The man on the other side of the door was a full foot shorter than him and wore a blue baseball cap that said ST. POSSENTI POLICE. His head was an almost perfect cylinder, an effect exaggerated by the close cut of his pale yellow hair. His face was a burnished shade of red, the deep painless sunburn that all men of German descent acquired when they lived in the tropics for any length of time. His blue eyes glittered with humor and inspiration.
“Here I am,” Kellaway said. “What’d you want to look at?”
The man in the cap pressed his lips together, opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. He looked like he might cry. “Well, sir, my two grandchildren were in the mall this morning, with their mother—my daughter. And they’re all still alive, and so are a whole bunch more people. So I guess I just wanted to know what a hero looks like.”
And with that, St. Possenti police chief Jay Rickles took Kellaway in his arms and hugged him.
11:28 A.M.
Lanternglass saw the lights and heard the scream of sirens and was on her way to the mall before Tim Chen called to ask if she was busy.
“I’m about to be,” she said. “I’m driving toward it now.”
“The mall?”
“Uh-huh. What are they saying on the scanner?”
“Shots fired. All units. Multiple homicides.”
“Oh, shit” was her thoughtful reply. “Mass shooter?”
“Looks like it’s our turn. How was the fire?”
Lanternglass had spent the morning in a helicopter, buzzing up and down the edge of the fire blazing through the Ocala National Forest. The smoke was a filthy wall of brown cloud, climbing ten thousand feet high and throbbing with a feverish umber light. Her escort was an official from the National Park Service, who had to yell to be heard over the steady whap of the rotor blades. He shouted unnerving trivia about state cuts to emergency services, federal cuts to disaster relief, and the good luck they’d had so far with the wind.
“Good luck? What do you mean you’ve had good luck with the wind?” Lanternglass had asked him. “Didn’t you say you’re losing a thousand acres a day to this thing?”
“Yeah, but at least the wind is blowing north,” said the Park Service man. “It’s pushing the fire into uninhabited scrub. If it turns to the east, this thing could be on top of St. Possenti in three days.”
Now Lanternglass told her editor, “The fire was a fire. Hot. Greedy. Impossible to satisfy.”
“Hot. Greedy. Impossible to satisfy,” Tim said, speaking very slowly, weighing each descriptive in turn. “How do you satisfy a fire?”
“Timmy. That was a setup. You were supposed to say, ‘Sounds like my ex-wife.’ You gotta work with me here. When I give you a perfect setup like that, you have to take it.”
“I don’t have an ex-wife. I’m happily married.”
“Which is amazing, considering you are the least funny, most literal man in the ranks of American journalism. Why does she stay with you?”
“Well, I suppose the kids exert a certain pressure to remain together.”
Aisha Lanternglass made a buzzing sound, as if he’d replied with the incorrect answer on a game show. “WRONG. Wrong. Try again, Timmy. You’re the least funny man in American journalism, so why does your wife stay with you? Think carefully. This might be another prime setup.”
“Because . . .” His voice trailed off uncertainly.
“You can do it. I know you can do it.”
“Because of my thick, uncircumcised penis?” he asked.
Lanternglass whooped. “There you go! Much better. I knew you had it in you.” By then she was turning in to the lot at the mall and could see yellow sawhorses, ambulances, half a dozen cop cars. Blue and silver strobes stammered weakly in the near-equatorial heat. It wasn’t quite noon, and she already had doubts that she would get to Parks & Rec on time to pick her daughter up from tennis camp. “Gotta go, Tim. Gotta figure out who killed who.”
She parked and got out, threaded through the crowd to a line of sawhorses outside the entrance to the mall’s central atrium. TV vans were pulling in, the local guys, Channels 5 and 7. She figured there were only three or four dead, not enough to catch the attention of the national cable networks. On the other side of the sawhorses, it was the usual crime-scene chaos. Cops milled about. Walkie-talkies crackled and bleeped.
She didn’t recognize any of the uniforms, and after a while she sat on the hood of her twelve-year-old Passat to wait. The lot broiled, heat wavering up from soft blacktop, and pretty soon she had to stand again, her buns getting too hot against the steel of the car. All kinds of folks had driven in to see what was happening, or maybe they’d shown up to shop and decided to stick around to see what all the excitement was about. A hot-dog truck was parked at a discreet distance, outside a party-supply store across the road encircling the mall.
Lanternglass’s eight-year-old daughter, Dorothy, had gone vegetarian three weeks ago. She didn’t want to eat anything that had felt feelings. Lanternglass had done her best to play along, eating pasta and fruit salad and bean burritos, but the smell of hot dogs was making her feel feelings, and not empathetic ones.
She was wandering over to buy herself a lunch to regret when she passed some black girls standing around a sporty little bubblegum-colored ride and heard one of them say, “Okello had a front-row seat. EMT is looking at his hand, ’cause one of the SWAT stepped on it. SWAT ran right by him, carrying machine guns and everything.”
That was interesting, but Aisha Lanternglass kept going, couldn’t eavesdrop without being noticed. The hot-dog truck specialized in Asian fusion, and she wound up with a jumbo draped in cabbage and plum sauce. She could tell Dorothy she had cabbage and fruit for lunch and it wouldn’t even be a lie—it would just be leaving out details.
She meandered back toward the scrum but slowed and stopped to chug her dog while standing near the rear bumper of the bubblegum-mobile, license plate OOHYUM. Three girls, a little past high-school age, wearing jeans so tight that none of them could fit their cell phones into the back pockets, loitered around the front end. A car like that—it was an Audi—they weren’t out of the Black & Blue. More likely they were from the Boulevards north of town, where every house had a driveway of crushed white shells and usually a fountain with a copper mermaid in it.
The girl who’d been talking about the SWAT typed something on her phone, then said to the other two, “Okello is waiting to see if they’ll let him get his stuff and change back into his street clothes. He can’t stand that Boost Yer Game uniform. Taking it off is the best part of his day.”
“I thought it was the best part of your day,” one of the other girls said, and they all had a good dirty cackle.