In the Evil Day

  Julie Roy saw it happen. She was carrying a can of coffee and trailing Kim Richards and Cody through the IGA’s automatic exit door. A bearded man in a blue plaid shirt and a red baseball cap stood outside the driver-side door to that pickup she had seen at Clarkeie’s. A state trooper, having left his cruiser’s door swung open, walked in that man’s direction. Julie was near enough to hear them speak—but as she recalls, no one did so. Not a word was exchanged. The bearded man simply hoisted something to his shoulder. It was a small black rifle, with a scope and a sling dangling from its stock, and it was pointed at the trooper—who stopped, lifting his hands, palms out. With no apparent provocation, the bearded man started firing.

  This looked like a pantomime of some sort, but with sound effects—some stark and brutal ritual that had nothing to do, certainly, with the world in which Julie or Kim lived. Julie saw the trooper step back, fall to one knee, and reach for his sidearm while the first volley of bullets raked over the cruiser and cut into his legs. The firecracker pop of the rifle could not be linked, somehow, to the leveled flame of pale, forked fire that issued from its barrel. Nothing seemed to connect to anything else or to where she stood stunned outside the exit door of this familiar place at the tail end of an ordinary day.

  She saw the trooper’s Stetson fall to the pavement. He staggered to his feet, limping around the passenger side of the cruiser, and then crouched behind its trunk. He managed to draw his pistol as more bullets rained over and through the cruiser, punching out its side and rear windows. In that hail of lead he couldn’t return fire, or stay where he was.

  Julie found herself huddled behind the bulk of a soft-drink vending machine. Kim and Cody had already stepped into the open when the gunfire started. Julie saw Kim’s groceries fall and skitter across the asphalt as she snatched Cody and yanked him forward several yards to the cover of her truck. There she pressed herself against its door and wrapped her arms around the boy, Julie would say later, “like a mother bear.”

  Now the trooper was moving crablike, not toward the store, but instead toward the eastern edge of the lot, using the last row of parked cars as a spotty sort of cover. He was firing his pistol with his left hand, but he was unable to aim, with his right hand down on the pavement to help him stay upright. The man with the rifle took no cover himself. He stood fence-post stiff at the door of his truck, squeezing off rounds at the trooper as if at a duck glimpsed at intervals in a shooting arcade.

  The trooper flinched with another hit, maybe another one as well, but somehow he kept moving—to the last of the parked cars, and finally on a covered angle from that car into the high grass fringing the lot. And now the gunman was moving, walking slowly in that direction and firing as he went.

  Julie turned and ran, back to the exit door of the supermarket, which wouldn’t open from the outside. Another shopper popped it open, and Julie stood on its threshold, screaming for someone to call 911. Faces in the aisles and at the cash registers snapped toward her in unison—“They think I’m nuts,” Julie thought. But one of the clerks, Albert Riff, knew better. He had walked outside ahead of her when he had seen a cruiser pull into the parking lot. He ran in and told her to get inside. “I can’t,” Julie said. “My girlfriend’s out there.”

  Not for long—Kim picked Cody up and dashed for the door. Julie followed her inside, staring back over her shoulder. Her last glimpse of the parking lot was this: the bearded man back at the door of his truck, attaching a new ammunition clip to his rifle, as a second state police cruiser turned off Route 3 and glided placidly down the entrance ramp.

  Directly across the road from the IGA stood the New Hampshire Electric Cooperative’s Colebrook warehouse and offices, which was where Woody Crawford and Mark Monahan parked their vehicles each morning. As Monahan stomped on the line truck’s gas pedal, Crawford wondered about the .243 Browning BLR deer rifle that his partner always kept in the gun rack of his pickup. “You got your gun?” he shouted.

  “Nope,” Monahan said. “It’s home today. Been working on its sights.”

  No point in pulling into the warehouse, then. Monahan shot the truck past the supermarket entrance and spun it into a leaning, looping turn—and screeching stop—in a swath of empty gravel at the parking lot’s west end. Crawford had had no luck in raising the Colebrook Police Department on the truck’s radio. Both men leaped out and stared at what Crawford still hoped was a police exercise of some sort: people huddled by vehicles or else running like hell into the supermarket, a trooper in staggering retreat, his pistol flashing, and a man with an assault rifle pursuing him.

  This was very realistic—too much so. “Mother of God,” Crawford said. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

  Yes, and Monahan also saw the little girl they had passed on the road, now coasting down the entrance ramp. He cried at the top of his lungs for her to stop, and the girl braked so suddenly she fell over. She got up gaping at Mark, and he waved her into cover behind a Dodge van parked just off the ramp.

  At nearly the same time another vehicle came down the ramp, rolling obliviously past Monahan’s shouts. “Oh, Christ, that’s Claude Wheeler,” he told Crawford. “Claude!” The vehicle kept going, turning beyond the divider and slipping neatly into a parking space that only seconds ago had entertained gunfire from both directions.

  By then the gunman had turned around. He was at the passenger window of an old pickup that sat next to a Thunderbird. They saw him reach through the truck’s window and take out a new banana clip—as Wheeler strolled past on his way inside. The gunman snapped the clip into place and looked up, directly at the truck and the two linemen, the orbs of his sunglasses like powder pans in the afternoon light. “Woody, shit—get the hell back in the truck.”

  Their first thought was to park the truck across the supermarket entrance. But then they saw a second state police cruiser approach from the south and make that turn. “Check that,” Crawford said. “We don’t want to block those guys. Go to Hughes—we’ll stop traffic there.”

  Monahan swung the truck across the southbound lane opposite Hughes Road. They tumbled out of the doors again, and Crawford said, “Pinch me, will you? I think I’m ready to wake up.”

  His partner just stared back at the supermarket. Still dreaming, Crawford looked up in time to see the gunman turn in the direction of that other cruiser and once more lift the rifle to his shoulder.

  First IGA manager Lance Walling locked all the doors. Then he started herding everyone—employees and customers, food company sales reps and truck drivers—to the back of the building. Among them was a woman who protested that her son was out in the parking lot. Walling refused to let her out, though, and finally the mother and her daughter went to the back with Julie, Kim, and Cody and the rest.

  Albert Riff, forty-eight, the clerk who had been outside with Julie, was helping people get in from the parking lot and shooing others away from the window. He was still at the window himself when the second cruiser arrived and then a woman in a Subaru. He saw the gunman drop to one knee and draw a bead on that cruiser, whose driver seemed unaware of any emergency.

  Riff saw two holes open like flower blossoms in its windshield. The cruiser jerked to a stop, rocking forward on its springs, as did the Subaru some sixty feet behind it. Then the cruiser snapped into reverse, backing over a curb and onto grass. Meanwhile the gunman was advancing and spraying fire, forty to fifty shots, Riff thought. The cruiser came to a stop, just its rear wheels over the curb, as its windows exploded in shimmering clouds of broken glass.

  The gunman kept going, all the way to what was left of the cruiser’s passenger-side window. He looked inside, stuck the muzzle of his rifle through the window opening, and fired several more times. Then—in no particular hurry, as though he were a shopper running errands—he started walking toward the grass where the first trooper had fled.

  Once the gunman’s back was turned, the woman in the Subaru opened her door. Riff saw her run to the shattered cruiser, linger just an insta
nt at its driver-side window, and turn away in distress. Then she saw a child crouching and weeping behind the van parked on the side of the ramp. She beckoned for the girl to run to her.

  By then a Ford station wagon had pulled to a stop behind the woman’s car. The driver, a middle-aged man, had gotten out of the wagon. The woman shouted a warning as she hustled the child into her car. Riff saw both vehicles back up and speed away at the same time that he heard still more gunfire.

  In the backseat foot well of the tan Thunderbird next to Drega’s pickup, a thirteen-year-old boy clapped his hands over his ears.

  Ian Venne had ridden his bike to the IGA that afternoon from the T&T Mobile Home Park in Columbia, opposite the Drega property on Route 3. In Colebrook, he had paused opposite the Brooks Auto Parts store on Main Street and had recognized the orange pickup parked there as belonging to the guy who had lately taken to carrying a gun every time he checked his mailbox. The boy wondered if he drove around town with a gun as well. In either case, the guy was having a hard time starting the pickup, was still cranking it like an eggbeater when Ian started pedaling again.

  Ian’s mother and nine-year-old sister were driving the family’s ’79 Thunderbird to the supermarket. They passed him as he turned into the entrance ramp, and then Ian’s mother helped him stow his bike in the trunk. He went to sleep on the back seat while they went shopping.

  Then he woke to a popping sound, looked out long enough to see what was happening, and locked the Thunderbird’s backseat doors—he didn’t dare try to reach the front.

  In the foot well, trembling, he stitched his eyes shut and pressed harder on his ears. That shut out the light, but the sound leaked through: shouts, a woman’s scream, more gunfire, and then what he knew must be the voice of the policeman who was being shot at.

  The boy squeezed so hard that his ears hurt. Still he heard the policeman pleading for help, and then for his life.

  In the Colebrook Village Cemetery, sexton Roland Martin, his grandson Mike Martin, and Robert Grassette were taking a break from mowing grass when the shooting began in the parking lot, which was about 150 yards from where they were working.

  By the time the second cruiser arrived, they had moved to the bluff on which sat the Green Mountain Snack Bar. They could see the gunman firing at something in the direction of the entrance ramp, but from where they stood, they couldn’t see what.

  They were spared the sight of that execution, but not this one. They saw the gunman walk from there and into the grass at this east end of the lot. He used the barrel of his rifle to push aside tall stalks of reed and bulrush. The sexton couldn’t see the wounded trooper, but he thought he could hear him saying, “No, no,” once the gunman found him.

  The gunman didn’t speak. He pointed the rifle straight down, almost at his own feet, and fired four times.

  Patrolman Steve Breton, twenty-seven, had grown up in Colebrook and had studied criminal justice at Champlain College, not for the pay—$9.50 an hour for a beat cop here—but because he liked the idea of a job where every day was different. He especially liked it in a place where the color of your uniform—blue, gray, green—didn’t matter, where all the different agencies pitched in and shared a sense of camaraderie. He had brothers, a lot of them, who respected who he was and what he did, no less than he did them. That was its own sort of pay.

  This day was sufficiently different: quiet enough at first to wash the cruiser, or half of it anyway; then a domestic violence call that was really just an argument in need of refereeing; a friendly traffic stop in town, warning given, when a salesman from Lewis Ford pulled an illegal U-turn right in front of him. Now this radically day-changing call from Dispatch—shots fired at the IGA, all units respond.

  He got on the radio with Lynn, who told him that Dan Couture, light duty or not, wanted to get picked up. That was good, even if it did take Breton out of his way. Shots fired? Yes, he’d want backup.

  Because this was a Code 1000, though, he couldn’t wait for it. Breton sped south down Main, in the opposite direction from the IGA, and into Bridge Street. There he popped a Y-turn out of the town hall parking lot, squealed to a stop in front, and waited for Dan. A second passed, and then one or two more, maybe five, and still no sign of Couture, so the hell with it. He’d have to take his chances.

  Soon Breton found backup anyway. He had gotten as far as Brooks Chevrolet when he saw a Ford station wagon in the opposite lane flashing its headlights at him. Breton could hardly abide another delay, but he had a feeling this was important. He stopped, as did the wagon. Its driver sprinted over to Breton’s window.

  It was Lenny Dennis, a guy Breton knew from the window factory he had worked at before catching on full time with the Colebrook Police Department in 1994. Dennis was somewhere in his forties and had formerly been a cop in Connecticut. He knew how shorthanded they were at the Colebrook PD, and how cops everywhere got sent into places without knowing what the whole situation was. Dennis’s face was grim. “A couple of troopers are down at the IGA,” he said. “Did you know that?”

  Fuck, no, Breton didn’t know it was like that. He tried to talk—ended up staring slack-jawed at Dennis.

  “You want some help?” Dennis said, patting his back pants pocket. “I’ve got a gun.”

  Breton wanted information and, yes, he did want help, even if backup from a former cop wasn’t strictly by the book. He told Dennis to jump in.

  No, Dennis didn’t know which troopers were down, or who was shooting, or why. He told Breton he had turned into the IGA and seen Amy Hall’s car parked on the ramp and a small bicycle tumbled over on its side. He thought there had been an accident with the bike and he got out to help. Amy, whom Dennis knew as a welder at the window factory, was frantic. She told him a trooper had been shot, to get the hell out of there. From the road he saw a second parked cruiser and a guy with an assault rifle openly stalking the parking lot. So he had this bad feeling there must be another trooper down.

  Breton couldn’t be sure which troopers were in peril—any of several on duty that day. He knew Phillips and Lord had both been around town, but he couldn’t imagine either of them getting taken down by anybody.

  Breton’s tires squealed as they angled into the ramp. The cruiser raced down it and past the discarded bicycle. “Be careful here,” Dennis warned. Breton stopped only when blocked by a cruiser as punched full of holes as a pepper shaker. He got out, and he knew it was Lord inside, more from the cruiser’s badge number than what was left of poor Les, who lay across a blood-soaked passenger seat and was all too plainly past saving.

  Breton couldn’t linger. He looked up to see a man with an assault rifle standing in the vicinity of that other cruiser Lenny had mentioned, maybe forty yards away. The man was looking at him. Now he was walking toward him, now raising the rifle to his shoulder and sighting through its scope.

  Breton had drawn his sidearm, a 9 mm Ruger, and thoughts were colliding in a pileup inside his head. There were people in the parking lot behind the suspect, or in their vehicles, maybe, who might get hit if he fired and missed. This was just a suspect, might not even be the guy—someone else might have done this to Lord. And if he missed or if this guy was wearing body armor, he was about to be seriously outgunned.

  Dennis had taken cover behind Breton’s cruiser, and as the rifle came up, Breton backpedaled there as well. But he knew from the ruins of Lord’s vehicle that this wouldn’t be cover enough. He also knew there wasn’t time to get his shotgun out of the trunk.

  Breton gestured to their right. Hearts in their mouths, he and Dennis flew up a shrubby slope to the cover of a steel dumpster at the end of the snack bar’s parking lot. Breton thought there was a good chance they’d die on that slope, but somehow they got up it without drawing fire.

  The bullets came when Breton poked his head out from behind the dumpster to see where the suspect was. The first round exploded like a grenade into metal just inches from his head. That was when Breton entered that odd dilation of spa
ce and time described by soldiers in combat—a hollowed-out form of being in which hearing and smell seem to disappear, vision narrows to only the train tunnel in front of you, and time warps enough for seconds and hours to impersonate each other.

  No uniform, no badge, and certainly no ballistics vest—Dan Couture got out of his Chevy Cavalier in just his summertime civvies, his Ruger sidearm bouncing around in the hip pocket of his shorts.

  When he was at the police station, Lynn Jolin had needed a cigarette break, and that was how Couture—after Breton had gone out on that domestic call—had ended up on the telephone lines at 2:42 p.m., the moment they blew up with calls from the IGA and near neighbors. He took the first several calls and then yelled for Lynn to man the phones as he limped to his car for the handgun kept in its glove department when he was off duty. Then he went back into Dispatch to tell Lynn to have Breton come pick him up.

  But Couture didn’t know how close Breton already was, and Breton probably underestimated how fast Couture could move from Dispatch to the front door with his bad ankle. Couture got outside in time to see the department’s only cruiser swerve onto Main with its wigwags going.

  So he took his Chevy instead. He parked on the road above the IGA and stood aghast for just an instant to see Breton and a civilian, both with drawn handguns, taking high-velocity fire from behind that dumpster. Couture ran in his hop-along gait to join them, hoping that he had cover—he couldn’t see around the dumpster to fix where the fire was coming from or who was shooting.

  Breton poked his head out once more as Couture arrived, and immediately two more rounds slammed into the dumpster. “He’s coming this way,” Breton said. “Time to get the fuck out of here.”