In McLeod's guise, Teresa entered the ExEx at the point when he was parking the pickup truck. She loaded the semiautomatic with a fresh magazine, then climbed down from the pickup, slammed the door, and walked round the back to gain a clear view of anything that might be moving in the parking lot. Traffic went by on the highway beyond the lot, but the restaurant was in a cleared patch of forest and thick trees rose in every direction.
Satisfied that there was no one observing her from outside, McLeod shouldered her way through the door of the restaurant. Full of ease, with her rifle resting casually on her shoulder, she surveyed the customers and staff. A waitress was by the door, writing something on a pad of paper next to the cash register.
'Open it up, and let me have it,' she said, bringing the rifle to bear.
The waitress glanced up, and immediately ran away from her, yelling incoherently. After a few steps she collided with one of tables, which were heavy and made of metal and connected by a stout pillar to the floor. She sprawled across the floor. McLeod could have killed her then, but she had nothing against her.
She heard a shot, and turned in amazement towards the
sound. Someone shooting at her? She strolled across the restaurant to see who it was, stepping over the waitress who had fallen. A man by the salad bar, in a stupid shirt, with a glove-compartment handgun. Salad Bar Man lost his chance to fire again, after McLeod started striding towards him.
in one of the semicircular booths by the window, a young family was crowded in together, empty plates and glasses and screwed-up paper napkins scattered on the table in front of them. The young woman, the mother, was getting to her feet, trying to press down the heads of her children as she did so, getting them below the surface of the table. McLeod paused in her progress across the room, to stare her down. She seemed unafraid of her, concerned only with her children.
Teresa loosed a casual burst in her direction, then continued across to the salad bar, where the man with the toy pistol was still standing, apparently paralysed by fear.
Teresa decided to spare them all any more concern on her account. She reached over, removed the handgun from Salad Bar Man, checked to see that it was still loaded, then shoved the muzzle in her own mouth and pulled the trigger. She died within seconds.
Later, Teresa was taken through video recordings of the ExEx scenarios about the Oak Springs shootings, shown where she had gone wrong in her decisions, how she could have acted, what further options were open to her.
[In July 1958, Sam Wilkins McLeod, a former inmate of Kentucky State Penitentiary, who had recently become a fugitive from the same institution, went berserk with a semiautomatic rifle in a hamburger bar on Route 64, killing seven people, including one child. A young woman on the scene called Samantha Karen jessup tried to tackle him, but she was killed by one of McLeod's bullets. She was not related to the child who died.]
CHAPTER 10
W hen she had finished clearing up the restaurant and kitchen after breakfast, and Mrs Simons had gone upstairs to her room, Amy went through to the hotel office and discovered that a fax message had arrived overnight. She tore it off and read it.
Her first reaction was to run upstairs and show Nick, but he was still in bed asleep, and she knew he didn't like being woken early.
Instead, she decided to deal with it herself and let him see it later. Within half an hour she had drafted her reply. She faxed lt to the number in Taiwan, confirming that the White Dragon Hotel in Bulverton had reserved four bedrooms with double beds for single occupancy halfboard, from the Monday evening of the following week, for a minimum period of two weeks with an option to extend indefinitely. She quoted the prices. At the bottom of the letter she enquired as politely as she could as to their proposed manner of payment.
Thirty minutes later she was making a photocopy of the original fax for her files, and rimming the bookings software that Nick had installed seriously underused in recent months when a faxed response came through.
lt told her, in formal but roundabout English, that an account had been opened at the branch of Midland Bank in Bulverton, where she could make arrangements for weekly direct transfer in sterling to the White Dragon's account. Receipted invoices were to be sent direct to the company's
head office in Taipei. After a flurry of what read to her like exotic and oriental greetings, the fax message was signed by Mr A. Li, of Project Development Division, GunHo Corporation of Taipei.
At the bottom of the message were printed the names of the four GunHo executives on whose behalf the booking was being made. Amy stared at these for a moment, then went upstairs with the fax. Nick was still asleep.
The day went by, and although Nick did appear at midday he was obviously in another bad mood. Amy knew better than to try to get through to him.
In the afternoon she went for a brief walk, annoyed with herself for allowing him to control her with his moods, even, as things now stood, with her own anticipation of his moods. lt wasn't as if the news was bad: it promised a sudden increase in business, with nearly half the hotel's rooms occupied, probably for the first time since the media circus had left town last summer. The further news, that the people from Taiwan would be staying halfboard which meant they would be In the hotel for dinner every evening suggested that she and Nick could now afford to take on extra staff, at least on a temporary basis. As she walked through the Old Town park, Amy was already making calculations about how much help would be needed in the kitchen, in the restaurant, and also for servicing the rooms. She knew Nick would baulk at first at the idea of paying more staff, but the other side of the equation indicated that the hotel would be profitable for the next two weeks at least, and possibly afterwards.
When AMY returned to the hotel she noticed that Nick's car was missing from its parking place, so she was able to stay out of his way for the rest of the day. His moods still mystified her. She had seen many sides of him in the past,
when they were younger, but this destructive moodiness had not been one of them.
That evening, after she had cooked and served Teresa Simons' dinner, Amy went down to the bar, where she knew she would find Nick. He was there, propped up on the stool behind the counter, a paperback novel on his knee. Half a dozen customers were drinking at one of the tables by the window. The jukebox was playing.
'I thought you'd like to see this,' she said, trying to make it sound casual. She gave him the original fax message on its curl of thermal paper, and then used one of the cloth towels to wipe down the counter needlessly, while he read the fax.
'Two weeks,' he said. 'That's good.'
'The hotel will be busy.'
'It'll be a lot of work. And what sort of food will Chinese guests expect?'