My gun hand was shaking, so I held it with both hands.
I’d never used a firearm. I hated guns.
You might as well pull the trigger yourself, you little shit.
I’m trying, Mother. I’m trying.
Varner exhausted the assault rifle’s extended magazine. Maybe it was already the second magazine. Like Eckles, he carried spares on a utility belt.
From forty feet, I fired a round. Missed.
Alerted by the crack of the shot, he turned toward me and ejected the depleted magazine.
I fired again, missed again. In the movies they never miss from this distance. Unless it’s the hero being shot at, in which case they miss from five feet. Simon Varner was no hero. I didn’t know what I was doing.
He did. He plucked a fresh magazine from the utility belt. He was practiced, swift, and calm.
With the pistol I had taken from him, Eckles had used six rounds on the security guards. I had expended two. Only two left.
From about thirty feet, I squeezed off a third shot.
Varner took the hit in his left shoulder, but it didn’t drop him. He rocked, he recovered, he jammed the fresh magazine into the rifle.
Jittering, thrashing with excitement, scores of bodachs swarmed around me, around Varner. They were solid to me, invisible to him; they obstructed my view of him but not his view of me.
Earlier in the day, I had wondered if maybe I might be crazy. Issue settled. I am totally bugshit.
Running straight at him, through bodachs as opaque as black satin but as insubstantial as shadows, pistol held out stiff-armed in front of me, determined not to waste my final round, I saw the muzzle of the assault rifle coming up, and I knew that he would cut me down, but I waited one more step, and then one more, before I squeezed the trigger point-blank.
Whatever grotesque transformation occurred in his face, the ski mask concealed it, but the mask couldn’t entirely contain the spray. He went down as hard as the Prince of Darkness himself had been cast out of Heaven, into Hell. The weapon clattered out of his hand.
I kicked the assault rifle a few feet away from him, out of his reach. When I stooped to examine him, there was no question that he was carrion. POD was DOA.
Nevertheless, I returned to the rifle and kicked it even farther from him. Then I followed it and kicked it farther still, and again.
The pistol in my hand was useless. I threw it aside.
As if I were suddenly standing on high ground, as if they were black water, the bodachs flowed away from me, seeking the spectacle of dead and dying victims.
I felt as if I might throw up. I went to the edge of the koi pond and dropped to my knees.
Although the motion of the colorful fish ought to have turned me inside out, the nausea passed in a moment. I didn’t purge, but as I got to my feet, I started to cry.
Inside the stores, beyond the shot-out windows, people dared to raise their heads.
We are destined to be together forever. We have a card that says so. Gypsy Mummy is never wrong.
Trembling, sweating, wiping tears from my eyes with the backs of my hands, half sick with an expectation of unbearable loss, I started toward Burke & Bailey’s.
People had risen to their feet from the ruination in the ice-cream shop. Some began to make their way cautiously across the broken glass, returning to the promenade.
I didn’t see Stormy among them. She might have fled back to the storeroom, to her office, when the shooting started.
Suddenly I was overwhelmed by the need to move, move, move. I turned away from Burke & Bailey’s and took several steps toward the department store at the south end of the mall. I stopped, confused. For a moment, I thought I must be in denial, that I was trying to run from what I might find in the ice-cream shop.
No. I felt the subtle but unmistakable pull. Psychic magnetism. Drawing me. I’d assumed that I had finished the job. Evidently not.
THIS DEPARTMENT STORE STYLED ITSELF more upscale than the one in which Viola had bought the Rollerblades. The crap they sold here was of a more refined quality than the crap they sold in the store at the north end of the mall.
I passed through a perfume and makeup department with beveled-glass cabinets and glamorous displays that not so subtly implied the merchandise was as valuable as diamonds.
The jewelry department dazzled with black granite, stainless steel, and Starfire glass, as if it offered not common diamonds but baubles from God’s own collection.
Although the gunfire had fallen silent, shoppers and employees still sheltered behind counters, behind marble-clad columns. They dared to peek at me as I strode among them, but many flinched and ducked out of sight again.
Even though I didn’t have a gun, I must have appeared to be dangerous. Or maybe I only seemed to be in a state of shock. They weren’t taking any chances. I didn’t blame them for hiding from me.
Still crying, blotting my eyes with my hands, I was also talking aloud to myself. I couldn’t stop talking to myself, and I wasn’t even saying anything coherent.
I didn’t know where psychic magnetism might be taking me next, didn’t know if Stormy was alive or dead in Burke & Bailey’s. I wanted to go back to find her, but I continued to be drawn urgently forward by my demanding gift. My body language was marked by tics, twitches, hesitations, and sudden rushes of new purpose. I must have looked not just spastic but psychotic.
Sweet-faced, sleepy-eyed Simon Varner didn’t have such a sweet face anymore, or sleepy eyes. Dead in front of Burke & Bailey’s.
So maybe I was tracking something related to Varner. I couldn’t guess what that might be. This compulsion to keep moving without a clearly defined quarry was new to me.
Among racks of cocktail dresses, silk blouses, silk jackets, handbags, I hurried at last to a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. Beyond lay a storeroom. Directly across from the door by which I entered, another led to a concrete stairwell.
The layout was familiar from the department store at the north end of the mall. The stairs led down to a corridor where I passed employee-only elevators and came to oversize swinging doors marked RECEIVING.
This room reflected a thriving enterprise, though it didn’t quite equal the size of the one at the north-end store. Merchandise on racks and carts awaited processing, prepping, and transfer to stockrooms and sales floors.
Numerous employees were present, but work appeared to have come to a halt. Most had gathered around a sobbing woman, and others were crossing the room toward her. Down here where no shots could have been heard, news of the horror in the mall had now arrived.
Only one truck stood in the receiving room: not a full semi, about an eighteen-footer, with no company name on the cab doors or the sides of the trailer. I moved toward it.
A burly guy with a shaved head and a handlebar mustache braced me as I reached the vehicle. “Are you with this truck?”
Without responding, I pulled open the driver’s door and climbed into the cab. The keys weren’t in the ignition.
“Where’s your driver,” he asked.
When I popped open the glove box, I found it empty. Not even the registration or proof of insurance required by California law.
“I’m