“Stop!” Lila shouted. “Stop it right now!”
For a wonder, the woman did. She looked up, her bloodshot eyes so wide they seemed to fill half her face. She stood, holding a dripping brick in each hand. One red, one blue. God bless America. Lila saw a couple of Roger’s teeth stuck in the cocoon material hanging down from her chin.
“Watch out, Sheriff,” one of the men said. “She sure does look ray-bid to me.”
“Drop them!” She raised her Glock. Lila had never been so tired, but her arm was steady. “Drop the bricks!”
Jessica dropped one, and appeared to consider. Then she raised the other brick and ran, not at Lila but at one of the men who had crept closer for a better look. And, hard as it was for Lila to believe, to take a picture. The man’s cell phone was raised at Jessica. As she approached, he squealed and turned tail, head down and shoulders hunched. He knocked the girl in the tracksuit sprawling.
“Drop it drop it drop it!”
The Jessica-thing paid no attention. She leaped over the girl in the tracksuit and raised the remaining brick. There was no one behind her, all the neighbors had scattered. Lila fired twice, and Jessica Elway’s head exploded. Chunks of scalp with yellow hair still attached flew backward.
“Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.” It was the fallen girl.
Lila helped the girl to her feet. “Go home, hon.” And when the girl started to look toward Jessica Elway, Lila turned her head away. She raised her voice. “All of you, go home! In your houses! Now!”
The man with the cell phone was creeping back, looking for a good angle, one where he could capture every bit of the carnage. He wasn’t a man, though. Beneath his sandy hair his features were soft and teenage. She recognized him from the local newspaper, some high school kid, she didn’t know his name, some kind of sports star, probably. Lila pointed a shaking finger at him. “You take a picture with that thing and I’ll stuff it down your motherfucking throat.”
The kid—it was Eric Blass’s friend Curt McLeod—stared at her, brows furrowing together. “It’s a free country, isn’t it?”
“Not tonight,” Lila said. Then she screamed, shocking herself as much as the cluster of neighbors. “Get out! Get out! GO!”
Curt and the others went, a few snatching glances back over their shoulders, as if afraid she might come flying after them, as crazy as the woman she’d just shot down in the street.
“I knew they had no business putting in a lady sheriff!” one man called over his shoulder.
Lila restrained the urge to give him the finger and walked back to her cruiser. When a lock of hair fell in her eyes, she brushed it back with a panicky shudder, thinking it was that stuff, trying to spin out of her skin again. She leaned against the door, took a couple of deep breaths, keyed her mic.
“Linny?”
“I’m here, boss.”
“Is everyone coming in?”
A pause. Then Linny said, “Well. I got five. Both Wittstocks, Elmore, Vern, and Dan Treat. And Reed’s coming back soon, too. His wife—fell asleep. I guess his neighbor’s going to look after little Gary, the poor kid . . .”
Lila did the addition and it came to eight officers, not much when you were hoping to fend off anarchy. None of Dooling’s three female deputies had responded to Linny’s calls. It made Lila wonder how they were doing at the prison. She closed her eyes, started to drift, and forced them open again.
Linny was onto the subject of the countless emergency calls. There had been more than a dozen from men like Reed Barrows who suddenly found themselves the sole guardians of small male children. “Several of these feckless fools wanted me to explain to them how to feed their own children! This one idiot asks me if FEMA is setting up a facility to take care of kids because he’s got tickets for a—”
“Any of them at the station yet?”
“Who? FEMA?”
“No, Linny. Any of the deputies.” Not Terry, though. Please not him. Lila didn’t want Terry to see what was left of the man he’d most often partnered with for the last five years.
“Afraid not. The only person here is that old guy from Adopt-A-Highway and the VFD. Wanted to know if he could do anything. He’s outside, smoking his pipe.”
It took a few seconds for her exhausted, shocked brain to process this. Willy Burke, who knew about fairy handkerchiefs, and who drove a rattletrap Ford pickup.
“I want him.”
“That guy? Really?”
“Yes. I’m at 65 Richland Lane.”
“Isn’t that—”
“Yes. It’s bad, Linny. Very. Jessica killed Roger. He must have cut open the stuff on her face. She chased him outside and—she came at a kid with a brick, some little asshole, he was trying to take her fucking picture. She was out of her mind.” What mind? Lila thought. “I warned her to stop, and when she didn’t, I shot her. She’s dead. There was no choice.”
“Roger’s dead?” Nothing about his wife being dead. Lila wasn’t surprised. Linny had always had a soft spot for Roger.
“Send Willy out here. Tell him we’ll be transporting two bodies to the hospital morgue. He should bring a tarp. Hold the deputies there at the station. I’ll come as soon as I can. Out.”
She lowered her head and prepared to cry. No tears came. She wondered if a person could be too tired to cry. It seemed possible. Today, anything seemed possible.
Her cell phone rang in its little holster on her utility belt. It was Clint.
“Hello, Clint,” she answered. “This isn’t really the best time to talk.”
“Are you all right?” he asked. “You don’t sound all right.”
Lila wasn’t sure where to begin. With Roger and Jessica Elway, dead in the yard? With the hallucination she’d had out by the power lines in the woods behind the rubble of Truman Mayweather’s meth shack? With Sheila Norcross? With Shannon Parks? With the day Clint shut down his practice with no advance warning? With their marriage vows?
“You’re not falling asleep, are you? Lila?”
“No, I’m right here.”
“Janice is—out of commission. Long story. Hicks has gone off. Somehow I’ve ended up in charge of this place.”
Lila said she was sorry. It was a difficult situation, no question about it. But maybe it would look better once he had some sleep. Her husband could do that: go to sleep, and then wake up again.
He said he was going home to check on their son. Jared had said he’d hurt his knee and it was nothing serious, but Clint wanted to see it for himself. Did Lila want to meet him there?
“I’ll try.” But Lila didn’t know when she’d be able to get away. All she knew was that it looked like it was going to be another late one.
3
“Do you hear that?” A woman had found Kayleigh Rawlings in the dark. The woman smelled like booze and had a soft arm. Magda, she said her name was. “Singing, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” It was Maura singing. Maura’s voice wasn’t worth a shit; her sense of a tune was all seasick, up and down and creaky and broken; and to Kayleigh right then, it was incomparably sweet, carrying off the silly old words of that dirty old air.
“. . . Royal Canal . . .”