Chapter 30
brOCK
Time did the thing it does.
It went slow and wide and clear, the way it has for me since I was a teenager in a town nobody remembers, the world dropping into that cold, bright stillness where I see everything and feel almost none of it.
The static went out of my head. It always goes out.
And I hated it more in that second than I have ever hated it, because the one place I never wanted to feel that terrible calm was here, ten seconds from her. It came, anyway. It always comes.
I saw it all at once.
The muzzles coming up out of the wagon windows, four of them, swinging.
The first burst going wide and stupid—spray-and-pray, no discipline, rounds chewing into a parked sedan and a luggage cart and the glass front of the terminal, but some of it tracking toward the crosswalk, toward her, and toward a dozen travelers who'd done nothing but pick the wrong afternoon to fly.
People dropping. People running. The ugly math of a crowd when death arrives in it.
The two cops down the curb were turning, slow, their hands going to their belts a full beat behind the world.
Old men. Soft through the middle. Twenty years past the last time either of them had cleared leather with intent.
They were going to be no help and a hazard both, because frightened men with guns and no targets shoot the first thing that moves wrong.
And the first thing moving wrong was me—the only man on that whole curb running toward the guns.
"Federal agent!" I roared it at the cops as I came, the lie that buys you a half second, the magic words that might keep two scared old patrolmen from putting one in my back.
"Federal agent, the wagon, the wagon!" I threw an arm at it without breaking stride.
Point them at the threat. Give the panic somewhere useful to go.
I had her in the corner of my eye—down on the crosswalk, flat, arms over her head, alive, moving.
I couldn't find Daniel anywhere in the chaos and didn't have a half second to spend looking.
Ran off? Didn't matter. Not now. Nothing mattered now but the men with the rifles and the fifty feet between me and them.
They were piling out of the wagon. Good. On their feet in the open they were just men, and men are a problem I have solved more times than any chaplain would forgive.
The first one came around the wagon's hood with his weapon up and his eyes on the crosswalk—on her, looking for her, not for me.
I gave him my first two rounds, center mass, and watched them fold him backward over the hood he'd just cleared, the rifle clattering off into the lane.
He slid down the grille and didn't get up.
One.
The second had better instincts—heard his buddy go and spun on me, bringing the muzzle around—but better instincts and trained instincts are two different animals.
I'd been doing this since before he grew the beard.
I dropped low behind a parked SUV, came up off the front quarter-panel where he wasn't looking, and put one through his throat and one through the bridge of his nose.
He went straight down, all his strings cut at once, a wet ruin where his face had been.
Two.
"Stay down!" I bellowed it at a man frozen between two cars with his phone still up like the screen would save him.
"Down, get down, behind the car, go!" I shoved him as I passed and he went.
I leapfrogged forward to the cover of his car, working car to car, engine block to engine block, the only dense steel in a soft place full of people.
Screaming everywhere. A woman on the ground with her arms around a kid, both of them tucked behind a tire.
I caught her eye and jerked my chin—stay, stay there—and kept moving.
The third one had found cover of his own behind the open wagon door and was firing blind around it, panicked bursts.
One of his rounds finally found something that mattered—I heard a clatter and one of the old cops went down clutching his leg—but his partner, the heavyset one, the one I'd half written off, steadied his service piece across the trunk of a car and got off three rounds with more nerve than I'd credited him for.
One of them got lucky. Caught the shooter high in the shoulder and spun him out from behind the door, exposed, off balance.
I finished it. Two rounds, clean, and he dropped across the threshold of the wagon he'd ridden in on.
Three. Good shooting, old man.
That left one.
He'd come the farthest. Made it almost down to the crosswalk, almost to her, and now he stood maybe fifteen feet off her prone body.
Something in him had broken loose. Sweat pouring off him, soaking the camo dark.
Eyes wild and glassed and too wide, pupils blown—high, I'd have bet, cranked up on whatever they'd fed these poor, dumb bastards to point them at a crowd.
He had his rifle and he had a decision to make and you could see he didn't have the wiring left to make it well.
"Drop it!" The standing cop, screaming now, gun up and shaking. "Drop the weapon, drop it, drop it!"
No chance. I knew it the way I know weather. A man with eyes like that doesn't drop anything. The yelling just gave him a clock—two seconds, maybe three, to land somewhere. I watched him spend it the only way men like that ever do.
He swung the muzzle off her and onto me.
I didn't hesitate. I have never once hesitated, that's the whole curse of me.
I walked straight at him, measured steps, sights settled, and I emptied what I had left into the center of him, round after round, steady as a metronome, closing the distance as I fired so the last shots went in from almost touching range.
He came apart and went down—and his trigger finger clenched on the way, one last wild burst climbing up the face of the parking structure, stitching concrete and glass, and then dropping as he dropped, the muzzle dragging a line of sparks across the deck before the rifle died under him.
And then, it was quiet.
The terrible after-quiet. Ears ringing, cordite thick, the whole departures lane gone still except for the crying and the moaning and somebody's car alarm going off down the line.
I stood in the middle of it with an empty gun and that level, righted, correct feeling settling into my chest like it always does.
I did not look at it. I never look at it. I looked at the work instead.
"Search them!" I shouted at the standing cop, who was staring at me like I'd dropped out of the sky.
"All of them—gather the weapons, check for pulses, make sure every one is done.
You hear me? Move!" Whatever he thought I was, he did it.
Shock makes men obedient. He went shooter to shooter doing what I told him, and I trusted the dead to stay dead because I'm good at my job, but you confirm, always, you confirm.
Then, I let myself go to her.
She was face down on the crosswalk, not moving, arms still locked over her head. For three of the longest steps of my life, I did not know. I crossed to her and dropped to a knee and put my hand on her back, light, and said her name.
She turned.
Alive. Her face came around streaked and wet, eyes blown wide with terror. They found mine and something broke open in them—relief and horror both, too much of both to hold.
"He saved me," she said.
I followed her eyes to the place just beside her.
Daniel Whitaker lay on the concrete with his arms still half around the space where she'd been. He'd put himself over her. Covered her with his own body, the decent man, the careful man who drove the speed limit—he'd thrown himself across the woman who left him and taken what was meant for her.
His face was peaceful. That was the thing I'd carry.
Not a mark of fear on it. Just gone, easy, like he'd lain down to rest in the worst possible place.
The rest of him was ruin—the good suit black and soaked, the blood spreading wide and slow across the crosswalk, more of it than a man can lose and stay.
Damn, I thought. That was all I had. Damn.
There wasn't time for more and there wasn't more in me to give him, not there, not with her shaking under my hand and sirens finally rising in the distance and a curb full of dead militia and screaming strangers and a thing about to come down on this airport that no Dominion Hall on earth could make disappear.
So, I did the only thing left that I knew how to do.
I got my arms under Mary Catherine Donovan and I lifted her up off the bloody concrete, and she came, boneless, her face going into my neck. I turned my back on the death and the wreckage and Daniel Whitaker's peaceful face, and I carried her away from it.