Gary was not running, however.
He had the girl’s arm gripped in his hand. He was trying to drag her behind a big SUV, to get her out of the other man’s line of fire. He was trying to save her.
The girl was fighting him. She was struggling hard, screaming at him, frantic. Gary was shouting, too.
“Bethany!” he said. “Wait!”
The man aimed his weapon straight at the girl.
Gary saw it happening and yanked her back again, rolling his own body to get between them, and the man’s first shot went wide.
People started screaming louder. The sound of sirens was closer now.
The girl suddenly got away from Gary. I can’t imagine where she thought she was going to go. She was trapped, and she wasn’t even running. It was as if she were making it easier for the man who was coming for her. Gary must have known he couldn’t get to her in time, couldn’t get her to safety. But he threw himself toward her nonetheless, knocking her off her feet and shielding her with his body as they stumbled forward.
The man fired four times.
All four shots hit Gary, knocking him back and down.
Gary kept his grip on the girl and crashed down on top of her. They hit the ground together, the girl’s forehead smacking onto the pavement with a sound I heard from twenty feet away.
I was running at the gunman by then, throwing myself at him to smash into his chest—as his gun went off once more, then twice. We fell together into a car door.
The man bounced off, but I was twisted and dropped straight into the gutter. I wrenched my head up to see that police cars were now hurtling into the street.
The man with the gun was back on his feet. He glanced over to the girl and saw a swelling pool of blood across the sidewalk. He hesitated. Then he turned and slipped away, dodging into the crowds.
I pulled myself up onto the sidewalk, pushed myself up to hands and knees. Crawled over to where Gary lay.
The girl was not moving. Her eyes were closed.
Gary’s shirt was red, all over, and the pool beneath him was spreading fast.
My arm gave out, and I collapsed to the ground next to him, my face landing no more than two feet from his.
Much of the back of his head was missing. His eyes were open and flat and dry.
chapter
FORTY-TWO
“We didn’t get him,” a voice said.
I was sitting in a chair in a hospital room, after the most recent of a series of conversations with members of Seattle’s law-enforcement agencies. I’d given a selective account of events during the altercation inside the building in Belltown. It was not the first time I’d given this account. I doubted that it would be the last. I had burns on my face and arms, had lost a chunk of hair. The pain of the wound in my shoulder and its associated stitching was bitterly emphatic, even through a pile of painkillers. My lower back felt like I’d been hit by a truck, and my head hurt in a way that felt as if it would never go away. I was not feeling receptive to news of any kind. I glanced up. Blanchard stood in the doorway.
“I hope you feel better than you look,” he said.
He came in and leaned against the side of the bed, folded his arms and stared down at me. I waited for him to say whatever it was he’d come to say.
“You could be worse,” he said eventually. “You were a lot worse, until half an hour ago. You’re a lucky guy.”
“In what way?”
“Forensic report came in. The bullets that killed Mr. Fisher and the one they dug out of you share a profile with those they found in Bill Anderson.”
“I said it was the same guy.”
“You did. But you know what? Ballistics reports carry a little more weight than the word of an ex-cop, especially one who’s happened to be on hand at every gun fatality Seattle has seen in the last week.”
“And there’s no sign of this guy? He just melted away on the open street?”
“Like he walked away from killing Anderson, and Anderson’s family. The guy is evidently a professional. A professional what, I have no idea. All we do know is that it seems like his name might be Richard Shepherd.”
I don’t think I did more than blink, but Blanchard was watching me closely. “Mean something to you?”
I shook my head. “How do you know his name?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute. I want to be sure on something first. You really have no idea of how the fire in the basement started? In these ‘storage areas’?”
“No.” This at least was true. “How bad was it?”
“Bad. The fire department is only really getting down there now. Anything that wasn’t rock is gone. Assuming there was anything there to be found?”
I made a face indicating I had nothing to say on the matter.
Blanchard smiled tightly to himself.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll walk you out.”
“I can go?”
“For now. That’s what I’m telling you,” he said, standing. “You’re a lucky man.”
I followed the detective down the corridor. Walking hurt more than sitting had. Nurses made a big deal out of not watching us. There’d been a couple of armed cops sitting outside my room since I arrived. They were gone now.
“They can’t specifically put the gunman at the scene of the Anderson-family murders,” Blanchard said. “But since he killed both Bill and Gary Fisher—who was the only person making noise about that case—nobody has any problem assigning those to him, too. And you have no idea why he might have done all this?”
I shook my head. It was barely a lie. “What about the other guy? Todd Crane?”
“Private hospital across town. Lost a bucket of blood and took a lot of sewing up, but he’s going to be okay. He’ll live to hike again.”
“What?”
“He was babbling about it to his wife when he came out of surgery. Going hiking in the Olympic Mountains. So apparently Shepherd stabbed him, right?”
“If that’s what Crane says.”
“Busy guy.”
Though the environment was clean and bright, it felt oppressive. I was glad to be alive, more or less. Other than that, I wasn’t sure what to feel. I’d spent the night awake, my eyes open, watching and rewatching the memory of Gary Fisher being killed. I’d told myself that the man in the long coat, Shepherd, had planted killing shots in Gary before I could have made a difference. It was true. It hadn’t helped a great deal. You always feel you should have been able to do something about events in the past, more even than those that may lie in the future. I don’t know why that is.
Blanchard paused near the nurses’ station. Across from it was a room where a young girl was lying. A man and a woman were holding hands across the bed. I realized that this was the girl I’d last seen lying under Gary Fisher, covered in his blood.
“She’s okay,” Blanchard said. “Serious concussion, some burns and scrapes. Seems to have lost a lot of the last week, though, big chunks gone like they never happened. Could just be she’s blanking stuff, abuse or something, but the psychologist thinks it’s permanent.”
“What was she doing in the building?”
“That’s the other thing I mentioned. Madison O’Donnell was abducted from a beach house down in Oregon
