he thought, how many are there? Did they send an army for one little boy?
“He’s behind the desk, Alice,” the older woman said. Considering the carnage, she sounded eerily calm. “I can see a bandage on his ear sticking up. Pull him out and shoot him.”
The woman named Alice came around the desk. Tim didn’t bother telling her to stop—they were way past that—only pulled the trigger of Wendy’s Glock. It clicked dry, although there should have been at least one more round in the clip, and probably two. Even in this do-or-die moment, he understood the reason: Wendy hadn’t fully reloaded after the last time she took target practice with it on the gun-range over in Dunning. Such things were not high on her list of priorities. He even had time to think—as he had during his early days in DuPray—that Wendy had never been cut out to be a cop.
Should have stuck to dispatch, he thought, but too late now. I think we’re all going to die.
Luke rose up from behind the dispatch desk, the laptop held in both hands. He swung it and hit Alice Green full in the face. The cracked screen shattered. Green staggered back into the woman in the pant suit, her nose and mouth bleeding, then raised her gun again.
“Drop it, drop it, drop it!” Wendy screamed. She had scooped up Tag Faraday’s Glock. Green took no notice. She was aiming at Luke, who was pulling Maureen Alvorson’s flash drive from the laptop’s port instead of ducking for cover. Wendy fired three times, eyes slitted, uttering a shrill cry with each trigger-pull. The first bullet took Alice Green just above the bridge of her nose. The second went through one of the empty holes in the door where a frosted glass panel had been only a hundred and fifty seconds before.
The third struck Julia Sigsby in the leg. Her gun flew from her hand and she folded to the floor, a look of unbelief on her face. “You shot me. Why did you shoot me?”
“Are you stupid? Why do you think?” Wendy said. She walked to the woman sitting against the wall, her shoes crunching on broken glass. The air stank of gunpowder, and the office—once neat, now a shambles—was filled with drifting blue smoke. “You were telling them to shoot the kid.”
Mrs. Sigsby gave her the sort of smile reserved for those who must suffer fools. “You don’t understand. How could you? He belongs to me. He’s property.”
“Not anymore,” Tim said.
Luke knelt beside Mrs. Sigsby. There were spatters of blood on his cheeks and a shard of glass in one eyebrow. “Who did you leave in charge at the Institute? Stackhouse? Is he the one?”
She only looked at him.
“Is it Stackhouse?”
Nothing.
Drummer Denton stepped in and looked around. His pajama shirt was soaked with blood down one side, but he looked remarkably alert in spite of that. Gutaale Dobira was peering over his shoulder, eyes wide.
“Holy shit,” Drummer said. “It’s a massacree.”
“I had to shoot a man,” Gutaale said. “Mrs. Goolsby, she was shooting a woman who was trying to shoot her. It was a clear case of self-defense.”
“How many outside?” Tim asked them. “Are they all down, or are some still active?”
Annie pushed Gutaale Dobira aside and stood next to Drummer. In her serape, with a smoking gun in each hand, she looked like a character from a spaghetti western. Tim wasn’t surprised. He was beyond surprise. “I believe everyone who got out of those vans is accounted for,” she said. “A couple wounded, one with a bullet in his foot, one hurt bad. That was the one Dobira shot. The rest of the sons of bitches look like they are dead in here.” She surveyed the room. “And Christ, who’s left in the Sheriff’s Department?”
Wendy, Tim thought but did not say. I guess she’s the acting sheriff now. Or maybe Ronnie Gibson will be when she comes back from vacation. Probably Ronnie. Wendy won’t want the job.
Addie Goolsby and Richard Bilson were now standing with Gutaale, behind Annie and Drummer. Bilson surveyed the main room with dismay—bullet-riddled walls, broken glass, pools of blood on the floor, sprawled bodies—and put a hand to his mouth.
Addie was made of sterner stuff. “Doc’s on his way. Half the town’s out there in the street, most of em armed. What happened here? And who’s that?” She pointed at the skinny boy with the bandage on his ear.