HUGH HAD BEEN THE THIRD POLICEMAN TO ARRIVE. His unmarked car screamed to a stop behind a cruiser. He was immediately approached by two wide-eyed beat cops, who’d been the first to reach the Center after Dispatch’s all-hands-on-deck call reporting an active shooting. “Lieutenant,” one of the cops said. “What do you want us to do?”
“What do we know so far?”
“Nothing,” said the second officer. “We got here ten seconds before you did.”
“Have you heard any gunfire?”
“No.”
Hugh nodded. “Until more backup arrives, position yourselves at the northwest and southeast corners of the building in case the shooter tries to leave the building.”
The cops hurried away. Hugh started running a checklist in his mind. He would need the street cordoned off. He would need a command center. If the shooter wasn’t coming out, he would need a direct line inside to speak to him. He would need to get rid of the people lining the street who thought this was entertainment.
His personal cellphone was buzzing frantically in his pocket, but he ignored it as he reached into his car and called Dispatch. “I’m on-site,” he told Helen. “I’m securing the scene. Shooter’s still inside, presumably with hostages. Has anyone gotten hold of the chief?”
“Working on it.”
“Call the regional SWAT team and get them here,” Hugh said. “And get me aerial photos of the Center.”
As he hung up the radio, three more squad cars arrived. He reached into his breast pocket, pushing the button on the side of his phone to dismiss whoever wouldn’t leave him the fuck alone while he tried to keep a nightmare from becoming even more disastrous.
When others were paralyzed by panic or overwhelmed by adrenaline, Hugh kept calm, steady, clearheaded. He didn’t yet know if there were survivors inside the building, nor did he know what had happened that brought this gunman into a collision path with him today. But he would find out fast, and he would move heaven and earth to get the guy to put down his weapon before there was any more damage.
Even as he instructed additional beat cops on how to secure the perimeter and what materials he needed to do his job, Hugh was praying. Well, maybe not praying, but pleading to the universe. Praying was for people who hadn’t seen what Hugh had in his line of work. Praying was for people who still believed in God. He was fervently hoping that this asshole with a gun was one who could be easily defused. And that the shots he’d fired might have struck plaster or glass, and not people.
Within minutes, Hugh was managing thirty-odd policemen. He tapped impatiently on his thigh. He needed to have the area secure before he initiated contact with the shooter. This was his least favorite part of the process: waiting to begin the work.
His phone began to buzz again.
Hugh drew it out of his pocket. There were twenty-five messages from his daughter.
There is a moment when you realize that no matter how well you plan, how carefully you organize, you are at the mercy of chaos. It’s the way time slows the moment before the drunk driver crosses the median line and plows into your vehicle. It’s the seconds that tick by between when the doctor invites you to take a seat, and when she gives you bad news. It’s the stutter of your pulse when you see another man’s car in the driveway of your house in the middle of the day. Hugh looked down at the home screen of his phone and felt the electric shiver of intuition: he knew. He just knew.
He clicked on Wren’s messages.
Help
There’s someone shooting.
I’m here with Aunt Bex.
She’s hurt. I don’t know where she is.
Dad? Are you there?
DAD THIS IS AN EMERGENCY
I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO
DAD
He stopped reading. His hands felt like lead and all his blood was pooling in his gut. Why was Wren in there? Why was Bex in there? He managed to type out a response:
Where are you?
The longest moment in Hugh’s life was the breath he held until he saw those three little dots that meant she was typing. He sank to his knees, his body singing.
Hiding, she wrote.
Stay there, Hugh typed. I’m coming.
He should recuse himself. The whole point of hostage negotiation was to be clearheaded, and he couldn’t be objective if his own daughter was a hostage. Staying in charge here would be against the rules.
He also knew he didn’t care. There was no way he was going to trust Wren’s life to someone else.
He started to run toward the clinic.
—
TO BEX, AIR HAD BECOME fire, and every breath was charring her raw. Some tiny cell of self-preservation warned her to crawl somewhere, anywhere, that she could hide. But when she tried to roll to her side the agony that stabbed through her made it impossible; the world went white at the edges.
She stared overhead, her brain making patterns of the fluorescent lights and the tiles of the dropped ceiling. That was what artists did, they arranged the unarrangeable into something that made sense.
When she created her canvases, with their giant pixels, she was filtering impressionism through technology. The key to her technique was that the human eye—the human brain—did not have to see individual parts to imagine the whole. It was called Gestalt theory. Similarity, continuation, closure—these were some of the principles that the mind craved. It would complete lines that weren’t fully drawn; it would fill in boxes that were empty. The eye was pulled to what was missing, but more important, the eye finished it.
Maybe Hugh would be able to do that, too, if she were gone. Finish her work.
And yet she also knew that there was another tenet of art: the observer could easily miss what wasn’t obvious. An optical illusion worked because the brain focused on the positive space of a chalice, and not the negative silhouettes of the two profiles that formed it. But just because the viewer saw a goblet didn’t mean the artist, while creating the piece, hadn’t been wholly focused on those faces.
Maybe one day Hugh and Wren would hold a gallery retrospective of her work. Maybe she would achieve fame by dying relatively young. And only then, maybe, would they realize they were the subjects of every one of her pieces.
This was the worst pain she had ever felt.
She opened her mouth to say their names, but found her throat was filled with the words of Leonardo da Vinci: While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.
—
LOUIE COULDN’T HEAR. THE SHOTGUN blast had left him with a heavy, seeded silence pushing on his ears, the absence of sound hammering in his head. He rolled over, which hurt his leg so much his vision went blurry, and he thought he was about to lose a second sense. He found himself looking at Harriet, the nurse who’d been working with him in the procedure room that morning, who was sprawled on the floor as well. Harriet’s brown eyes were wide and her mouth was open. There was a bullet hole, neat as a thumbtack, in the center of her forehead. A feathered fan of blood sprayed the wall behind her.
Louie turned his head and vomited.