Grant was above him, then, and Lucas saw that he was going for something, the gun, probably, and Lucas managed to tangle up Grant's knees and Grant went down again and Lucas rolled up on top of him. Got his good arm around Grant's neck, got his legs around Grant's body, locked them at the ankles so that he had Grant in a scissors hold.
Grant tried to pull away along the long axis of their bodies, trying to knee or kick Lucas, and they turned again, upside down on the stairs, and he heard the gun clank, thought, "He's got it," and heaved upward as his body weight pushed Grant down.
The gun went off, a flash and a boom, then Lucas got his feet braced against a step, groaned and lifted Grant's head up, gave a final desperate jerk…
Grant's neck snapped like a tree branch.
He went limp, and Lucas fell on top of him.
Around them, he thought, was nothing but pain and silence: but he was wrong about the silence. In a second or two, when he'd caught his breath and had gotten upright again, he began to hear the screaming, and realized it was coming from everywhere.
27
A half dozen fires and two dozen fights added to the chaos of the shootings. When the smoke got dense in one wing of the security section, maintenance men used a forklift to break through a locked door to the outside, and frightened, angry, and medicated patients scattered over half a square mile of woods and farmland.
The Big Three, with Grant, killed six people and seriously wounded eight more. The final death toll, including the four killers, was ten.
Of the three people in the cage, one, a woman, had survived because Beloit had gotten to her quickly enough to keep her from drowning in her own blood. The bullet had gone through her cheekbone, her palate, and out through a jawbone, taking along a couple of upper teeth.
The shooting was ending when the fire department got to the hospital, and the paramedics, and three doctors in the hospital itself, quickly got to the other shooting victims.
LUCAS WAS TAKEN to the hospital in Mankato. Sloan rode with him. Sloan kept saying, "This is not a problem. This is not a problem…"
Lucas finally said, "Sloan, shut the fuck up. This is definitely a problem."
THE MORE SERIOUSLY INJURED were flown to Regions Hospital in St. Paul or to the Mayo in Rochester, except for two who needed immediate blood transfusions. They were taken to Mankato to be stabilized.
Lucas was evaluated at Mankato. The bone in his upper arm had been broken by Biggie's bullet. The bullet itself had not gone through but was stuck on the underside of the skin at the back of his arm. With his good hand, Lucas could actually feel the bullet under the skin.
"So what?" he asked. "I'm gonna need a splint or something?"
"More than that," the doc said. "We'll have to go in there to put your arm back together. This will be a little complicated."
After talking with Sloan, Lucas insisted on being reevaluated at Re-gions. He was flown out with one of the more severely wounded victims who had been taken to Mankato to be stabilized.
At Regions, as at Mankato, he was told that the arm would need an operation to place screws to hold the bones together. He could expect to be in a cast for three to six months; and there would be physical rehabilitation after that.
"Am I gonna lose anything? Any function?"
"Shouldn't," the doctor said. "Maybe a little sensation on the, back of your arm."
SLOAN, JENKINS, Shrake, Del, and Rose Marie crowded in to see him before the operation. Sloan had briefed Rose Marie on the shootings. "There are already people running around, trying to figure out whom to hang," Rose Marie said, before Lucas was rolled into the OR. "It's amazing. It's like the second reaction. The first is to ask how many are dead, the second is to ask whom we can hang."
THE OPERATION TOOK two hours and was routine, the surgeon told Lucas in the recovery room. He was given additional sedation when he came out of the recovery room and slept through the night, waking at six o'clock.
A nurse came to see him: "Hurt?"
"Not much," he said. "I'd like cup of coffee, is what I'd like. And a New York Times or a Wall Street Journal?"
"I don't think so," she said. "How about a nice glass of orange juice?"
"How about if you hand me my cell phone? And I gotta take a leak…"
Both his arm and his face hurt-his nose had been recracked in the fight-but he was able to walk to the bathroom without a problem, pulling a saline drip along behind him.
The lying had already begun.
He added to it.
WEATHER CALLED AT SEVEN, an hour earlier than usual. She'd heard about the shooting after she'd finished her morning work in the operating theater, and called in a panic. Lucas had kept his cell phone on a bedside table.
"I'm fine," Lucas lied. "But I gotta get into the office. There's gonna be a political shit storm starting about ten o'clock. Soon as the politicians finish their double-latte grandes."
"Were you involved in the shooting? Were you in there?" she asked, still scared.
"Yeah, I was right there," Lucas said. "It's a goddamn mess, Weather. I don't want you to think about it. I gotta talk to everybody on the face of the earth in the next two days, covering our asses and getting the story right. I don't want to have to worry about you, too."
"You sound… hoarse."
He was, from the anesthesia. He said, "I spent all yesterday screaming at people. I need a couple of cough drops."
She asked, "What about Sloan?"
"He's bummed. I gotta get to him, too," Lucas said.
"Take care of yourself-don't worry about everybody else," Weather said.
"Hey, I'm fine," he lied. When he hung up, he was satisfied that he'd pulled it off.
Then Weather called Sloan's wife, worried about Sloan's state of mind, and Sloan's wife said, "We stayed for the operation, but Lucas was pretty groggy when he came out of it. They said everything went okay…"
"What operation?" Weather asked.
Lucas was talking to the docs about getting out and was being told "No," when Weather called back.
"LUCAS…" she wailed.
"Ah, shit…"
Trapped like a rat.
SLOAN AND JENKINS lied about Biggie's death.
Jenkins gave the blow-by-blow. He was a superb liar: "He had his back against the wall. I made a move and he fired at me, six feet away, right through the doorway."He talked with his hands and eyes as much as with his words. "Goddamn, I'm lucky to be here. Sloan came in low, right under Biggie's shot, and shot him twice. It was all so fast, not even Biggie knew the gun was empty. I mean, we're talking Bam! Bam-Bam!
Everybody bought that.
And why not? All the bullet holes were right there. Besides, the re-construction of events suggested that Biggie's.45 had killed three people and wounded three more, including Lucas.
SHRAKE'S DESCRIPTION OF Chase's death had Chase pointing his weapon at the second woman's face, ready to pull the trigger. The rescued woman was incoherent for two days after the shootings and kept talking about Chase rolling the other body's eyes back and forth with his fingers.
Nobody wanted to know much more about Chase.
LUCAS TOLD THE absolute truth about Taylor and Grant, and blood analysis proved it.
Later analysis also indicated why the shootings weren't more deadly than they were. O'Donnell's guns, used by Biggie and Taylor, were loaded with target loads and cast slugs, apparently homemade by O'Donnell himself, for shooting close range at metal plates. They punched holes in the victims but didn't expand, and most didn't penetrate as deeply as combat loads would have. The third gun, a 9mm that did have combat loads, was used by Chase and had only had two or three rounds fired.