Lawrence Block - The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

And the kid kept moving.

As Andy took aim to fire again, the front door swung open, and Keith Shannon, Elizabeth’s husband, stuck his head in and shouted for everyone to hurry up and come on.

Keith saw Theresa’s body dangling from the statue and screamed over his shoulder at the other men out on the lawn, then ran inside, calling out the names of his wife and children.

He never stopped to see if Theresa was still alive.

Andy stormed across the kitchen and through the second, smaller archway that led into the rooms on the front left side of the house. As a result of taking this shortcut, he beat Keith to the living room by a few seconds, enabling him to take his brother-in-law by surprise. Andy emptied the rest of the Magnum’s rounds into Keith’s head and chest. One shot went wild and shattered the large front bay window.

Andy tossed the Magnum aside and pulled both the Mauser and the Walther from his jeans, holding one pistol in each hand. He bolted from the living room, through the dining room, and rounded the corner into the foyer just as Irv hit the top step of the porch.

Andy kicked open the front door. For the next fifteen seconds, while the sky ignited and Lee Greenwood sang how God should bless this country he loved, God bless the U.S.A., the front porch of the Leonard house became a shooting gallery as each of the four remaining adult males — at least two of whom were drunk — came up onto the porch one by one and was summarily executed.

Andy fired both pistols simultaneously, killing his father, his uncle Martin, his older brother Chet, and Tom Hamilton, Jessica’s husband.

A neighbor across the street, Bess Paymer, saw Irv’s pulped body wallop backward onto the lawn and yelled for her husband, Francis. Francis took one look out the window and said, “Someone’s gone crazy.” Bess was already dialing the police.

Andy went back into the house and grabbed the rifle off the dining-room table, picked up the Magnum as he passed back through the living room, then headed for the kitchen, where Randy, still alive, was attempting to drag Joseph through the back door. When he heard his uncle come into the kitchen, Randy reached out and grabbed a carving knife from the scattered contents of the cutlery drawer, which Miriam had wrenched free on her way down, then threw himself over his infant brother.

“That was one brave kid,” an investigator said later. “Here he was, in the middle of all these bodies, he had two bullets in him so we know he was in a lot of pain, and the only thing that mattered to him was protecting his baby brother. An amazing kid. If there’s one bright spot in all this, it’s knowing that he loved his brother enough to... to... ah, hell. I can’t talk about it right now.”

For some reason, Andy did not shoot his nephew a third time. He came across the kitchen floor and raised the butt of the rifle to bludgeon Randy’s skull, and that’s when Randy, in his last moments, pushed himself forward and jammed the knife in his uncle’s calf. Then he died.

Andy dropped to the floor, screaming through clenched teeth, and pulled the knife from his leg. He grabbed his nephew’s lifeless body and heaved it over onto its back, then beat its face in with his fists. After that, he loaded fresh clips into the pistols, grabbed Joseph, stumbled out the back door to the garage, and drove away in Irv’s brand-new pickup.

At 9:21 P.M., the night duty dispatcher at the Cedar Hill Police Department received Bess Paymer’s call. As was standard operating procedure, the dispatcher, while believing Bess had heard gunfire, asked if she were certain that someone had been shot. This dispatcher later defended this action by saying, “Every year we get yahoos all over this city who decide that the Kiwanis fireworks display is the perfect time to go out in their backyard and fire their guns off into the air — well, the Fourth and New Year’s Eve, we get a lot of that. We had every unit out that night, just like every holiday, and there were drunks to deal with, bar fights, illegal fireworks being set off — M-80s and such, traffic accidents... holidays tend to be a bit of a mess for us around here. Seems that’s when everybody and their brother decides to act like a royal horse’s ass.

“The point is, if we get a report of alleged gunfire during the fireworks, we’re required to ask the caller if anyone’s been hurt. If not, then we get to it as soon as we can. If we had to send a cruiser to check out every report of gunfire that comes in on the Fourth, we’d never get anything else done. I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not my fault.”

It took Bess Paymer and her husband the better part of two minutes to convince the dispatcher that someone had gone crazy over at the Leonard house and shot everyone.

Francis, furious by this point, grabbed the phone from his wife and informed the dispatcher in no uncertain terms that they’d better make it fast because he was grabbing his hunting rifle and going over there himself.

A cruiser was dispatched at 9:24 P.M.

At 9:27, a call came in from the Leonard house; by noon the next day, the phone call had been replayed on every newscast in the country:

“This is Francis Paymer. My wife and I called you a couple of minutes ago. I’m standing in the... the kitchen of the Leonard house... that’s One-eighty-two Merchant Street... and I’ve got somebody’s brains stuck to the bottom of my shoe.

“There’s been a shooting here. A little girl’s hanging in the hallway, and there’s blood all over the walls and the floors and I can’t tell where one person’s body ends and the next one begins because everybody’s dead. I can still smell the gunpowder and smoke.

“Is that good enough for you to do something? C-could you maybe please if it’s not too much trouble send someone out here NOW? It might be a good idea, because the crazy BASTARD WHO DID THIS ISN’T HERE—

“— and I think he might’ve took a baby with him.”

By 9:30 P.M., Merchant Street was clogged with police cruisers.

And Andy Leonard was halfway to Moundbuilder’s Park, where the Second Presbyterian Church was sponsoring Parish Family Night. More than one hundred people had been gathered at the park since five in the afternoon, picnicking, tossing Frisbees, playing checkers, or flying kites. A little before nine, the president of the Parish Council had arrived with a truckload of folding chairs that were set up in a clearing at the south end of the park.

By the time Francis Paymer made his famous phone call, one hundred seven parish members were seated in twelve neat little rows watching the fireworks display.

Between leaving his Merchant Street house and arriving at Moundbuilder’s Park, Andy Leonard shot and killed six more people as he drove past them. Two were in a car; the other four had been sitting out on their lawns watching the fireworks. In every case, Andy simply kept one hand on the steering wheel while shooting with the other through an open window.

At 9:40 P.M., just as the fireworks kicked into high gear for the grand finale, Andy drove his father’s pickup truck at eighty miles per hour through the wooden gate at the northeast side of the park, barreled across the picnic grounds, over the grassy mound that marked the south border, and went straight down into the middle of the spectators.

Three people were killed and eight others injured as the truck plowed into the back row of chairs. Then Andy threw open the door, leaped from the truck, and opened fire with the HK53. The parishioners scrambled in panic, many of them falling over chairs. Of the dead and wounded at the park, none was able to get farther than ten yards away before being shot.

Andy stopped only long enough to yank the pistols from the truck. The first barrage with the rifle was to disable; the second, with the pistols, was to finish off anyone who might still be alive.