Holy Ghost (Virgil Flowers #11)(8)

The kid pointed up the street. “She was standing at the corner, waiting to cross to the church. Wearing a green jacket and black pants. I was walking up to the store when I saw her get hit. I don’t know, maybe because that Coates guy got shot, and I had it in my mind, but as soon as I saw it, I knew she was shot. She jerked sideways, and then she made this noise, not a scream, more like she was calling out to somebody, and then she fell over, and tried to crawl . . .”

“You didn’t hear the shot?”

“Nope, not a thing. Anyway, I ran up to her, and she was bleeding bad, and she said, ‘Somebody shot me . . . Somebody shot me . . .’ I had a newspaper under my arm, and me and another guy pressed some folded paper over the holes in her hips. And I saw this guy I knew, and told him to call the hospital at Fairmont, to get an ambulance down here. They took her to Fairmont, and then Fairmont called the Mayo in Rochester, and they flew her there on the Mayo chopper.”

A good-looking, forty-something woman walked by and winked at Skinner, who said, “Hey, Madison.”

She said, “Skinner . . . Don’t be a stranger.”

Virgil looked at her for a second as she walked away, then checked out Skinner’s face, which was a picture of innocence, before wrenching himself back to the original topic. “Do you remember which way Rice was facing when she got hit?”

“Yeah, I talked about that with Wardell. She was looking across the street at the church, but I couldn’t tell you if her hips were square to the street or she was square to the church—that’s a big difference in terms of where the bullet would’ve come from and where it wound up.”

“All right.”

“Then me and Wardell were talking about whether the shooter was up high or level with her,” Skinner continued. “The thing is, if she had a little more weight on one leg than the other, it would have cocked her hip one way or the other—so you can’t tell where the shooter was. I can tell you that the bullet hit the ball of her joint on the entry side but not on the exit side. On the exit side, it was lower.”

“You seem to have thought about it quite a bit,” Virgil said.

Skinner nodded. “I don’t ever see people getting shot. I’ll remember it for the rest of my life. It’s got me worried, Virgil. The town’s got a good thing going, and I’d hate to see some nutball mess us up. One or two more shootings and we’re toast.”

“Why’d you stick newspaper in the wounds?”

“Untouched by human hands, or any other hands, or even germs,” Skinner said. “That newsprint pulp comes out of a big vat and gets ironed out flat and rolled up on a reel, and then it’s printed on, so the inside of a newspaper is about as sterile as a bandage.”

“How do you know that?”

“Went on a tour of a paper plant when I was at Scout camp. The guide told us.”

“So, tell me about the Nazis.”

“Aw, don’t waste your time on them. It’s two guys and their girlfriends, and they don’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of,” Skinner said. “They decided they wanted to be somebody, get somebody to pay attention to them, so they signed up to be Nazis and got themselves a couple of pit bulls. They’re not exactly harmless, but bar fights are really more their style. The Nazis, not the pit bulls.”

“Then they’re seriously stupid.”

“Yeah, they are that. They used to work over at the elevator, but after they signed up to be Nazis they got fired. Now they all live on welfare. They didn’t shoot anyone, though. The shooter is somebody smarter.”

“Got any ideas?”

Skinner scraped his lower lip with his upper teeth, then said, “No. It could be somebody who doesn’t like what’s happened to the town since the apparitions, but I can’t think who that would be. If maybe there are a couple of people like that, none of them would be crazy enough to go around shooting people. You have to understand—I know every single person who lives here. Not counting the visitors.”

“You think it’s a visitor?”

“Could be. When I lie in bed and try to think of a person I know, who could be doing this, I come up with a total blank. We got our assholes, we’ve got a couple of goofs, some people angry from watching Fox News . . . but it seems to me that it has to be something more than a goof.”

“Like what?” Virgil asked.

“Don’t know. It’s like an oxymoron: random shootings for a reason,” Skinner said. “Gonna have to think more about it. The two people who got shot, Rice and Coates, don’t have any connections. Nothing at all. Didn’t know each other, didn’t come from the same place, Coates isn’t even a Catholic. The only thing they have in common is the fact that they were shot and where they were shot. That could mean the shooter has a particular spot he likes to go to and is maybe sighted in at a specific range.”

“I told Wardell and the sheriff that we need to figure out why people were shot . . .”

“That’s exactly right, Virgil,” Skinner said. “If you can figure that out, we’ll know who’s doing it. Unless he’s some outsider religious nut and he really is crazy. But how would he know the town well enough to find a spot and not be seen or even caught? People here notice if you drop your Sno Ball wrapper on the ground. That he can get away with shooting people . . .”