Doolin and Gilstrap finally made it to the foot of the steps with Terry between them. Howie and Marcy joined them. Howie shouted something at the assistant district attorney, something else at the sheriff. Ralph couldn’t tell what it was over the chanting, but it got them moving again. Marcy reached out to her husband. Doolin pushed her back. Now someone began shouting “Die, Maitland, die!” and the crowd picked up that chant as Terry and his escorts started up the steep flight of steps.
Ralph’s gaze was drawn back to the man with the canvas newspaper sack. READ THE FLINT CITY CALL was printed on the side in fading red letters, as if the bag had been left outside in the rain. The man who was wearing a knit watch cap on a summer morning when the temperature was already in the mid-eighties. The man who was now reaching into his bag. Ralph suddenly remembered his interview with Mrs. Stanhope, the old lady who had witnessed Frank Peterson getting into the white van with Terry. Are you sure it was Frank Peterson you saw? he had asked. Oh yes, she’d said, it was Frank. There are two Peterson boys, both redheads. And wasn’t that red hair Ralph saw sticking out from beneath the watch cap?
He used to deliver our newspaper, Mrs. Stanhope had said.
Watch Cap’s hand came out of the bag, and it wasn’t holding a newspaper.
Ralph drew in all his breath even as he drew his Glock. “Gun! GUN!”
The people around Ollie screamed and scattered. ADA Gilstrap had been holding one of Terry’s arms, but when he saw the old-fashioned long-barreled Colt, he let go, dropped into a toad-like crouch and backpedaled. The sheriff also let go of Terry, but to draw his own weapon . . . or attempt to. The safety strap was still fastened, and the gun stayed where it was.
Ralph didn’t have a clear shot. The blond anchor from Channel 7, still dazed from the blow to her head, was standing almost directly in front of Ollie Peterson. Blood trickled down her left cheek.
“Down, lady, down!” Sablo shouted. He was on one knee, holding his own Glock in his right hand and bracing with his left.
Terry took his wife by the forearms—the handcuff chain was just long enough—and pushed her away from him just as Ollie fired over the blond anchor’s shoulder. She shrieked and clapped a hand to her no doubt deafened ear. The bullet grooved the side of Terry’s head, making his hair fly up and sending a cascade of blood onto the shoulder of the suit Marcy had been at such pains to press.
“My brother wasn’t enough, you had to kill my mother, too!” Ollie shouted, and fired again, this time striking the Camaro across the street. The young men who had been dancing on it jumped for safety, shouting.
Sablo leaped up the steps, grabbed the blond reporter, pulled her down, and landed on top of her. “Ralph, Ralph, do it!” he shouted.
Now Ralph had a clear shot, but just as he fired, one of the fleeing spectators crashed into him. Instead of hitting Ollie, the bullet struck a shoulder-mounted TV camera, shattering it. The cameraman dropped it and staggered backward with his hands over his face. Blood streamed through his fingers.
“Bastard!” Ollie screamed. “Murderer!”
He fired a third time. Terry grunted and stepped back onto the sidewalk. He held his cuffed hands up to his chin, as if struck by a thought that needed serious pondering. Marcy scrambled to him and threw her arms around his waist. Doolin was still yanking at the strapped butt of his service automatic. Gilstrap was running down the street with the split tail of his awful plaid sportcoat flapping behind him. Ralph took careful aim and fired again. This time no one jostled him, and the boy’s forehead collapsed inward as if struck with a hammer. His eyes bulged from their sockets in an expression of cartoon surprise as the 9 mm slug exploded his brains. His knees unhinged. He fell on top of his newsboy’s bag, the revolver slipping from his fingers and clattering down two or three steps before coming to rest.
We can go up those steps now, Ralph thought, still in his shooter’s stance. No problem, all clear. Except Marcy’s shout—“Somebody help him! Oh God, somebody please help my man!”—told him that there was no longer any reason to climb them. Not today, perhaps not ever.
4
Ollie Peterson’s first bullet had only grooved the side of Terry Maitland’s head, a bloody injury but superficial, something that would have left Terry with a scar and a story to tell. The third one, however, had punched through the coat of his suit on the left side of his chest, and the shirt below was turning purple as the blood from the wound spread.
It would have hit the vest if he hadn’t refused it, Ralph thought.
Terry lay on the sidewalk. His eyes were open. His lips were moving. Howie tried to crouch next to him. Ralph swung an arm hard and shoved the lawyer away. Howie went over on his back. Marcy was clinging to her husband, babbling “It’s not bad, Ter, you’re okay, stay with us.” Ralph put the heel of his hand against the soft springiness of her breast and pushed her away, too. Terry Maitland was still conscious, but there wasn’t much time.
A shadow fell over him, one of those goddam cameramen from one of the goddam TV stations. Yune Sablo grabbed him around the waist and spun him away. The cameraman’s feet stuttered, then crossed, and he went down, holding his camera up to keep it from harm.
“Terry,” Ralph said. He could see drops of sweat from his forehead falling onto Terry’s face, where they mixed with the blood from the head wound. “Terry, you’re going to die. Do you understand me? He got you, and he got you good. You are going to die.”
“No!” Marcy shrieked. “No, he can’t! The girls need their daddy! He can’t!”
She was trying to get to him, and this time it was Alec Pelley—pale and grave—who held her back. Howie had gotten to his knees, but he did not attempt to interfere again, either.
“Where . . . get me?”
“Your chest, Terry. He got you in the heart, or just above it. You need to make a dying declaration, okay? You need to tell me you killed Frank Peterson. This is your chance to clear your conscience.”
Terry smiled, and a thin trickle of blood spilled from either side of his mouth. “But I didn’t,” he said. His voice was low, little more than a whisper, but perfectly audible. “I didn’t, so tell me, Ralph . . . how are you going to clear yours?”
His eyes closed, then struggled open again. For a moment or two there was something in them. Then there wasn’t. Ralph put his fingers in front of Terry’s mouth. Nothing.
He turned to look at Marcy Maitland. It was hard, because his head seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Your husband has passed on.”
Sheriff Doolin said dolefully, “If he’d been wearing the vest . . .” He shook his head.
The new-minted widow looked unbelievingly at Doolin, but it was Ralph Anderson she sprang at, leaving Alec Pelley with nothing but a shredded piece of her blouse in his left hand. “This is your fault! If you hadn’t arrested him in public, these people never would have been here! You might as well have shot him yourself!”
Ralph let her rake her fingers down the left side of his face before grabbing her wrists. Letting her blood him, because maybe he had that coming . . . and maybe there was no maybe about it.
“Marcy,” he said. “It was Frank Peterson’s brother who did the shooting, and he would have been here no matter where we arrested Terry.”