'You mean jack?'
'Do I? Is that his name?'
'Jack Masters. He comes in on Saturdays, and some Fridays.'
'Jack. You got anyone who works here called Mike?'
He shook his head. 'Not lately, not while I've been here.'
'A guy called Mike.'
'No.'
'What about an elderly couple? Do they ever work in here, behind the bar? One of them would be called Jim.'
He straightened, and moved the top crate to one side, now it was empty.
'Are you talking about my parents? They used to own this place.'
'I don't think so.'
'My mother's name was Michaela. Dad sometimes called her Mike.'
'Oh shit,' said Teresa. 'Mike. She came in, I saw her. I'm sorry, I'm so drunk. It won't happen again. I'll forget all this. I'm going upstairs.'
She made it somehow, lurching from side to side on the stairs. The nausea of the migraine was rising in her now, and she no longer fought it. She threw up in the toilet bowl, as tidily as possible but with horrible retching sounds that she was convinced would be heard all over the building. She didn't have the energy to be prissy, to care what anyone thought. Afterwards, she washed her face, drank some water, took a Migraleve, then lay on the bed and gave way to everything.
CHAPTER 14
Kingwood City, Texas, was little different from any of the other satellite towns that were growing up around Abilene. Until the coming of the computer companies it had been a small fanning town on the plains, but it had expanded rapidly through the 1980s. The original old centre of the town was now preserved and protected, and sometimes rented by the town council to TV or film companies. Craft shops and wholefood restaurants prospered there.
Alongside was a small but intensively developed downtown area of banks, insurance companies, hotels, finance houses, despatch agents, convention complexes, public relations offices.
To the north of the town, stretching away towards the Texas panhandle, was a strip some five miles in length, lined with shopping malls, plazas, automobile dealerships, drivethru hamburger bars, supermarkets and the mirrorglass industrial complexes that had brought the expansion to the town. In the same area were six newly constructed golf courses, an airfield for private planes and a manna built on the shore of Lake Hubbard. Extensive middleclass suburbs filled the rest, bulging east and west, and down towards Interstate 20 in a new grid pattern.
In winter, Kingwood City suffered under the chill of the northers, the icy winds from the mountains and plains, but during the long summers, from early May to the end otOctober, it sweltered night and day in the high 90s and low 100s, the outside air feeling as unbreathable as furnace fumes.
Andy was in Abilene on June 3, meeting with the section chief of the Bureau field office, Special Agent Dennis Barthel. This was a routine conference, one of many similar ones Andy held with section chiefs around the country, although in recent months the anticipatory demographics of the computer models had given his visits to Texas an extra edge.
While he was in Barthel.'s office, a message came through from the city police that there had been a holdup and shooting at the Baptist church on North Ramsay Street. The gunman had taken a hostage and had driven with her to North Cross shopping mall, where he had shot several more people before the place could be made secure. He was currently cornered in the service bay of the mall, holding two hostages.
The FBI cannot automatically be called in to every crime: its remit is in theory restricted to fewer than three hundred categories of federal violation, although the details of these constantly change as a result of legislation and the process of events. A shooting alone would not normally cause the Bureau to be brought in. There had to be extra features to the offence the involvement of organized crime, the market in narcotics, terrorism, foreign intelligence, or extreme violence and an interstate element to the perpetrator's relocation.
In this case, the gunman had been identified by witnesses at the church as john Luther Aronwitz, who was connected in some way with the church, perhaps as an attender or lay worker. The police computer meanwhile recorded that Aronwitz had gained a record of violent offences while he was living in the neighbouring state of Arkansas. Records of his crimes ceased when he moved to Texas, three years before.
Aronwitz was still at large when Andy Simons drove to
Kingwood City, that sweltering afternoon in June. He went alone. His partner, Danny Schnieder, who had been out of the field office when the call came through, was due to follow as soon as he could. Andy had not paused to call Teresa, apparently because all the signs were that the situation was already under control by the police.
The reality was different. Although Aronwitz was surrounded, the delivery area of the mall had large goods bays, connected at the rear by a long metal passageway, wide enough and high enough to take the forklift trucks that were now abandoned at a number of positions along its length. These, plus the steel doors that separated the bays, gave Aronwitz cover and several possible places of concealment.
When Andy arrived, the police SWAT team were trying to gain access to the delivery bays from inside the building, while Aronwitz was held down by other police staked out in the service area. Two of the police had been shot during the operation; one was killed. One of the hostages was also now dead, and her body lay in full view of the long lenses of the TV
cameras clustered behind the police lines. Aronwitz's score for the afternoon had already reached fourteen dead, and an as yet unknown number of injured.
Andy Simons was to become the fifteenth and last victim.
When his presence at the scene was known, the SWAT officer in charge briefed him on the situation. Andy
