“You were great.” Nelson’s voice was thick with emotion. “I almost started crying myself.”
Mindy sniffled, wiped her hands down her pink, wet cheeks. “Thank you.”
Ben nodded at Jamie. “Now it’s our turn onstage. Come on, let’s do this.”
Ben and Jamie climbed out of the front, and Jamie opened the door so Nelson could slide out of the back. When Nelson was standing next to the car, Jamie slammed the door shut again. If they were all killed in the next few minutes, Harper and Mindy Skilling would be trapped in the police car. Mindy, at least, had a gun, a little silver-plated .22. If she could play a gun moll as well as she could play a grieving daughter, Harper thought they’d have a chance.
“Crying is easy,” Mindy continued. Harper didn’t think she was talking to her. Instead, she seemed to be addressing the empty car, as if she hadn’t noticed the others had left. “At least for me. I think it’s harder to appear genuinely happy—to laugh like you mean it. And then, hardest of all, is dying in front of a crowd. I had to do a death scene as Ophelia . . . worst five minutes I’ve ever had onstage. I could hear people sniggering at me. By the time the scene was over, I wished I really had died.”
Harper tracked Ben and Jamie with her gaze as they made their way to the front of the car to stand in the headlights, where they would be backlit. Ten Verdun Avenue was behind a thick wall of snow-dusted hedge that came to Nelson Heinrich’s chest. Ben waved a hand, A little more to your right, a little more, positioning him about midway along the hedge.
She looked past Nelson, at the house where once the Fireman had dwelt with Allie and Nick and the dead woman. Around one side of the cottage she could see a plank fence, the gate open just slightly to show the corner of an empty swimming pool.
Harper tried to imagine John and the others crowded around a picnic table back there. She pictured Nick squirting some mustard on a hot dog, Allie pawing in a bag of chips, the plastic crinkling noisily. She visualized Tom and Carol Storey sitting across from each other with a Scrabble board between them, heard the click of tiles as Tom played a word. It was not hard to conjure up the smell of burgers charring on the grill, the odor mixing with the sharp chlorinated scent of the pool. And then, what’s that? The first thuds as propane tanks begin to explode at the CVS, and John turning from the grill with his spatula in one hand and Sarah coming out of the water to stand stiff and alert in the shallow end of the pool and—Harper caught herself there, thinking about Sarah Storey in the pool. Thinking about chlorine.
“Now, this, this is exciting,” Mindy said, leaning forward, big damp eyes glittering in the dark.
“Is it?”
“Yes,” Mindy said. “I’ve always wanted to play a heist scene.”
Harper heard the yowl of an approaching siren. Blue and silver lights made the street corner into a wintry discothèque. A police cruiser swung around the corner, in no great hurry, and glided toward them.
Ben walked forward, one hand raised in greeting, while the driver of the police car pulled himself out from behind the wheel. The interior of the cruiser was fully lit. A second police officer, a thickset woman, remained in the passenger seat with a laptop open across her knees,.
The cop who had been driving stepped into the headlights, raising a palm to shield his eyes and see Ben more clearly. He was a short little guy, his hair gray bristles like shavings of dull steel, a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles resting on the end of his nose. Harper’s first impression was that he looked more like an accountant than a police officer.
“Ben Patchett?” He smiled a puzzled smile. “Hey, I don’t think I’ve seen you in—”
A shocked realization clicked into place behind his eyes. The dumpy police officer turned and began to run back to the car, handcuffs jingle-jangling on his belt.
“Bethann! Bethann, radio back—” he was shouting.
Jamie Close reached between the Challenger’s headlights for her Bushmaster. It had been propped against the grille, half hidden behind her.
Ben lowered his head and took four hustling steps toward the police cruiser—not moving toward the officer who looked like a CPA, but crossing in front of the hood, moving around toward the passenger side of the car.
“Hey!” Jamie shouted. “Hey, fucker, stop running or someone is—”
The shotgun went off from behind the hedge with a heart-freezing clap of sound. The little gray-haired police officer stumbled and his gold-rimmed spectacles fell into the road and Harper thought, He’s been shot, Nelson just shot him. But then the little man steadied himself and stood still, holding his open hands out to either side of his body.
“Don’t shoot!” he screamed. “For God’s sake, don’t shoot!”
The female police officer inside the car had twisted her head around, so her chin was pressed to her collarbone. She had one hand on a mic attached to her shoulder, was squeezing the button. Ben stood over her, pointing his pistol at her temple through the window.
“It’s all clear,” Ben said. “All clear! Possible heart attack, that’s a code twenty-four, code twenty-four. Let them know, Bethann.”
Bethann stared at him from the corners of her eyes, then repeated, “Code twenty-four, code twenty-four at ten Verdun Avenue, officers on scene, awaiting ambulance.”
She released the mic without being told, closed her laptop, and rested her hands on top of it.
Jamie walked down the center of the road, the butt of the Bushmaster socked into her shoulder, sighting down the barrel at the little police officer in the street.
“Get on your knees,” she said. “On your knees, cop. We aren’t looking to hurt no one.”
“Bethann, if you’d step out of the car and lay facedown on the sidewalk, I think we can get through this without any ugliness,” Ben said.
Harper heard another siren now, deeper in tenor, rising in volume to make the cold air reverberate in a way she could feel on her skin. Mindy glanced at Harper, her eyes shining with excitement.
“I wish we were filming this,” she whispered.
“Ben,” called the gray-haired cop, as he lowered himself to his knees. Jamie stood over him, pointing the Bushmaster at the back of his head. “You got the shit, don’t you? You got that shit all over you. You’re sick with it.”
“I’m carrying Dragonscale, but I don’t know you’d rightly call me sick, Peter. By my way of thinking, I’m better than I ever was.” Ben stepped back, keeping his gun leveled on Bethann, who opened her door and got out with her hands raised. Without looking away from her, Ben called, “Nelson, didn’t I tell you to keep your finger off the trigger? Why did you discharge your weapon?”
Nelson stood behind the hedge, holding the .410 so it pointed into the sky. “It stopped him running, didn’t it?”
Ben said, “While you were blazing away, Bethann was speaking into an open mic.”
“Oops!”
“What’s that mean?” Jamie asked.
“It means if you’re smart you’ll get out of here while you still have time to run,” Bethann said. “There’s a good chance they heard the shot over the radio and are already sending additional officers.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Ben said. “Around the time I had to stop going to work, we were already stretched so thin it could take upwards of half an hour to get any kind of backup. And that was months ago. Everyone knows things have only gotten worse. Even if dispatch was listening, they’re not going to send the cavalry because they might’ve heard something irregular in the background.”
“Yes, that’s true!” Peter agreed, on his knees in the road, hands stretched out to either side. “But it isn’t just dispatch listening these days. You don’t know who’s on the radio anymore.”