Someone Bad and Something Blue

by Miranda Parker

  Justus had “opened my nose” as Granny had often said when she’d teased Ava and me about our high school crushes. Life smelled sweet again. I had possibilities and wonder, a future designed just for me. Moms, especially the hard-working, will-kill-for-her-kids lioness kind, needed teenaged whimsy to wake them from tedium. This date tonight felt like God breathing life into my inner Eve.

  “Angel, wait.” Lana caught my arm.

  I gasped. “What’s wrong?”

  She looked up at me. “Stacy needs her car.”

  “But she can’t drive.” I looked over to the EMT van. She sat on the cot eyeballing me.

  “She’s upset. Lana didn’t want to go with her to the emergency room,” Whitney said. “While you were chatting with the cops, they got into an argument.”

  Lana tried to speak between sobs. “She’s hurt, but what can I do? I’m not a nurse. She said something that made me really, really mad. I lost my temper. She backed out of being my maid of honor. She says she can’t take care of all the things that need to be done on a bum leg.”

  “It’s my fault, so I could escort her around, in order to get things done. I’m still on my vacation for the next few weeks.”

  “Angel, she doesn’t want to be anywhere near you.” Lana sniffed.

  “But it’s for a good cause.” I reached into my purse for a hankie and handed it to her. “We can put on our big-girl panties to get you down that altar.”

  “I wish Stacy thought the same thing.” Lark pursed her lips. “She’s pissed and doesn’t want to be a part of the wedding at all now.”

  “So you’re short a bridesmaid because of me.” I pouted. “I’m so sorry, Lana.”

  “No, don’t be. Mom says that disappointments are opportunities to see the silver lining. I think I see it now.” She smiled and grabbed my hand.

  I smiled back, but shook my head at Whitney. Whitney shrugged. Neither one of us knew what she was talking about.

  “Whitney, will you be my new maid of honor and Angel, will you be my bridesmaid? You’re the same size as Stacy. It’s perfect.”

  The girls squealed in excitement. I’m pretty sure I didn’t accept the invitation.

  Lana stopped jumping. “Angel, you didn’t say yes.”

  I cringed.

  Garden Ridge was set off Beaver Ruin Road I-85 exit in Norcross. It was definitely on my way home with a small ten-minute drop and ride differential. So I could do it and have plenty of time to love on Bella before I got ready for my date. But I wasn’t sure I would get this limo back on time. I texted Maxim my issue with the limo and he texted me back that he would meet me at Garden Ridge with Ty. I guess it was a go. Now as for the bridesmaid thing . . .

  I turned to Lana. “I think it would only be fair if I inform your mom about what happened today before she reads it in the paper. And I don’t need you worrying and getting forehead wrinkles before the wedding over this bridesmaids’ thing so . . . I’ll do it.”

  Lana jumped forward and hugged me too tight to hug her back. “Thank you, thank you, thank you for everything, Angel.”

  I nodded while removing her bony arms from around my neck. For a petite, quiet thing she was strong just like her mom.

  Friday Noon

  Garden Ridge Retail Store, Norcross, Georgia

  Saturdays at Garden Ridge were no picnic, especially on cold days in March. Soccer moms, soccer mom’s moms, schoolteachers, and the oh so crafty traveled the four corners of Atlanta to get their decor on at this do-it-yourself home interiors retailer. I used to come here often during my last trimester of pregnancy, to try out all the nice rocking chairs and buy an excessive amount of terry cloth baby blankets. I couldn’t find one of those blankets now.

  We parked at the back end of the store near the lawn care department. Lark had to stay behind to drive Stacy’s car to Dekalb Medical and make sure she was okay. I asked her to talk Stacy back into her bridesmaid’s duties so I could back out graciously.

  According to Lana, the congresswoman’s meeting would be set up in the lawn and garden department. I thought it was clever, because they didn’t need to set out any chairs and tables. They were already out there. The kudzu camouflaged the interstate guards, supposedly creating great sound barriers from the highway noise, but it didn’t help a whole lot, in my opinion. It was still loud out here. However, knowing Congresswoman Turner, she would have made some lemonade out of the acoustics nightmare here, else she wouldn’t be doing it.

  The Honorable Elaine Tempest Turner was a blond spitfire hidden underneath Southern charm and a legal mind that couldn’t be matched by most Supreme Court Justices. She held these town meetings all over her district as a way to stay in touch with her constituents and gain some good PR. However, I wondered for her safety sometimes. Of course, she didn’t.

  Yet her bravery and spunk weren’t the things that made her exceptional. It was the way she’d raised Lana. That girl was dang near perfect. I welcomed her advisement on parenting Bella more than I did Mom’s.

  As we rounded the back wall where we’d heard her voice, I heard a sound from somewhere near the clay planters.

  I stopped. “Oh, sh . . .!”

  I caught both Whitney and Lana’s shirt tails. Clipped us all to the ground. The girls landed first; me on top of them. Splat. Cupped their mouths with my hands and listened.

  The sound was the high-pitched, feathered whistle of a shell flying through the air. Someone was shooting at us with a rifle.

  It wasn’t a sound you felt or could anticipate. If you got the chance to hear it once, you never forgot it. You’d better not.

  I knew this sound from years of shadowing dad on his deer hunts. I was the closest thing to a son he had. Ava, of course, hated dirt. He’d pitch me in his deer stand, a wooden shack he built and set high, camouflaged among Georgia pine. All I could do was eat sandwiches and sip cold, flat beer and listen. One day I was munching and minding my own business when it flew past me. There I became frenemies with that whistle.

  “Sh . . .” I squeezed the girls tighter and prayed. God, who do I have to kill to save us?

  27

  Friday, Noonish

  Garden Ridge Retail Store, Norcross, Georgia

  “Stay down and behind the lawn umbrellas.” I slid off the girls.

  “What do we do?” Whitney screamed.

  I whispered, “Don’t move, Lana. Whitney, call the police and stay here.”

  I pulled my Kahr from out of my holster and scanned the perimeter. People were screaming to the east of us. People ran from the west, north, and south. More shots rang out. I ducked, but began running toward the sound of bullets.

  Whitney mumbled, “You brought a gun to the Running of the Brides?”

  “Shut up before you get us killed,” I said in a drier tone like I did the first time the Big Bad Boys let me join a seize and capture. “I have to see what’s going on.”

  I studied Lana’s wide eyes and quivering lips. I knew she was concerned about her mom, but I couldn’t say anything reassuring to her. I didn’t know anything until I found Elaine.

  “Gonna find your mother. Okay?”

  She whimpered softly and nodded. I patted her head.

  “Call the police, Whit, and don’t leave this spot,” I said again before I disappeared between wicker lawn chairs and florals.

  I ran east, where the screams were loudest, but no one was coming out of the store.

  My heart raced. I had no plan but to find Elaine. And I meant to find her fast.

  Footsteps approached from somewhere around the corner we had just come from. I stopped and stepped back into a Weaver stance. My legs were bent, both hands on the gun. It wasn’t the best shooting position, but my mind wasn’t in the best position either. Nonetheless, whoever was coming from the other side better not be squeezing a stick, else they’re getting popped.

  An unarmed man flew around the wall and fell. He scrambled up. Panting.

  “Hey,” I whispered. “What’s going on?”
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  He looked at me, then at my gun, and stumbled back.

  “No, no, no. I’m not the shooter.” I caught him, almost pinned him up against the wall, and reached for my Georgia bail recovery agent identification card.

  In Georgia bounty hunters have to carry identification cards. It notes the bondsmen who contracted us and our physical appearance. Big Tiger’s ridiculously oversized T was scribbled over my chin on the ID photo.

  “I’m here to take down the shooter,” I said while placing the gun back into my holster.

  He trembled and began to sob in my arms. He was a frail man. Korean descent. Late thirties. Dressed in khakis, a plain white tee, and a blue jean jacket cuffed around his neck.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Jason Song,” he said.

  “Jason, I need to help the other people.” I patted his back and tried to quiet him down.

  “Don’t leave,” he pleaded.

  “But I have to go see.”

  “He’s shooting everyone. He’s coming.” Jason’s hands shook. “I have nowhere to hide.”

  “Trust me.” I placed my hands over his. “I’m coming to get him first.”

  I reached for my walkie-talkie to call Whitney, then reconsidered. “Quiet is kept” was the best plan so far. I lowered my phone back into my pocket and turned the corner.

  Unlike the scene at Filene’s Basement, the crowd ran toward me with nothing in their hands, but a whole lot of fear in their eyes.

  A man with strong hands grabbed my arm.

  I was in shock. I grunted. “Sir, let go.”

  “No.” He continued to run, dragging me with him.

  I planted my feet on the ground, which forced him to stop. “Let me go.”

  He frowned, then looked over my head, then back at me. “Woman, are you crazy?”

  “Is the shooter a man?” I yanked myself away from his hold.

  “Lady, I’m not letting you die.”

  I pointed at the gun attached to my hip. “Does it look like I want to die?”

  “Who are you, lady?”

  “Not again . . .” I huffed and ran past him.

  By the time I reached the east entrance, Garden Ridge looked like a scene from an urban zombie movie. One of those Top 40 pop songs—that you couldn’t remember the title or the artist, but knew the words by heart—played in the background. However, it didn’t muffle the sound of people in agony and the soft crunch of steel-toe work boots coming toward my left.

  I slid out the gun again, took a breath, and crouched behind the nearest cash register station.

  A tall, white man with a dark buzz haircut, long bowed legs, and blood splattered across his T-shirt walked past the linen aisle toward the entrance. He carried a sawed-off shotgun. I assumed he was either leaving or going out to shoot anyone still outside.

  My heart raced. Whitney and Lana were out there. I couldn’t let Rifle Man go out there. But then there was Elaine. Where was Elaine? What had he done to Elaine? Until I found her I couldn’t let the shooter stay in here either.

  I looked behind me and assessed my options. The police hadn’t arrived, which meant Rifle Man and I were the only ones armed. I was at a disadvantage, which didn’t look good.

  The last time I’d been in this predicament I’d gotten a concussion fighting off Cade Taylor, a skip who thought he could drag me through Underground Atlanta. Before I passed out I made sure the police dragged his butt back to jail.

  I thought I heard a police siren. I hoped that is what I heard, because I couldn’t wait any longer.

  His footsteps came closer. I braced my gun with both hands and slowly stood up.

  “Sir, put the gun down.”

  His eyes widened. He stumbled back and began firing. I dropped to my knees and focused on his knee cap. But before I squeezed the trigger and made him a cripple I noticed something peculiar. He wore a Garden Ridge badge around his belt strap. I looked around me. All his bullets had dropped on the floor, but nowhere near where I stood. I don’t think the man knew how to shoot a gun.

  “Look. The police are on their way and you can’t shoot worth a spit. So if you’re not the crazy shooter on the loose, put that gun down. If you are”—I lowered my voice—“then put the gun down, because I can blow your head back easy.”

  He dropped the gun and slumped to the floor. “I’m not who you’re looking for. I work here.”

  I looked around us. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.” His shoulders jerked. He threw his hands over his face and began crying. “Lord, help me. I don’t know.”

  I loosened my hold of the gun and ran over to him. “What does he look like?”

  “Normal.” He quaked.

  I held his hands until I heard the police sirens.

  “Sir, I have to find my friend before the police arrive. Have you seen the congresswoman? Where is she?”

  His eyes widened, then his face crumpled some more. “You don’t want to go where she is.”

  I felt my knees buckle. “I’m afraid I do.”

  He pointed with trembling hands toward the pottery area near the back of the building, the place I’d been heading toward from the outside before the shooting happened. I begged him to call me after he spoke to the police, gave him my card, then patted his back.

  I ran with lead feet toward the pottery area.

  If my worst fears were answered and Elaine was dead, I had to check the crime scene before the cops pulled me out of here. Technically I had no jurisdiction here, because the shooter to my knowledge didn’t have a skipped bond. But I couldn’t. I wouldn’t leave Elaine back here to be looked over with pity. She deserved more than that. She deserved my kind of justice.

  I tiptoed down the aisle until I saw Terri, Elaine’s mousy press secretary, crumpled on the floor. Dead. I gulped and continued on my tiptoes. I was superstitious about being noisy around the newly dead and dying. I felt that the silence was being respectful.

  And then I gasped. “Sean!”

  My brother-in-law Devon had been butchered by his assistant with a chef’s knife and I had watched him bleed out in Ava’s arms. I’d thought it was the cruelest, most cowardly way to kill someone, but as I watched Sean’s frozen-in-time lifeless body I changed my mind. This was the cruelest way to kill someone.

  He sat in an iron lawn chair with a digital tablet in his lap. His head had fallen back over the chair’s backrest. His sandy brown hair dripped with blood and brain matter. His blue left eye appeared to study the detail of the green ceramic garden angel staring back at me. We both knew Sean was dead. His right eye was gone and so was my faith in decorum.

  28

  Friday, After Noonish

  Garden Ridge Retail Store, Norcross, Georgia

  I stood frozen, watching Sean’s dead body. Prayers came out of my mouth, but the prayers were more for me. I didn’t know what to do. I needed help; a clue. I observed his head injury. From a distance it looked like a gunshot wound, but something was off. The entry wound didn’t look like the effects of a bullet. It reminded me of something else, but I couldn’t think of it, because I was still searching the place for Elaine.

  “Angel.” I heard someone whisper my name from behind me.

  I spun around. My heart beat so fast. My hands had automatically drawn the gun out of my holster. I pointed the gun at the air. I saw no one.

  “Am I going crazy?” I lowered the gun and dropped my head.

  “No, but whoever did this must be,” the invisible spoke again.

  I knelt down and squinted. “Elaine?!”

  She was crouched inside a ceramic pot on the bottom shelf in the back row. “Is he gone?”

  “Thank God you’re alive.” I caught my chest and breathed a sigh of relief. “Stay where you are. You’re probably the safest person in the building.”

  She gave me a thumbs-up. I checked around for other signs of life.

  I tiptoed around Sean and looked on the ground to my right. His wallet had fallen
out of his tweed trousers. Yet, I didn’t see any blood dripping on the floor. If I hadn’t smelled a weird metal-like burned odor coming from near his collar I would have thought he was just unconscious or asleep. Was the bullet stuck in his bone? That didn’t make sense, but I wasn’t going to move him to make sure, because I didn’t want to further contaminate the crime scene.

  However, I did kick his wallet away from him so that his blood, which had oozed a bit from his head, didn’t stain its leather. Sean prided his things, and in honor of his memory I thought I should at least preserve his wallet. It looked expensive. Yet, I had enough knowledge of crime scene investigation to know not to put my hands on it. I probably shouldn’t have kicked it either, because when I did, the wallet turned over and fell open. I gasped at what I saw.

  “Angel, it’s Maxim. Gwinnett County sheriffs are here with me. Tell me where you are.”

  “Maxim, we’re back here. Congresswoman Turner is back here with me alive, but Sean is dead.” I looked down at Sean’s wallet again and began to tremble. “Get here quickly; I need to show you something.”

  I reached for a linen hankie in my pocket. I collected them at estate sales all over Atlanta. They are small, inexpensive, and something I can visualize passing on to Bella. I scooped up Sean’s wallet with it, then took a picture of his ID with my phone camera. I then scanned some receipts and his grocery super saver cards in my scanner phone app. You can gather a great deal of personal data from a grocery discount card: home address, e-mail, shopping preferences, prescriptions, and the name of family members who can also use the card. I rubbed the wallet down with the hankie, then placed it back on the floor where I’d seen it and kicked it into the blood.

  “Angel, where are you?” Maxim shouted again.

  “We’re in aisle 9 wicker!” Elaine shouted. She now stood on the other side of Sean’s dead body. “Angel, where is my daughter?”