I pressed the accelerator down.
When I’d heard the dispatcher’s voice, a small shockwave had risen from deep in my body, heat rising to the surface of my skin. It was recognition.
The business wasn’t a pharmacy, but that didn’t surprise me. Whether or not Marc realized that Cicero ’s forged prescriptions were nonsense, he knew better than to try again to cash one in, at least not in the Cities. But Marc needed money, and so he was turning to a profession that he knew. Marc likes to think he’s thugged out, Lisette had said.
He had laid low until nightfall, and now he was moving. One score, and then he’d leave town.
The Nova’s front end bumped down and surged up as the car dove into a low parking lot. There was a single squad car outside.
I got out of the Nova, flashed my shield as I approached. “What’s going on?” I asked.
The officer looked up at me, and I saw that she was very young indeed. I knew her: Lockhart, from the drowning scene, who’d taken me downtown to have my statement taken. Roz had been with her then, but now she was nowhere in sight. Lockhart had graduated to working alone, but she didn’t look quite in control of the situation.
She was trying, though. She responded to my question with a clipped nod, just a lift of her chin, and then cut her eyes toward the store. “I think I’ve got an armed assailant in there,” she said. “The sole customer said he ran when the shooting started. Shooter was a young white male, he thinks.”
“Where’s the witness?” I asked.
“Across the street. I told him to stick around, then I yelled for everyone to vacate the parking lot and stay clear.”
She must have had a bigger voice than her size suggested, because while a small crowd of witnesses were watching us, none of them had tried to breach the territory Lockhart had put off-limits.
“The customer just saw it out of the corner of his eye, the guy drawing the gun, then he ran,” she went on. “He heard the shots as he made the door. Didn’t see the shooter come out.”
“What about the other customers?” I asked.
“He’s pretty sure he was the only guy in there,” Lockhart said. “Except the owner, who was behind the counter.”
“The owner didn’t come out?”
Lockhart shook her head. Her brown hair was clipped up against the back of her skull, but a small rooster tail was free enough to shake along with the movement. “Neither of them,” she said.
“There could be a back way out,” I said.
The store was a boxlike structure, with bars on the windows and posters for Minnesota ’s lottery games behind the bars, taped from the inside. Jostling with them for the attention of passersby were posters for cigarettes, for beer, for flavored liqueur, and for phone cards. I couldn’t see a goddamned thing that was happening inside. If anything was.
For the robber to flee through the back and not be seen again was one thing, but the owner should have made himself known to us, if he could walk.
Lockhart said it aloud. “I think the owner’s down. I want to go in.”
“No,” I said. “There are paramedics on the way, right? With the backup?”
“That could be too late,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “I’ll go in.”
“We’ll both go,” she said.
“No,” I said again. She was young and untried, and I didn’t want her on my conscience. “Just me.” Before she could protest, I said, “Stay here and cover the door. I’m going to check out the back.”
I was setting a lousy example for Lockhart, not waiting for the backup, but I took out my.40 and circled the building, slowly.
It was strange to think that we were coming up on ten o’clock. Even Venus hadn’t been able to break through the pale blue light of the northern sky, and the store’s neon sign seemed weakly lit, as though low on energy.
When I turned the corner, into the back alley, I saw a car parked there. An old blue sedan. I glanced down at the tag, the number unfamiliar to me. It wasn’t Marc’s.
The back door was open. This was the heart of it.
I stood to one side. “Sheriff’s officer!” I yelled in. “If anyone inside can hear me, please identify yourself!”
Only silence.
“Okay, I’m coming in, and I’m armed!” I went on. “I’m prepared to use deadly force if threatened. Last chance!”
I sounded like the training manual for deadly force situations. I felt like a teenager pretending to be a cop, sweat breaking out on those bits of skin that are the first to dampen, under the eyes, the back of the neck.
Still nothing. I moved inside slowly.
Immediately inside the back door was the inventory room, wooden shelves piled with cardboard boxes. There was no motion in my line of sight, no human forms. To my left I saw an open door. A bathroom, with a few cases of inventory piled up even in there, next to the dirty toilet and towel dispenser. A smell of cigarette smoke hung in the air. Otherwise empty. All this took only a second to register.
Before I even got into the salesroom, I smelled it. Not blood, but the barroom smell of spilled liquor, sweet and corrupt.
It was all in the salesroom: fallen shelves, broken bottles, disaster. A millimeter of liquid spread along the pale linoleum floor, glimmering in the light from the fluorescent fixtures overhead. The creeping spill was still moving, heading toward my feet even as I stood looking at it. Within the nearly colorless spill were rust-colored rivulets of blood.
I followed these rivulets up to their source, turned reflexively away, made myself look again.
He was young and male and white. Beyond that I didn’t know. He’d been wearing a nylon stocking over his head as a mask, and now it had turned into a thin sack of blood and brain matter. There was nothing in the sack that could be called facial features. His handgun, a.38, was on the floor at his side.
I turned to follow what logically was the course of the gunshot. It seemed to have come from the counter, which made sense if the owner had shot him. The owner was nowhere to be seen, but the counter was waist high. It wasn’t hard to piece together.
For good measure, I spoke again as I approached the counter. “I’m a Sheriff’s detective,” I repeated, circling the far end of the barrier. “I’m coming around the counter now. If you’re hiding down there with your weapon, please let go of it now. It’s all over.”
The owner lay on the floor before a wall of pint and ounce bottles, not moving, eyes closed. His clothes were sodden, but not with blood. With alcohol. Shattered glass lay all around him, and what little blood trickled from his superficial cuts obviously came from the bottles that had shattered. His chest rose and fell serenely as a sleeper’s, fallen shotgun near his side.
He was balding, with light-brown Mediterranean skin. He looked a little like Paul, the frugal john, whom I vaguely remembered meeting about a hundred years ago. Here a third smell competed with the blood and alcohol. It was urine, from the stain on the front of the shopkeeper’s cheap trousers.
Handgun versus shotgun. The young robber had probably pulled his piece at a decent shooting distance for a weapon like that, two feet away, on the other side of the cash register. The store owner had probably played along until he could reach down on a pretext and pull out his shotgun. When he had, the boy had been startled into the wrong reaction. He’d stumbled backward first, to get away, then remembered to fire his own gun. But by then it was too late. He was too far back, and too rattled, to hit the owner. The slug had hit the wall of short bottles, which had shattered. The store owner, having been fired upon, pulled his own trigger, to deadly effect. Maybe more than once, judging by the mayhem he’d turned his store into. Then, seeing the results of his own work- the kid’s head seeming to explode red behind the thin nylon- he’d fainted, losing control of his bladder on the way down.