’s carrying.”
“That a fact? I’m impressed. Well, I guess he was carrying, all right. Just wasn’t carrying a gun,” he added with an ugly grin. “Which kinda changes the lay of the land in an unfavorable way for you. Be hard to call this shooting righteous, even if you were still a police officer—which, of course, you’re not. I’m afraid you’re going to need to come with us, Mr. Gurney.”
Gurney noticed that Hardwick had returned and positioned himself at the inside edge of the growing circle of gawkers, not far from Madeleine, who now appeared less frozen but no less fearful. Hardwick’s eyes had taken on an icy malamute stillness that signaled danger—the particular danger that arises from indifference to danger. Gurney got the feeling that if he were to give a small nod in the direction of the antagonistic cop, Hardwick would calmly put a nine-millimeter round in the man’s sternum.
It was then that a sound of humming caught Gurney’s attention—a humming barely audible amid the growing clamor of the fire and medical equipment moving in all directions through the fairgrounds. As he strained to make out the source of this incongruous sound, it grew stronger, with a more noticeable pattern. And then the pattern became recognizable.
It was “Ring Around the Rosies.”
Gurney recognized the melody first, its source second. It was coming from the slightly parted lips of the wounded person on the ground—the slightly parted lips in the center of the painted rust-red smile. Blood, just a bit redder than the smile, was beginning to soak through the shoulder area of the black hooded sweatshirt and stain the dusty pavement. As everyone who could hear it stood staring, the humming was gradually transformed into the actual words:
Ring around the rosies,
Pocket full of posies,
Ashes, ashes,
All fall down.
As he sang, he slowly raised the pink cell phone that had been left in his hand.
“Jesus!” cried Gurney to the two cops as the truth hit him. “The phone! Grab it! That’s the detonator! Grab it!”
When neither of them seemed to understand what he was saying, he hurled himself forward, taking a wild kick at the phone—as the two cops launched themselves at him. His foot reached the phone, sending it skittering across the concrete, just as he was tackled.
But Peter Pan had already pushed the SEND button.
Three seconds later there was a rapid-fire series of six powerful explosions—sharp, near-deafening blasts—not the muffled reports of the earlier incendiaries.
Gurney’s ears were ringing—to the exclusion of all other sounds. As the cops who’d tackled him were struggling to their feet, there was a tremendous impact on the ground very close by. Gurney looked around wildly for Madeleine, saw her grasping the railing, evidently stunned. He ran toward her, extending his arms. Just as he reached her, she screamed, pointing over his shoulder to something behind him.