She wiped tears from her eyes, her mouth trembled.
‘I need more from you than the smell of soap. I really don’t want you to leave,’ Whit said. ‘If I ask Gooch, he’ll toss you over his shoulder, throw you in his van, and drive you all the way to Port Leo, Ellen.’
‘Eve. No one calls me Ellen.’
‘Eve,’ he said, as though tasting the word. ‘Look at me. I want to know exactly what’s happening. Exactly. Otherwise I’m going to go to the police and-’
The window exploded.
Whit hit the floor in front of the booth, airborne chunks of pie and a gush of hot coffee flying around him, shards of glass bursting in from the barrage of gunfire. His mother screamed. She was cut or shot, trying to get down into the well of the booth, blood streaking her face. Whit grabbed her shoulders and dragged her below the window line into the mess of gunshot pie and pooling coffee and water.
The gunfire stopped.
Screams wailed around them, ranging from full-out shrieks to hiccuping moans of terror. The party girls were facedown on the floor or huddled in the leather womb of their booth, the window by them cracked and webbed. The waitress lay sprawled by Whit, a shattered plate still in her hand, eyes open and still, gray hair dislodged from a bun, her throat a wet wound.
‘Back door,’ Eve said. ‘Run…’
He clutched her head to him, searching for the wound. ‘You’re shot.’
‘No, oh no,’ she said. Her eyes went wide.
Then people started running, a mad stampede out of the restaurant, toward the front doors.
Whit pulled Eve toward the swinging doors of the kitchen and his mind registered Gooch, his gun drawn from a back holster under his jacket, jumping from booth top to booth top, heading for them, and a man, swarthy, rushing the window, jabbing the remaining cracked glass out of his way, swinging the eye of a semiautomatic toward him and Eve.
The gunman paused to smile – a smile that said you’re so fucked – and the gesture cost him because the next bullet fired came from Gooch’s Sig Sauer and the gunman fell back.
‘Back door,’ Eve said again, crawling past the dead waitress, pushing Whit along. He grabbed her, rammed through the swinging doors as the gunman, either hit or not, blasted off another round. Whit, Eve, and Gooch landed on the cool tile of the kitchen, the cooks and bakers mostly gone, one girl babbling into a wall phone. Whit got Eve to her feet, followed two terrified dishwashers barreling toward a fire exit.
As he reached the door, the dense, staccato thrum of gunfire hit pots and pans and countertops. A hard gong sounded, a bullet striking the exit door north of his head. Gooch returned fire and Whit shoved Eve out the door. The kitchen staff scrambled through the parking lot, running, yelling in Spanish.
Gooch’s van was parked near the rear of the lot and Whit steered Eve toward it. He glanced back. Gooch had taken cover near a Dumpster, gun leveled at the back door. Waiting.
More shooting inside. Whit pushed Eve through a line of cars, putting vehicles between them and the door. ‘Gooch!’ he screamed. ‘Get out, come on…’
The gunman came out the door, holding the young woman who’d been on the wall phone as a human shield. Gooch didn’t lower his gun.
The cops will be here in thirty seconds,’ Gooch called. ‘Let her go.’
‘We want Eve!’
Eve and Whit ducked down by a red pickup truck. Her hand tightened on his.
‘You hit Eve, man,’ Gooch called, ‘and she’s bleeding bad.’ From his vantage point the gunman couldn’t see if Eve was with him or not. In the distance police sirens began to shriek in their approach.
Then a Lincoln Navigator wheeled around the restaurant. The gunman shoved the young woman to the pavement and dashed toward the car.
He made it three steps and Gooch gave him a bullet for each. He skittered a little dance, collapsing before the open door of the Navigator. The SUV sped onto Kirby, door still open, rumbled into a shopping center parking lot and hard-turned onto a side street.
The girl ran back into the restaurant, and Gooch sprinted from the Dumpster toward them.
‘Go,’ he yelled. ‘Now.’
‘The guy…’
‘He’s dead, Whit. We got to get out of here.’
‘We can’t leave,’ Whit started. ‘This is a crime scene… that waitress is dead…’
‘We have to.’
‘But…’ Whit almost said I’m a judge, I can’t do this, but if his mother heard that, she’d take off running herself.
‘You want the cops to take in your mom? Because they will when they find out her connection to this,’ Gooch said. ‘Find her, lose her, all in short order.’
Whit pulled Eve into the back of the van with him and Gooch powered up the engine, tore out the back of the parking lot onto a feeder street that ran parallel to Kirby, vanishing with a right into a residential neighborhood, and was two blocks away by the time the police cars and ambulances tore into the lot, red and blue lights making the broken windows glitter like diamonds.
16
‘Hospital,’ Whit ordered Gooch. ‘Now.’
‘No,’ Eve said. ‘I’m not hurt, Whit. I’m okay.’
‘No hospital,’ Gooch said. ‘At least for now.’
They headed back to Charlie Fulgham’s house, ten minutes away from the restaurant; back down lower Kirby, cutting through the quiet of the big old houses of West University Place, taking a winding route along tree-shaded roads with names like Tulane and Rutgers and Loyola. Gooch drove at the speed limit and came to a complete stop at every sign. West University Place police were notorious for ticketing for the smallest traffic infraction.
Eve lay on her back in the van. Whit pulled off his blue shirt, mopped her head free of blood. The wound in her scalp wasn’t too big, probably from flying glass, but had bled with the flooding tendency of head wounds.
They hurried her inside, Gooch parking the van at the rear of Charlie Fulgham’s driveway, out of sight of the street. Charlie sat in his kitchen, drinking a beer and flipping through a copy of Texas Bar Journal, marking stories with a red pen, when they staggered in.
‘What the hell happened?’ Charlie stared at Eve and Whit’s bloodied shirt.
‘First-aid kit?’ Gooch asked.
‘Yeah. Here.’ Charlie rummaged in the back of the kitchen pantry, pulled out a little plastic case that seemed wholly inadequate to stitch up the carnage of the past fifteen minutes. ‘You want me to call 911?’
‘No,’ Gooch said. ‘We’ll tend to her.’
‘This is my mother,’ Whit said. Weird, the words of introduction coming from his mouth, never spoken before. ‘Eve, this is Charlie Fulgham. Our host.’
‘Hi,’ Eve said.
‘Uh, hi,’ Charlie said. Eve gave him a weak smile, her shoulders still shaking. Now, in clear light, Whit saw she had a score of small cuts and abrasions on her hands, her arms. His hands, too, and a sharp sting lashed his forehead.
They didn’t follow us,’ Gooch said to Whit. The guys or the cops.’
‘Gooch,’ Charlie said. ‘Let’s talk, you and me, in the living room, as in right now.’
‘Sure,’ Gooch said. Calm. Like he hadn’t shot another person to death a few minutes before.
Whit swabbed at Eve’s wound with a wet washcloth, took scissors from the kit and clipped away the graying hair close to her cut. The wound was not bad, but it needed closing. He sprayed disinfectant on it and she winced. He cleaned and taped the wound shut, covering it with a strip of gauze.
‘You need a stitch or two.’ He shook two ibuprofen painkillers into her open palm. ‘We could make up a story, take you to an emergency room. You should see a doctor.’
