high fives every ten seconds and calling each other bro.
When Cole screamed his warning, Deese exploded off the seat. A gun appeared in his right hand, and Bob shouted, “Deese! Stop!” and the jocks all went to the floor. A heartbeat later, Deese shot a woman out in the mall’s center corridor, who went down, and then shot a man, and Rae screamed, “Stop!” and Lucas and Tremanty ran toward them, Lucas glancing sideways as he did and saw Santos, frozen, in the corridor.
Rae and Bob both had their guns out, but there was a virtual wall of humanity on the far side of Deese, as he, running, turned to his left. He would be running past Tremanty and Lucas and they both drew their weapons and moved to block him, but Deese saw Tremanty and snapped off a shot and Tremanty and Lucas both juked, and Deese deliberately shot the woman right in front of Tremanty, her blood spraying from the side of her head onto Tremanty’s face.
Lucas still couldn’t take a shot without a crowd in the background, and the mall had erupted into chaos by then, with shoppers and children running in all directions, screaming. The Vegas cops were thirty yards away in the wrong direction, so they couldn’t stop Deese. A short man ran directly into Lucas’s chest, sending Lucas staggering backwards, trying to keep his balance, as Deese went by fifteen feet away, past a Johnny Rockets. Then Deese saw Santos and he shot at him, missing. Santos reeled away, and Deese closed in on him, shot him in the back, then kept going.
Lucas ran after Deese after he shot Santos, but a woman toppled in front of Lucas and he tripped and went down. He scrambled back to his feet and saw Tremanty, with his hand pressed to the shot woman’s face, looking wildly at him. Lucas ran after Deese again. He collided with another man, bounced off.
He could still see Deese, who turned and fired a shot at Lucas. There was another man closer to Deese who pulled a gun from his pocket and shot at Deese, who stumbled but continued on, and, looking over his shoulder, saw Lucas coming after him. The shooter looked at Lucas, who shouted, “No!” but the man shot at him, and somebody screamed behind Lucas, and he shouted, “Police! Police!”
The man held his gun upright, and then Bob was there, in his vest that said “U.S. Marshal,” and he slapped the man in the face with his own weapon and the man went down. Rae sprinted past Lucas to where they’d last seen Deese, disappearing down a hallway to the left, and when they got there . . . Deese was gone.
“Where? Where’d he go?” Rae shouted.
They looked down the empty hallway, which ended with an exit door leading to the parking structure. They ran that way, past a short utility hallway to the left, and outside to the structure.
Where nothing was moving.
“Hiding between cars?” Rae said.
“I don’t think so,” Lucas said. “He scouted the place, he had lookouts. He’d know he couldn’t get a car out of there.”
They both looked back inside at the utility hallway and jogged to it. There were several doors down the hall, all of them metal, all of them locked. Lucas turned and saw a security guard in the main hall, where the shooting had taken place.
“U.S. Marshal,” Lucas shouted. “Key! Need a key!”
The security guard ran toward them. One of the doors opened into an equipment closet, the second led to a storage area, the third to a loading dock with a dumpster. Lucas and Rae checked behind the dumpster and then inside it.
“He’s gone,” Lucas said to Rae. He looked back out into the main corridor. “But we’ve got shot people and we’ve gotta help if we can.”
Lucas asked the security guards to watch the doors in the utility and the exit from the parking structure, and then he and Rae ran back to the corridor. Lucas checked Santos: two FedEx boxes were lying next to the green shopping bag he’d been carrying, and Lucas could see two more inside. Santos, on his stomach, his head turned, looked glassy-eyed up at Lucas and said, “Shot.”
“Got help on the way,” Lucas said. “Let me roll you over.”
Santos had been shot on the left side of his spine, from the back, and the front exit wound was pumping blood. Lucas couldn’t see an artery, but he’d seen an arterial wound once