Marla said, “He’s hanging in there.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“What about you, and your parents? Are they okay?”
Derek nodded, said his parents were out of town, and he’d heard the loudspeakers from a passing fire truck while still in bed. Marla filled him in on how her cousin had brought them to the hospital, what the doctor had said, how she was thinking of going home to change and feed the baby.
“I can take you,” he said.
Arlene thought that was an excellent idea. “I’ll stay here,” she said. “Go.”
Marla made a token protest before allowing herself to leave. Derek, slipping an arm around Marla, whispered, “I don’t think… I didn’t realize how big a part of my life you and Matthew are until I thought maybe I’d lost you.”
It was the first thing in several hours that made Arlene Harwood smile. She said to Gill, “I don’t know if you can hear me or not, Gill, but I think things are going to be okay with Marla. I really do.”
Gill’s lips appeared to move slightly, although his eyes did not open.
“What was that?” Arlene said, bending over, putting her ear close to his mouth. The lips moved again.
Arlene reversed things, shifting her mouth close to his ear. “I’ll tell Marla no such thing. You’ll tell her yourself when you’re better. And she knows, Gill. She knows.”
She stood back, hoping he might open his eyes. She reached for his hand and gave it a squeeze.
At the far end of the hall, a man in his forties who was standing over a silver-haired woman parked on yet another gurney caught sight of the woman wearing the hijab. She was speaking in whispers to the patient Dr. Moorehouse had been attending to moments earlier.
The man raised a hand, pointed, and said, “You’ve got your fucking nerve.”
He spoke loud enough that it was hard for anyone not to hear. Heads turned, looked his way. The woman in the hijab looked, too, and realized quickly she was the one being pointed at.
The man said, “Being right here, among us. That takes some gall, lady.”
The woman, with a pronounced accent, said, “Are you talking to me?”
“You see any other terrorists around?”
The woman clearly didn’t consider that worthy of a response, and returned to comforting her loved one.
“You think we don’t know what’s going on?” the man said, taking measured steps up the hallway.
The woman turned her head again. “Please leave us alone,” she said.
“You know who that is back there?” he said, pointing to the woman he’d been looking after. “That’s my mother. She’s only sixty-six years old, and yesterday, she was the healthiest woman in this goddamn town. But now, she’s just clinging to life. I don’t know if she’s going to make it or not.”
“This is my husband,” the woman said. “And he is dying.”
“But isn’t that what you people do? You sacrifice a few for the cause? Like when you send a woman into some public square with dynamite strapped to her chest?”
“Stop it!” Arlene said.
The man looked past the woman he’d been harassing to take in Arlene. “Don’t you see? They’re hiding in plain sight. They’re here-they’re everywhere. This is how they’re doing it.”
“Shut up!” Arlene shouted. “Go take care of your mother and leave that woman alone.”
A door halfway up the hall opened and Angus Carlson emerged.
“What’s going on?” he asked, glancing first in Arlene’s direction, then at the man who was still pointing. Except now there was something in his hand that was not there before.
He was waving around a gun.
People started screaming. Those who had been standing next to gurneys either dropped to the floor or used their bodies to shield the sick, except for the woman in the hijab, who stood tall and straight and stared directly at her accuser.
Carlson immediately drew his own gun, and as he pointed it at the man, he shouted, “Police! Drop your weapon!”
The man did not. He said, “Arrest her!”
“Sir, you need to lower your weapon right now.”
“Don’t you see?” he said. “What’s happened today? It’s an attack! First it was the drive-in, and now this.” The man’s eyes were filling with tears. “My mother is dying.”
Carlson’s voice came down a notch, but remained firm. “Sir, you need to lower your weapon immediately. If what you’re saying is true, then that’s good, that’s good, you bringing it to my attention.”
The woman glanced at him, anger and fear in her eyes.
Carlson met them for half a second, then said to the man, “You can be certain a full investigation of your allegations will be made. If you turn out to be right, I wouldn’t be surprised if they want to give you some kind of medal. But so long as you’re waving that gun around, we can’t get started on any of that.”
“They get off,” the man said. “They always get off.”
“We’ll have to make sure nothing like that happens.” Carlson moved closer, extended his left hand. “Why don’t you just hand your weapon over to me? Let’s put this behind us. We’re all under tremendous stress today. We’re all on edge.”
The man’s eyes darted back and forth between Carlson and the woman, but the gun remained trained on the woman.
And Angus Carlson had his weapon trained on the man.
“Please, sir. I don’t know how good a shot you are, but if you pull that trigger, there’s a chance you may hit someone else. Maybe someone else’s mother. Or father. A son or daughter. And I have to tell you, if you pull that trigger, I’m going to have to do the same. I’ll have to shoot you. And even though I’ve had training, there’s a good chance I’ll hit someone I’m not supposed to, too.”
Everyone was frozen. No one in the hall was breathing.
“Think about your mother. Think about when she gets well. She’s going to need you. And how are you going to help her with her recovery if you’re sitting in jail someplace waiting to go to trial?”
Arlene said, “He’s right. What would your mother want?”
Carlson gave her a look that said I don’t need your help.
But Arlene continued. “If my son shot an unarmed woman, for any reason, I would be ashamed of him.”
A silence that felt eternal followed. But it didn’t go on for more than five or six seconds.
At which point the man said, “I don’t care.”
He raised the gun a quarter of an inch, looked at the woman in the hijab, squinted.
Carlson fired.
The shot was deafening, and in its wake came a chorus of simultaneous screams. The bullet caught the man in the upper thigh and blew him back, as though he’d been brought down by an invisible football player. As he fell, the gun slipped from his hand and clattered to the floor.
Carlson dived for it, scooped it up, then reached into his pocket for a set of plastic cuffs.
“You shot me!” the man said. “Jesus Christ, you shot me.” The screams lasted only a few seconds, and now some people, at least those who were not on gurneys, had switched to applause. Carlson holstered his own gun, tucked the man’s into the pocket of his sport jacket, then, as blood streamed from the man’s thigh, rolled him onto his side so that he could cinch his wrists together behind his back.
“The good news is,” Carlson said, “we don’t have to worry about how long it will take to get you to the hospital.”
A pretty good quip, considering his voice was trembling, and his heart pounding so hard it felt like it would come right out of his chest.
TWENTY-NINE
Duckworth
ONCE the water treatment plant had been evacuated, I put a call in to Rhonda Finderman.
“If you haven’t already,” I told her, “you need to call the governor. If those Homeland Security guys who were here looking at the drive-in explosion can be called back, send them to the water plant. Tell them to bring their hazmat suits. The state has a spills response program for dealing with hazardous material, which is exactly what it looks like we’ve got here.”