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  She took a bullet from the slash pocket of her jacket and thumbed it into the cylinder.

  I stopped and racked the hammer of the Detonics with my left thumb. “Don’t do that. Just let go of the gun.”

  She thumbed another round into the revolver.

  Mark scuffled to his feet and announced, “Mark Behler, Channel Six News.”

  “Just freeze like you are,” I told her. “You can get out of this if you don’t move.”

  She shifted her eye to Mark while she slid another silver cartridge into the revolver. Deadpan, she said, “There is a God.”

  Mark snatched the tape recorder out of his pocket and held it out toward the woman. “Why did you do this?”

  “Please put it down, ma’am,” I said. “Stop loading it.”

  Mark started around on my left. “Hey, where did you get the gun?” he inquired like a child asking after a tin whistle. I board-checked him into the tables and lost my sight picture. The woman loaded the last two chambers, swung the cylinder closed with a flourish, and fixed me with insolent eyes.

  I hung my front sight on the right side of her ten-ring. “Please, just set the gun down, ma’am. Please.”

  I took up the slack in the trigger. “Just put the gun down and walk away, ma’am.” I said, “I won’t try to stop you. Please, just put it down and go. No one will bother you. You can just walk away if you put the gun down.”

  She showed me arched eyebrows that had been plucked clean and penciled on. A half inch of drool traced down from the taut line of her pale-pink-painted lips. She began to raise the revolver in our direction.

  I said, “Don’t do it!”

  She thumbed back the hammer of her revolver.

  I took the shot, but it seemed like only a pop, and I made a panicked glance inspection of my pistol to see if it had misfired. I found the hammer cocked and the slide in battery. The woman hung, suspended in the air. I could see the soles of her running shoes. Her revolver fired. Plate glass exploded in the mall. Instinct dictated that I pull a double tap, but I managed to get my finger out of the trigger guard before I felt my chest and arms tense twice.

  • • •

  Detective Lieutenant Gerald Van Huis of the Kentwood Police Department knelt his six-foot-four, two-hundred-and-plenty pound frame among the scattered chairs. His charcoal-colored raincoat, sized and styled for his previous decade, looked like a tarp thrown over a Jeep. He lifted the broken tabletop that had fallen onto the woman and made a whistle that sounded like a falling bomb. With two fingers he felt for a pulse, made a negative wag of his head, and turned his mop of sandy hair to look me in the face.

  “Jesus Christ, Hardin,” he said. “You just whacked somebody’s gramma.”

  I closed my eyes and shook my head.

  Van Huis asked, “Where’s your gun?”

  “On my hip.” I pulled my suit coat open for him to see.

  He reached up to take it, but stopped. “God’s sake, Hardin, it’s cocked and locked.”

  “My hands were shaking. I didn’t think I could ease the hammer down, so I thumbed up the safety and holstered it.”

  Van Huis grabbed the black pipe that had been the stanchion for the broken table and pulled himself to his feet. “You think you can clear it now?”

  I nodded, and Van Huis produced a large clear-plastic evidence bag from the pocket of his raincoat. I snapped open the strap on my high-rise hip holster and lifted my pistol clear. I mashed the magazine release with my thumb. Van Huis held the bag open like a kid on Halloween, and I dropped in the magazine. It took both hands to lock the slide to the rear. My left palm, over the receiver, caught the extracted live round. I eased my Detonics into the bag and dropped the loose round in after it. Behind me, I heard someone holster a pistol.

  “Still carrying hollow points,” Van Huis said nonchalantly as he sealed the bag. He produced a pen and started writing on the tag. “April ninth?”

  “Tenth,” I said. “It’s Wednesday.” I looked at my watch. “Twelve forty-seven p.m. And, no, I have not been drinking, and I am not taking any prescription medications.”

  A smoke smile drifted across his face but quickly dissipated. “What the hell happened here?”

  I’d already said enough to give my attorney fits, so I went with “Lady came in and shot up the place.”

  “She shoot at you?”

  “She shot all over.”

  “She direct a threat at you?”

  “She was pretty much a threat to everybody, including the three people she shot.” I fixed my eyes on the detective’s. “You can write this down, ‘I – was – in – fear – for – my – life.’”

  Van Huis handed the evidence bag to a uniformed officer who stepped around from behind me. The officer left, and Van Huis dug a notepad out of the breast pocket of his suit jacket. While he wrote, he asked, “What exactly did she say?”

  “She said, ‘There is a God.’”

  Van Huis wrote and then turned his eyes up to me without moving his head. “I need to see your permit to carry and your private ticket.”

  I fished out my ID case and handed the items over, along with the registration for the Detonics.

  Van Huis thumbed the cards and noted the numbers. “This for the pistol you just handed over?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Your permit says ‘while on duty for Peter A. Ladin Investigative Associates.’ You working here today?”

  I own the company. I’m always on duty.

  “I was being interviewed by Mark Behler about the private industry for his TV show.”

  Van Huis rolled his eyes up from the pad again. “That requires that you be armed?”

  How many body bags did you want to fill?

  “I was on duty.”

  Van Huis handed the cards back but held his hard gaze. “Where were you when this happened?”

  I pointed sideways with my thumb. “In the alcove seating.”

  No way out except past the woman with the gun.

  While Van Huis wrote, he said, “She was out here in the dining room.”

  “She shot into the alcove. You’ll find a bullet hole in the wall.”

  “Lieutenant, if you’re done here, I need to take some pictures,” said Patty Oates, the evidence tech from the Kentwood Police. I recognized her voice. She was a regular at the American Society for Industrial Security dinner meetings, which provided an interface for the public and private factions of law enforcement. The meetings had become crowded with blue serge since the Nine-Eleven tragedy—a proactive law enforcement mission suddenly all the rage.

  I turned, and she gave me a nod. Since the last time I had seen her, she’d had her light auburn hair cut quite short. She wore blue coveralls with police patches on both shoulders and latex gloves. She wagged her camera at Van Huis.

  The lieutenant’s eyebrows crowded into storm clouds, but after a throat-clearing noise, he said, “I suppose I could interview Mr. Hardin outside the tape.”

  “‘Preciate that, Boss, but it’s a zoo out there. We have all the TV crews and half the population milling around.”

  “I need a picture of the bullet hole in the wall in the alcove,” he said.

  “Already got it,” she said.

  Van Huis nodded toward the alcove, and we strolled the dozen steps to get there. He looked from the bullet hole back to where the woman’s body lay and then at me. “That’s twenty—twenty-five feet. You said your hands were shaking.”

  “After she was down,” I said. “Adrenalin.”

  He nodded and thumbed up a page in his notes. “You say anything to her?”

  No, I just stood up and capped the old bat because my pizza was cold, and I was tired of making nice with the TV dickhead.

  A little louder, Van Huis said, “You say anything to her?”

  “I told her to put the gun down.”

  “Like how? You have your weapon in your hand?”

  “Mark Behler had a tape recorder running,” I said. “Listen t
o the tape.”

  “Behler’s tape recorder has a bullet hole in it. How’d that happen?”

  “When the woman was on the floor, Behler ran around me and shoved it in her face. He asked her where she got the gun. She whispered something to him and then lifted her revolver to plug him. He fended the muzzle off with the tape recorder.”

  Van Huis snapped his pad shut and squared his shoulders. “You trying to tell me that tiny woman pulled off another round after you shot her with that pocket Cuisinart you carry?”

  “She let one go on the way down, but she had already racked the hammer for that one. She was strong as an ox. I had to stand on her hand to break her grip on the weapon. I think she was dusted.”

  “Horse tranquilizer?”

  “Just a guess,” I said. “She was zombied out. No expression and rock steady while she reloaded the weapon.”

  “Why didn’t you jump her while she was reloading?”

  “The guy in the tan suit tried that, and they wheeled him out of here in a ziplock bag.”

  “While she was reloading?”

  “No, I think she was still unloading,” I said. “She was fifteen feet away, and after she had the first bullet in the cylinder, the gun was loaded good enough to kill me.”

  Van Huis gave me a prune face but looked over at Patty Oates and asked, “We still have Behler’s tape recorder?”

  “The tape recorder went to the state police crime lab with Hardin’s sidearm,” said Patty, hunched over her camera as it flashed. She lowered her camera, turned to face us, and said, “It was pretty much exploded, but there was no tape in it. I nicked my thumb checking for the cassette.”

  “You know if Behler is still here?” asked Van Huis.

  “He was outside with his camera crew at one of the ambulances,” said Patty.

  “C’mon,” said Van Huis, with a nod toward the mall.

  I followed him to the yellow police tape at the front of the restaurant, and he lifted it for me to duck under. “You didn’t tell me if you had your weapon out,” he said.

  “No sir, I didn’t.”

  Van Huis followed me under the tape. “I didn’t care for that ‘unloading’ crack.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Yeah, right,” he said.

  “I try to keep that stuff to myself.”

  “It’s written all over your face. You’re lucky I can’t charge you with possession of a crappy attitude.”

  A gaggle of newsies and cameramen had formed at the back of the ambulance. Bright spring sun warmed the temperature to the low sixties. We found Mark Behler sitting in his shirt sleeves on the rear step of a Life Anchor ambulance. A lady med-tech wearing a white shirt with sewn-in military creases and black cargo pants wrapped Mark’s hand in gauze. His face had been spackled and his toupee combed in place.

  “How bad is that?” asked Van Huis.

  “Just a nick on his thumb,” she said. “I gave him a Band-Aid, but he wanted me to wrap his hand for the cameras.”

  “That’s as big as a boxing glove,” said Van Huis.

  “This is the third take,” she said.

  A male voice in the crowd of newsies said, “Mark Behler, Woodland shoot-out. Take three.”

  Mark Behler looked at the camera, and the med-tech wound gauze. He said, “Mark Behler, Channel Six News. We are at Woodland Mall, where the easy access to firearms has caused yet another tragedy here in greater Grand Rapids, Michigan. A young mother is fighting for her life and the life of her unborn child. One man was killed, and three were injured, including this reporter, in a shoot-out between a surly off-duty security guard and a sad and very troubled woman.”

  3

  RANK HATH ITS PRIVILEGE. For Detective Lieutenant Gerald Van Huis, privilege yielded a small cubicle of precious space in the windowless—and Tokyo-subway-crowded—Kentwood Police Department. Van Huis could usually be found with his collar loose and his sleeves rolled a turn or two to keep the cuffs clean. Today, he sat at his desk wearing his suit coat with his tie cinched up to his Adam’s apple. He folded his hands atop the yellow pad on his desk and, by way of announcement, said, “The prosecutor is talking ‘vigilante.’”

  Pete Finney, my attorney, sat to my left across the desk from Van Huis. A faint smile bloomed on his face while he stared at his notes but wilted before he looked up to speak. He said, “My client was in fear for his life.”

  Van Huis patted the yellow notepad on the top of his desk and said, “Your client identified himself as a police officer.”

  “Mr. Hardin,” said Pete, his English accent making it sound like Hah-din, “never represented himself as a police officer.”

  “I have three witnesses who say he did,” said Van Huis.

  “Mr. Hardin tells me he announced himself as a detective,” said Finney.

  “He’s a private detective. And the prosecutor is still talking vigilante.”

  “Mr. Hardin’s license reads ‘Detective,’“ said Finney.

  “Counselor, you’re making this harder than it has to be. I haven’t read Art his rights. At this point he’s a witness. I need his statement.”

  “You transported Mr. Hardin in handcuffs,” said Finney.

  “Policy,” said Van Huis. “I took them off and let him talk to you in private and unescorted in the lunchroom.”

  “The lunchroom is the end of the upstairs hallway,” said Finney, “hardly what I would call private. Not to mention that three of your officers developed a sudden need for coffee while we were conferring.”

  Van Huis rocked his chair back, thumping the divider wall. “When we get into the new building, we’ll have more room,” he said with a shrug downsized to a small tilt of his head. “Right now”—he pointed a finger at me—“I need to know why Art said ‘detectives.’ Plural. With an ‘s.’“

  “Clearly Mister Hardin felt that she would surrender if she were opposed by more than one person,” said Pete.

  “I want to know if any of Art’s people were there and what his relationship was to the woman who did the shooting.”

  “Mr. Hardin has told me that he did not know the woman.”

  “Let me refresh his memory,” said Van Huis. He thumbed up a page in his notepad. Squinting his eyes, he backed up his head until he read, “Peggy Shatner,” then shot me a hot glance.

  I made big eyes and showed Van Huis my open hands. Pete patted the desk in front of me so I’d look at his hand and Van Huis wouldn’t be able to read my face. Van Huis let his shoulders go round and said, “She was a retired accountant. Worked as a temp at Merchant’s Insurance.”

  Pete watched me play my best poker face, then took his hand back. I had done work for Merchant’s Insurance, but I rarely went to their office and had never seen the woman before she shot up the pizzeria.

  A door banged against the wall. A policeman said, “Ma’am, you can’t go in there.”

  I heard Wendy snap, “Take your hands off me!”

  I said, “Uh-oh!”

  “You said my husband was not under arrest, and I want to see him right now.”

  I started out of my chair, but Finney tugged on the sleeve of my suit coat. Van Huis bolted to his feet as Wendy appeared in the doorway. She wore a scowl, a burgundy sweater and slacks, and a uniformed policeman’s hand on her shoulder.

  “Sorry, Lieutenant,” said the officer as he placed his other hand on Wendy’s opposite shoulder.

  Wendy let her tooled leather handbag drop to the length of the strap and straightened her arm. She made a half turn toward the officer and focused a hot stare on the tip of his nose.

  I said, “Oh, shit.”

  Pete said, “Wendy!”

  Van Huis raised both hands in surrender and said, “Wait!” loud enough to be heard in the courtroom next door.

  The officer removed his hands. I stood in time to catch Wendy as she threw her arms around me and buried her face into the space between my neck and shoulder. She said, “Thank God.”

  I kissed the side of her head
and said, “I’m okay, Kiddo.” She hugged me tight. I rubbed her back. “Everything is going to be all right.” I rested my cheek on the side of her head and found her hair stiff with lilac-scented hair spray.

  “It’s okay, Ted,” said Van Huis. “You’re right. She shouldn’t be in here. But, Mrs. Hardin owns Silk City Detective Agency. I needed to ask her a couple of questions.”

  “Boss, I’m sorry. She just—”

  “Really, Ted. It’s okay,” said Van Huis.

  Ted walked off, his heel cleats clicking the tile floor.

  “Mrs. Hardin—” said Van Huis.

  “It’s Silk City Surveys,” said Wendy.

  “Mrs. Hardin hasn’t anything to say,” said Finney.

  “We’re investigating a homicide, Counselor,” said Van Huis.

  Wendy exploded out of my arms. “Homicide?” she asked.

  “Wendy,” said Finney, “anytime a person is killed, it’s a homicide.”

  Wendy turned her scorching eyes on Finney.

  “Thus far,” said Finney with a glance at Van Huis, “no one has suggested that Art is criminally liable.”

  “I need the answers to some questions,” said Van Huis.

  “You have no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Mr. Hardin,” said Finney.

  “Until the bullets have been recovered from the victims, I can’t say who shot who.”

  “You cannot say Art shot anybody,” said Finney.

  “Art’s weapon had been fired. I can hold him for seventy-two hours for investigation,” said Van Huis.

  I eased Wendy into my chair, rubbed her shoulders and kissed the top of her head. The rolled turtleneck of her sweater concealed the chain of her gold butterfly pendant. She straightened the chain and centered the butterfly.

  “Mr. Hardin has not been charged,” said Finney.

  Van Huis said, “We’re working on that.”

  “Mr. Hardin will not be making any further statements,” said Pete, “and he is not a flight risk.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m afraid of,” said Van Huis. “He’ll stay here. And every time he gets on a tear, the entire department ends up on overtime.”

  “I’ll keep Art with me,” said Wendy. “We have to pick up a friend at the airport. How much trouble can we get into there?”