“Now what the heck is that supposed to mean?” Ben asked, but if Peter answered, Harper couldn’t hear it. His voice was drowned out by the caterwaul of the ambulance turning onto Verdun off Sagamore.
Jamie was the first to move, stepping around Peter, on his knees, and striding toward the ambulance as it pulled in behind the police cruiser. She pointed the Bushmaster through the windshield, calling out as she came forward:
“Hey there! Take your hands off the wheel—”
Nelson’s shotgun went off with a thunderous slam. The am bulance leapt forward, like a person jumping in surprise. Jamie sprang aside to get out of the way and even still was clipped by the driver’s-side mirror. The Bushmaster was knocked out of her hands and would’ve hit the road if she hadn’t been wearing the strap around her neck.
The cop named Peter got up on one foot, the other knee still touching the road, and the shotgun blammed again. Peter’s head snapped back. His wispy gray combover flipped up. He began to sink backward as if he were performing some sort of advanced yoga pose.
“Stop shooting!” someone screamed. Harper never knew who. For all she knew, she was hearing herself.
The ambulance began to back up. Its bent front bumper was tangled in the police cruiser’s rear fender, and it dragged Peter and Bethann’s car along with it, through a cloud of smoke. Ben watched the ambulance dragging the cruiser away in a kind of gaping bafflement, as if he himself had been shot.
When Bethann took off, she did not try to grab for Ben’s gun and she did not try to draw her own. Instead she pushed herself off the sidewalk and gave Ben a kind of comical shove, one hand in his face, the other on his breastbone. He reeled. She turned, took one step, then a second. Ben’s right foot plunged over the curb. He pitched backward toward the street. His pistol cracked. Bethann buckled, pushing her chest out, arching her back. Then she straightened and ran another half dozen steps, her hand falling to the butt of her Glock, before she suddenly fell face-first onto the icy, unshoveled sidewalk.
The tires of the ambulance smoked and spun. Jamie got her hands back on the Bushmaster and lifted it to her shoulder, hollering something Harper couldn’t hear. There was a wrenching clang of tortured steel. The rear fender of Peter and Bethann’s cruiser fell in the road. The ambulance, free, shot backward, straight into a telephone pole, banged to a stop once more.
The tires screamed and it jolted forward, veering straight toward Jamie. The Bushmaster went off in a series of pops. The shotgun sounded with a clap. Ben stepped into the road, leveled his pistol, and fired one shot after another.
The windshield of the ambulance exploded. The siren choked, made a dismal, dying wail, and went silent. A headlight exploded with a bright snap.
Jamie backpedaled, moving aside, then stood there, watching dumbly as the ambulance glided sedately past, no longer gaining speed, but moving at a surreal creep like a zombie in a horror movie. They watched as it rolled over Peter the cop’s body. Peter’s spine snapped like a tree branch. The ambulance trundled on another five yards before thumping to a stop against the curb, the fuming, bullet-riddled grille less than twenty feet away from the front of Ben’s Challenger.
3
Ben Patchett stood at the ready, like a shooter taking target practice at the gun range. He had swiveled around to follow the passage of the ambulance as it rolled by him, firing the whole time. At last, he lowered the gun and looked around at the broken glass and the blood in the street with a sort of stunned amazement.
They were all shining—all of them. Even Harper was lit up, could feel the tingling thrill of the Dragonscale racing over her skin. Nothing created a sense of harmony, it seemed, like a communal act of homicide.
“Whoa!” Nelson cried, a kind of ragged excitement—maybe even euphoria—in his voice. “Anyone hurt?”
“Is anyone hurt?” Ben shouted, almost screamed. “Is anyone HURT, you jackass?” Harper had never heard him say anything so profane. “What’s it look like? We got four corpses here. Why in God’s name did you start shooting?”
“I shot the back tire out,” Nelson said. “So they couldn’t get away. The guys in the ambulance. They were backing up. Didn’t you see?”
“They didn’t start backing up until you started shooting!” A vein stood up in the center of Ben’s forehead, an ugly red twig pulsing across his brow.
“No. No! I swear, they were making a run for it. Seriously! Jamie, you were standing right there. Weren’t they making a run for it?”
Jamie stood over Peter the cop, pointing her Bushmaster at the corpse, as if he might get up and start running again. Peter, however, was bent over backward and grotesquely squashed, a red tread mark printed across his flattened chest. Some of his guts had been forced up and out his mouth in a bluish-red mass of slick tissue.
“What?” Jamie lifted her head, and looked from Norman to Ben, her face bewildered. She put a finger behind her right ear. “What’d you say? I can’t hear anything.”
“Look. Maybe if we had instant replay, we could go back and see what really happened. I don’t know. I thought they were trying to drive away. Someone had to do something, so I shot out a tire.” Nelson shrugged. “Maybe I made a rookie mistake. If you want to lay all the blame on someone, go ahead! Pile it on! I don’t mind being the scapegoat here.”
Ben looked as if he had been knifed, mouth open, eyes wide and unblinking. He went to put his pistol back in his holster, and missed on the first two attempts.
Jamie came around to Harper’s side of the car and let her out of the backseat.
“Come on,” Jamie said. “Let’s go.” Moving around to open the trunk and collect the duffel bags.
Harper felt short of breath, as if she had stepped into shockingly cold water. Her legs wobbled. A high-pitched drone rang in her ears.
She walked to the ambulance, glass crunching underfoot, and looked in. The driver was a young black woman who had dyed her close-cropped hair a ripe banana yellow. Her mouth was open as if to call out. Her eyes were wide and startled. Her lap was filled with blue safety glass.
Harper couldn’t see a bullet hole and didn’t know what had killed her. She had no doubt the driver was dead—she could see it in her face—but she pulled open the door and put two fingers on her neck to feel for a pulse. When she did, the driver’s head slid over to rest on her right shoulder, leaving a smear on the vinyl headrest. A single bullet had entered her open mouth and exited through the base of her skull.
The woman in the passenger seat—a tiny, small-boned woman zipped into a blue EMT jumpsuit—groaned. She had dropped onto her side, facedown across the front seat.
Harper left the driver, made her way around to the passenger side. She opened the door and climbed onto the step.
There was blood on the passenger seat and blood soaking the passenger’s right shoulder. Harper suspected a bullet had pulverized her scapula on the way through . . . painful, but hardly fatal. Someone she could help. She felt a relief so intense it left her weak.
“Can you hear me?” Harper asked. “You have a wound in your shoulder. Do you think you can move?”
But even as Harper spoke to her, she had the growing sense there was more wrong than a smashed shoulder. It was the way the small woman was breathing. Her inhalations required a sobbing effort; her exhalations were worse, made a strenuous gurgling sound.
Harper put one knee up in the footwell, leaning into the ambulance and taking the woman by the hip, lifting and rolling her slightly. The EMT had another bullet wound, dead in the center of her chest. Blood drenched the front of her jumpsuit. Bubbles frothed in the wound when she exhaled.