Ten yards.
Five.
I'm huffing. My heart pounds. I leap the last three feet and grab on to the wheelchair handles.
My momentum pushes us forward.
Behind me, I hear what sounds like a string of firecrackers going off. Explosions. Fast.
Jimmy recognizes me.
I hear another quick burst of dull thuds. Something smacks me in the ribs. No. I just strained a muscle or something. I push the chair.
“Stop!” Jimmy freaks. I don't blame him.
I run and roll him up the boardwalk until we're safely in front of a store.
T. J. Lapczynski is standing there, licking barbecue sauce off his fingertips.
“Dude! Who's got the firecrackers?”
“Watch him!” I shove the wheelchair toward T. J.
“You got it.”
Jimmy's still freaking. I need to split.
“Easy,” I hear T. J. say. “Easy.”
I run back across the boards. Need to help Ceepak.
I race down the steps, tear across the asphalt.
I don't hear any more firecrackers. No more shots.
I make it to the stalled Pepsi truck, slip around to the side, duck down, almost crawl. I slide along the side, move past the rear tires. The blacktop is sticky. Wet. Something drippy hits me from up above.
Blood?
I look up. One panel of the truck is riddled with bullet holes. Brown foam gushes out like a hot Pepsi can somebody shook then pricked with pins.
I look at the white van.
The front of the Thule cargo carrier is glowing neon green.
From inside the tube, I hear muffled curses followed by a flurry of angry kicks.
Natalia Shevlyakova Weese must be inside, temporarily blinded by the paintballs Ceepak just fired down her peephole.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Monday night, I'm at the hospital with what's left of the Marshmallow Crew.
Jess, Olivia, Becca, and, of course, Katie.
Nobody's talking much. We're just sort of being there for each other, like they say. I guess everybody's thinking about the Mad Mouse. George Weese. What we did to him, back when we called him Wheezer. What he did to Katie and, of course, Mook. What he almost did to a bunch of total strangers.
It could have been worse.
Katie's feeling better. She sits up in her bed, pillows propped behind her back. I brought along a take-out box of Labor Day barbecue for her. Ribs. Baked beans. Cole slaw. Corn bread. But she doesn't eat any of it. I don't blame her. I can't eat tonight, either.
The doctors aren't sure yet if the sniper bullet did any permanent damage to Katie's spinal cord. They do know she'll be in a wheelchair for a while. That's cool with me. I can handle wheelchairs. Just ask Jimmy.
Katie tells us how she listened to some of the concert on a radio her nurse friend smuggled into the room.
“And then the power went out on the bandstand. That was weird.”
“Totally.” Jess agrees.
So does Becca. “Extremely random.”
“You'd think they would have made proper arrangements prior to the event,” adds Olivia.
Power outages. This is the kind of stuff you talk about when the important stuff you should be talking about is still too raw. It's like the weather. You can talk about it without thinking about what you did ten years back when you were a kid learning how to be cool. August 28, 1996. Oak Beach. The end of summer. The Marshmallow Crew. We have our memories. The mad mouse has his.
“You ready?” Katie asks, looking at me with her sweet green eyes, still a little fuzzy from all the drugs being pumped into her veins. “Tomorrow's the big day.”
I feel like saying, Today was big enough. Instead, I say, “Yeah.”
Katie smiles.
“That's right!” Becca tries to perk up the room. “Tomorrow, you can officially fix all my parking tickets!”
“Nah, he'll be too busy,” says Jess. “Officially eating doughnuts. Hanging out at the Qwick Pick.”
I snuffle a laugh. So does Olivia. But the mood in the room? It's not exactly elevated. A week ago? We would have immediately launched into a round-robin debate, riffing on the relative merits of Krispy Kreme versus Dunkin’ Donuts, glazed versus cake. Today, we all just get real quiet again. We listen to the air conditioner humming under the window and think.
Mook. Wheezer. Weese.
Natalia Shevlyakova Weese quit firing her machine gun when those paintballs splattered in her eyes. She couldn't see so she kicked and screamed, but she didn't squeeze her trigger anymore. Her hands were busy, pounding the sides of the cargo carrier while she yelled something about “fucking American assholes.”
That's when Ceepak put down the paintball rifle, pulled out his pistol, and steadied his firing stance in the open door of the Pepsi truck. I moved to the passenger side of the minivan, near the latch for the cargo carrier.
“On me,” he said. Army talk. Meant to wait for his command.
He held his pistol with both hands in front of him. Aimed it down at the Thule luggage tube.
“Go,” he said.
I popped open the snap, flung up the lid like I was flipping open a coffin.
“Freeze!” Ceepak yelled, jutting his pistol forward and down, ready to fire if Natalia made one wrong move.
She didn't.
She put her hands behind her head. It was over. Guess Russians are realists. Fatalistic. Must be those long, cold winters.
The first thing I noticed when I raised that lid was the stench. The trapped heat had made quite a stew in there. Gunpowder, B.O., hot urine. Seems Natalia had been locked inside her secret sauna for quite some time.
I also noticed that she had a machine gun instead of an M-24 sniper rifle. It was one of those long-muzzled jobs with a belt of pointy-tipped bullets feeding into its side. The belt was very long. If Natalia had opened fire, if Ceepak hadn't blocked her with the Pepsi truck, Saltwater Tammy's son wouldn't have been the only one mowed down. Natalia would have sprayed the whole boardwalk, might've broken that other Russian lady's record for outdoor sniping casualties.
We cuffed her and hauled her to the house. After we locked her up, we went up front to report in with the desk sergeant. He had a radio playing. WAVY. Their news update featured a short interview with Chief Baines.
The reporter asked the chief about the “slight commotion” he had heard in the parking lot earlier.
“Teenagers playing with firecrackers,” Baines replied, his voice strong and confident again. “Another unfortunate consequence of-”
Ceepak and I finished for him:
Then, Ceepak laughed. A bigger laugh than I've ever heard him laugh before, like he was letting loose all the pressure that had built up over the past few days, letting it out in one incredible, rib-splitting rumble.
When he was done, he took a deep breath and turned to me. Shook my hand.
