'Mike!' he shouted. 'There's someone out there with a gun!'
But strangely he went to the door, pulled it open, stepped outside. All four of the other men were at the windows now, stretching up on their toes to see through the clear glass.
In great consternation, her hold on reality abruptly uncertain, Teresa stood away from the bar stool, clinging on to the polished wooden surface of the counter.
The door to the corridor opened, and an elderly but still upright and goodlooking woman came hurriedly into the bar area.
'Jim?' She looked directly at Teresa. 'Did Jim call me?'
'Is Jim the ?'
'He's outside!' one of the men yelled across the room from the window. 'There's some idiot out there with a gun!'
'Jim!'
The woman pushed her way through the bar flap at the same moment as one of the windows exploded into the room with a shattering crash, the glass flying in all directions. All four of the men fell back on to the floor, blood already flooding across the boards. The woman, obviously hit by flying glass, turned sharply away, buried her face in her hands and went down to a halfcrouch, but then she continued towards the street door. Blood was pouring through her fingers. She leaned weakly against the door, and Teresa thought she was going to fall, but she managed to hold on. Brilliant sunlight outlined her. A younger woman rushed into the bar from the road, thrusting her way past the drooping figure. just then there was another series of shots, and the elderly woman was thrown backwards into the room by the impact of the bullets.
As suddenly as it had appeared the impression of daylight vanished, and Teresa found herself alone in the bar again. The overhead lightbulb, the darkened glass of the windows, the dreary emptiness, all as before. How long? A glimpse, a fleeting memory, a few seconds, a few minutes? How long had that gone on?
She was standing where she had been when the window exploded inwards: just a foot or two away from the bar stool, her hand still stretching back to steady herself against the counter.
The jukebox was silent, the bar flap still raised, as the greyhaired woman had left it as she passed through. Had it been open earlier, when Nick was tending the bar? lt was normally closed.
She stared at her unfinished drink, trying not to think what it might be doing to her. And, now she thought about it, there was again that background sense of another migraine attack, looming somewhere, ready to swoop. The drink was her enemy: she couldn't take her tablets if she had been drinking. Not safely, anyway.
She sat down on the stool again, feeling drunk, feeling like a foolish drunk, a drunk who hallucinated, who was about to throw up.
But she held on, and was still sitting miserably at the counter when Nick returned. He was lugging two crates of
beer bottles, one on top of the other. He dumped them heavily on the floor behind the counter.
'Are you OK, Mrs Simons?' he said.
'Teresa, call me Teresa. Am 1 OK? No, 1 guess I'm not. Don't call me Mrs Simons.'
'Can 1 get you anything, Teresa?'
'Not another drink. Never drink on an empty stomach. Look what happens.' She waved a hand vaguely to describe herself
'I could make you a cup of coffee.'
'No, I'll be OK. Don't want any more whiskey. I'll finish this one.'
She didn't mean it though, and sat there staring at the glass while Nick went about stacking the bottles on the refrigerated shelves.
Presently, she said, 'That guy who comes in here sometimes, to help behind the bar?'
'You mean jack?'
'Do I? Is that his name?'
'Jack Masters. He comes in on Saturdays, and some Fridays.'
'Jack. You got anyone who works here called Mike?'
He shook his head. 'Not lately, not while I've been here.'
'A guy called Mike.'
'No.'
'What about an elderly couple? Do they ever work in here, behind the bar? One of them would be called Jim.'
He straightened, and moved the top crate to one side, now it was empty.
'Are you talking about my parents? They used to own this place.'
'I don't think so.'
'My mother's name was Michaela. Dad sometimes called her Mike.'
'Oh shit,' said Teresa. 'Mike. She came in, I saw her. I'm sorry, I'm so drunk. It won't happen again. I'll forget all this. I'm going upstairs.'
She made it somehow, lurching from side to side on the stairs. The nausea of the migraine was rising in her now, and she no longer fought it. She threw up in the toilet bowl, as tidily as possible but with horrible retching sounds that she was convinced would be heard all over the building. She didn't have the energy to be prissy, to care what anyone thought. Afterwards, she washed her face, drank some water, took a Migraleve, then lay on the bed and gave way to everything.
CHAPTER 14
Kingwood City, Texas, was little different from any of the other satellite towns that were growing up around Abilene. Until the coming of the computer companies it had been a small fanning town on the plains, but it had expanded rapidly through the 1980s. The original old centre of the town was now preserved and protected, and sometimes rented by the town council to TV or film companies. Craft shops and wholefood restaurants prospered there.
Alongside was a small but intensively developed downtown area of banks, insurance companies, hotels, finance houses, despatch agents, convention complexes, public relations offices.
To the north of the town, stretching away towards the Texas panhandle, was a strip some five miles in length, lined with shopping malls, plazas, automobile dealerships, drivethru hamburger bars, supermarkets and the mirrorglass industrial complexes that had brought the expansion to the town. In the same area were six newly constructed golf courses, an airfield for private planes and a manna built on the shore of Lake Hubbard. Extensive middleclass suburbs filled the rest, bulging east and west, and down towards Interstate 20 in a new grid pattern.
In winter, Kingwood City suffered under the chill of the northers, the icy winds from the mountains and plains, but during the long summers, from early May to the end otOctober, it sweltered night and day in the high 90s and low 100s, the outside air feeling as unbreathable as furnace fumes.
Andy was in Abilene on June 3, meeting with the section chief of the Bureau field office, Special Agent Dennis Barthel. This was a routine conference, one of many similar ones Andy held with section chiefs around the country, although in recent months the anticipatory demographics of the computer models had given his visits to Texas an extra edge.
While he was in Barthel.'s office, a message came through from the city police that there had been a holdup and shooting at the Baptist church on North Ramsay Street. The gunman had taken a hostage and had driven with her to North Cross shopping mall, where he had shot several more people before the place could be made secure. He was currently cornered in the service bay of the mall, holding two hostages.
The FBI cannot automatically be called in to every crime: its remit is in theory restricted to fewer than three hundred categories of federal violation, although the details of these constantly change as a result of legislation and the process of events. A shooting alone would not normally cause the Bureau to be brought in. There had to be extra features to the offence the involvement of organized crime, the market in narcotics, terrorism, foreign intelligence, or extreme violence and an interstate element to the perpetrator's relocation.
In this case, the gunman had been identified by witnesses at the church as john Luther Aronwitz, who was connected in some way with the church, perhaps as an attender or lay worker. The police computer meanwhile recorded that Aronwitz had gained a record of violent offences while he was living in the neighbouring state of Arkansas. Records of his crimes ceased when he moved to Texas, three years before.