“I turned to watch her go. I might even have started to walk after her. To see if she was— Ow!”
His girlfriend had punched him in the shoulder. “You ass. She had a gun, O.K.!” She hit him a second time.
He rubbed his shoulder, and when he spoke again, it was as much to Sarah as to Lanternglass. “I didn’t follow too close. She left me behind anyway. After a moment I began thinking I ought to find someone in security. I had just started back down the steps when I heard Mr. Lewis shout and then a gun popping off. I got down flat on the stairs and froze. Then I heard Mr. Kellaway yelling—he’s the head of mall security—and more shots.”
“Do you remember how many?”
Okello closed one eye, looked into the sky with the other. “Three at first. That was when she killed Roger Lewis. About a minute after that, another shot and a sound like something falling over, then a fifth shot. And about five minutes later, two more.”
“You sure about that? Five whole minutes between the fifth shot and the last two? In a stressful incident, it’s pretty easy to lose track of time.”
He shook his head. “Uh-uh. Four, five minutes. I know because I was texting with Sarah, so I could see the time on my phone.”
Lanternglass nodded but doubted him. Eyewitnesses reshaped memories into stories very rapidly, and stories were always at least partly make-believe, dramatic interpretations of half-recalled facts.
Okello shrugged again. “That was it. I stayed put, and a couple minutes later the police charged up the stairs in their armor, carrying machine guns, ready to fight off ISIS. Only impact they made was on my hand. One of them stepped on it running by.” He paused, then shook his head. “You can leave that part out, too. They went in to save lives. For all they knew, they might’ve been about to face a hail of gunfire. I don’t want to put them down. EMTs had a look at my hand while I made a statement. No bones broke.”
“And you’re out and you’re O.K.,” Sarah said, and stretched up on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “And don’t you dare say it or I’ma twist your nipple.”
Okello grinned, and his lips found hers, and in spite of herself Lanternglass decided OOHYUM was all right.
“Don’t say what?” Lanternglass asked.
“That he’s always O.K.,” Sarah said, and rolled her eyes. “Him and his stupid dad jokes.”
“I’m even more O.K. than usual. I mean, I’m not okay a baby got killed—”
“A baby?” Lanternglass asked.
His eyelids lowered, and a sudden scared, unhappy look crossed his face. “Yes, ma’am. Shot with his mom. A woman in a hijab, her baby, a chubby dude, and Mr. Lewis. Those are the four casualties, everyone who died—not counting the shooter. But you think about some of what’s happened in other places, like Aurora and Columbine, and I’m glad it wasn’t worse. I’m sure the cops are glad they didn’t have to shoot it out with anyone.” He laughed then—a harsh, jarring sound that carried no real humor in it. “And I bet Mr. Kellaway is glad he finally got to shoot someone.”
Lanternglass was thinking she ought to wrap it up, get a couple quotes from the girls she wasn’t going to use and split. If she didn’t get moving soon, she’d be late to pick her daughter up from camp. She still recalled, keenly, the sick and lonesome feeling of being the last to go home, staring out the rain-speckled windows of her modern-dance class, wondering if someone, anyone, would turn up to get her. But there was no walking away from that last line, which grabbed her attention and held it.
“What do you mean, he’s probably glad he finally got to shoot someone?”
The almost hungry grin on Okello’s face slipped away. “Ah, maybe you better leave that out, too.”
She paused the recording. “I won’t print anything that makes trouble for you here, Okello. I’m just curious. What’s the story with Kellaway?”
Okello met her stare with a sudden chill in his own Mississippi-colored eyes. “Old Nazi bastard put a gun in my neck on my third day of work.”
“He . . . what?”
“Mr. Boston, the floor manager at Boost Yer Game, he asked if I could use my car to run some merch down to Daytona Beach. I was doing a bunch of errands because I didn’t have my uniform yet.” Tugging at the silly gold basketball shirt that bore the words BOOST YER GAME and showed a black hand gripping an orange ball of flame. “I was out here sticking boxes in the back of my car when Kellaway sneaks up behind me and sticks the barrel of a gun against my neck. He says, ‘Jail or the morgue—it’s up to you. It’s the same to me either way.’”
“Bullshit,” Lanternglass said, although she believed him, and her tone said she believed him.
Sarah’s jaw was set, her mouth a grim line, and she was squeezing her boyfriend’s fingers tightly. She’d heard this story already, Lanternglass could tell.
“Hand on my heart,” Okello said, and tapped his fingers against his chest. “He got on the radio, said he had someone lifting boxes off the loading dock behind Boost Yer Game. Said I had a box cutter and a gun, too. But before his office radioed the cops, Mr. Boston saw what was happening and came running out to tell him it was all right. That I was an employee.”
“You had a gun?”
“I had a tape gun,” Okello said. “To seal a couple of boxes. The handle was jutting out of the pocket of my hoodie. He was right on the box cutter, though. That was in the back of my pants.”
The suspect rose, and I saw a flash in his hand. He leapt. I thought he was coming for me with a knife, and I fired my weapon to defend myself—that was what Officer Mooney had said when he was deposed before a grand jury. Lanternglass had read the entire statement years later. All it took to turn a CD into a knife or a tape gun into a .45 was a little imagination, a little panic, and a lot of prejudice.
“You’re lucky you didn’t get shot,” Lanternglass said. “Why didn’t he get fired?”
One corner of Okello’s mouth turned up in that movie-star grin of his, although there was a certain cynicism in it now that disheartened her. “Mr. Boston had the shakes for an hour. He was so pale he looked like he had the flu. He said he was going to call the complaint line for the firm that runs mall security, but when he tried, it was disconnected. He wrote them an e-mail and it bounced back as undeliverable. They’re a big southern outfit—Falcon Security? They provide the men for a lot of shopping centers. You’d think it’d be easier to get in touch with them. Mr. Boston asked if I wanted to go to the cops and file a complaint, but I figured nothing would happen, so I said skip it.”
“Why didn’t you quit?”
“ ’Cause I can’t pay for college with my good looks.”
“Did Kellaway apologize?”
“Yep. On the scene and then again the next day, in his office. He gave me a twenty-five-dollar gift certificate good at any shop in the mall.”
“Holy shit. That was big of him. Twenty-five whole dollars. What’d you spend it on?”
“Still got it,” Okello said. “I’m going to hold on to it until someone in the mall starts selling discount bulletproof vests. I’m in the market for one.”