Chapter Twenty–Two
CHAPTER TWENTY–TWO
M ayhem waited until Mahrci was out of the store before he went over to the woman who was in charge of the self-scan lanes.
Dropping his voice, he said, “Call the police.”
Her eyes bulged. “Excuse me?”
“There’s about to be a robbery.” When she started to tremble and put her hands up, he shook his head. “No, not me. I’m not robbing anything. C’mere.”
Drawing her through the lane, he nodded toward the pharmacy, which was in the far front corner of the store, all the way down on the other side.
“You see those two men—hey, it’s going to be okay.” He moved her back out of sight. “I want you to go behind the customer service counter, and get down while you call their description in. One in a trucker’s hat, the other in a knit beanie. Both in camo flak jackets. They’re about to hold up the pharmacy.”
“How do you—”
“Trust me.”
“Y-y-yes, sir.”
“ Go .”
The woman hightailed it over to the customer service department, let herself in, and disappeared.
With that settled, Mayhem moved quickly, jogging on the balls of his feet. As he passed by the canned vegetable aisle, a man with a handbasket was headed toward the checkout.
If only there was time to warn him.
The guy Mayhem had seen first out in the parking lot, the one with the John Deere trucker hat, was standing at the pharmacy’s staff-only door at the far end of the lockup room, his right hand inside his coat, the bill of that cap moving from side to side, as he twitched back and forth on his boots. The other guy, who’d just come in and sealed the deal that something was about to go down, was hovering in front of the drop-off counter, searching his pockets as he stared at the pharmacist.
The woman in the white coat seemed confused. She was frowning and leaning over her counter, as if trying to understand all kinds of mumbling.
Mayhem almost got there in time.
He was still a good twenty feet away as both of the men got guns out at the same moment. The pharmacist immediately put her hands over her head and started stammering.
“Open the door!” the man in the knit hat hissed at her. “I’ll fucking kill you—you open the fucking door—”
Mayhem held off for a count of three—which was the amount of time it took the frightened woman to unlock the glass-fronted room where the drugs were kept. When she did, her body was briefly shielded by the doorjamb.
That was when he went airborne.
Using his momentum and body weight, he leapt at the assailant at the counter, zeroing in on that gun. Double-handing the weapon, he tackled the guy—
At which point, Trucker Hat at the other end started waving his nine millimeter around. “Fuck you! Let him the fuck up! I’ll fucking kill you right now!”
“You shoot me, you shoot him,” Mayhem yelled as he got control of the robber under him. “You want to kill your buddy?”
With a quick shift, Mayhem looked over his shoulder and locked eyes with the guy who was still on his feet. Burrowing into that scattered mind, he had a sudden concern that the brain running things was going to be too compromised by drugs to get into and control.
“I’ll kill you!” the man shouted.
“No, you won’t. You’re not going to do anything—”
“You’re going to die—”
“—but lower your gun to the floor—”
“—I’ll fucking—”
“—and kick it to me. Right—”
“Fuck . . . you . . .”
“—now.”
The man started to breathe heavily. Then he winced like someone had poked him in both eye sockets. His next move was to look at his hands and the gun in them with a kind of shocked horror. Sure enough, that muzzle started to go down. Meanwhile his whole body was shaking, like he was fighting some invisible force—because he was.
He was in conflict with his own neuropathways.
And he lost.
When the nine millimeter made contact with the floor, he gave it a push in Mayhem’s direction. Then he straightened up and stayed where he was, shaking in his Timberlands.
Mayhem took a deep breath. Keeping the other aggressor down didn’t require a lot of effort, but he wasn’t moving. He had the bastard pinned, and he wasn’t taking any chances—
“Who are you?”
He glanced up again. Over at the drop-off counter, the pharmacist had poked her head around the jamb, and she didn’t seem to know what to look at.
“The police are coming,” he said to the woman. “But I want you to lock yourself in there, okay? In case there are others in the store right now.”
She nodded with such vigor, her dangly earrings danced. “I’ve never seen anybody do that—”
“Lock yourself in. You’ll be safer there. When the cops arrive, that’s when you can come out. Go on, now.”
She nodded and disappeared. Then there was a click and the shift of a dead bolt.
“Can you get off me, man,” the assailant under him groused.
“Nope, I’m quite comfortable right where I am. Thanks for asking, though.”
Mahrci left the supermarket, but she didn’t make it out to the SUV. She stopped in the slush as soon as she got to the handicapped spaces. Turning back around, she stared at the front of the Hannaford, all the lights glowing like the moon had crashed to earth. As she closed her eyes, she saw Hemmy telling her to leave.
She headed back for the entrance before she was aware of deciding to change direction.
As the glass door slid to the side for her, all the carts were still lined up in their chutes, and the mats were where they’d been on the floor, and through the next set of doors, everything was just as it had appeared.
Including all the bags of food she’d been about to pay for.
The Muzak was still playing softly overhead, and there was a man approaching one of the scanners with a basket full of canned vegetables—
The shouting came from deeper in the store, to the left.
She ran before she could think better of it—
And skidded around a candy display just in time to see Mayhem throw his body at a human man who had a gun pointed at a woman behind the pharmacy counter.
“Hemmy!” Mahrci raced forward.
Except she stopped as her male focused on another man with a weapon. With the roar in her ears, she couldn’t hear what was being said between the two—but she knew what he was doing as soon as the perpetrator put down his gun, pushed it across the floor, and then just stood there, as if he’d been shackled to the spot.
The woman who’d been in charge of the self-scan checkout rushed by. “I’ve called the police! They’re coming!”
And then from the back of the store, a male voice: “Off-duty PPD!”
From out of the frozen foods section, a man in blue jeans and a navy blue parka shot forward. Along the way, he ditched his cart so that the thing rolled into a display of toiletries and L’Oréal cosmetics—but on the fly, he managed to grab two extension cords off a pop-up bin marked “Household Essentials.”
He ripped the packaging off and jumped in behind the man who was still on his feet.
“You’re under arrest.” The cop grabbed one arm and pulled it to the small of the robber’s back. Then he took the other. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against . . .”
As the cord got wrapped around those wrists fast, Hemmy shifted his position and brought the man underneath him up to a standing position.
“Cord me,” he said as he held out a hand.
The cop tossed the other extension pack over, and within moments, Hemmy had wound things up and tied the ends together.
“He saved us,” the pharmacist said as she pointed at Hemmy. “He made sure we were safe!”
“It’s true,” the checkout lady said. “He told me to call nine-one-one.”
The off-duty cop nodded. “Fast thinking. Good job—”
Off in the distance, the sounds of sirens grew louder and louder. And then a pair of women in uniform jogged in.
As the humans all started talking at once—the two who were detained each protesting that it was the other guy’s fault, the cops telling everybody to take a deep breath, the supermarket workers explaining everything—Hemmy looked over, and Mahrci’s first thought was to run to him. Instead, she held herself in place and lifted her hand in a stupid “hi.”
“Happy to hand this guy over,” he said to the cop who stepped in to take his place. “And we’ll go wait over there to get our statements taken, if that’s okay?”
“Thank you,” the female cop replied. “That’d be great.”
Mahrci couldn’t help but run her eyes up and down as Hemmy approached her. Except there had been no shots fired, he wasn’t bleeding, and he probably didn’t have anything more than a bruise on an elbow or a knee from the takedown.
“Are you okay?” she whispered.
“Yup. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Everyone else in the store, from the deli manager and a pair of stock boys to a couple more shoppers, headed over to the drama. Meanwhile, the only two vampires in the place bucked that trend.
And one of them was on a stroll. Like there hadn’t just been a couple of AWOL humans with guns prepared to hold up the place, and he hadn’t just saved a bunch of people from an active shooter situation.
“I-I don’t know how you did that,” she stuttered.
Another couple of cops steamed by them, hands on the guns at their hips, eyes trained on the pharmacy department.
“I wish you’d stayed outside.” He shook his head. “You could have gotten hurt.”
“The same’s true for you.”
Hemmy made a dismissive sound. “I’m fine. I’m always fine.”
As they came up to their cart of groceries, he held his finger up. “One sec.”
Before she could respond, he got his own credit card out and quickly finished the transaction. Then he locked a pair of grips on the cart.
With a shrug, he started pushing. “We still need the food, right?”
Mahrci opened her mouth. Shut it. “Ah, yes. Yes, I suppose we do.”
Outside, there were all kinds of blue flashes from the Plattsburgh Police Department cars that had been parked nose-in at the entrance. Hemmy’s strides were long and quick as he shoved the cart through the slush, and over at the Suburban, she helped him with the bags. Within a minute or two, they were driving off, just as another pair of patrol vehicles shot into the parking lot.
In the SUV, everything suddenly seemed very silent to her. Which was what happened when there were things you wanted to say, but you weren’t sure how to phrase them.
“That was an incredible kindness you did,” she murmured. “But how did you know? That those men were trouble?”
He shrugged and kept his eyes on the road ahead as he followed signs to the Northway. “Let’s just say I’m good at picking out felons.”
“I didn’t even notice them.”
“Well, it all worked out. That’s all that matters, right?” Hemmy glanced over. “And besides, we got groceries. Mission accomplished.”
When he refocused on what was ahead of them, she glanced in the back at the bags. All she could think about was . . . what if things hadn’t gone well. What if he’d been shot. Killed.
The violence terrified her. But the idea he might be gone? Well, that did something to her soul. And yet . . . he was just a stranger, right?
Once they were on the highway, she stared out the window at the drifts of snow, the pine trees, the hills in the distance that loomed in the clear night sky . . .
If he had died, there in front of the human pharmacy, in a wrong place, wrong time kind of thing, what would she have missed?
The pain in the center of her chest was a shock, and she did her best to rub it away.
Now was not the time to meet the love of her life.
It really wasn’t.