Let the Devil Out (Maureen Coughlin #4)(61)
Detillier had reached the end of his cover. Maureen made her move.
She sprinted across the wide lane in front of the store, jumped up on the sidewalk, and threw herself against the brick fa?ade of the building. She held her gun at port arms.
She watched the glass doors as Detillier ran to take his position on the opposite side of the entrance. In unison, they took slow, careful steps to the end of their respective walls. Detillier made a “stop” sign. Maureen waited. Detillier crouched, then, his gun drawn, staying low, duckwalked toward the doors. They opened when he got close, and he moved into the doorway, making himself small against the wall. Maureen held her breath, waiting for gunshots.
Detillier stayed crouched in the doorway, gun out in front of him, his head turning left then right as he surveyed the inside of the store. He waved for Maureen to follow him. She glanced back at the parking lot as multiple NOPD units rolled in, sirens blaring. A dozen more cops had arrived. And there, on their heels, in their big, boxy truck, was the Tactical Unit. Detillier hissed her name. Maureen took a deep breath and duplicated Detillier’s approach. He’d started moving again when she had, and she followed him to the nearest register station. They ducked behind it for cover. She’d been right that the Watchmen had moved to the back of the store. There was no sign of them up front.
Maureen and Detillier sat hip to hip on the tile floor, catching their breath.
“So far so good,” Detillier said, his voice low. “They don’t want a shoot-out. If they did, they would’ve been waiting for us right here. Maybe suicide by cop isn’t how this ends after all.” He looked up at the ceiling. He peeked around the corner of the register station. “Man, this is a big f*cking store. It’s a lot for two people to cover.”
Of course it’s big, Maureen thought, it’s a f*cking Walmart. But she said nothing. She understood Detillier’s frustration. The people they hunted could be ten yards away, or they could be a hundred yards away. She certainly understood his urge to act. She more than understood it; she shared it.
As Detillier reported their progress and observations into his radio, Maureen tried to tune him out. Instead, she listened as hard as she could for sounds from the belly of the store. She wanted clues to what might be waiting for them. Unfortunately, she couldn’t hear anything but the god-awful piped-in New Country station playing over the speakers. Bon Jovi rejects with banjo thrown in. She was sweating. She wiped her forehead with the backs of her hands. The things you thought about, she mused, when trying not to get shot. What she wanted to hear was voices. When they hadn’t been met with gunfire at the door, she’d become more convinced that she and Detillier now faced a hostage situation. She thought she’d hear commands from the shooters, or even weeping and whimpering from the hostages. Nothing came to her, though. Nothing but that terrible f*cking music.
“I can’t see anything from here,” Detillier said. “If we could find the security office, we could use the CCTV cameras to see the whole store.”
“They could be anywhere,” Maureen said. “They could be gone. They might’ve escaped.”
Back-to-back gunshots roared through the store. Maureen shouted and tried to shrink. Two more shots echoed under the high ceiling in the cavernous space. Detillier had time to mutter “Fuck me” before one more lone shot followed the others. The gunshots had come from the same location, far from where Maureen and Detillier hid. Whoever was shooting wasn’t aiming at them. From what Maureen could discern, all the shots had come from the same gun. The source was a single shooter repeating fire, Maureen figured, not an exchange of gunshots. Had Tactical slipped someone inside through a back entrance? Had the shooters been taken out? Maureen doubted it. Detillier was in contact with the world outside; they would’ve alerted him. That’s assuming, Maureen thought, that there’s order and strategy to what’s happening out front—a big assumption.
As the echoes of the final shot died, Detillier counted down, “Three, two, one.”
He didn’t have to tell Maureen what to do.
When he hit “one,” they scrambled to their feet and ran up the checkout aisle, Maureen hard on Detillier’s heels. She could hear him shouting information into his radio as they sprinted through Housewares. She was grateful for Detillier’s narration of their location and progress, “Bathroom, Dining Room, Kitchen.”
With the shots fired, SWAT, Tactical, and everyone else would come crashing in with guns drawn, and there’d be heavy weaponry involved. The description of the shooters, she recalled, mentioned a man and a woman in matching outfits. A white man and a white woman, that was true, and dressed quite differently from how Detillier and she were attired. But considering what had gone down that afternoon, those trigger fingers would be extra-itchy. Maureen didn’t even want to think about how far ahead of the brains that commanded them those fingers might run.
Borrowed FBI jacket or not, Maureen thought as she ran, after everything she had survived in her life, she was in no mood to get cut down by friendly fire.
21
Using the direction of the gunshots, Maureen and Detillier tracked the shooters to Sporting Goods, located in the far back corner of the store. Detillier turned down the sound on his radio, in case anyone hiding in the store tracked their approach. They moved through Electronics at a brisk pace, crouched and cautious, guns drawn, held low in two hands in front of them. They breathed hard. They didn’t speak. They didn’t see any other people.