She pulled the Remington twelve-gauge pump from the pouch and stuffed some extra shells into her pockets. She pumped one into the chamber and walked out with the barrel leading the way.
The worst table in a restaurant is always the one nearest the restrooms. There are people constantly walking by, on their way to piss or shit or hock a loogie, and in the worst establishments you can even hear the toilets flushing. Not very appetizing. Plus, the hallway to the restroom is usually near the door to the kitchen, so you have servers and busboys scurrying back and forth with trays of hot food or plastic bins of dirty dishes, and the chef is always shouting at someone for screwing something up. The worst table in a restaurant is always the one nearest the restrooms, and at the Retro it was a four-top nestled between the lobster tank and a life-sized statue of Elvis. Shelly turned the corner and saw the unlucky party, an elderly couple on one side of the table and a much younger couple on the other. Next to the younger woman there was a little girl, probably between the ages of one and two, strapped into a wooden high chair. The baby was screaming for all she was worth, and all four of the adults had their elbows on the table and their hands laced together and their eyes closed. They were praying. Shelly aimed the gun and pulled the trigger, and chunks of Grandma and Grandpa splattered all over Elvis’s chubby face. It looked like someone had thrown a plate of spaghetti and meatballs at him. The young couple’s expressions had quickly turned from worry to terror, and they backed toward the wall and held their palms out in a defensive gesture as Shelly turned the gun on them and their baby.
“Stop!”
Shelly looked toward the front entrance. It was Matt Cahill, and he was pointing a pistol right at her.
11:45 a.m
Decaying flesh hung from Shelly’s face in strips, as though someone had fed rotten liver through a paper shredder. Her teeth were thick and yellow, her inflamed eyeballs bobbing around in their sockets like hardboiled eggs in some sort of ghastly stew. Matt had seen her car in the parking lot when he drove in, so he’d known she was here at the Retro, but he had no clue as to how she’d managed to get hold of a gun. A sawed-off shotgun, no less, a goddamn portable cannon. She had already slaughtered an elderly man and woman, and she was about to do the same to a young couple and their toddler.
“Let them go, Shelly,” Matt shouted. “They never did anything to you.”
Matt was still dizzy. Sweat trickled down his face in streams, and his heart raced, but jacked on adrenaline, he felt no pain from the shrapnel wound in his left leg or the slug embedded in his left shoulder. He felt nothing but an intense rage at all the bloodshed this horrible day had brought, and an intense sorrow for what he was going to have to do now.
He lined the pistol’s sites at Shelly’s chest, trying his best to focus.
“Drop your gun,” she said, pointing the shotgun directly at the baby’s head. “Or I shoot the baby.”
It was a stalemate. If Matt pulled the trigger, Shelly would die, but so would the baby.
“Why the baby?” Matt asked.
“Why not?” she said. “Aren’t they adorable? That’s all the bitches at the plant ever talk about. Let them talk about this.”
Matt saw her finger tense on the trigger. “What’s the baby’s name?” He turned to the terrified mother. “Tell me.”
In a quivering voice, the young woman said, “Kylie. Her name is Kylie.”
“You hear that, Shelly? Her name is Kylie. Why would you possibly-”
“Shut up,” Shelly said. “Or shoot me. I’d be doing this kid a favor.”
“A favor?”
Shelly gestured to the horrified mother. “Look at her, sopping up the beer. A couple years from now she’ll be too drunk to notice when her man starts feeling up little Kylie. Or she’ll notice and not even give a shit. Hell, maybe she’ll even pimp her out for drug money.”
“Or maybe her mother will love her and she’ll grow up to live a happy life,” Matt said.
“No such thing,” Shelly said.
Suddenly, blue lights started flashing against the restaurant’s window shades. Shelly saw them, too.
The cops had arrived, but Matt knew they wouldn’t storm in right away. They would secure the area, try to negotiate a surrender, and eventually send in a SWAT team. By that time, little Kylie and no telling how many others would perish.
One way or another, it would be over soon.
“I know you drift off sometimes,” Matt said. “When the pain becomes too much. Where do you go?”
Shelly turned and faced Matt. The expression on her gruesome face seemed to soften, and her voice sounded like it belonged to a little girl.
“High school. Isn’t that fucking pathetic? Everybody in the world hated high school, and it’s all I’ve got to look back on… I was almost head cheerleader, you know. I was…” She paused and then shouted, “Fuck you!”
She gritted her teeth and scrunched her brow, and as she started to turn back toward the child in the high chair, Matt squeezed the trigger three times in quick succession. Shelly spun and fell backward, and the shotgun blasted a hole in the ceiling as she crashed into the lobster tank. The glass shattered, and a hundred gallons of murky green water flooded the floor.
The liberated creatures did not crawl on Shelly, or even toward her. They crawled away from her, as though she and they were opposite poles of a magnet.
The restaurant patrons, many of whom had climbed under tables or had taken other defensive positions, seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief.
Someone began clapping.
It was Mr. Dark, sitting at a table, wearing a lobster bib, waiting for his meal.
“Nicely done,” Mr. Dark said. “Shame you couldn’t do it before.”
“I’m not a murderer,” Matt said.
“No, no, you’re not,” the baby’s mother said, clutching her baby now and sobbing. “You saved us. Thank God, you saved us.”
Matt looked at her, wanting to believe she was right. But the bodies on the floor said otherwise.
When he turned back around, Mr. Dark was gone.
Epilogue
A pair of police detectives grilled Matt as he lay on a gurney in the emergency room awaiting treatment. He told them everything he knew about the slayings at Nitko and at the Retro.
But he didn’t really have to convince them.
By the time he got to the hospital, they’d found Terri Bonach, and she backed up his story. And there was the mother, who credited him with saving her child.
And Kevin Radowski was still alive, somewhere in the same hospital, under heavy guard.
They said that Matt had probably saved thousands of lives.
But it was the few that he didn’t… and especially Shelly… that he couldn’t stop thinking about.
If only he’d killed her the instant Mr. Dark had touched her…
But he hadn’t had the guts.
Or the heart.
Shelly was broken long before he’d met her, but no more than millions of other people who were living lives they hated. The anger and bitterness were just small parts of her. There was joy in her, too. He’d seen it. He’d felt it. Maybe if she’d lived long enough she could have figured out how to let the good feelings overwhelm the bad. Or maybe not. But that was just life.
Then Mr. Dark had touched her and the bitterness and anger were all that were left.
Matt had kept hoping until the last minute that he could save her from what Mr. Dark had done with his
