onto the little beige tabletop, knocking over his coffee. Blood and coffee, commingled, sloshed across the beveled edge. The friend sitting to his left had been smacked out of the seat by the force of the shot and deposited on the floor, faceup, his eyes and his nose replaced by a frilly spray of pink and gray. The third old man had rocked back in his chair, arms flung out to either side. A portion of his forehead was missing.
Carla turned toward the door.
She saw – she thought she saw – the blur of an arm sweeping up with a flourish, a wild arc, dramatic, like in a movie, and at the end of the arm, a ridged chip of dark gray, an angled chunk of metal, dull gray, not shiny, and her gaze shifted and she saw – she thought she saw – a skinny face, two tiny eyes, pig eyes, Carla thought, it looks like a pig’s eyes, pink and tiny, and the arm sweeping back down again.
Another frantic blur, and the glass double doors flapped back and forth and back and forth in a diminishing swish. Then the doors were still.
Now the other customers realized what had just happened.
And that’s when the screaming started.
2
Pale yellow tape stamped with a repeating bleat of ominous black block letters – CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS – stretched across the mouth of the Salty Dawg’s parking lot, bouncing and twisting in the crisp fall wind, bellying and sagging.
Bell Elkins tore through the tape as if it were tinsel on last year’s Christmas tree – as if it were, that is, superfluous, out of place, and certainly nothing that ought, under the present circumstances, to be impeding her progress. She crossed the lot in five long strides, dodging emergency vehicles, hopping over crumble-edged fissures in the blacktop. Her arms were tucked tight against her sides, hands curled into fists, chin tilted up as she charged forward.
The door was blocked by Deputy Charlie Mathers. He was a wide man with slicked-back black hair, a perpetual frosting of sweat on his bright pink forehead, and a small dimple in his chin that looked like the half-moon print of a baker’s thumbnail pressed randomly in a ball of dough.
‘Ms Elkins,’ he said, palms held straight up like stop signs, as if she might just take a mind to run him over, ‘this here’s a crime scene and I really can’t let you—’
‘Hell with that, Charlie. My daughter’s in there.’
Bell pressed the crunchy ball of yellow tape against his massive chest and prepared to go right on by. She had run track in college, before she became pregnant with Carla, and while that was almost twenty years ago and she hadn’t kept up with the punishing daily regimen, she still had strong legs and a kind of permanent forward momentum. Her body language, she’d been told too many times, gave off the constant vibe that she was pushing against things: doors, rules, limits, propriety, even the wind. Maybe I am, had become her standard reply, more to shut people up than anything else. Maybe I am. She had springy reddish brown hair divided by a left-side part, a high forehead, thin mouth, small nose. Because she’d bolted from her desk and headed over here in such a hurry, she was still wearing black-rimmed reading glasses, glasses that she would’ve torn off if she’d remembered them. Behind the lenses, her eyes – ferocious-looking at the moment, half-wild, aimed at the place where she knew her daughter was – were light gray.
‘Ms Elkins, you can’t just go bustin’ in here without proper authoriza—’
‘Back off, Charlie. I mean it.’
Sixteen minutes earlier, Bell had been sitting in her office in the county courthouse, lost in the thought-maze of a complicated case, when her assistant, Rhonda Lovejoy, had arrived in a frantic dither, the orangey-blond curls of her perm bouncing and shivering, as if her hair were even more frightened than she was.
‘Trouble!’ Rhonda had squealed. Foamy flecks of spit accumulated in the loose corners of her mouth. ‘Gunshots . . . downtown—’ She paused to pant dramatically, sticking out a chubby index finger to mark her place in her narrative. With her other hand, she clutched her considerable stomach.
Bell, frowning, had lifted her gaze from the tiny print in the massive leather-bound law book that lay open between her spread elbows on the desktop. The case – she had to decide in two days whether