Strange Weather
Page 22
“You sure you even still want me to go to the candle-lighting?” Kellaway said. “Maybe it might be better for you to put distance between the two of us.”
“Fuck that,” Rickles said, and he laughed again, and Kellaway knew it was all right. “Too late anyway. We’ve been on cable news together every night all week. You don’t know this yet, but I got an e-mail from a top man at the NRA, and they want us both to deliver a joint keynote speech in Las Vegas next year. Hotel rooms, tickets all paid, ten-thousand-dollar speaking fee. I spoke to them about the restraining order, and it don’t bother them at all. Far as they’re concerned, it just proves the state puts people at risk when they step in to deprive them of their rights.” He sighed and then said, “We’ll get through it. You’re still the good guy in this. Just . . . no more surprises, Kellaway. All right?”
“No more,” Kellaway said. “I’ll see you at your house in half an hour.”
He ended the call and breathed in the scent of char, of sizzling pinecones, stood tall in the smoke of a burning world. After a moment he tossed the phone back into the passenger seat. He thought that before he got on the road, he might like to grab the Webley and put it in the trunk. Jim didn’t need it anymore.
Jim didn’t need the guns in his garage either. Kellaway decided to take a minute to hunt around, see if there was anything he might want. Jim had said he ought to help himself.
9:44 A.M.
“Right here,” Okello said, pointing at his feet.
They were halfway up the great, curving staircase at the center of the Miracle Falls Mall, in a deep well of sunlight, beneath a banked roof of skylights.
“I got low and stayed here,” Okello said. “Sarah had me texting her every thirty seconds to let her know I was still alive.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask about that,” Lanternglass told him. “Let’s walk up the rest of the way. I want to have a look at Devotion Diamonds.”
They climbed to the top, all three of them: Okello, Lanternglass, and Dorothy. Lanternglass had called Okello over breakfast to ask if she could read and possibly quote from his text messages to his girlfriend. She did not mention she wanted to look at the time stamps on his messages and see if they revealed when each of the shots had occurred. Okello had offered to do her one better.
“The mall is reopening this morning. Going to be a candle-lighting ceremony at eleven.”
“I know,” Lanternglass had said. “I was planning to be there to cover it.”
“So come by at nine-thirty, before the stores open up. Meet me at the entrance to Boost Yer Game. I can show you my texts and walk you through what I did and what I heard.”
“That’s no problem?”
“You kidding? My little sisters are going nuts about me being in the paper. Total strangers have been asking if they can take selfies with me. I might be getting a taste for fame. I think it suits me.”
She’d smiled at that but had felt a kind of gentle twisting in the chest as well. In that instant Okello sounded very like Colson.
The entrance to Devotion Diamonds was still blocked off by yellow crime-scene tape. On the other side of the tape, the doors had been slid shut and locked. The rest of the stores along the gallery were busy, prepping for the eleven o’clock ceremony and the expectation of a curious crowd. Voices yelled and echoed in the big open space of the central atrium. The gate was rolled up at Lids, the hat store next to Devotion Diamonds, and a sleepy-looking stoner with bushy, shoulder-length yellow hair was using a sticker gun to put 20-percent-off tags on baseball caps.
“Hats!” Dorothy cried, squeezing her mother’s hand. Dorothy wore a fuzzy yellow chicken-headed hat today, tied under her chin. “Hats! Mom!”
“Mm-hm,” Lanternglass said. She craned her neck and raised her voice to be heard by the stoner. “Hey, you mind if my daughter has a wander around?”
“Huh? Sure. Go for it,” said the stoner, and Dorothy squeezed her mother’s fingers again and went leaping into the aisles of Lids.
Okello said, “Sorry—there isn’t really anything to see. But you want to look at my phone?” He held it out to her. “I scrolled back to my texts from the day of. Um, don’t go back any further, okay?”
Lanternglass said, “Pictures?”
“You know it.” Okello grinned.
“She’s out of high school, isn’t she?”
Okello scowled, looked offended. “She’s a year older than me!”
“Are you out of high school?”
“I told you I’m in college. College is the reason I work this job. Books don’t pay for themselves.”
“They pay you plenty eventually, if you keep at ’em,” Lanternglass said, and accepted his phone.
Holy shit, this girl just walked into Devotion Diamonds and started shooting.
10:37
For real. Three shots.
10:37
WHAT????? Where are you? Are you okay?
10:37
On the big staircase, about halfway down. I’m flat on the steps. I’m practically close enough to see what’s happening.
10:38
STAY DOWN. Can you7 get away? OMG OMGOMG I’m freakingo ut
10:38
If I go down the stairs I’d move into sight of anyone standing in the hallway above.
10:39
I love you.
10:39
I love you too.
10:39
Don’t move. Stay where you are. Oh Jesus God. Praying so hard right now.
10:39
You said the person with a gun is a girl you saw her?
10:40
Another hots.
10:40
“shot” not “hots”
10:40
ohgod oh god please please please I don’t want you tog et shot
10:40
Im kinda hoping not to get shot too
10:40
you idiot I love you
10:40
Something fell over and then there was another shot.
10:41
r u all right? you havent texted
10:42
I’m fine
10:42
whd you stop texting
10:42
I didn’t it’s only been a minute.
10:42
You cared me don’t you dare stop texting
10:42
Im all right.
10:43
Still all right.
10:44
Shit. Another shot.
10:45
Oh God. Oh God.
10:45
I’m not sure what’s going on now.
10:46
And another shot.
10:46
OK maybe you should run for it
10:46
I’m all right. I dont want to leave the frappachinos.
10:47
THE WHAT YOU ASSHOLE?
10:47
I’ve got frappachinos. I cant run with my drinks. I’ll spill them.
10:48
I hate you. So much.
10:49
There was more, but Okello didn’t mention any other shots. He had the cops arriving and stepping on his hand at 10:52, less than twenty minutes after the first shot was fired but way too late in the day to change what had happened.
The way the St. Possenti police had it, Becki Kolbert had put three into her boss and one into Mrs. Haswar and her child. Kellaway had entered, fired twice, nailing Kolbert once and missing with the second. Then a final shot, when Kolbert rose up again to shoot Bob Lutz. Seven shots in all.
On the time stamp, though, they clustered differently, wrongly. Three, then two a bit later (And something fell over. What? The computer maybe?), then one, and then one more. Lanternglass had some ideas about what that might suggest, but it wasn’t anything she could take to press. She wasn’t sure Tim Chen would even let her note the discrepancies between Okello’s texts and the official report.
She gave Okello back his phone and dug
her own out of her pocket.
“You want screen captures of any of these, that’s no problem,” he said.
Lanternglass said, “I might. Let me talk to my editor and run a couple of possibilities by him.”
Dorothy skipped to the threshold of Lids and stopped just inside the security barrier, wearing a raccoon hat with raccoon paws and a raccoon face. Not a Davy Crockett–type cap—more like a raccoon hand puppet that fit on a person’s head.
“No,” Lanternglass said, and Dorothy’s grin vanished, replaced by an ugly scowl.
“Twenty percent off,” Dorothy said.
“No. Put it back.” Lanternglass dialed the office.
Dorothy said, “I have to pee.”
“In a minute,” Lanternglass said.
“They’ve probably got an employee bathroom out back of Lids,” Okello said. He jerked his head at the stoner with bushy hair. “Hey, bruh. You mind if pokey here runs into your bathroom?”
The stoner blinked slowly and said, “Sure, man. Go fur it.”
Dorothy began to prance back toward Lids.
“No, wait,” the stoner said in a dreamy sort of tone. He looked as if he had only just been shaken awake. “Shoot. Maintenance is in there. We been asking ’em for three months to fix the flush. It only took a mass shooting for them to finally find time.”
Dorothy gave her mother a wide-eyed, bewildered look: What now?
“Wait,” Lanternglass hissed, just as Tim Chen picked up.
“Aisha,” Tim said, no preamble. “You heard?”
“Heard what?”
“About the evacuation order.” Tim sounded untroubled, almost mild. “Park Service fire department called forty minutes ago and made it official. We need to clear the office by ten tomorrow morning.”
“You’re shitting.”
“I never shit,” Tim told her.
“You really don’t. You’re the most constipated man I know.”
Tim said, “I need you back here. Everyone’s coming in, and I’ve got Shane Wolff swinging by to pack up our computers. There are trees burning less than a quarter of a mile away, and the wind is picking up.”
“We going to lose the building?” she asked. She was surprised at her own calm, although her anxiety was a smooth, hard weight in the pit of her stomach, like a swallowed stone.
“Let’s just say they can’t promise to save it.”
Lanternglass said, “What about the candle-lighting ceremony?”
“They’ll cover it on TV. We can watch it when we have a chance.”
“Are we going to be able to get tomorrow’s paper out?” she asked.
When Tim Chen replied, his voice was forceful, almost harsh. She had never heard him say anything in such a tone. “You bet your ass we will. This paper has come out every weekday since 1937, and I’m not going to be the first editor to let down the team.”
“I’ll be back as soon as I can get out of here,” Lanternglass promised him. She disconnected, glanced around for her daughter.
She expected to find Dorothy back in Lids, digging through the hats. But the little girl was sitting with Okello on a steel bench down the corridor—both of them planted in the very same place Randall Kellaway had settled, almost exactly a week ago, after the shooting in Devotion Diamonds.
But someone else had appeared in Lids: a skinny, elderly Asian man in a stained maintenance jumpsuit. He had a dripping wrench in one hand and was waving it at the stoner, muttering in a low, almost angry voice.
“Everything okay?” Lanternglass asked him.
The maintenance man went silent and turned his stern gaze upon her. The stoner gave her an embarrassed shrug.
“I’ll tell you what I told him. The last person to use that toilet,” the maintenance man said, wagging his wrench, “left something in it. I think someone needs to take a look at it.”
The stoner lifted one hand in a placating gesture. “And like I said: Dude. Whatever it is, it wasn’t me. Swear to God. I never crap at the mall.”
10:28 A.M.
When Kellaway steered his Prius into the courtyard of crushed white shells, Jay Rickles was already in the cab of his pickup, sitting in the open door with his feet on the chrome running board. Kellaway got out of his ride and climbed up into the chief’s.
“That the same thing you were wearing last night?” Rickles asked, slamming the driver’s-side door and starting the truck.
Rickles wore a crisp dress uniform: blue jacket with a double row of brass buttons, blue uniform pants with a black stripe down the sides, Glock on his right hip in a black leather holster that looked as if it had been oiled. Kellaway had on a rumpled blue blazer over a polo.
“It’s the only thing I’ve got I can wear on TV,” Kellaway said.
Rickles grunted. He wasn’t the grinning, grateful, wet-eyed grandpa today. He looked sunburned and irritable. They took off in a bad-tempered lurch of speed.
“This was supposed to be a hero’s welcome,” Rickles said. “You know you and I were going to lay a wreath of white roses together?”
“I thought we were each just lighting a candle.”
“PR thought a wreath would look nice. And the CEO of Sunbelt Marketplace, the guy who manages the Miracle Falls Mall—”
“Yeah. I know him. Russ Dorr?”
“Yeah, him. He was going to give you a Rolex. I don’t know if that’s still happening now. People get skittish about pinning medals on wife beaters.”
Kellaway said, “I never touched Holly in my life. Not once in my life.” It was true. It was Kellaway’s belief that if you reached a point where you had to use your knuckles on a woman, you had already shamefully lost control of the situation.
Rickles slumped a little. Then said, “I’m sorry. I take that back. That was uncalled for.” He paused and said, “I never pointed a gun at my wife, but I used a belt on my oldest daughter, when she was seven. She wrote her name all over the walls in crayon, and I went ballistic. I snapped my belt at her, and the buckle hit her hand and broke three knuckles. This was over two decades ago, but it’s still fresh in my mind. I was drunk at the time. Were you drinking?”
“What? When I threatened her? No. Sober as you are now.”
“It would be better if you had been drinking.” Rickles tapped his thumb on the steering wheel. The police scanner under the dash crackled and men talked, calling out codes in lazy, laconic voices. “I’d give anything to take it back—what I did to my little girl’s hand. Most horrible thing. I was blasted and feeling sorry for myself. Defaulted on a loan. Had my car repoed. Hard times. Do you go to church?”
“No.”
“You might think about it. There’s a part of me that will always carry a bruised heart because of what I did. But I was redeemed through the grace of Jesus, and eventually I found the strength to forgive myself and move on. And now I have all these amazing grandchildren and—”
“Chief?” came a voice on the scanner. “Chief, you there?”
The chief snagged the mic. “Rickles here, go ahead, Martin.”
“It’s about the thing happening at the mall. Did you pick up Kellaway yet?” Martin said.
Rickles clapped the mic to his chest and looked at Kellaway sidelong. “He’s going to tell me you’re not getting the Rolex. Do you want to be here or not?”
“I guess just say you haven’t seen me yet,” Kellaway said. “If he tells you I’m not getting a fancy watch, I promise I won’t embarrass you by sobbing in the background.”
Rickles laughed, a fine web of wrinkles appearing at the corners of his eyes, and for a moment he was his old self. “I like you, Rand. I always have, from the first instant I clapped eyes on you. I hope you know that.” He shook his head, barely clamping down on his mirth, then squeezed the mic. “No, the son of a bitch hasn’t turned up yet. What’s the story?”
They were cruising along the highway, through a fog of pale blue smoke, maybe ten minutes from the mall. The wind caught the high pickup and rocked it on its springs.
“Phew,” Martin said. “Good. Listen, we’ve got a real fucking problem down here. A maintenance guy was fixing a toilet out in back of Lids, the shop next to Devotion Diamonds, and you aren’t going to believe what he found in the tank. A lead slug. Looks like the one we couldn’t locate, the one that took out Mrs. Haswar and her baby, over?”
“How the hell did it get in a toilet, over?”
“Well, didn’t someone have to put it there? Gets worse, Chief. That reporter, Lanternglass, she was right there, she heard all about it. What’s the bet it’s all over TV by lunch, over?”
While Martin was blabbing, Kellaway reached across the seat and unbuttoned the chief’s holster. Rickles glanced down as Kellaway pulled out the Glock and stuck the barrel in his ribs.
“Tell him to head to my house and that you’ll meet him there, then hang up,” Kellaway said.
Rickles held the mic in his hand, staring down with clear, surprised blue eyes at the gun in his side.
“And watch the road,” Kellaway added as Rickles looked up and braked hard to keep from rear-ending a Caprice dawdling along through the smoke.
Rickles squeezed the mic. “Jesus. Okay. What a fucking mess. We better . . . we better convene at Kellaway’s house. He hasn’t turned up at my place, so he’s probably still there. First officers on the scene should hold him. I’m putting on my party lights and heading that way now. Out.” He released the mic and hung it on the scanner.
“Pull over in that gas station,” Kellaway said. “The Shell up on the right. I’m going to let you out and drop you off—because I like you, too, Jay. You’ve never been nothing but generous to me.”
Rickles touched his blinker and began to slow. His face was stiff, impassive. “Yasmin Haswar? And the boy, Ibrahim? That was you?” he asked.
“It was the last thing in the world I ever meant to happen,” Kellaway said. “They say that guns don’t kill people, that people kill people. But I feel like the gun wanted the both of them. I really do. Yasmin Haswar leapt up out of nowhere, like she knew there was a bullet waiting for her, and the gun went off. Sometimes guns do kill people.”
The truck pulled in to a parking lot containing eight rows of pumps and a small central convenience store. At that time of the morning, most of the pumps were empty. A film of blue smoke rippled steadily across the lot, coursing over the roof of the tiny mini-mart. The truck’s blinker was still click-click-clicking.