“This woman and her baby shouldn’t be dead,” the mall cop said. “I hesitated, and that crazy cunt in the office killed her. Killed her and the baby both. One shot. How am I going to live with that?”
“The only one to blame for what happened to them is the person who pulled the trigger,” Harbaugh said. “You remember that.”
The mall cop considered this and then nodded slowly, his colorless eyes vacant and far away.
“I’ll try,” he said.
11:11 A.M.
The ESU officer named Harbaugh helped Kellaway stand up and kept an arm around him as they walked into the corridor. They left the guns and the dead behind.
Harbaugh walked Kellaway to a stainless-steel bench in the hall and eased him down onto it. A pair of EMTs wheeled a gurney past. Harbaugh told Kellaway to sit tight and stepped away.
It was getting crowded in the hall. Uniformed police had turned up. Kellaway saw a gang of Indian kids—India Indians, not American Indians—standing ten yards off, and two of them were filming everything with their cell phones. Someone yelled to push the onlookers back. A pair of cops stalked past carrying a sawhorse.
Ed Dowling, with mall security, appeared at one side of the bench. He was a ridiculous stork of a man with a prominent Adam’s apple and an inability to make eye contact with anyone.
“You okay?” Dowling asked, looking at his own feet.
“No,” Kellaway said.
“You want water?” Dowling said. “I could get you some water.”
“I want to be alone for a minute.”
“Oh. Okay. Yeah, l get that.” He began to shuffle away, moving sideways, like a man creeping along a high, narrow ledge.
“Wait. Help me up, Edward. I think I’m going to be sick, and I don’t want it all over YouTube.” Nodding toward the pack of fifteen-year-old Hindus or whatever they were.
“Oh, yeah, okay, Mr. Kellaway,” Dowling said. “Let’s go into Lids. They’ve got a can in the storage room out back.” He took Kellaway by the forearm and winched him to his feet.
They crossed to Lids, next door to Devotion Diamonds, and made their way past racks of baseball caps. A dozen Kellaways walked with them, reflected in the mirrored walls—a big, tired-looking man with circles under his eyes and blood on the hip of his uniform. He wasn’t sure how that had gotten there. Dowling used his key ring to open a mirrored panel that doubled as the door to storage. Just before they stepped through into the back, Kellaway heard someone shout.
“Hey!” called a uniformed officer with a plump, pink face. It amazed Kellaway that the force took such soft, out-of-shape, suburban-dad types and yet had turned him down. “Hey, wait. He needs to stay out here. He’s a witness.”
“He’s sick is what he is,” said Dowling, with a sharpness that took Kellaway by surprise. “He ain’t gonna york up out there with a bunch of nimwits filming him. He just nearly got himself killed stopping a mass shooting. Now he ought to be allowed thirty seconds to compose himself. That’s just being decent.” He nudged Kellaway into the storage room and then turned and stood in the doorway, as if to physically block anyone from following him. “Go on, Mr. Kellaway. Take care of yourself.”
“Thank you, Edward,” Kellaway said.
Dusty steel shelving stood against the walls on either side, boxes on top of them. A grimy couch, patched with duct tape, had been shoved into a back corner next to a stained counter with a Mr. Coffee on it. A very narrow doorway opened into a dingy bathroom. A chain dangled from the fluorescent bar above the sink. Graffiti on the wall over the toilet—he didn’t read it.
He shut the door and slid the bolt. He sank to a knee, fished around in one pocket, and came up with the deformed lead slug he’d picked out of the wall behind the shattered mirror. It had popped right out after a moment of working on it with his little multitool. He dropped it into the toilet.
He had his story straight in his mind. He would tell the police he’d heard shooting and approached Devotion Diamonds to assess the sit uation. He’d heard three shots, but in his statement he would say he’d heard four. It didn’t matter what anyone else said. When people were panicked, details became mutable. Three shots or four—who could be certain how many they’d heard?
He had entered and discovered three dead: the Muslim woman, her baby, and Roger Lewis. He’d encountered the shooter, the blonde, and they’d exchanged words. She moved to shoot, but he fired first, discharging his gun twice. He hit her with his initial shot, missed her with the second. They’d think that when he missed, the bullet went out the open window. Finally the kid who looked like Jonah Hill had entered the shop, and the shooter, with her dying breath, had put a bullet in his fat, foolish face. In fact Kellaway had fired her gun twice. Once into the kid, once out the window. When forensics did the math, the empty shell casings would all add up right: three for Lewis, one for the Arab woman and her infant, and one for the fatso.
He hit the flush. It clanked uselessly. He frowned and hit it again. Nothing. The lead slug sat in the bottom of the basin like a little squashy lump of turd.
Someone knocked.
“Mr. Kellaway?” said a voice he didn’t know. “Are you all right in there?”
He cleared his throat. “Just a minute.”
His gaze drifted up to the wall, and for the first time he read what was scrawled in Sharpie: TOILET FUCKED UP—USE THE PUBLIC RESTROOM.
“Mr. Kellaway, there’s an EMT out here who’d like to examine you.”
“I don’t need medical assistance.”
“Yep. But he’d still like a look at you. You’ve been through what you’d call a traumatic experience.”
“A minute,” he said again.
Kellaway unbuttoned his left cuff and folded it back to the elbow, then plunged his hand into the water. He fished out the slug that had killed Yasmin Haswar and her child, Ibrahim, and set it on the floor.
“Mr. Kellaway, if I can do anything to help you—”
“No, thank you.”
He lifted the heavy lid on the water tank behind the toilet and very gently set it on the seat. His left hand dripped. He picked up the slug and sank it in the water tank. Then he hefted the lid and carefully, quietly put it back in place. There would be time, in a day or two—a week at the outside—to return and collect the slug and ditch it more permanently.
“Mr. Kellaway,” came the voice on the other side of the door, “you need to let someone look at you. I’d like to have a look at you.”
He ran the sink, washed and soaped his hands, splashed water on his face. He grabbed for a hand towel, but there weren’t any left in the dispenser, and wasn’t that always the way? There wasn’t any toilet paper either. When he opened the door, his face was still wet, drops glittering in his eyebrows, in his eyelashes.