Her gun went off with a crack and a pop and a flash of light. He fired back, instinctively, and flung most of her right lung up onto the desk.
His scalp tingled. The barrel of her .357 was still pointing at the floor. If he was shot, he couldn’t feel it, not yet. She stared at him with bewildered, stunned eyes. When she tried to speak, she gurgled blood. Her right hand began to drift up with her weapon. He caught it and twisted it out of her grip, and that was when he saw that the iMac had tilted off the desk and hit the floor. He played the crack and pop and flash of light back in his head, then pushed the notion aside before it could even fully form. No. He had heard a shot. He was sure it had been a shot, and not the sound of a falling computer. He even had a half memory of the slug passing by so closely it had seemed to twitch the fabric of his shirt.
The convert sagged. He almost stepped in to catch her, but at the last moment he deflected her with his left arm to keep her from tumbling into him. She wasn’t a person anymore. She was just evidence. She flopped across Roger Lewis and was still.
His ears rang strangely. The world expanded and brightened around him, and for a moment he had the ridiculous idea that he was close to fainting.
The air was blue from gunfire. He stepped out of the office, backing away from the pile of dead.
Kellaway saw the other radical on her back, staring at the ceiling, still clutching the trigger for the explosives. He took a step nearer to kick her hand free from the button. He wondered what kind of explosive she had packed into the vest, which looked a bit like a converted BabyBj?rn.
He saw a pair of small dusky fists clutching the front of her gown, but the image didn’t make sense to him, not at first. He looked at the trigger in her right hand and saw a silver letter opener with an opal in the handle instead of a black button. He frowned. He glanced at the bomb vest again. The cap covering the infant’s head had come loose. He could see an inch of scalp, lightly dusted in tan fuzz.
“Holy shit, dude,” came a voice from his right.
He looked and saw the fat kid who resembled Jonah Hill. He had walked right up to stand behind Kellaway, had wandered in, still clutching his breakfast burrito. He looked at the bodies heaped in the office, then at the dead woman and her dead baby.
“D’joo shoot her for?” the fat kid asked. “She was just hiding, man.”
“I asked you who was in the store. You said Muslim female shooter.”
“No I didn’t!” the fat kid said. “You asked who was in here. I said a Muslim, female shooter, and the owner. Holy shit. I thought you’d go in and save her, not blow her the fuck away like a fucking madman!”
“I didn’t blow her away,” Kellaway said in a dull, leaden voice. “The crazy bitch in the office killed this one. Understand? It wasn’t me. It was her. Tell me you understand.”
The fat kid laughed, a little wildly. He didn’t understand. He didn’t get it at all. He waved a hand at the mirrored wall where the bullet had struck after passing through the Arab and her baby. A silvery pink web of shatter lines that spread across the glass marked the point of impact.
“Dude, I saw you shoot her. I saw you. Plus, they’re gonna pick the bullet out of the wall. Forensics.” He shook his head. “You were out of your fucking mind. I thought you were going to stop a rampage, not go on one yourself. You killed more people than she did! Christ, I’m just glad you didn’t shoot me!”
“Huh,” Kellaway said.
“What?”
“Now that you mention it,” Kellaway told him, and raised the shooter’s fancy filigreed gun.
10:59 A.M.
Harbaugh was first up the stairwell, lumbering to the top in sixty pounds of black Teflon armor. Halfway up he stepped on something fleshy and heard a cry. A skinny black kid was stretched out flat on the stairs, and Harbaugh had mashed his hand with one boot heel. Harbaugh kept going, didn’t apologize. When you were in the middle of a mass shooting, manners were the first thing out the window.
At the top of the steps, he put his back against a round plaster pillar and snuck a look along the second-floor gallery. It was fucking apocalyptic: two acres of polished marble floor, brightly lit, and only a few people scattered around, all of them hiding behind potted plants or spread prostrate on the floor. Like that movie about the walking dead taking over the mall. Matchbox Twenty played on the sound system.
Harbaugh made his move, sprinting across the corridor, two other guys on the team right behind him, Slaughter and Velasquez. He was on his sights the whole way. The guys called it Xbox time, hunt and shoot.
He hit the wall to one side of the store entrance and dipped his helmeted head around the corner into the shop. After his very first glance, though, he lowered his weapon a few inches. A single security guard stood in one corner, facing a shattered mirror. The guy was tranced out, in a daze, poking one finger at a bullet hole in the center of the glass. He wasn’t carrying, but there were a pair of pistols resting on one of the display cases beside him.
“Hey,” Harbaugh said, in a soft voice. “Police.”
The guy seemed to rouse himself, shook his head, stepped away from the smashed mirror.
“You can stand down. It’s all done,” the security guard told him.
The mall cop was in his forties, sculpted, big arms, big muscley neck, hair in a marine crew.
“How many down?” Harbaugh asked.
“Shooter is in the office, on top of one of the victims,” the mall cop said. “They’re both dead. I’ve got three more in here. One’s a baby.” He didn’t choke on that last word, but he did need to clear his throat before saying it.
Harbaugh’s insides went sick and loose at that. Harbaugh had a nine-month-old himself and didn’t want to see an infant with its skull smashed open like a pink egg. He padded into the store all the same, boots almost silent on the thick carpet.
A fat kid, maybe twenty, had been thrown across one of the display cases, a bullet hole almost perfectly between his eyes. His mouth was open as if to object. Harbaugh glimpsed a dead girl in a do-rag, sprawled over a white male in the office.
“Are you hurt?” Harbaugh asked.
Mall cop shook his head. “No . . . just . . . I might have to sit down.”
“Sir, you should exit the premises. My colleagues will walk you out.”
“I want a moment here. With the woman. I want to sit with her for a bit to say I’m sorry.”
The mall cop was looking at his feet. Harbaugh glanced past his ankles and saw a woman in a pigeon-gray robe, eyes open and staring blankly at the drop ceiling. The baby was tucked into an infant carrier, perfectly still, facedown against his mother’s breast.
The mall cop put a hand on the display counter and gently lowered himself to the carpet and sat beside her. He took her hand, moved his fingers over her knuckles, lifted them to his mouth and kissed them.