Even in a dazed fugue, I could tell by her demeanor, by the intense look in her eyes, that something was seriously wrong.
I suddenly felt tired and powerless, thoroughly unprepared for whatever I was about to be told. Staring at the woman’s hard face, I felt like going back into my bedroom and lying down. The sun broke as I stood there, light rapidly filling the sky.
“Yes?” I finally said.
“You need to come with me, Jeanine,” she said.
What the? What was this?
“I’m so sorry to have to tell you this,” the lady cop said. “It’s your husband. Peter. He’s been involved in a shooting.”
Chapter 23
A SHOOTING?!
That one stupid thought kept repeating in my numb mind as I sat in the passenger seat of the speeding cruiser. Every few seconds, I would try to form another thought, but my indignant, stubborn brain wouldn’t have it.
A shooting? I thought. A shooting?
That meant that Peter had been shot, right? I stared down at the cop car’s incident report–covered carpet. It had to. Otherwise, the red-haired lady cop behind the wheel wouldn’t be involving me.
I needed to talk to Peter. To find out what was going on. Now he’d been shot? I didn’t know what to think as the cop car’s tires cried around a curve. What did it mean?
If I thought I’d been disoriented riding in the cop car, it was nothing compared to the skull slap I felt as we screeched to a stop beside a Shell gas station on North Roosevelt.
It looked and sounded as if the world was coming to a violent end. Besides a half-dozen siren-screaming patrol cars, there were three ambulances and a fire truck. Yellow evidence tape strung across the pumps wafted in the breeze from the nearby north shore. The whole block around the station looked like a huge present wrapped in the stuff. A crowd of tourists and beach bums stood silently, shoulder to shoulder, behind the yellow ribbon like spectators at a strange outdoor sporting event that was just about to get under way.
It seemed like every cop in the department was there. I glanced from face to face, marking the people I knew. At our pickup softball games and barbecues, these men had been so happy and laid-back. Now, as they secured the crime scene in their stark black uniforms, they suddenly seemed cold, heartless, angry, almost malevolent.
What the hell had happened here?
“She’s here,” a cop and good friend of Peter’s named Billy Mulford said as he saw me.
The last time I saw Billy, a blond, middle-aged fireplug of a man, he was doing a cannonball off a booze cruise boat at a retirement party. Now he looked about as fun-loving as a concentration camp guard.
“It’s Peter’s wife, Jeanine. Let her through,” he ordered.
I was too stupefied to question what was happening as the evidence tape was lifted up, and I was beckoned under. Why were they treating me like a first responder? The deafening siren of yet another arriving ambulance went off as Mulford quickly led me over the sun-bleached asphalt and past the pumps.
Just inside the door of the food mart, half a dozen EMTs were kneeling down beside someone I couldn’t see. My hands started shaking as I tried to figure out what was happening in all the commotion. I grasped them together in a praying gesture.
“Come on, come on! Give me some fucking space here,” a big black medic barked as he retrieved a syringe from a bright yellow hard-pack first-aid case.
“Coming out!” someone else yelled in a high, panicked voice a moment later. There was a tremendous clatter as a trauma stretcher was clicked into rolling position. The crowd of cops and medics began to part in front of it, letting the stretcher through.
My knees almost gave out when Mulford moved out of my line of sight and I finally saw who was on the stretcher.
I staggered back, shaking my head.
Something caved in my chest as Peter was rolled past me, his eyes flat and unfocused, his face and chest covered in blood.
Chapter 24
COPS MADE A TIGHT CIRCLE around Peter, shielding him from the public as he was rolled toward a reversing ambulance.
I noticed several things at once. He was sheet white. A thin spiderweb of blood was splattered across his cheek and neck. His uniform shirt had been cut open, and I could see more blackish blood caked on his arm, dripping off his elbow.
Peter didn’t just look shot, I thought, staring at him as he was lifted into the back of the ambulance. Peter looked dead.
“Let her through,” Mulford said, dragging me forward. “It’s his wife.”
“Not now, goddammit,” the burly black medic said, stiff-arming him away.
“Oh, God. Oh, God,” Mulford said, shaking his head as Peter was borne away. He squeezed my shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Jeanine. This shouldn’t be happening.”
“What happened?” I said.
“We’re not sure,” he said, ashen-faced, as he shrugged his shoulders. “I just got here myself. We think Peter came in here to get some coffee during his shift. Walked into the middle of a robbery. Two Jamaican males. They had some kind of machine gun. Our guys were ambushed. We’re looking for them now.”
Mulford wheeled around as a wiry, startlingly muscular female EMT with bloody sneakers emerged from the food mart door.
“How is she?” he asked her.
She? I thought.
I stepped to my right and looked farther into the store. That’s when I saw the rest of them. Three more EMTs were surrounding another body.
When I stepped forward and saw the spill of blond hair beside a fallen police cap, I felt like I’d walked face-first into an invisible electric fence. For absolutely no reason, I began slowly nodding to myself.
My boss, Elena, her throat shot to ribbons, was lying in a pool of blood, dead on the floor.
Chapter 25
ONE OF ELENA’S UNMOVING EYES, the one that wasn’t shot out, was wide open, staring up at the ceiling. Blood was everywhere as if a mop bucket filled with it had been overturned. On her uniform. On a bunch of knocked-over plastic jugs of blue windshield-wiper fluid. On the surgical gloves that one of the EMTs snapped off with a loud curse. Ink blots and dashes and horrid smears of copper-smelling crimson red blood.
“I’m so sorry,” the female EMT said to Mulford. “Poor thing took at least half a dozen in the face and neck and another four in the lower abdomen. She’d lost too much blood by the time we got here. She’s gone.”
“And the other one?” Mulford said to the EMT, pointing to his left. I followed his finger to the pair of bare brown feet that poked out from the end of the aisle like the wicked witch’s from under Dorothy’s house.
“The station clerk?” the medic said with a shake of her head. “He took a long burst in his throat, looks like. Died instantly.”
I slowly nodded again at the new knowledge. There was a third victim?
I gaped at the blood-and-brain-splattered food racks, the brass shell casings, the broken glass. In the air was the strong hospital stench of voided bowels. I’d never been that close to so much violence and death. It was literally a bloodbath.
I stumbled behind Mulford back outside to get away from the smell and noticed that the crowd beyond the tape seemed to have doubled in size. A tall, shirtless middle-aged man in cutoff shorts and a panama hat suddenly reached under the crime scene tape and lifted a shell casing to his red-rimmed eyes.
“Hey! Put that down!” Mulford yelled, running toward him.
That’s when I noticed the gun.
On the fuel-stained asphalt, halfway between the first pump and the gas mart’s front door, beside a bright yellow police evidence cone sat a flat black pistol.