Page 32 of Hero

The bullet pounded the glass and left a milky impact scar like a frozen explosion above her head. His second shot went to the opening doorway but passed without touching her body. She was pivoting into the lobby and tugging the door after her, so he ran toward her again, this time firing a triple tap at the diminishing space, aware that his aim was bouncing with his steps. The door shut. Would the door’s electronic lock relay stay disengaged for a couple of seconds?

Sealy reached the door and tried to tug it open, then tried to duplicate her hand gesture in the hope that his fingers would hit the right four keys in the same order. He looked in the glass doors and saw nothing, but she must be crouching nearby. He spun and looked behind him in desperation.

There was a tall, thin man scurrying along the side of the building away from the door, trying to get out of the line of fire. Sealy made a quick decision. He sprinted after the man, pressed the muzzle of thepistol against his head so he would stop, and said, “Open the door to the building.”

The man’s mouth gaped. “I—I can’t. I don’t know the—”

Sealy swung the pistol down onto his head hard enough to start the blood flowing from his scalp, then held the muzzle against his forehead so he could see Sealy’s index finger on the trigger five inches from his eye as the trickle of blood reached his cheek. “One more chance.”

The man went limp and let himself be dragged to the door, punched the four numbers into the keypad, and pulled the door open. Sealy pushed him inside, shot him through the back of the head, and saw the blood spray appear on the upper wall as he ran past the falling body.

He knew the way to her condominium, so he threw open the door to the staircase and ran up the stairs toward the second floor. The door to the stairwell slammed shut behind him as he ran.

Justine heard the slam. She was crouching against the wall inside the elevator holding the “Close Door” button because a 9-millimeter pistol probably couldn’t penetrate the stainless steel doors, and if it did, she made a tiny target.

She heard the second floor stairwell door slam shut, pressed the “Open Door” button, ran out of the elevator and out the front door of the building. As she ran along the side of the building, she dialed 911. She said, “I’m at five-seven-nine-four Ashburton Street and a man is inside the building shooting people. He’s killed one man already, right inside the front door.”

“Your name, please.”

“Justine Poole. Got to go.” She ended the call and ran as hard as she could toward the place where she had left her car on the next street. Her killer might not have seen her car, but she wasn’t going to bet her life on it. She started it and drove. When she was about a mile away, she pulled the car to the curb, picked up her phone off the passenger seat, looked back at her recent calls, and pushed the icon to call Detective Raymond Kunkel.

She heard his voice. “Kunkel, Homicide.”

“Hello. This is Justine Poole. A man just tried to ambush me at my home and killed one of my neighbors.”

“You sure he was killed?”

“He was shot through the head. A lot of blood spatter. I called 911.”

“I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“I’m not there anymore.”

“Just stay put and keep your phone on. I’ll come to you.”

22

Justine sat in the car, looking in her rearview and side mirrors, then staring ahead through the windshield every few seconds in a repeated sequence, trying to look in every direction at once but also to breathe slowly and deeply to get her heart to stop pounding. She kept experiencing the light-headed feeling that came after a big scare and the rush of adrenaline and then feeling the weight of the exhaustion coming on. She kept seeing the body of the man who had been on the floor when she had dashed from the elevator to the front door.

He had been face down with an entrance wound in the back of his head. He had light brown hair, darkened because the wound on his head had bled so much. She tried to figure out which of the men in the building he had been. He’d been wearing a sport coat, something nobody in the building did very often, and blue jeans, which men did to say, “Don’t take the coat too seriously.” The shirt had been dark blue. The outfit seemed to be the kind of thing men in their forties wore, because the kinds of jobs they had tended to fit that look. Art Grosvenor was too old; Dave Campbell was about that height and shape, but his hair was darkbrown. So was Sam Melendez’s, and Charles Tucker was Black. They were all decent guys who didn’t deserve to have anything bad happen to them, so there was some relief, but then who was it? This was terrible. Whoever had gotten killed was dead because Justine had run inside and locked the door.

Just as she felt herself sliding into the guilt, she saw the cop cars. The first was a plain blue sedan. That stopped beside her car. Was it to shield her from the shooter or to keep her from opening her door? The second pulled up behind her car, and the third came around the next corner and stopped right in front of her grille.

She couldn’t tell if they thought she was still in imminent danger or thought she was the danger. It took only a few seconds before she knew. The two cops from the patrol cars got out and stood on the grass parkway above the curb with their right hands resting comfortably near their belts, not looking at her, but not looking at anything else either. Detective Kunkel finished saying whatever he had been saying into his car radio, got out, and stepped to her window.

She rolled the window down. “Hi,” she said. “Thanks for coming.”

“Can you please step out and come with us? Leave your keys in the car.”

He sidestepped out of the way so she could open her door and get out.

She said, “Is somebody going to my building?”

“A SWAT team was dispatched before you called me.”

“Good. Great. Did they—”

“We’ll have plenty of time to get to everything. Don’t forget your purse.”

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