crowd he saw Santos, with his green bag, and shot at him, the motherfucker, but missed, and Santos lurched away, maybe looking for a place to hide, and Deese shot him in the back. And then Deese thought, Wait, is that the money in the bag?
He turned to look behind and saw there was a guy coming at him with a gun. Deese ran, and somebody shot at him, and his foot twisted violently sideways, but the injury wasn’t crippling, and he was now at the hallway, then down it and through the door. He locked the door, ran behind the dumpster, then down the outside wall of the mall. Ten seconds later, he was in his truck and firing that mother up.
His foot . . . His foot didn’t feel like anything. As he drove toward an exit to the street, he reached down between his legs and ran his hand up his wounded ankle: no blood.
He turned onto the street, kicked off his left shoe, ran his hand over his ankle. Nothing. He picked up his shoe and looked at it and found a wide groove in the heel. He laughed. Some motherfucker had shot the heel of his shoe but not him.
He was halfway home before his ankle began to throb and suddenly the fear climbed on him. He turned down a side street, then another smaller one, into a residential area, pulled to the curb, got out of his truck, and puked his guts out. He’d killed a lot of people, he guessed, and he didn’t mind that so much, but he might have been killed himself.
He got back in the house, the taste of vomit in his mouth, the sweat streaming down his face. He could smell his own fear in the sweat, a corrupt odor, like a rat rotting after it died under the stove.
If he didn’t vanish, he was a dead man.
And he was haunted by one question. That bag that Santos had . . . A red bag? A green bag? . . . Was there money in it? Could he have slowed down enough to grab it? Where did the cops come from? Had one of the security guards spotted him? And that guy with the gun—that was that marshal, Davenport, who’d been shot in Altadena.
Where had their tip come from?
That fuckin’ Smith; that was the only answer he had. Santos told Smith about the meeting location and Smith called the cops, hoping he’d be killed. Maybe hoping both of them would be killed.
* * *
—
COX AND COLE were immediately swept up in a panicked crowd, running down the mall. Maybe one or two of the shoppers had seen Cole screaming at Deese, but they were left behind in seconds. Down the main hall of the mall, down escalators, into the parking structure to the Cadillac, the screaming fading behind them.
They didn’t know what had happened to Deese. Cole had lingered a second or two after he’d screamed the warning and he’d seen Deese come out of the Chipotle’s and fire his gun. He hadn’t seen if anyone had been hit.
They were afraid to call him in case the cops had his phone.
“Do you think he’s dead? That one marshal was pushing right through the crowd. He wasn’t but fifteen feet away from Deese,” Cox said. She’d been watching from the end of the atrium railing, thirty feet from Cole.
“I don’t know what happened, everything went crazy and I ran,” Cole said. “There was a lot of shooting.”
“Maybe it’s on the radio.”
They found a couple of local stations, but there was nothing but soft rock. Cox kept twiddling the dials. “It’ll be on TV,” Cole said.
“Sure. But should we go back to the house? If Deese isn’t dead, if he got out somehow, they might be following.”
Cox stumbled over a talk show in which the right-wing host was saying, “God help us, we’ve gotten word of a mass shooting, an active shooter, at the Show Boat mall. We don’t have details yet, but apparently there are several dead and wounded, and the shooter is still at large. Police and ambulances are there, and more are on the way. If you are listening to this in your car, don’t go to the Show Boat mall.”
“Ah, Christ, now we are fucked,” Cole said. “We’re in it for murder now. Both of us.”
“Maybe not, maybe not. Maybe if we get far enough away . . .”