There were, as it turned out, only three in the three Minneapolis-Saint Paul area codes. She dialed the first, got no answer, and then hit on the second.
“Yes,” she said. “This is WUFF-TV. May I speak with Amanda, please.”
A woman said, brokenly, “Amanda is in the mall.”
“I am so sorry, Mrs. Birkowsky,” Nikki said, guessing from the voice that it was a mom, not a sister.
“She’s all right,” said Mrs. Birkowsky. “For now. She’s upstairs in the-who did you say you were?”
Nikki explained the connection.
“What is it you want?”
“I’m trying to reach Amanda. She’s called you? I guess she has a cell, she called you to tell you she’s all right, she’s in no danger, or no immediate danger.”
“I can’t give you her number.”
“I understand. But… can you call her, give her my number, and if she decides, she can call me? I just think people have a right to know what’s going on. It’s my job. There’s next to no information available and that’s never a good thing.”
Amanda called Nikki three minutes later. She and two customers and two other staff were hiding in the rear room of Purses, Bags and Whatnot on the first floor of the mall, in the dark. They felt themselves all right for the time being as no one had begun to search the stores for hiding shoppers.
“Did anything happen at five?” Nikki asked. “We heard five shots. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Not a machine gun, not like that, but five individual shots. Then we heard the crowd-it makes noise, like an animal, all those people-we heard what I would call some kind of uproar, I don’t know, then barking from the voices of the guards, I guess. It was very unclear but something bad must have happened.”
“Five shots?” said Nikki. “Yes, exactly. I could try and sneak out there and-”
“No, no, no, no, you just stay where you are.”
“Are they going to come get us soon? The police.”
“There are police all over the place, but in truth, I don’t see any signs of an attack or an entry or anything.”
“This is so awful.”
“Listen, if something happens and you want to, and it seems safe, can you call me back? And if I think the cops are going to go, I’ll give you a heads-up through your mom, okay, and you can get low to the floor behind cover. I’ll never call you, because I won’t know what situation you’ll be in. Is that fair?”
“Thank you,” said Amanda.
“Sweetie, don’t thank me. You’re the brave one here.”
One minute later, Nikki was on the air with the news that five shots had been fired within the atrium and that possibly the gunmen had begun to shoot hostages.
“They just shot five people,” Ray said.
“You don’t know that,” Molly said.
“Yes, I do,” said Ray.
It seemed that the sound of the shots still echoed through the weird acoustics of the gigantic space. Everyone in the Frederick’s had stiffened when the sounds reached them, and in the several minutes since, nobody had said a thing until Ray broke the silence.
“Maybe some kid raised his rifle and pulled the trigger five times because he thought it was a cool thing to do,” Molly said.
“No,” said Ray. “That would have been faster shooting, onetwothreefourfive. This was deliberate fire. One shot, move to the next, shoot, move to the next. He just shot five people.”
Nobody said a thing. Ray, Molly, Rose the clerk, the broken-down manager of the store, and the three customers just lay there in the dark, in the storeroom.
“You could go check, like last time,” Rose finally said.
Ray didn’t answer right away. Then he said, “No. No, if I go out there, I’m not coming back. Somebody’s got to do something and I’m probably the only man with training who’s close enough to the situation to act and the police have no idea of how to get in here.”
“Ray-” said Molly, but Rose cut her off.
“If you go, what do we do? Do we just lie here? Six women, and there’s guys out there with machine guns? What do we do? What happens to us?”
“I think you’re okay,” said Ray. “You don’t need help. The people down there do.”
“There’s nothing you can do,” said Rose. “There’s a bunch of them, with army weapons. What can one guy do? You’ll just get yourself killed. You don’t even have a gun, much less a machine gun.”
Molly said, “She’s right. If they see you, they’ll kill you. That’s all. After all you’ve done, some punk kills you in the Payless shoe store or the Best Buy and you haven’t helped a thing and in six hours the hostage takers make a deal with the cops and fly to Cuba with a million dollars and what has your death accomplished?”
“If I hide in the ladies’ underwear store, what has my life accomplished?” Ray said. “You’ll be all right. As I said, you stay here, you commit psychologically to the long term, you don’t expect help now or in an hour or a day or a week, and you will survive.”
“He thinks he’s John Wayne,” said Molly, bitterly. “John Wayne was a fantasy. He never existed. He’s a dream, a phantom, a ghost.”
“He existed,” said Ray, “and his name was Bob Lee Swagger. He’s my father.”
“You don’t even have a gun,” said Rose.
“Then I will have to get a gun,” said Ray.
“Okay,” said Lavelva quietly. “Now, boys and girls, let’s go back to the bathroom, all right? The name of this game is Let’s hide in the bathroom.”
“Miss Lavelva,” said DAVID 3–4, “I’m scared.”
“David, don’t you be scared now. No one’s going to hurt you, you trust Miss Lavelva on this, sweetie, okay? Now, kids, come on now, let’s put on our quiet shoes and our quiet voices and go back to the bathroom and it will be all right.”
Somehow-she could feel their fear in the drop-off of energy, the quiet that overtook them, the lassitude that seemed to creep through their small bones-she got them back and into the room.
“Larry,” she said to the eldest, “you be in charge here, you hear? You stay till Miss Lavelva comes back. Y’all stay quiet now and listen to Larry.”
“Miss Lavelva, I’m scared too,” said SHERRY 4–6.
“It’s okay, Sherry,” said Miss Lavelva. “And when this is over, Miss Lavelva goin’ take you to get something nice to eat, maybe french fries or frosties, whatever you want, a nice treat, from Miss Lavelva.”
That seemed to quiet them down.
Lavelva slipped out. She was alone in the bigger room. She looked at the translucent glass blocks that marked off the day care center and saw nothing. Maybe he’d missed her. Maybe he was gone.
Asad could not read the English in the mall directory pamphlet, but he got the representation of the map well enough, and the imam had drawn a circle around the location of the day care center. Yes, this was the Colorado corridor, yes, COLORADO 2-145, the numbers were right. It seemed that helpfully each store had an address that indexed it to the map, and even though he had little English, he recognized the address NE C-2-145. He divined practically that it meant Colorado corridor, second floor, 145 retail designation, and since evens were on the left and odds on the right, it had to be on his left. Even though he assumed that he had free range, he was careful. He was aware that many of the stores still hid customers. What if some of them came rushing out and jumped him? Then he laughed. No Americans would do that. They were a soft and decadent people, and here, in this palace of luxury and greed, their reflexes and warrior minds, if they even had them, would be shoved way down by shock and fear. They would lie in the dark weeping, praying to their absurd man on the cross, saying to him pleasepleasepleaseplease.
He missed it. He looked at a store and saw an address that read COLORADO 2-157. He turned back, began to edge his way down the corridor. It was quiet and dark, strewn with abandoned bags, tipped carriages, shoes, hats, jackets, all signs of the intensity of the panic. A few windows had been broken but no looting appeared to have taken place.
Slowly he tracked the stores, stopping every once in a while to check for signs of threat. He saw none. And then he came to it. For about thirty feet, the gaudy glass windows of the storefronts yielded to glass brick, and a double door stood in the center. Above, a sign must have announced the purpose of the location, though he could not read it. He slid to the glass doors and peered in, and soon his eyes made out toys on the floor, children’s furniture tilted sideways, that sort of thing. This had to be where the babies were. But it was quiet. Maybe they had moved the babies, but he didn’t see how. Maybe they were inside, in hiding.