Detillier had reached the end of his cover. Maureen made her move.
She sprinted across the wide lane in front of the store, jumped up on the sidewalk, and threw herself against the brick fa?ade of the building. She held her gun at port arms.
She watched the glass doors as Detillier ran to take his position on the opposite side of the entrance. In unison, they took slow, careful steps to the end of their respective walls. Detillier made a “stop” sign. Maureen waited. Detillier crouched, then, his gun drawn, staying low, duckwalked toward the doors. They opened when he got close, and he moved into the doorway, making himself small against the wall. Maureen held her breath, waiting for gunshots.
Detillier stayed crouched in the doorway, gun out in front of him, his head turning left then right as he surveyed the inside of the store. He waved for Maureen to follow him. She glanced back at the parking lot as multiple NOPD units rolled in, sirens blaring. A dozen more cops had arrived. And there, on their heels, in their big, boxy truck, was the Tactical Unit. Detillier hissed her name. Maureen took a deep breath and duplicated Detillier’s approach. He’d started moving again when she had, and she followed him to the nearest register station. They ducked behind it for cover. She’d been right that the Watchmen had moved to the back of the store. There was no sign of them up front.
Maureen and Detillier sat hip to hip on the tile floor, catching their breath.
“So far so good,” Detillier said, his voice low. “They don’t want a shoot-out. If they did, they would’ve been waiting for us right here. Maybe suicide by cop isn’t how this ends after all.” He looked up at the ceiling. He peeked around the corner of the register station. “Man, this is a big fucking store. It’s a lot for two people to cover.”
Of course it’s big, Maureen thought, it’s a fucking Walmart. But she said nothing. She understood Detillier’s frustration. The people they hunted could be ten yards away, or they could be a hundred yards away. She certainly understood his urge to act. She more than understood it; she shared it.
As Detillier reported their progress and observations into his radio, Maureen tried to tune him out. Instead, she listened as hard as she could for sounds from the belly of the store. She wanted clues to what might be waiting for them. Unfortunately, she couldn’t hear anything but the god-awful piped-in New Country station playing over the speakers. Bon Jovi rejects with banjo thrown in. She was sweating. She wiped her forehead with the backs of her hands. The things you thought about, she mused, when trying not to get shot. What she wanted to hear was voices. When they hadn’t been met with gunfire at the door, she’d become more convinced that she and Detillier now faced a hostage situation. She thought she’d hear commands from the shooters, or even weeping and whimpering from the hostages. Nothing came to her, though. Nothing but that terrible fucking music.
“I can’t see anything from here,” Detillier said. “If we could find the security office, we could use the CCTV cameras to see the whole store.”
“They could be anywhere,” Maureen said. “They could be gone. They might’ve escaped.”
Back-to-back gunshots roared through the store. Maureen shouted and tried to shrink. Two more shots echoed under the high ceiling in the cavernous space. Detillier had time to mutter “Fuck me” before one more lone shot followed the others. The gunshots had come from the same location, far from where Maureen and Detillier hid. Whoever was shooting wasn’t aiming at them. From what Maureen could discern, all the shots had come from the same gun. The source was a single shooter repeating fire, Maureen figured, not an exchange of gunshots. Had Tactical slipped someone inside through a back entrance? Had the shooters been taken out? Maureen doubted it. Detillier was in contact with the world outside; they would’ve alerted him. That’s assuming, Maureen thought, that there’s order and strategy to what’s happening out front—a big assumption.
As the echoes of the final shot died, Detillier counted down, “Three, two, one.”
He didn’t have to tell Maureen what to do.