Karp sighed as he left the Criminal Courts building. All’s well that end’s well, he thought. Once again, his family had survived another brush with death, and now he was going to meet his beautiful wife, whom he saw waving on the other side of Centre Street.
God, she’s as beautiful now as the day I first met her, he thought and walked toward the curb.
On the other side of the street, Marlene waved again and began to walk toward him. The days following the events at St. Patrick’s had been surreal. First, she’d had to get used to the fact that John Jojola was alive and then forgive him for keeping her in the dark. She listened to his reasoning, accepted it, and then slapped him hard.
Jojola, Lucy, and Ned had all spent most of a week relaxing and seeing the sights. At Tran’s insistence, they’d all then boarded his private jet for the flight back to Taos County Airport and were, as the saying went, now happily back home on the range.
Kane was probably dead-and she wasn’t going to lose any more sleep over him. The Pope was safe and so was her family. Life just doesn’t get any better, she thought as she approached the curb.
Karp was so fixated on his bride that he didn’t see the sedan with the dark-tinted windows pull away from the curb and start to roll slowly toward him. But Marlene did and something about how it didn’t pick up speed to join the rest of traffic warned her that something wasn’t right. “Butch, watch out!” she shouted, pointing to the sedan and then reaching into her purse to pull her gun.
Karp saw her point but couldn’t hear her over the honking of taxis and general sound of traffic. He looked and saw a sedan approaching and noticed the window on the passenger side come down. He glanced back at Marlene and saw her darting into traffic with her gun, and only then realized that he was a target.
Karp never saw the person who shot him, just flashes from the gun. The force of the bullets hitting him in the chest, the shoulder, the neck, and leg drove him back, landing on the sidewalk as pedestrians screamed and moved to get out of the way. He looked up at the sky, noticed how white the clouds looked against the blue background…heard more shots, more screams.
Then Marlene’s face appeared above him. She was yelling something and crying. He wanted to tell her it was all right. Don’t cry. I love you. But something was pulling at him, lifting him from the sidewalk and into the air where he could look down, surprised to see his body lying in a spreading pool of blood as his wife and a man he didn’t recognize pressed at his wounds. He noticed the sedan was partly up on the curb, stopped where it had run into Dirty Warren’s newsstand.
Marlene kept pressure on the wounds, but there were too many. She’d been too late, getting through the traffic and emptying her gun into the dark window on the driver’s side. The first bullet had shattered the window, and she’d seen Rachel Rachman turn toward her, her former protegee’s face a mask of hatred and rage. Marlene’s second bullet had obliterated that face, the third turned it into a bloody mass, and the fourth and fifth pulverizing it until there was nothing much left.
The car had drifted past as Marlene ran to her husband and dropped to her knees and began applying pressure to his wounds. But there were too many. “Butch! Butch! Listen to me,” she screamed. “You’re not leaving me, Karp! Don’t leave me, please, baby.”
Lying on the sidewalk, Karp’s eyelids fluttered then closed. His mind was filled with a white light. So that part’s true, he thought. I wonder what’s next. He was ready to go then, almost irritated by Marlene’s screaming. His eyelids opened again. “What?” he said weakly. “Can’t you see I’m sleeping?”
