caught in the front doorway of the funeral home.
My gun was out, and I bolted across Madison as she pulled the trigger a second time. She was not a pro. Her one-armed shooting stance was all wrong, and her hand kicked back when she took the shot. I have no idea who she was aiming at, but I watched as the bullet drilled through Henry Muhlenberg’s skull, exiting in a trail of blood, bones, and brains.
The crowd was in chaos. With the barricade trapping them on one side, and the funeral home on another, a handful of people ran north toward 82nd Street, but the bulk of them came running straight at me, heading for the opposite side of Madison. The shooter, who was less than ten feet from Spence and Kylie, turned her gun toward them.
I stopped, trying to line up a clean shot.
And then I went down hard.
A large man in a purple sweatshirt had broadsided me, kicked the gun out of my hand when I hit the ground, fell on top of me, and screamed, “I got him, I got him!”
I heard another shot, then another, then a third, as more wannabe-hero civilians piled on top of me.
I had counted five shots in all. And then nothing. Five seconds passed. Seven. Ten. The gunfire had stopped.
The Counterterrorism Bureau was right. Every active-shooter event is different. I had no idea what was going to happen, and now with my face pressed to the oil-streaked pavement, I had no idea how this one had ended.
Chapter 61
I could hear NYPD coming to my rescue. “Let him up, let him up. He’s a cop.”
“He has a gun,” the fat guy directly on top of me yelled back in a thick southern drawl.
“He’s a
And then, from ten feet away, another voice-loud, official, conclusive. “She’s dead.”
I was at the bottom of a dogpile that must have been four or five guys high. I could feel the load getting lighter as the uniforms dragged them off one by one.
Finally, the 250-pound guy who brought me down, who turned out to be a high school football coach from Batesville, Mississippi, got up and reached out to help me.
“I’m sorry, Officer. It’s just that I saw you running toward a bunch of people with a gun…”
I stood up, got my bearings, and pushed my way to the front of the funeral home.
“You laying down on the job again?”
It was my partner, service pistol still in her hand, the hint of an inappropriate smile on her face, and, most important, not dead.
“You all right?” I said.
“No. But I’m better off than she is.”
The woman in black was lying on the sidewalk, face up, two bullet holes in her chest, one in her forehead.
“You do that?” I said.
Kylie nodded.
“I saw Trager and Muhlenberg go down,” I said.
“Muhlenberg was dead before he hit the ground,” Kylie said. “Shelley has a few broken ribs, but he’ll be fine.”
“A few broken…how is that possible? I saw him take a direct hit to the chest.”
“The son of a bitch was wearing a vest.”
Trager was lying on Madison, a jacket propping his head up. I knelt down beside him.
He smiled up at me. He still had the crooked teeth of a kid who had grown up in poverty. At this point, he had enough money to straighten them a thousand times over, but he kept them as they were-a daily reminder of his roots.
I smiled back. “You were wearing a vest?” I said.
“My wife bought it for me. I think Bloomingdale’s was having their annual Kevlar sale.”
“Your wife bought you a bulletproof vest?” I said. “Really?”
“She said I’m high enough on the food chain that if some
I stood up. “You’re a lucky man, Shelley.”
“I know, I know.” He sighed. “And she’ll never let me hear the end of it.”
“Zach. Over here.”
Spence Harrington was sitting on the front step of the funeral home. “You see that?” he said, pointing to a chunk of the building’s brownstone facade that had obviously taken a bullet. “Another half a second, and that would’ve been my head. Kylie shoved me out of the way. Saved my life.”
“I think she saved a lot of lives,” I said.
“You’ve got one hell of a partner,” he said.
“So do you.”
Kylie came over holding the shooter’s purse. “Her name is Alexis Carter, twenty-eight years old.”
“Alexis,” I said. “Lexi. The girlfriend J.J. told us about. What’s her address? He may still be there.”
“She has an Indiana driver’s license. There’s nothing in here that connects her to a New York City address. Damn it, Zach, I never thought about looking for the girlfriend. I was totally focused on looking for a man.”
“We were all looking for a man,” I said. “Gabriel Benoit.”
“And we’re still looking for him,” she said. “Let’s make sure this whole scene is locked down. Have the uniforms get statements from everyone in the crowd. I don’t care if it takes all-Zach…her cell phone. It’s vibrating.”
“Answer it.”
She scrambled to pull the shooter’s cell phone out of the purse. “The ID says ‘Gabe.’ It’s him.”
“Put him on speaker.”
She pushed the answer button. “Hello,” she said.
“Who is this?” the voice on the other end demanded.
“This is Detective Kylie MacDonald, New York City Police Department.”
“Where’s Lexi? Where is she?”
“I have a better question,” Kylie said. “Where are you?”
The line went dead.
BOOK THREE
Chapter 62
