by Jeremy Bates
Chapter 10
2:33 p.m.
Luke sat behind the wheel of the pickup truck on Church Street one hundred feet from the theater, where he could still command a view of the entrance. The truck belonged to the lanky motherfucker who’d been with the brunette the night before. He’d slit both their throats in the upstairs bedroom. They made a hell of a bloody mess before they died, and he had to shower and borrow some of the dead guy’s clothes. Nevertheless, killing them was necessary. He couldn’t have them find the blonde in the kitchen in the morning. They would call the cops, who would alert Charlotte. She wouldn’t go to the musical, and this game of cat and mouse would drag on.
He titled the bottle of Jack to his lips and spotted Charlotte and the dickhead emerge from a side street. He watched them talking and holding hands. He watched them ask a woman to take their picture in front of the tall brownstone columns along the façade of the theater. He watched them enter the lobby.
Originally Luke’s idea had been to wait until the matinee showing of Young Frankenstein finished, follow them back to the hotel where they were staying, and kill them there. He’d been looking forward to fucking Charlotte one last time with the boyfriend looking on with a crushed skull. But sitting in the truck, watching the flow of well-dressed people enter the theater, he had come up with something a bit more dramatic, something that would make the news and maybe garner enough attention that guys like him, guys who put their lives on the line for their country, would stop getting royally fucked by the shitheads back on Capitol Hill who’d never done anything for their country except smile for a camera.
Luke opened the glove compartment, found a pen and scrap of paper, and began scratching out a suicide note.
Chapter 11
You live and learn, that was Pandu’s motto. You take your beatings, you get back up, and you do better. It was this philosophy that had seen him rise above the Sri Lanka slums in which he grew up by working two jobs to pay for his education while saving enough money to become eligible for a United States green card, which he was granted in 1985. This December would mark his thirtieth anniversary in the country. He now had a loving wife, three successful children, and an equal number of adorable grandchildren.
He’d worked in kitchens and drove taxis for his first ten years in America, getting treated like third-world trash by his superiors, until he purchased the Church Street 7-Eleven franchise and became his own boss. Since then he had seen every type of customer imaginable walk through his doors, and he’d become adept at spotting trouble. Mostly the worst he had to deal with were drunks and shoplifters, but twice he’d been held up. The first time the thief got away with more than nine hundred dollars from the cash register. But you live and learn, isn’t that right, and the following day Pandu purchased a SIG Sauer P226. When he was held up the second time, he shoved the pistol in the thief’s face. The scumbag ran, but not before Pandu pumped two rounds into his back. The scumbag still managed to flee on foot, but the police arrested him two hours later after he showed up at a hospital missing a quart of blood.
That had been in 2008. Pandu had not had any more attempted robberies since, though he nevertheless kept the pistol at close reach beneath the counter.
He was thinking about all this now because he did not like the look of the large man who had just entered the store. The scumbag was dressed in clean jogging pants and a clean sweatshirt. But everything else about him seemed off. His hard face, his bloodshot eyes, his stiff gait, the way practiced drunks walk.
He came straight to the counter, which meant he either wanted to buy cigarettes—or steal the cash in the register. Pandu lowered his hand to the pistol.
“Good,” the man said, smiling at him.
“Good?” Pandu frowned. “I don’t understand you, my friend.”
“I was hoping you had a gun.”
The scumbag yanked Pandu across the counter with surprising speed and strength and tossed him to the floor Pandu had recently spent an hour mopping. In the next moment a combat boot struck him in the face. Pandu saw stars and tasted blood. The strength left his body. The SIG dropped from his hand.
The man retrieved the pistol and aimed it between Pandu’s eyes.
Even before he pulled the trigger a second later, Pandu knew he was done living and learning.
Chapter 12
The interior of the Dock Street Theater resembled an eighteenth-century London playhouse. The seats on the main floor were set in long benches, like church pews, while the balcony level featured boxes with individual chairs. Charlotte and Tony shared the first row of one box with an elderly couple.
Charlotte was looking forward to the show. Her parents had been theater enthusiasts, and she must have seen a half-dozen musicals as a child. She had fond memories of Phantom of the Opera and The Lion King and buying snacks in the concession areas during the intermissions. After her parents died, however, she never went to another production. She didn’t know why. She supposed she’d never had a reason to attend one.
The older gentleman sitting next to her leaned close and said, “Have you been here before?”
“No, never,” she said.
“Where are you from?”
“Oh, leave them alone, Gregory,” said the woman to his right, presumably his wife.
“It’s all right,” Charlotte said. “I’m from New York. My friend here’s from Colombia. We’re going to college in Asheville.”
“Hi,” Tony said.
“What’s your name, son?”
“Tony.”
“Did you know, Tony, that this is the oldest theater in the country? Well, almost. The original burned down in The Great Fire of—Lord if I can remember. A hotel was built on the same spot, which became the present theater, and it used to employ none other than Junius Brutus Booth. He was the father of John Wilkes Booth. You know who John Wilkes Booth is, don’t you?”
Charlotte said, “My high school history teacher would kill me if I didn’t.”
“The whole family was crazy. Son was the craziest, of course. But his father was missing a few screws as well. Tried to kill his manager in this very building.”
For the first time in hours Charlotte thought of Luke, and she frowned.
“Oh, I don’t mean to upset you, my girl. That happened a dog’s age ago—”
“Shush now, Gregory,” said the woman to his left as the lights dimmed. “It’s starting.”
#
Mel Brooks’ reinvention of Frankenstein followed a young Dr. Frankenstein (who the actors pronounced “Fronkensteen”), inheriting his grandfather’s castle and trying to duplicate the steps of his grandfather and bring a corpse back to life. The bumbling servant Igor (“Eye-gore”) and the buxom assistant Inga both got a lot of laughs from the audience. Nevertheless, the real star of the show was Frankenstein’s madcap fiancée, Elizabeth, played by Tony’s sister, Maria. She was not only a gorgeously exotic woman but wonderfully talented, and Charlotte could barely take her eyes off her.
During the latter part of the play, while the townspeople were hunting for the reanimated monster, a shout originated from backstage. Charlotte was so mesmerized by the production she barely noticed. A second shout, however, caused her to frown. The actors, who were in the middle of a musical number, faltered and looked at each other.
Then, a moment later, Luke emerged on the stage, brandishing a gun.
Charlotte was so surprised she thought she had to be mistaken. She wasn’t. Luke was right there. On the stage. Looking for her.
She stared in disbelief and fear, a sickening wave of unreality washing over her. She was repeating “no” over and over, though she was barely aware of this.
The actors, Tony’s sister included, stopped singing completely. The orchestra fizzled to a halt. Gasps swept through the audience.
Luke aimed the pistol at Igor and said, “No one fucking move, or I blow his brains out!”
More gasps from the audience, some whimpers, though no one tried to leave.
“Where are you, Char?” Luke said. “I know you’re here.”
Charlotte couldn’t move.
Luke stepped threateningly toward Igor. “You got three seconds!”
Charlotte shot to her feet. “Luke!” she shouted idiotically. It was all she could think to say.
Shielding his eyes from the spotlights with one hand, he trained the gun on her. “Will you look at you two,” he said. “Ain’t you just adorable up there.”
Charlotte realized Tony had gotten to his feet next to her.
Luke said, “Tell me, dickhead, she worth it? A few fucks worth your life?”
Tony held up his hands. “Luke…”
“There you go again, pretending you know me. Don’t you fucking learn?”
He fired the gun.
#
The spell of shocked silence that had fallen over the audience shattered. All at once everyone leapt to their feet, stampeding toward the doors, bumping, shouting. It was instant chaos.
Charlotte tried to catch Tony as he sank to his knees. She ended up on her rear, his upper body slumped in her lap.
From below came the staccato cadence of more gunshots, punctuated by screams of terror. She didn’t know if Luke was aiming at her or at the fleeing audience. For the moment, however, she was shielded by the balcony wall.
“Tony?” she said. She couldn’t find where he’d been shot. “Tony? Can you hear me?”
His face was deathly pale. “Can’t…feel my body.”
Those were the four most devastating words Charlotte had ever heard.
“You’re going to be okay, Tony. Hang in there. You’re going to be okay.” As tears filled her eyes she adjusted her position so she could cradle his head. That’s when her fingers brushed a warm and sticky clump of hair. She tilted his head and gasped.
She’d found the gunshot wound.
#
Officer James Brady and his partner of thirteen years, Murphy Peterson, fought past the swarm of manic people flowing out of the Dock Street Theater. Inside the box office lobby they stopped to assist an elderly man dragging an equally elderly woman by the hands.
“She okay?” Brady barked.
“No, she ain’t!” the man snapped. “Some bastard knocked her out of her wheelchair in the panic.”
“Murph,” Brady said, “help him get her out of here—”
“I got her, dammit!” the man said. “You go get that crazy terrorist on stage! Goddamn ISIS, I bet, gonna blow us all up.”
Brady and Peterson drew their guns and slipped through a set of double doors one after the other into the auditorium. Brady’s stomach turned upside-down at the sight of what awaited them, and his first thought was that a bomb had gone off after all. Bodies lay everywhere—in the aisles, draped over the benches, perhaps a dozen. A middle-aged man sprawled on his back, a pool of coagulating blood expanding slowly around him. A regal-looking Asian with a clump of salt-and-pepper hair and skull missing, revealing a wedge of brain. A pretty young woman in a one-shoulder red gown, a delicate hand stretched out before her, as if grasping at some invisible lifeline. Suddenly the hand spasmed, an eye opened. But it stared at nothing—dumb, like a butchered animal.
Fighting back nausea, Brady focused on the stage at the front of the room, where, lit up by the spotlights like the star of the show, the perp responsible for the mayhem stood. He was aiming a pistol at the balcony level, shouting at an out-of-sight woman, who was shouting back.
In all his time on the force, Brady had never fired his service revolver. Now, however, he widened his stance, thumbed back the hammer of the Model 28, and squeezed the trigger, praying to hell he hit the son of a bitch.
#
A bullet whizzed past Luke’s head so close he felt the displaced air. A second one struck him in the left leg. Grunting, he flopped to his stomach.
He spotted the pair of cops at the entrance and squeezed off several rounds, one of which took out the cop on the right. Then the slide on the semi-automatic locked back with a sharp click.
“Fuck,” he mumbled. He rolled off the front of the stage and slumped behind the first row of seats. He took a spare magazine from his pocket, which he’d found in the 7-Eleven vigilante’s back office, and swapped it for the spent one, seating it with a smack from the heel of his palm. He racked the slide, chambering a fresh round, and peered over the seats.
The cop was gone.
#
While gunshots boomed back and forth below, Charlotte was staring at Tony in amazement as he pushed himself to his feet.
“You can move!” she said, fearing he’d been paralyzed.
Tony, looking pale and shaky, took her hand. “Come on—when he’s distracted.”
Ducking low, shoving chairs aside, they made their way toward the balcony level exit.
#
“You still there, hotshot?” Luke called.
“Drop your weapon, asshole!” shouted the cop, who had apparently taken cover behind the last row of seats. “This place will be crawling with police in two minutes!”
Suddenly there was a commotion on the balcony level as Charlotte and the dickhead made a break for the exit. Luke was a decent marksman, and had he been standing he could have picked them off. As it was, however, he didn’t have a chance. He would have to intercept them in the lobby, but the fucking cop was between him and it—
He noticed the abandoned wheelchair. It was tipped over in the aisle close to where the cop was laying low. It had one of those portable oxygen tanks attached to it that people with emphysema used.
Luke aimed the SIG at the tank and unloaded the fifteen-round magazine until one of the rounds penetrated the pressurized cylinder.
With a whoosh like a fighter jet flying low overhead, a brilliant violet-and-yellow explosion consumed the auditorium.
#
The blast tossed Brady several feet through the air. He hit the ground hard and sucked back a hot, harsh breath of air. His ears were ringing and he couldn’t see anything but searing light. He rolled himself onto his side and smelled singed hair and cooked skin. When his vision cleared he groaned in horror. The right sleeve of his uniform had been burned away, revealing pig-smooth skin already turning a mushy, blistering pink. But worse than this was his right leg, which was missing below the knee and squirting blood.
Then the perp was standing above him, silhouetted against devil-orange flames. He pointed a black matte pistol at Brady’s face.
“Please…” Brady croaked. “I got kids…”
“More than I got,” the man said, and fired.
#
Charlotte and Tony had reached the staircase with the divided, symmetrical flights leading to the lobby when a tremendous explosion shook the building, knocking them to their knees.
“What the hell was that?” Charlotte gasped. “Does he have fucking grenades?”
She leapt back to her feet, though Tony remained on his knees.
“Come on, Tony!” she said.
“I can’t.”
“Come on!” She helped him to his feet.
The auditorium door banged open below them. A second later Luke limped into the carpeted lobby.
He saw them and fired the gun.
“Up!” Charlotte said, and they fled up the short set of steps to the second floor, stopping before a ten-foot-tall mirror with an ornate gilded frame. On either side of it were doorways with decorative molding. She and Tony went through the one on the right, though it turned out both led to the same large drawing room with tall windows and antique furnishings.
“That way!” she said, pointing to another doorway at the far end of the room.
“You go,” Tony said. “I can’t…”
“You have to!”
“Go!” He shook free from her and stumbled to a table draped with a white tablecloth. He collapsed behind it.
“You can’t stay there! He’ll find you!”
“Go!”
#
Ignoring the burning pain in hi
s leg, Luke limped up the right flight of steps. At the half-landing he stuck his head through the door to the balcony level, to make sure Charlotte and the dickhead hadn’t returned there. They hadn’t. The entire auditorium had become a scorching inferno.
He continued up to the second floor. As soon as he entered the large room off the hallway he saw Charlotte. She was standing in a doorway to his right, almost as if she had been waiting for him.
He raised the pistol and fired.
#
A gunshot popped, but Charlotte had been ready for it and dashed up a narrow stairway to the third floor. She came to a hallway lined with three doors. She ran past the first two and tried the third. Unlocked! She ducked inside, slammed the door closed, and found herself in a dark, stuffy room filled with old furniture.
And nowhere to go.
#
The first two rooms Luke passed had been empty—which meant Charlotte was in the last one. He gripped the door handle. The door didn’t budge. He drove his shoulder into it and got it open an inch or so. The bitch had shoved a desk in front of it. Two more shoulders, however, and he was able to slip into the room—just as Charlotte disappeared out a dormer window.
#
Charlotte tried her best to ignore the shot of vertigo that threatened to send her tumbling three stories to her death. She wasn’t close enough to the edge of the roof to see the theater patrons milling about on the street below, but she could hear them, some shouting, some crying, the pandemonium mixing with approaching police sirens.
Scrambling on all fours, a strong wind blowing at her back, she climbed the steep pitch of the gable roof and pulled herself over the ridgeline a moment before another gunshot popped.