Robin Lecks was a good shot, but the twilight was deepening and the distance was long for a handgun as small as the Micro. Her bullet got Drummer Denton high in the shoulder instead of hitting him center mass. It drove him back against the boarded-up box office, and her next two shots went wild. Orphan Annie stood her ground. She had been raised that way in the Georgia canebrakes by a father who told her, “You don’t back down, girl, not for nothin.” Jean Ledoux had been a crack shot whether drunk or sober, and he had taught her well. Now she opened fire with both of Drummer’s handguns, compensating for the .45 auto’s heavier recoil without even thinking about it. She took down one of the automatic riflemen (it was Tony Fizzale, who would never wield a zap-stick again), never minding the three or four bullets that whizzed past her, one of them giving a flirty little flick to the hem of her serape.

Drummer came back and aimed at the woman who had shot him. Robin was down on one knee in the middle of the street, cursing her Sig, which had jammed. Drummer socked the .30–06 into the hollow of the shoulder that wasn’t bleeding and put her down the rest of the way.

“Stop shooting!” Mrs. Sigsby was screaming. “We have to get the boy! We have to make sure of the boy! Tom Jones! Alice Green! Louis Grant! Wait for me! Josh Gottfried! Winona Briggs! Hold steady!”

Drummer and Annie looked at each other. “Do we keep shooting or not?” Annie asked.

“Fuck if I know,” Drummer said.

Tom Jones and Alice Green were flanking the battered doors of the sheriff’s station. Josh Gottfried and Winona Briggs walked backward, likewise flanking Mrs. Sigsby and keeping their guns on the unexpected shooters who had blindsided them. Dr. James Evans, who had not been assigned a position, assigned his own. He walked past Mrs. Sigsby and approached Drummer and Orphan Annie with his hands raised and a placating smile on his face.

“Get back here, you fool!” Mrs. Sigsby snapped.

He ignored her. “I’m not a part of this,” he said, speaking to the fat man in the pajama top, who looked to be the saner of the two ambushers. “I never wanted to be a part of this, so I think I’ll just—”

“Oh, sit down,” Annie said, and shot him in the foot. She was considerate enough to do it with the .38, which would cause less damage. In theory, at least.

That left the woman in the red pant suit, the one in charge. If the shooting started again, she would probably be cut to pieces in the crossfire, but she showed no fear, only a kind of pissed-off concentration.

“I’m going into the station now,” she said to Drummer and Orphan Annie. “There doesn’t need to be any more of this nonsense. Stand pat and you’ll be fine. Start shooting and Josh and Winona will take you out. Understood?”

She didn’t wait for an answer, simply turned away and walked toward the remains of her force, low heels clacking on the pavement.

“Drummer?” Annie said. “What do we do?”

“Maybe we don’t have to do anything,” he said. “Look to your left. Don’t move your head, just cut your eyes.”

She did, and saw one of the Dobira brothers hustling up the sidewalk. He had a pistol. Later he would tell the State Police that although he and his brother were peaceful men, they had thought it wise to keep a gun in the store since the holdup.

“Now to the right. Don’t move your head.”

She cut her eyes that way and saw the widow Goolsby and Mr. Bilson, father of the Bilson twins. Addie Goolsby was in her robe and slippers. Richard Bilson was wearing madras shorts and a red Crimson Tide tee-shirt. Both had hunting rifles. The cluster in front of the sheriff’s station didn’t see them; their attention was on whatever business they’d come here to transact.

You’re in the south now, Annie had told these gunned-up interlopers. She had an idea they were about to find out just how true that was.

“Tom and Alice,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “Go in. Make sure you get the boy.”

They went.

37

Tim pulled Wendy to her feet. She looked dazed, not entirely sure where she was. There was a shredded piece of paper caught in her hair. The shooting outside had stopped, at least for the moment. It had been replaced by talking, but Tim’s ears were ringing, and he couldn’t make out the words. And it didn’t matter. If they were making peace out there, good. It would be prudent, however, to expect more war.

“Wendy, okay?”

“They . . . Tim, they killed Sheriff John! How many others?”

He shook her. “Are you okay?”

She nodded. “Y-Yes. I think s—”

“Take Luke out the back.”

She reached for him. Luke evaded her and ran for the sheriff’s desk. Tag Faraday tried to grab his arm, but Luke evaded him, too. A bullet had clipped the laptop, knocking it askew, but the home screen, although cracked, was still up, and the flash drive’s little orange ready light was blinking steadily. His ears were also ringing, but he was close to the door now, and heard Mrs. Sigsby say Make sure you get the boy.

Oh you bitch, he thought. You relentless bitch.

Luke grabbed the laptop and dropped to his knees, cradling it to his chest as Alice Green and Tom Jones came through the shattered double doors. Tag raised his sidearm but took a burst from the HK before he could fire, the back of his uniform shirt shredding. The Glock flew from his hand and spun across the floor. The only other deputy still standing, Frank Potter, never moved to defend himself. There was a stunned, unbelieving expression on his face. Alice Green shot him once in the head, then ducked as more gunfire erupted in the street behind them. There were yells and a scream of pain.

The gunfire and the scream momentarily distracted the man with the HK. Jones wheeled in that direction, and Tim double-tapped him, one in the back of the neck and the other in the head. Alice Green straightened and came on, stepping over Jones, her face set, and now Tim saw another woman crowding in behind her. An older woman wearing a red pant suit, also holding a gun. Dear Christ, he thought, how many are there? Did they send an army for one little boy?

“He’s behind the desk, Alice,” the older woman said. Considering the carnage, she sounded eerily calm. “I can see a bandage on his ear sticking up. Pull him out and shoot him.”

The woman named Alice came around the desk. Tim didn’t bother telling her to stop—they were way past that—only pulled the trigger of Wendy’s Glock. It clicked dry, although there should have been at least one more round in the clip, and probably two. Even in this do-or-die moment, he understood the reason: Wendy hadn’t fully reloaded after the last time she took target practice with it on the gun-range over in Dunning. Such things were not high on her list of priorities. He even had time to think—as he had during his early days in DuPray—that Wendy had never been cut out to be a cop.

Should have stuck to dispatch, he thought, but too late now. I think we’re all going to die.

Luke rose up from behind the dispatch desk, the laptop held in both hands. He swung it and hit Alice Green full in the face. The cracked screen shattered. Green staggered back into the woman in the pant suit, her nose and mouth bleeding, then raised her gun again.

“Drop it, drop it, drop it!” Wendy screamed. She had scooped up Tag Faraday’s Glock. Green took no notice. She was aiming at Luke, who was pulling Maureen Alvorson’s flash drive from the laptop’s port instead of ducking for cover. Wendy fired three times, eyes slitted, uttering a shrill cry with each trigger-pull. The first bullet took Alice Green just above the bridge of her nose. The second went through one of the empty holes in the door where a frosted glass panel had been only a hundred and fifty seconds before.

The third struck Julia Sigsby in the leg. Her gun flew from her hand and she folded to the floor, a look of unbelief on her face. “You shot me. Why did you shoot me?”

“Are you stupid? Why do you think?” Wendy said. She walked to the woman sitting against the wall, her shoes crunching on broken glass. The air stank of gunpowder, and the office—once neat, now a shambles—was filled with drifting blue smoke. “You were telling them to shoot the kid.”

Mrs. Sigsby gave her the sort of smile reserved for those who must suffer fools. “You don’t understand. How could you? He belongs to me. He’s property.”

“Not anymore,” Tim said.

Luke knelt beside Mrs. Sigsby. There were spatters of blood on his cheeks and a shard of glass in one eyebrow. “Who did you leave in charge at the Institute? Stackhouse? Is he the one?”

She only looked at him.

“Is it Stackhouse?”

Nothing.

Drummer Denton stepped in and looked around. His pajama shirt was soaked with blood down one side, but he looked remarkably alert in spite of that. Gutaale Dobira was peering over his shoulder, eyes wide.

“Holy shit,” Drummer said. “It’s a massacree.”

“I had to shoot a man,” Gutaale said. “Mrs. Goolsby, she was shooting a woman who was trying to shoot her. It was a clear case of self-defense.”

“How many outside?” Tim asked them. “Are they all down, or are some still active?”

Annie pushed Gutaale Dobira aside and stood next to Drummer. In her serape, with a smoking gun in each hand, she looked like a character from a spaghetti western. Tim wasn’t surprised. He was beyond surprise. “I believe everyone who got out of those vans is accounted for,” she said. “A couple wounded, one with a bullet in his foot, one hurt bad. That was the one Dobira shot. The rest of the sons of bitches look like they are dead in here.” She surveyed the room. “And Christ, who’s left in the Sheriff’s Department?”