'Now'
They went at once, and just before they got to the door, Shrake vaulted ahead, crossing the opening in an instant; there was a reaction flash and a bullet pounded itself into the wall oppisite.
Sloan peeked, saw Biggie across the room, alone. There were no hostages, just the two bodies in the outer room. Biggie now with his hands up, gun on the floor, smile on his face.
'No, no, no, no!' Biggie shouted, 'I'm all out. I give up.'
Sloan did another peek. Biggie stood there with his hands above his head. 'Sloan? That you?'
Sloan turned the corner. 'Yeah.'
'I quit.'
'Yeah, right, Biggie,' Sloan said, and he shot Biggie Lighter twice in the heart. One of the slugs went cleanly through, shattered on the wall, and fragments of it ricocheted around the room. A piece of hot metal like the ripped-off rim of a dime hit Sloan in the lip and hung there, protruding from the skin. Sloan peeled it off and flicked it away, tasting the blood in his mouth.
Shrake nodded, 'Good shooting.'
LUCAS HEARD THE BOOM of the gun, turned his head that way.Then he caught the movement coming up the stairwell, turned back, and saw a man coming toward him. The man's head was a mass of blood, and he seemed to be trying to stanch the bleeding with his hands.
Lucas said, 'Just sit down, the doctors are…' and the man jumped at him, screaming, grabbing Lucas by the broken arm, and Lucas screamed back, swung awkwardly with his.45, and then they both went down the concrete stairs, rolling over and over each other.
Grant, or Roy Rogers, or whatever the fuck his name was. His face was shattered, but Lucas recognized the good half. Grant was soaked in blood, holding to Lucas's broken arm with one hand, swinging with the other, screaming incoherently. Lucas hit the stairs upside down, tumbled, Grant falling over him; he squeezed the trigger of the.45 involuntarily, and the flash lit the stairwell and the surprise and the pain from the broken arm and the recoil pulled the gun out of his hand and he heard it clattering down the stairs.
Grant was underneath him now and they turned again and Grant was on top, scrambling, and Lucas pulled him down and they rolled across the landing and Grant smashed Lucas in the nose; blood flooded into Lucas's mouth and he sputtered, came up close to Grant's face, sprayed blood into Grant's good eye, and they were turning again.
Grant was above him, then, and Lucas saw that he was going for something, the gun, probably, and Lucas managed to tangle up Grant's knees and Grant went down again and Lucas rolled up on top of him. Got his good arm around Grant's neck, got his legs around Grant's body, locked them at the ankles so that he had Grant in a scissors hold.
Grant tried to pull away along the long axis of their bodies, trying to knee or kick Lucas, and they turned again, upside down on the stairs, and he heard the gun clank, thought, 'He's got it,' and heaved upward as his body weight pushed Grant down.
The gun went off, a flash and a boom, then Lucas got his feet braced against a step, groaned and lifted Grant's head up, gave a final desperate jerk…
Grant's neck snapped like a tree branch.
He went limp, and Lucas fell on top of him.
Around them, he thought, was nothing but pain and silence: but he was wrong about the silence. In a second or two, when he'd caught his breath and had gotten upright again, he began to hear the screaming, and realized it was coming from everywhere.
27
A half dozen fires and two dozen fights added to the chaos of the shootings. When the smoke got dense in one wing of the security section, maintenance men used a forklift to break through a locked door to the outside, and frightened, angry, and medicated patients scattered over half a square mile of woods and farmland.
The Big Three, with Grant, killed six people and seriously wounded eight more. The final death toll, including the four killers, was ten.
Of the three people in the cage, one, a woman, had survived because Beloit had gotten to her quickly enough to keep her from drowning in her own blood. The bullet had gone through her cheekbone, her palate, and out through a jawbone, taking along a couple of upper teeth.
The shooting was ending when the fire department got to the hospital, and the paramedics, and three doctors in the hospital itself, quickly got to the other shooting victims.
LUCAS WAS TAKEN to the hospital in Mankato. Sloan rode with him. Sloan kept saying, 'This is not a problem. This is not a problem…'
Lucas finally said, 'Sloan, shut the fuck up. This is definitely a problem.'
THE MORE SERIOUSLY INJURED were flown to Regions Hospital in St. Paul or to the Mayo in Rochester, except for two who needed immediate blood transfusions. They were taken to Mankato to be stabilized.
Lucas was evaluated at Mankato. The bone in his upper arm had been broken by Biggie's bullet. The bullet itself had not gone through but was stuck on the underside of the skin at the back of his arm. With his good hand, Lucas could actually feel the bullet under the skin.
'So what?' he asked. 'I'm gonna need a splint or something?'
'More than that,' the doc said. 'We'll have to go in there to put your arm back together. This will be a little complicated.'
After talking with Sloan, Lucas insisted on being reevaluated at Re-gions. He was flown out with one of the more severely wounded victims who had been taken to Mankato to be stabilized.
At Regions, as at Mankato, he was told that the arm would need an operation to place screws to hold the bones together. He could expect to be in a cast for three to six months; and there would be physical rehabilitation after that.
'Am I gonna lose anything? Any function?'
'Shouldn't,' the doctor said. 'Maybe a little sensation on the, back of your arm.'
SLOAN, JENKINS, Shrake, Del, and Rose Marie crowded in to see him before the operation. Sloan had briefed Rose Marie on the shootings. 'There are already people running around, trying to figure out whom to hang,' Rose Marie said, before Lucas was rolled into the OR. 'It's amazing. It's like the second reaction. The first is to ask how many are dead, the second is to ask whom we can hang.'
THE OPERATION TOOK two hours and was routine, the surgeon told Lucas in the recovery room. He was given additional sedation when he came out of the recovery room and slept through the night, waking at six o'clock.
A nurse came to see him: 'Hurt?'
'Not much,' he said. 'I'd like cup of coffee, is what I'd like. And a New York Times or a Wall Street Journal?'
'I don't think so,' she said. 'How about a nice glass of orange juice?'
'How about if you hand me my cell phone? And I gotta take a leak…'
Both his arm and his face hurt-his nose had been recracked in the fight-but he was able to walk to the bathroom without a problem, pulling a saline drip along behind him.
