“In a minute,” Lanternglass said.
“They’ve probably got an employee bathroom out back of Lids,” Okello said. He jerked his head at the stoner with bushy hair. “Hey, bruh. You mind if pokey here runs into your bathroom?”
The stoner blinked slowly and said, “Sure, man. Go fur it.”
Dorothy began to prance back toward Lids.
“No, wait,” the stoner said in a dreamy sort of tone. He looked as if he had only just been shaken awake. “Shoot. Maintenance is in there. We been asking ’em for three months to fix the flush. It only took a mass shooting for them to finally find time.”
Dorothy gave her mother a wide-eyed, bewildered look: What now?
“Wait,” Lanternglass hissed, just as Tim Chen picked up.
“Aisha,” Tim said, no preamble. “You heard?”
“Heard what?”
“About the evacuation order.” Tim sounded untroubled, almost mild. “Park Service fire department called forty minutes ago and made it official. We need to clear the office by ten tomorrow morning.”
“You’re shitting.”
“I never shit,” Tim told her.
“You really don’t. You’re the most constipated man I know.”
Tim said, “I need you back here. Everyone’s coming in, and I’ve got Shane Wolff swinging by to pack up our computers. There are trees burning less than a quarter of a mile away, and the wind is picking up.”
“We going to lose the building?” she asked. She was surprised at her own calm, although her anxiety was a smooth, hard weight in the pit of her stomach, like a swallowed stone.
“Let’s just say they can’t promise to save it.”
Lanternglass said, “What about the candle-lighting ceremony?”
“They’ll cover it on TV. We can watch it when we have a chance.”
“Are we going to be able to get tomorrow’s paper out?” she asked.
When Tim Chen replied, his voice was forceful, almost harsh. She had never heard him say anything in such a tone. “You bet your ass we will. This paper has come out every weekday since 1937, and I’m not going to be the first editor to let down the team.”
“I’ll be back as soon as I can get out of here,” Lanternglass promised him. She disconnected, glanced around for her daughter.
She expected to find Dorothy back in Lids, digging through the hats. But the little girl was sitting with Okello on a steel bench down the corridor—both of them planted in the very same place Randall Kellaway had settled, almost exactly a week ago, after the shooting in Devotion Diamonds.
But someone else had appeared in Lids: a skinny, elderly Asian man in a stained maintenance jumpsuit. He had a dripping wrench in one hand and was waving it at the stoner, muttering in a low, almost angry voice.
“Everything okay?” Lanternglass asked him.
The maintenance man went silent and turned his stern gaze upon her. The stoner gave her an embarrassed shrug.
“I’ll tell you what I told him. The last person to use that toilet,” the maintenance man said, wagging his wrench, “left something in it. I think someone needs to take a look at it.”
The stoner lifted one hand in a placating gesture. “And like I said: Dude. Whatever it is, it wasn’t me. Swear to God. I never crap at the mall.”
10:28 A.M.
When Kellaway steered his Prius into the courtyard of crushed white shells, Jay Rickles was already in the cab of his pickup, sitting in the open door with his feet on the chrome running board. Kellaway got out of his ride and climbed up into the chief’s.
“That the same thing you were wearing last night?” Rickles asked, slamming the driver’s-side door and starting the truck.
Rickles wore a crisp dress uniform: blue jacket with a double row of brass buttons, blue uniform pants with a black stripe down the sides, Glock on his right hip in a black leather holster that looked as if it had been oiled. Kellaway had on a rumpled blue blazer over a polo.
“It’s the only thing I’ve got I can wear on TV,” Kellaway said.
Rickles grunted. He wasn’t the grinning, grateful, wet-eyed grandpa today. He looked sunburned and irritable. They took off in a bad-tempered lurch of speed.
“This was supposed to be a hero’s welcome,” Rickles said. “You know you and I were going to lay a wreath of white roses together?”
“I thought we were each just lighting a candle.”
“PR thought a wreath would look nice. And the CEO of Sunbelt Marketplace, the guy who manages the Miracle Falls Mall—”
“Yeah. I know him. Russ Dorr?”
“Yeah, him. He was going to give you a Rolex. I don’t know if that’s still happening now. People get skittish about pinning medals on wife beaters.”
Kellaway said, “I never touched Holly in my life. Not once in my life.” It was true. It was Kellaway’s belief that if you reached a point where you had to use your knuckles on a woman, you had already shamefully lost control of the situation.
Rickles slumped a little. Then said, “I’m sorry. I take that back. That was uncalled for.” He paused and said, “I never pointed a gun at my wife, but I used a belt on my oldest daughter, when she was seven. She wrote her name all over the walls in crayon, and I went ballistic. I snapped my belt at her, and the buckle hit her hand and broke three knuckles. This was over two decades ago, but it’s still fresh in my mind. I was drunk at the time. Were you drinking?”
“What? When I threatened her? No. Sober as you are now.”
“It would be better if you had been drinking.” Rickles tapped his thumb on the steering wheel. The police scanner under the dash crackled and men talked, calling out codes in lazy, laconic voices. “I’d give anything to take it back—what I did to my little girl’s hand. Most horrible thing. I was blasted and feeling sorry for myself. Defaulted on a loan. Had my car repoed. Hard times. Do you go to church?”
“No.”
“You might think about it. There’s a part of me that will always carry a bruised heart because of what I did. But I was redeemed through the grace of Jesus, and eventually I found the strength to forgive myself and move on. And now I have all these amazing grandchildren and—”
“Chief?” came a voice on the scanner. “Chief, you there?”
The chief snagged the mic. “Rickles here, go ahead, Martin.”
“It’s about the thing happening at the mall. Did you pick up Kellaway yet?” Martin said.
Rickles clapped the mic to his chest and looked at Kellaway sidelong. “He’s going to tell me you’re not getting the Rolex. Do you want to be here or not?”
“I guess just say you haven’t seen me yet,” Kellaway said. “If he tells you I’m not getting a fancy watch, I promise I won’t embarrass you by sobbing in the background.”