He found himself next to a metal pole that had a large, brass rectangle attached to the top. Words were embossed on the rectangle. The harsh reflection from the emergency vehicles provided just enough illumination for him to be able to read:
Welcome to the Rostov lights. Many people have claimed to see them, but no one has ever been able to explain them. If you’re lucky enough to experience them, decide for yourself what they are.
Footsteps approached. Page turned from the plaque and saw a silhoette of a man in a cowboy hat. As the figure came nearer, he recognized a Highway Patrol captain he’d spoken with earlier. The Hispanic man had a broad face, with prominent cheek- and jaw- bones. The emergency lights revealed his blue tie and tan uniform. His last name was Medrano.
“We finished interviewing your wife,” he announced. “You can take her back to where you’re staying.”
Page didn’t comment on the complexities that lay behind that statement.
“You’re done with me, too?”
“For now. All the survivors tell the same story. The guy went crazy. If not for you and your wife, a lot more people would have been killed. You still don’t have any idea why he did it?” Medrano looked as if he desperately wanted something that would explain what had happened.
“Only that he said the lights were evil.”
“The lights? The way you talk about them… You saw them, too?”
“It took some effort, but yeah. At least, I saw something.”
The captain looked puzzled. “I live in Harrington, about a hundred miles down the road. It’s a big town because of the oil refinery, but there’s not a lot to do. Whenever my wife’s parents or my brother and his family came to visit, we used to drive here to try to see the lights. I bet I made that trip a dozen times. Never saw a thing. Neither did my wife’s parents or my brother and his family, even though strangers standing right next to us claimed they could. We finally gave up and stopped coming. What’d they look like?”
“They seemed miles away, yet I thought they were so close I tried to reach out and touch them. They bobbed and floated, merged and separated, and came together again. They kept changing colors. Once I saw them, I had trouble turning away from them.”
Medrano nodded. “That’s usually the way they’re described.”
“The thing is, I’m beginning to wonder if I just persuaded myself they were out there. It was like mass hysteria, and I might have just been caught up in it.”
“Yeah, that’s one explanation-that people talk each other into seeing them.”
“One explanation? What are the others?”
“Phosphorescent gas that rises from seams in the earth. Another theory suggests that the underground rocks here have a lot of quartz crystals in them. After the heat of the day, the rapid cooling causes the rocks to contract and give off static electricity.”
Page looked past Medrano toward the emergency lights, the smoke rising from the shell of the bus-and the corpses.
“All those people died because of static electricity?” He shook his head. “If so, that makes it even more senseless.”
“Your wife says the killer shouted to the crowd, ‘Don’t you realize what they’re doing to you?’”
“He meant the lights. Then he started shooting at the horizon. He yelled, ‘Go back to hell where you came from.’ Then, ‘You’re all damned.’ I thought he meant the lights again, but it turned out he meant that the crowd was damned because the next thing he opened fire on everyone around him.”
“Some kind of religious lunatic,” Medrano suggested.
“He sure had a fixation on hell. ‘Came from hell.’ ‘Going back to hell.’ He said that a couple of times while he was shooting people.”
“Well, the fire that burned him gave him a taste of where he was going,” Medrano said.
“That thought occurred to me, too. Do you know who he was?”
“Not yet-any ID he had on him was destroyed. By process of elimination, we’ll figure out which car he used and track its registration number.”
“Unless he came on the bus.”
“With an AK-47 that nobody noticed?”
“He could have carried it in something like a guitar case,” Page offered.
“Yeah, that’s possible. You know, you do think like a cop. Well, if the shooter arrived on the bus, any evidence was probably destroyed by the fire. That’ll make our job a lot more difficult.”
Page shivered, perhaps because of the cool breeze or perhaps be- cause he looked toward the corpses again.
“You could use a windbreaker,” Medrano said.
“Chief Costigan told me the same thing. Any word about how he’s doing?”
“An ambulance driver phoned me from the Rostov hospital. He’s in surgery. What about you? How are you holding up?”
Page rubbed his right side, where the gunman had kicked him. “I’m not looking forward to seeing the bruise.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know. There’s a lot to sort through. For now, I’m just glad to be alive.”
“Ever been involved in a shooting before?”
“Once. But nobody died. For certain, my wife was never in a shooting before. If it hadn’t been for her, the guy might have reached me.”
“She did an amazing thing. We collected six spent pistol cartridges.”
“Actually, she fired eight times,” Page said.
“And yet she only remembers pulling the triggerfour times. If you and your wife worked for me, tomorrow morning you’d be talking to a counselor, but there’s not much I can do to help outsiders.”
“I understand. Thanks for your concern.”
Medrano turned toward the western sky, where the roar of a helicopter was rapidly approaching. “Good. Another medevac chopper.”
“I’ll drive my wife back to the motel.”
The emergency lights revealed Tori’s silhouette in the front seat of her Saturn. As Page headed in that direction, he heard the helicopter getting louder.
Its lights suddenly blazed, but instead of landing in a nearby field, it hovered over the crime scene-not close enough to the ground to kick up dust or blow objects around and interfere with the investigation, but carefully maintaining a legal altitude.
“What the hell’s going on?” Medrano wondered.
But Page had already figured it out, managing to detect four huge letters on the chopper’s side.
Medrano shook his fist at the sky. “That’s a damned TV news chopper.”
24
For a couple of seconds, Brent glimpsed the lights of a town below him. Then the helicopter roared over it, and all he saw was darkness again. At once a cluster of flashing lights appeared ahead.
A lot of flashing lights.
Through headphones, he heard the pilot’s voice. “There it is.”
Smoke rose from a burned-out shell of a bus. Firefighters, police officers, and medical personnel swarmed everywhere he looked.
“Do you see any bodies on the ground?” Brent asked the pilot. “Yes! There!”
Body bags covered human shapes on a gravel parking lot. Brent counted twelve. Others were being placed in ambulances.
His news producer was waiting back at the station, at the other end of a two-way radio. Brent flicked a switch and spoke into his microphone. “I made it here in time. They’re just starting to remove the bodies.”
“Any other news choppers?”
“None.”
“Good. You know what to do.”
“Did you find the background material I asked for?” Brent asked. “You didn’t give me a chance to do any research. I need to know about this town.”
“There’s not much,” the producer’s voice said through the earphones.
“‘Not much’ is better than ‘nothing.’”
“Wikipedia has a small item. Seems the town’s main claim to fame is that it was the location for the James Deacon movie Birthright.”
“It was released on DVD last mo
nth. I watched it,” Brent said.
“Well, I don’t know how that’s going to help you.”
“Rostov. What kind of name is that? Sounds foreign.”
“Russian,” the producer’s voice answered. “The railroad that was built there in 1889 was owned by a husband and wife who stopped in the area when the place was only a water-refilling station. The wife happened to be reading a translation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. One of the characters is Count Rostov, so that’s the name she gave to the place. If you want to put our viewers to sleep, go ahead and mention that. Also, there’s an abandoned military base-just a ruin, really, where they used to train bomber pilots. There are so many unexploded bombs that they had to fence off the area and post warning signs, but there hasn’t been an incident in years.”
“Anything else?”
“Nothing. Except…”
“What?” Page asked. “I need anything you’ve got.”
“There’s something about lights.”
“Lights?”
“It calls them, and I quote, ‘the mysterious Rostov lights.’”
“What the hell are those?”
“All it says is ‘colored balls of light in a field.’ Along with the old movie set from Birthright, they’re the big local attraction. Any bets the good citizens of Rostov go out in the field and wave colored flash- lights around to attract gullible tourists? But how you’re going to use any of that is beyond me.”
“You’ll be surprised. Get ready.”
The pilot had told Brent how to work the camera that was mounted on the chopper’s nose. Now he maneuvered controls that allowed him to aim the exterior lens wherever he wanted and zoom in on any detail.
“Transmitting in five, four, three, two, one, now,” he said. A cockpit monitor showed the images he sent to the station: the flashing lights, the emergency vehicles, the police, the firefighters, the medical team, and the bodies.
If that jerk-off thinks I’m going to play nice and let Sharon have most of the airtime, he’s out of his mind. I’ll give him stuff that’s so much better than she can do, he’ll be forced to put me on camera more than her. I’ve got a feeling this story is big enough to take me to Atlanta.
He let the scene achieve its impact, then gathered his thoughts around the meager information the producer had given him.
“This is Brent Loft reporting from the First-on-the-Scene News chopper. The carnage below me might be mistaken for the aftermath of an attack in a war zone, but this isn’t Afghanistan or Iraq. It’s peaceful west Texas cattle country, near the sleepy town of Rostov. That name comes from a character in Tolstoy’s War and Peace-but peace is exactly what Rostov doesn’t have tonight. The senseless gun- fire that broke out at this scenic vista two and a half hours ago left at least twenty people dead and prompts the question, ‘Is any place truly safe anymore?’”
Below, a vehicle backed away from the police cars, ambulances, and a fire truck. Brent aimed the camera toward it, hoping it was an emergency vehicle whose roof lights would suddenly come to life as it raced toward town. But he quickly realized that the vehicle was a civilian SUV, so he redirected the camera toward the firefighters spraying foam on the smoking shell of the bus.
“A half century ago, not far from here, James Deacon starred in the classic film Birthright, about a lifelong bitter feud between a wildcat oil driller and a prominent Texas cattle family. It’s a gripping saga about how the Old West became the New West. But even in the lawlessness of the Old West, the unspeakable massacre that occurred here tonight would have been unimaginable. The New West, as it turns out, is far more violent than the Old. Early reports indicate that the as-yet-unidentified killer was shot by someone on the scene, one of the innocent bystanders he was trying to slaughter. If so, his motive for this shocking outrage might remain as elusive and unexplained as the mysterious Rostov lights that draw tourists to this area.”
25
Hearing the roar of the chopper above him, Page drove Tori’s Saturn away from the turmoil of the crime scene. As he left the flashing emergency lights behind, he peered over at his wife, troubled by the way she stared straight ahead toward the darkness of the narrow road beyond the car’s headlights. Her face was tight. She looked dazed.
“You didn’t have a choice,” he told her. He kept remembering her frenzied shouts as she repeatedly pulled the trigger, even after the gunman had stopped moving. “You did the right thing. Never forget that.”
Tori might have nodded slightly, but perhaps it was only the motion of the car.
“Imagine the alternative,” Page said. “If he’d grabbed me, I might have been burned to death. Those people on the bus would have burned to death as well.”
“Maybe I shot him once to save you,” Tori murmured. Her lips barely moved. As she continued staring ahead, he had to concentrate to decipher what she told him.
“And maybe I shot him a second time to save those other people.” She drew a breath, her features more stark. “But I shot him the other times… so many…”
Page waited.
“… because he made the lights go away. He ruined the night, the son of a bitch.”
The interior of the car became tensely silent.
When they reached the motel, a neon sign said, NO VACANCY. Page stopped in front of unit 11 and recognized one of the cars farther along. The Audi belonged to the mother and father who’d brought their children to the observation area and then had become impatient, wanting to move on. Or at least the mother and the children had wanted to move on. Page remembered how defeated the father had sounded.
Your wife and kids saved your life, he thought.
In the harshly lit parking lot, he helped Tori from the Saturn, took the motel key from her purse, and unlocked the room. The place smelled old and musty.
He switched on the overhead light and saw that the room had two beds. Just as well, he thought.
When he secured the deadbolt on the door, the noise made her turn to him. Page was afraid she was going to say, “I don’t want you here.” But instead she told him numbly, “I’m going to take a shower.”
She opened a suitcase, removed boxer shorts and a T-shirt-her usual pajamas-and went into the bathroom.
She locked it.
Feeling empty, Page studied each bed and noticed that one had books on the table next to it. Choosing the other, he lay on a thin blanket and listened to the sound of the shower. He smelled smoke on his denim shirt and felt a spreading pain where he’d been kicked in the side.
The memory of the gunman’s blazing arms reaching out to embrace him made him grimace.
When Tori came out of the bathroom, she wore the boxer shorts and loose T-shirt. Her towel-dried hair was combed back, darker red than usual because it was damp. She went to the door, shut off the light, and crawled beneath the covers on the other bed.
The scent of soap and shampoo drifted from the bathroom.
“Good night,” Page said.
He lay in the darkness, waiting for her to reply.
“Good night,” she finally told him, her voice so muted he barely heard her.
26
When Page had learned to fly, his dreams had been filled with the sensation of floating, as if he were in the air on a gentle current, drifting over forests and fields. The plane was as silent as a glider.
He hovered.
He turned.
He sailed along the smooth air.
Now he had a version of that dream. But he wasn’t above forests and fields. He was in blackness, suspended in a void, settling, then rising, drifting to the left, pausing, then floating to the right, as if on invisible waves.
The way he’d seen the lights moving.
When he wakened, he felt groggy. He gradually opened his eyes and waited for his troubling memories to anchor him. Daylight streamed past the corners of the cheap drapes. He looked toward the other bed and saw that it was empty, its covers piled to the side. Immediately he sat up, realizing that he still wore his smoke-smel
ling jeans and denim shirt from the night before. He hadn’t even taken off his sneakers.
His side ached worse.
“Tori?”
The bathroom door was open. He looked inside, but she wasn’t there.
He hurried to the main door and pulled it open, relieved to see Tori’s car.
The sun hurt his eyes. A glance at his watch showed him that the time was almost a quarter after three. He recalled checking his watch when he’d driven Tori back to the motel. The time had been a little after one. My God, I slept more than twelve hours.
Tori.
Stiff from the pain in his side, he ran through the afternoon heat to the motel office. Inside, the same gangly young clerk was behind the desk.
“Did you see my wife go past?”
“She walked down the road toward the Rib Palace a half hour ago.” He gave Page a vaguely accusing look. “Like Chief Costigan told me, I saved a room for you last night. Could’ve used it when all that trouble happened. Lots of people coming to town.”
“I’ll pay for not using it. Give it to someone else now.”
“I already did after checkout time. A reporter’s got it now.”
“Reporter?”
“There’s a ton of them.”
The clerk pointed toward the television next to the soft-drink ma- chine in a corner of the lobby. On the screen, a handsome man in a rumpled suit held a microphone and looked intently at the camera. His tie was loose and his top shirt button open. His blond hair was in disarray. He had whisker shadow, and his face was drawn with fatigue.
A crowd was gathered behind him. Police officers motioned for people to stay behind barricades. Beyond a cluster of police cars, the observation platform was visible.
“Keep back. This is still a crime scene,” a policeman warned, speaking loudly enough for his voice to carry to the microphone.
Meanwhile, the television reporter addressed his viewers. “As you see from the commotion in the background, events are unfolding swiftly. Since First-on-the-Scene News started broadcasting images of the massacre’s aftermath early this morning, the eyes of the entire nation have been directed to this quiet Texas town. The gunman’s motive appears to have been a religious fixation on the mysterious Rostov lights that attracted the victims here last night. ‘You came from hell. Now go back to hell,’ witnesses report him shouting before he turned his rifle on them.
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