کتاب 06-04

4

The Browning went off in a series of deep concussions that could not be thought of merely as sound. Harper felt those stammering blasts through her entire body, in her teeth, in her eyeballs.

The ambulance shuddered. Pulverized tar leapt up from the street as the Browning strafed from left to right. Bullets passed through Nelson Heinrich’s legs, tearing them apart and throwing red smoke: blood turned to a cloud of vapor. His right leg folded backward at the knee, like the leg of a praying mantis. The portable defibrillator dropped a shower of white sparks. Nelson jittered like a man at a tent revival show getting a dose of the Holy Spirit.

Harper went down on her hands and knees, dropping behind the rear of Ben’s Challenger. From around the tire she saw Ben in Peter and Bethann’s cruiser. He knelt in the driver’s seat, leaning out with his automatic pistol. She saw the gun muzzle flash, but couldn’t hear the report over the merciless thudding of the .50 caliber.

Then Ben jerked his head back into the car and shrank down. In the next instant Peter and Bethann’s police cruiser was rocking from side to side, as if in a gale. Windows erupted. Bullets whanged into steel, blew out tires, sheared off the open driver’s-side door—it fell with a bang into the street—sprang open the trunk, smashed taillights.

Jamie had retreated behind the front of the ambulance, sunk into a crouch, Bushmaster between her legs. The Dodge Challenger was only a dozen steps from where she was taking shelter, but it might as well have been in a different county. Trying to cross that distance made about as much sense as diving headfirst into a wood chipper.

Then the shooting was over. Distantly, Harper heard the jingle-jangle of empty cartridges falling into the road. The air throbbed with reverberations.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” shouted the Marlboro Man. “I saw AC/DC with Bon Scott in ’79 and they sounded like pussies compared to our noise. You all lay still unless you want to hear our encore. Let me tell you what’s going to happen now. You’re all going to—”

A gun popped from the rear of the ambulance. After the racket of the Browning, Mindy Skilling’s little silver pistol sounded like a party cracker.

“Run for it, Mr. Patchett!” Mindy shrieked. “I’ll cover you! Run, run, everyone run! My life for Mother Carol! My life for the Bright!” The gun popped again and again. Mindy was no longer in the ambulance, but crouched on the sidewalk, behind the ambulance’s rear end.

“Mindy!” Ben shouted. “Mindy, don’t—”

The Freightliner ground into first gear and lurched forward with a raggedy diesel roar. It crashed over a curb, wrenching a holly bush out of the ground and flinging it aside in a shower of dirt. The truck found second gear with a steely crunch and third a moment later. Filthy smoke gushed from the exhaust pipe behind the cab. Mindy’s little gun popped and popped, bullets spanging musically off the plow. At the last moment Jamie Close dropped her Bushmaster and scrambled away from the ambulance, clambering on all fours across the sidewalk, to take shelter behind a telephone pole.

The Freightliner hit the ambulance, picked it up off the asphalt, and tossed it across the yard of 10 Verdun Avenue. Mindy Skilling was still behind it and she went along for the ride, was under it when it rolled on top of her and slid across the lawn. The ruin of the ambulance wrenched up grass and earth, left a wide, smoking skid mark behind it. One of Mindy Skilling’s boots was squashed deep into the dirt, but the rest of her was beneath the deformed wreck. She had said it was hard to die in front of an audience, but in the end she had made it look easy.

“Who else wants to be a hero?” the Marlboro Man’s voice boomed from the loudspeakers. “We got all night, plenty of ammo, and the next best thing to a tank. You can come on out with your hands up and play Let’s Make a Deal, or you can try and fight it out. But let me tell you, if you decide to make a scrap of it, not one of you will live to see the light of day. Does everyone understand me?”

No one spoke. Harper couldn’t find her own voice. She had thought nothing could be louder than the sound of the .50 caliber, lighting up the street, but the Freightliner crashing into the ambulance had been like a seventy-five-gun broadside from a ship of the line. She felt incapable of even beginning a thought, let alone completing one. One moment ticked by, and then another, and finally it was the Marlboro Man who spoke up yet again—only this time there was a distracted uncertainty in his voice.

“The fuck is that?” he said, his voice muted. Harper wasn’t sure he meant to broadcast that one.

The street brightened as if the sun had, impossibly, jumped into the sky. A rushing gold light flared and lit the road with a perfect noontime clarity. Or almost perfect. That unseen sun was moving, swooping straight up the lane. A hot summer gale rocked the cars, blasting them with the smell of the Fourth of July: a perfume of cherry bombs, campfires, hot tarmac. Then it was gone and the darkness dropped back over Verdun Avenue.

The Marlboro Man chuckled nervously. “You wanna tell me the fuck that was? Someone shoot a flare gun at us?”

The light began to build again: a bronze burning glow that made the spotlight shining from the van as unnecessary as a penlight at high noon in July. Harper rose to one knee and twisted her head to look over the roof of the Challenger . . . just in time to see a teardrop of flame, the size of a private jet, plunging out of the night above.