“Coughlin!”
Her shouted name hit Maureen like a slap in the face. She turned. Detillier. Damn. Forgot about him.
“What are you doing?” Detillier asked.
“I, uh, I thought he might not be dead, so I checked.” She looked down at the corpse, then back at the FBI agent. “But he is. I can say for sure he’s deceased.”
“Now you’re the medical examiner?” Detillier asked. “Step away, please.”
He was disturbed, Maureen could tell, by finding her looming like a reaper over the dead man’s body. How long had he been standing there, she wondered. What had he heard her say?
“Just, geez,” Detillier said, “you’re standing in the blood. C’mon, we need to be professional here.”
“All right, all right.” Maureen backed away from the body, gave the dead woman as much distance as she could as she headed over to Detillier at the end of the aisle. She left bloody boot prints on the floor.
“The woman,” Detillier said. “Do you recognize her?”
“Should I?” Maureen took another look, as a courtesy to Detillier, but she knew it wasn’t anyone she had known. “Because I don’t.”
“She look like someone you’ve heard discussed? Maybe by Quinn or Ruiz?”
“Nope.”
“What about him? You got a good-enough look.”
“I don’t recognize him,” she said.
“You see anything useful on him,” Detillier asked, “during your closer inspection?”
“I saw that he’s got a big fucking bullet hole in the base of his throat. Gotta be where she shot him. I think he was on his knees, waiting for it. I wonder if he was begging her to do it, or begging her not to do it. We’ll see when they turn him over if he had the guts to open up his armor to her.” She shook her head. “Leave it to the man to lose his nerve when it counts. Anyways, she put a couple of rounds into the shelves behind him. Those were the first shots we heard, her trying to get him. The single shot that came last, that was her finishing the job. Suicide pact is my guess.”
“Makes sense,” Detillier said. “For some reason, these types never want to stick around for the glorious revolution. Less work to be a martyr, I guess. They never live long enough for me to ask them.”
“Revolution,” Maureen said, shaking her head. “Martyrdom. Is it really that deep, or are they just bananas? Seriously, if these two hadn’t found the Sovereign Citizens and the Watchmen, wouldn’t someone else be cleaning up the same mess in a trailer park somewhere over meth or dog fights?”
Detillier shrugged. “Anything’s possible.”
“You’ve seen this before?” Maureen asked.
“I have,” Detillier said. “And I get the feeling I’ll see it again.”
“Well, whatever happens next,” Maureen said, “it won’t involve these two.”
22
With the bad guys dead, Maureen didn’t have anything to do.
She hung around the fishing aisle, thinking someone might want to ask her questions about what had happened there, but nobody did. Everyone who came through went right to Detillier. As the crowd grew, she grew more and more eager to leave. She wanted to lose the FBI jacket and get out of her heavy vest. She wanted to go home, be alone, and have a drink and a long shower. For right now, she’d be happy to get outside and breathe cooler, less blood-laden air. Outside she could find someone to ask about Preacher’s condition. Christ, she had a shift that night, which was hard to even think about.
Who would do roll call?
Sporting Goods swarmed now with NOPD detectives and FBI agents, large, anxious men arguing in hushed tones over who was in charge of what. The FBI was labeling the afternoon’s shootings acts of domestic terror, which came under their jurisdiction. As far as Maureen could tell, the NOPD didn’t give a shit about terminology and jurisdiction. They wanted an all-out manhunt. They wanted blood. However much of it pooled on the floor of the fishing aisle, that blood wasn’t blood they had spilled. It wasn’t enough. That blood didn’t count. Maureen understood. She watched as a calm and determined Agent Detillier struggled to explain to whoever from the NOPD would listen to him, which appeared to be nobody, that the investigation was paramount now, that the three known shooters from that afternoon were dead.
At the moment, Detillier insisted, there was no one to hunt.
Maureen wasn’t so sure that was true. Somebody, she thought, scratch that, everybody should be looking for Leon Gage. Detillier had to be thinking the same thing.