F. Paul Wilson: Hosts

Sandy wove slowly through the crowd, pausing to listen whenever and wherever he could.

"… and then out of nowhere, this savior appeared," said a stooped old woman in a wrinkled blue dress.

"What did he look like, ma'am?" said the female officer bending over her with notebook in hand.

"Like Jesus."

"You mean he had long hair?"

"No."

"Short, then?"

"Not exactly."

"Can you tell me what he looked like?"

"We were not to look upon his face…"

Sandy moved on, pausing again by the tall ministerial black man he recognized from the death car.

"… and so then I spoke to him."

"Spoke to who? The second shooter?"

"We think of him as the Savior."

"'We'?"

"We who were blessed enough to survive. When we were freed from the train, someone said, 'Who was he? Who was our savior?' And that's how we now refer to him."

"Can you give me a description of this 'savior,' sir?"

"Medium build, brown hair… I can't tell you much about his face because I didn't see it. He had this hat, you see, and he pulled it down to hide his face."

"How tall was he?"

"I'd say average height. Shorter than me, anyway."

Sandy kept moving, taking a circuitous route back to Beth, and along the way he kept hearing his fellow survivors trying and failing to describe this man they were calling 'the Savior.' He understood their problem: a guy so unremarkable seemed virtually invisible. Sandy had tagged him GPM for that very reason: he was a paradigm of the generic pale male.

He found Beth again but now she wasn't alone. A plainclothesman was seated next to her, his notebook held at the ready. Beth had her hands stuffed stiff-armed between her knees and was still shaking. Sandy knelt beside her. She jumped when he laid a hand on her shoulder.

"Oh, it's you," she said with a nervous flicker of a smile.

"And you are…?" said the detective.

"Sandy Palmer. I was on the train with Beth."

"Have you given a statement yet?"

The word no was approaching his lips when a subliminal warning from somewhere in his subconscious made him pull it back.

"Who's that policewoman back there?" he said, trying to avoid getting caught in a lie later. "I forget her name."

The detective nodded. "Were you able to get a look at the second shooter?"

"You mean the Savior?" Sandy replied.

"Whatever."

To avoid a direct answer Sandy turned to Beth. "You saw him, didn't you, Beth?"

She shook her head.

"But you were right there, just a couple of feet from him."

"But I wasn't looking at him. I barely looked at you, if you remember."

Sandy smiled. "I remember."

"I mean, I saw his back when he went after the killer—wait! He had a name on the back of his shirt!"

The detective leaned forward, his pencil poised over his pad. "What did it say?"

Beth squeezed her eyes shut. "It was all such a blur, but I think it said 'Sherbert' or something like that that."

"Sherbert?" the detective said, scribbling. "You're sure?"

Sandy rubbed a hand over his mouth to hide a smile. "Chrebet," he offered. "I remember now. He was wearing a green-on-white Jets jersey. Number eighty."

"Christ," the detective muttered, shaking his head as he scratched out a line on his pad with hard, annoyed strokes. "I think we can figure it wasn't Wayne Chrebet."

"You know him?" Beth said.

"Wide receiver for the Jets," Sandy replied, then added, "That's a football team."

"Oh." She seemed to shrink a little. "I hate football."

"You didn't see his face?" the detective said.

"No. He had it covered when he turned around." She turned to Sandy. "You didn't see him either?"

Sandy wet his lips. An idea was forming. Its boldness tied his gut into knots but its potential made him giddy. It meant going out on a limb—far out on a very slim limb. But then, nothing ventured, nothing gained…

"I saw what you saw," he said.

"Shit," the detective muttered and slapped his notebook against his thigh. "What was this guy—invisible?"

"When can we leave?" Beth said. "I want to go home."

"Soon, miss," the detective said, softening. "Soon as we get names and addresses and statements from all you witnesses, we'll see that you all get home safely."

As the cop moved off, Sandy leaned close to Beth and whispered, "I'm getting stir crazy. I've got to move around. You'll be okay for a few minutes?" He didn't know why but somehow he felt responsible for her.

"Sure," she said. "Not like there aren't any cops around."

"Good point."

He left her and edged back toward the death car where flashes from the forensic team's cameras kept lighting the interior like welders' arcs. He noticed a cluster of three plainclothesmen and one uniform gathered outside one of the open sets of doors. Farther on, a man wearing latex gloves—from the forensics team, no doubt—examined the killer where he'd fallen through the doorway.

Sandy needed to be over there, needed to hear what these cops were saying, but he couldn't get his feet to move. One step past that tape and he'd be sent scurrying back with his tail between his legs to stay put with the rest of the survivors. But he wasn't just a survivor, he was the press too, damn it—the people's right to know and all that.

He tried to remember techniques from that assertiveness training course he'd taken last year but came up blank except for the old bromide about how the worst that could happen was that someone simply would say No .

But fearing rejection, of all things, seemed more than silly after what he'd just been through.

Sandy pulled his press card from his wallet and palmed it. A quick glance around showed no one looking his way. He noticed that one of the plainclothes cops was pretty big. Huge, in fact. Choosing an angle of approach that used the big guy's bulk as a shield, Sandy ducked under the yellow tape and sidled up to the foursome, listening, taking mental notes.

"… like the second shooter knew what he was doing."

"How you mean?"

"According to what we're hearing he got the crazy in the shoulders first, then blew him away."

"Fucking executed him's more like it. But what was he carrying? Nobody can tell us anything about his gun except it was real small."

"And holds at least four rounds."

"Not a .22, I can tell you that. Not a .32 either from the size of the crazy's wounds. Guy took his brass with him so we can't use that."

"The whole thing's weird—including the way he blew away the crazy. I mean, why not just do the head shot and have it done with?"

"'Cause if you miss that first head shot—and if we're talking about a tiny little barrel, there's a damn good chance you will—you're a goner because this Colin Ferguson wannabe's got a pair of nines and he's going to blow you away. So if you're smart you do what our guy does: you go for an arm and—"

"Seems low percentage to me. I'd go for center of mass."

"Fine—unless he's wearing a vest. And witnesses say the crazy was turned sideways when he took the first hit. An arm's bigger than a head, and even a miss has got a good chance at the torso, vested or not. So our guy goes for an arm and makes the shot. Now there's one less gun to deal with, and he's also a few steps closer. So now it's easier to take out the other arm."

"Sounds like he's been trained."

"Damn straight. Taking his brass with him says he's a pro. But trained by who? With both arms messed up, the crazy wasn't going to do any more shooting. Could've left him like that. But he finished him off."

"But good."

"Probably didn't want to hear about 'yellow rage' for the next two years."

"Like I said—a fucking execution."

"You got complaints about that, McCann?"

"Maybe. Maybe I don't like executioners running around loose."