Julia Spencer-Fleming - I Shall Not Want

Flynn shook his head as if to clear it, then nodded again. His red hair disappeared, to pop up again moments later, behind the chief. The chief heard whatever it was Flynn said to him. His eyes narrowed and his skin seemed to stretch across his cheekbones. He murmured something to Flynn, who slid into one of the cruisers and grabbed a mic.

"What's going on?" the shooter asked. "What's he doing on the radio?"

"I just told him to ask the state troopers to stay back a ways." Van Alstyne held up one hand. "I want you and me to have the time we need to talk our way out of this thing. Can't do that with a bunch of staties with guns hanging around."

More likely Flynn was telling the SWAT team to detour its sharpshooters farther along the road leading to the Christies' half-mile drive. If they went the long way around and stuck to a narrow approach through the sheep pasture, they could make it to the barn without being seen. Once inside, they would have an ideal vantage point through the haymow and upper windows.

The same idea seemed to occur to the gunman. "You tell those bastards to stay away from us," he shouted. "Anybody tries to mess with us, they gotta go through one of these kids to do it." Within the house, a woman cried out. Hadley didn't realize the man had left his defensive position at the front window until the chief shouted, "Knox! What's he doing in there?"

She scrambled to her feet and peered into the window she had been crouched beneath. She got a beautiful view of the front hallway and the stairs. Useless. She covered the eight feet to the next window in two long strides. The sill was just low enough for her to see into a room in chaos, children scattering, a teenager clutching an infant, a woman struggling with the man as he yanked a little boy off his feet.

"He's holding a kid," Hadley yelled. "He's-oh, shit, no!" She watched, helpless, as the man clubbed the woman in the face with the butt of his gun. The woman dropped to the floor.

"Are there other shooters?" the chief yelled.

"I can't tell!" she screamed. "Maybe in the front-"

The man holding the squirming child turned toward the window, aiming the revolver at Hadley. She ducked and covered just in time. The window shattered. Shards of glass sliced into her hands, stabbed the back of her uniform, caught in her hair.

The chief was yelling for her and Flynn to get to the back door. She heard the muffled thud of footsteps against grass and then Flynn was beside her. He tossed her a Kevlar vest identical to the one he was wearing. She caught it, rose, and took off for the rear of the house, glass tinkling as it flew off her like water off a shaggy dog. She struggled into the vest as Flynn rounded the corner, taking the steps up to the porch in two bounds. He went high, holding the door open, while she crouched low, stepping over the body of the murdered woman- I'm sorry, ma'am, so sorry -shouting, "Police! Put your weapons down!" to the empty kitchen. She moved aside for Flynn to pass through and almost fired when a straggly boy appeared in the doorway. "Porsche!" he bawled. From unseen rooms beyond she heard Van Alstyne bellowing, a girl shrieking, and then, Holy God, the sound of gunfire, one, two shots and the.357 Magnum going off.

"Get in here!" Hadley shouted at the boy, as one gun and then another gun fired, and fired, and fired, too many shots, way too many. She and Flynn pushed past him into the doorway, low, high, her heart beating so fast she thought she was going to die.

She thought she was going to die.

The teenager screamed, yanking one of the kids out of the way. They rounded the big table dominating the space and approached the front room. Through the doorway, Hadley could see the other woman, out on the floor, bleeding from a vicious cut in her forehead. Beside her, the gunman was sprawled half on and half off a sofa, his eyes staring unseeing at the ceiling, his chest a bloody mess. A second man slumped in the far doorway, folded over like a stringless marionette.

Hadley thought she might collapse on the spot from relief. Instead, she and Flynn fanned into the room. She froze. Flynn let out a keening sound like a banshee. Omen of death. There was another body crumpled on the wooden floor.

Russ Van Alstyne.

Lyle MacAuley looked up from where he knelt beside the chief. "Call nine-one-one," he snapped at Flynn. He looked at Hadley. "Get me something I can use for compresses." His voice was as sharp-edged as ever. She and Flynn stumbled into the kitchen, where Flynn whirled and ran out the door, while Hadley stood stupidly, thinking, Compresses ? Then she remembered the basket of laundry. She stepped over the dead woman, dug into the basket, and emerged with two bath towels.

"Hurry, Knox!"

She dashed back to the front room, holding out the towels. MacAuley snatched them out of her hands. While he folded them into thick pads, she looked down at the chief.

"Oh, Jesus," she said.

"Shut up!" MacAuley nodded toward the dining room. "Get these civilians out of here."

Hadley turned around. The door between the two rooms was crowded with crying kids. The teenager with the infant stood weeping-the scraggly boy's Porsche, she supposed-rocking the red-faced baby back and forth while it screamed. Best to start with her. Hadley stepped through the doorway, forcing the girl to retreat.

"Porsche? Are you Porsche?"

The girl nodded, openmouthed with crying.

"Is this your baby? What's her name?"

The girl gasped. "Amari." Her voice was wet and shaking.

"Why don't you let me hold Amari for a sec while you catch your breath." Hadley scooped up the baby and ran her pinkie knuckle over its toothless gums. The baby stopped wailing, a startled look on its face. Then it clamped around Hadley's knuckle and began sucking with a vengeance. An old ploy, but it still worked. "Porsche." Hadley moved her face so she blocked the girl's line of sight. "Let's get these little ones out of here. They don't need to see this anymore."

"M-m-my aunt."

"The ambulance is on the way. The best thing you can do for her is help calm the children down."

The girl nodded. Wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Let Hadley slide the baby back in her arms. The girl copied her pinkie-nursing trick. "C'mon, everybody," she said, in a fake-calm voice that Hadley herself used when she was trying to keep it together in front of her kids. "We're going outside." She stepped into the kitchen, saw what was blocking the door, and whirled around. "No, Aston! Not that way! Out the front hall."

Hadley helped steer the kids toward the mercifully blood-free front hall. The little boy she had seen in the kitchen stopped beside the door to the front room, his eyes fixed on the unconscious woman. He looked up at Hadley. "Is Izzy gonna die, too?"

Hadley scooped him up in her arms. "An ambulance is coming to help her, sweetie. She'll have to go to the hospital, but she'll be fine." She prayed she wasn't lying. She took the last child's hand and followed Porsche out the front door and across the drive, to where a small grove of large maples cast a deep shade over the grass.

Kevin emerged from one of the squad cars. "Ambulances coming." He headed for the house. "Harlene called them in before we got here. Support team from emergency services and Children and Family, too."

Hadley shot a glance at the traumatized family, then followed Kevin.

Without the crying children, the farmhouse sank into the deep dreaming silence of a hot July afternoon. The only sounds were the clunk and rattle of cubes falling from the icemaker and a hoarse, wet churning as Russ Van Alstyne tried to breathe. MacAuley had folded one towel around the wound in the chief's thigh and cinched it tight with his belt. As Hadley watched, a pulse of blood appeared on its white surface. MacAuley pressed the other towel, already sodden, against the chief's chest. Flynn was dragging cushions off the couch, wedging them beneath the unconscious woman's legs, getting more blood flow to her injured head. Hadley scooped some ice cubes out of the freezer, knotted them into a dishrag, and laid the improvised ice bag over the woman's eyes and nose. None of them said anything, as if a single word would break open their pretense at composure.