Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

“He’s got a gun!”

Stock ignored the woman and kept his eyes on the pharmacist, who was moving to his left, probably toward an alarm button.

“Don’t do it!” Stock yelled, and an instant later, he fired. The pharmacist crashed backward into the shelves that held rows of drug jars, spilling several onto the floor. A bright-crimson stain started spreading across his white coat at the right shoulder, and he sagged as the elderly woman began screaming hysterically.

Behind him, Bonaro could hear other customers in the store running for the front doors, a few screaming themselves. Bonaro glanced at McGill, whose concentration was riveted on the prescription counter. As Stock turned toward the elderly woman, turning his back to the pilot, McGill began advancing.

“Don’t hurt me, please!” the elderly woman implored. “I didn’t see anything. Please!”

“Shut up,” Stock said. McGill was twenty feet from him, still advancing. The woman continued to scream, and the gunman fired a single shot directly into her open mouth. Bonaro, who was still crouched, saw the bullet blow off the back of the old woman’s head, blood and brain matter mingling with her blue-white hair as she hurtled backward and out of sight behind a display of foot-care products.

McGill came up directly behind Stock. In a single motion, he grabbed the gunman’s arm at the wrist, twisted it up and behind his back and exerted strong downward pressure on the thumb. Stock screamed and dropped his gun. Without letting Stock go, McGill kicked the pistol out of reach beyond the prescription counter.

“Now we’ll wait for the police, you fucking piece of shit,” McGill spat as he pushed Stock face-first over the prescription counter and held him down. Bonaro had a clear shot. He withdrew a chrome-plated .357 Magnum with a six-inch barrel from his waistband, pointed it at McGill and fired once, the report so loud it reverberated through the store like a cannon shot.

McGill was blown forward, over Stock, then tumbled backward off his feet. It felt to him as if he’d been hit with a baseball bat, but there was no pain. He was on the floor, although he had no notion how he got there. The man with the big silver gun was standing over him, and McGill was looking up the barrel into the blackness of his own future.

“A setup,” he said, the harsh whisper gurgling up past the blood flooding his throat from a shattered lung.

He heard the man standing over him say, “You’ll never know,” and saw a spit of flame from the gun’s muzzle. McGill thought it strange that he heard no sound. He felt his body convulse, and then he felt nothing, for the second shot had plunged through his chest, nicking his heart and severing his spinal cord. Instead of pain, McGill felt a blanket of icy cold envelop him. He dropped into a long tunnel and spiraled down into total darkness.

Pace and Schaeffer watched McGill walk through the archway and into the foyer leading to the street in front of Maison Rouge.

“He’s a hell of a guy, Steve,” Schaeffer said. “How’d you meet him?”

Pace repeated the story as they waited for the waiter to return with Schaeffer’s credit card and the bill. The restaurant was busy, and the process took nearly fifteen minutes. That business accounted for, they got up to leave and heard the first distant shriek of sirens.

It was a common sound along that stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue, a main corridor to the George Washington University Hospital. But these sirens weren’t going to the hospital. They sounded as though they were stopping right outside the restaurant. Pace felt his heart rate click up.

He muscled ahead of Schaeffer and out the front door of Maison Rouge.

People were milling about in the street, awash in the eerie flash of police and ambulance lights. Everyone’s attention was directed off to Pace’s right, toward the entrance to the drugstore. With Schaeffer behind him, he jogged the 120 feet or so to the facade that proclaimed he had arrived at “Price-Less Drugs: Items for your home and hygiene, priced less.” Pace felt a hand on his arm.

“This is a crime scene, friend. You’ll have to move back.”

Pace turned and saw a D.C. police officer, a young black man with a hard-set face.

“What happened?” Pace demanded, extracting his press card from his wallet.

“Lieutenant over there’s in charge, sir,” the officer said. “Official comments from him only. But generally, it looks like it was a drug stickup gone bad. Some dude went in thinking he could muscle the pharmacist outta some speed. Pharmacist sounded an alarm, and the dude panicked. Some innocent bystanders got blasted.”

Pace’s breath was coming in short pumps. “Who?” he demanded. He grabbed the cop at the bicep hard enough the rookie thought for a moment he had a problem on his hands.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I honestly don’t. An old woman, I heard, a pharmacist, and some other customer. I don’t know names.”

“Dead?” Pace asked.

“Some of ’em, yeah.”

“No,” Pace breathed. “Goddamn it, this can’t be happening.”

He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Schaeffer. “Let’s go see, Steve. There’s no sense standing outside speculating.”

They approached the lieutenant, whose nameplate identified him as Barnes.

“Lieutenant Barnes, I’m Avery Schaeffer, editor of the Chronicle, and this is Steve Pace, one of our reporters. We have reason to believe we know one of the people, uh, involved in there. Is there any way we can check on him?”

The lieutenant was sympathetic. “I recognized you when you walked up, Mr. Schaeffer,” he said. “I’ve seen you on TV a bunch of times. But we’ve got a multiple homicide under investigation, and I don’t have authority to let you in until the medical examiner’s people are finished.”

“Even if I can identify one of the victims?”

“Well…” Barnes hesitated. “Maybe if their personal effects have been collected, I can check out an ID for you, off the record. Who am I looking for?”

“Michael McGill,” Pace said. “He’s from Memphis. You should find a driver’s license and an air-transport pilot’s license.”

The lieutenant nodded. “Wait here,” he ordered.

He was back about two minutes later, looking solemn. “When was the last time you saw your friend?” he asked Pace.

“Twenty minutes ago.”

“Can you describe what he was wearing?”

Pace did, down to the boots and the leather jacket.

“I’m sorry,” Barnes said. “He’s in there. But it’s just as well you not see him. The gunman took particular care to make sure he was dead. Some crazy motherfuckers we got on these streets.”

Pace was only half-listening. He was staring beyond Barnes, into the brightly-lighted drugstore, but he couldn’t see anything. He was breathing hard, feeling the light-headedness of early stages of hyperventilation.

“Mike was murdered,” he insisted.

“Yes, sir, they were all murdered, Mr. Pace. Three of ’em. When we catch whoever did this, the charge will be murder one.”

“Not that way, goddamn it! I don’t mean murdered that way. He was set up.”

If Pace had possessed any less self-control, he would have pushed by Barnes and gone right through everybody who tried to stop him from entering the store. Every muscle in him bunched and strained to hold him back, some logical portion of his brain managing to overcome the momentum of his fury.

“Those other poor people, they were window-dressing to make it look like a robbery,” he said with force, his words passing jaws set so tight they ached. “It wasn’t a robbery, damn it, it was an assassination!”

Barnes regarded Pace thoughtfully, and a crowd began to gather around them. Schaeffer put a hand on his reporter’s shoulder again.