The Bitterest Pill

Eighty

As the first set of automatic doors at the front entrance of Paradise General slid open, Jesse thought he spotted a vaguely familiar face coming toward him. The man, thirty yards away, illuminated by a pole lamp, seemed to spot Jesse at the same moment. The man stopped walking and turned away as Jesse came quickly through the second set of automatic doors. Approaching him, Jesse tried to put a name to the man’s face. Then it came to him. Arakel Sarkassian. And when the name came to him, Jesse realized there was only one reason that made any sense for Sarkassian to be at the hospital.

“Mr. Sarkassian,” Jesse said calmly, reaching for his nine-millimeter.

Sarkassian jumped to his left, taking cover behind a granite wall. But before he could go after Sarkassian, someone called to Jesse.

“Jesse! Jesse! Chief Stone!” Jesse looked over his shoulder to see Ambrose North coming at him in a full run. “I’ll give you the name.”

“Get down! Everybody get down!” Jesse was shouting. “North, get down!”

The few people around the hospital entrance at that hour of the evening fell to the ground, facedown, instinctively covering their heads with their hands. But Ambrose North was still coming toward Jesse. When he looked back to check on Sarkassian, Jesse saw Sarkassian’s upper body was above the wall ledge, a pistol in his right hand aimed in his direction. Jesse had a choice to make and no time in which to make it. He turned, dived, and knocked Ambrose North to the ground, bullets whining over their heads. The glass of the hospital doors shattered. People screamed. Sarkassian ran.

North grabbed Jesse’s collar, pulled him close. His voice was strained and cracking, his fight-or-flight reflex in high gear. “Brandy Lawton,” he said. “It’s Brandy Lawton.”

Jesse pushed himself up, fished his cell phone out of his pocket, and took off after Sarkassian.

Brandy Lawton brought her suitcases to the door. Foolishly and out of habit, she went back through the house, checking to make sure the lights were all out and that the stove was off. It was amazing how some routines persisted in the face of everything. Satisfied, she went back to retrieve her bags and take them out to her car.

Across the street, leaning on the side of the van, Georgi waited for Stojan to give him the signal. If he had had his way, Stojan would simply have broken into the apartment or rung the bell and killed the woman when she came to the door. His first preference would have been to use a Kalashnikov, to drive past, spraying the woman with bullets. Witnesses shocked and frightened, escape made easy because he would already be on the move. But their bosses had been explicit in their instructions. Kill her quietly by her car. Put her in the car. Make her disappear. Stojan once again saw the teacher’s silhouette at the door. The door opening slightly. Stojan banged his hand against the van. Georgi made his way to the opposite sidewalk.

Jesse, phone back in his pocket, weapon drawn, took off in a sprint. Sarkassian was darting in and out between cars in the hospital parking lot. Jesse had a few clear shots but did not fire for fear of hitting a passerby. Arakel Sarkassian had no such worries. As he ran, he would half turn, fire blindly behind him in Jesse’s direction — windshields spiderwebbing, side windows shattering, alarms shrieking. Above the din of the car alarms, Jesse heard sirens. He thought to pen Sarkassian in at a corner of the fence surrounding the lot until backup arrived. Until then, he would bait Sarkassian into exhausting his ammunition.

Brandy Lawton put her suitcases on the front porch, the gym bag slung over her shoulder. She locked the door, pulled up the handles on both suitcases, and walked toward her car, wheeling the rollerbags behind her. She stopped, hearing sirens in the distance. She snickered at herself, realizing the sirens probably had nothing to do with her. She pressed the key fob and popped open the trunk of her car.

Stojan and Georgi heard the sirens, too. They were louder, coming closer, very close.

Stojan yelled to Georgi. “Hurry up. Bürzam! Bürzam!”

Instead, Georgi froze and stared across at Stojan. Then saw the cruiser coming down the street.

Brandy heard that voice, recognized it. It was the voice of the man who had threatened her the night she had taken the stash bag back from the girl. She dropped her bags and ran back to the front door.

Georgi sprinted, his .22 Ruger with sound suppressor held in front of him as he ran.

One Paradise police car and Suit’s pickup skidded to a halt in front of Brandy Lawton’s driveway. Neither Suit nor Peter Perkins looked at the white van, focusing instead on the man with the pistol in his hand turning into the driveway. A bullet smashed the passenger-side back window of Perkins’s cruiser. He hit the floor. Suit dived out the passenger side of his pickup, grabbed his nine-millimeter.

Brandy Lawton, panicked, nauseated with fear, dropped her keys at the door, bent down to pick them up.

Georgi turned the corner of the driveway and rushed toward the teacher. He raised the .22, squeezed the trigger once, heard a moan, glass breaking, but also heard more than one shot. He fell forward, facedown in the gravel, unable to move, confused because he felt no pain. His confusion came to an end as his hand relaxed around the butt of the gun and his blood spilled out of his wrecked veins and arteries into the cavities in his body. He laughed a short bark of a laugh, a laugh wet and red. The last sound he would ever make.

Stojan hit the gas, firing out the window as he went, bullets flattening tires on the cruiser and pickup. Peter Perkins rolled out of the cruiser, took aim at the van, and fired. Two bullets hit the van’s rear doors, the hole visible to him. But the van was quickly out of range for an effective shot and, like Jesse, Perkins feared ricochets or stray bullets hitting civilians. The taillights disappeared.

After calling it in, Perkins stopped by Georgi’s body. He checked for a pulse, found none. Suit had already kicked the .22 far away from the dead man. Perkins found Suit hunched over Brandy Lawton. He was pressing his hand to her neck, blood spurting out between his fingers. She was clutching at him with one hand, clawing at her gym bag with the other. Her eyes were big with fear, her mouth open. Perkins ran to the car to put a rush on the ambulance and to get the first-aid kit. By the time he returned, the blood had stopped spurting between Suit’s fingers. Brandy Lawton had stopped clutching and clawing forever.

Suit’s hands and uniform were covered in blood. He fell back against the wall next to Lawton’s body and hung his head. “What do you think she was clawing at in the gym bag, Pete?”

Perkins, hands now gloved to begin doing the forensics, knelt down beside the dead woman and unzipped her gym bag. He pulled out a white pharmaceutical bottle and shook it at Suit. “This, probably.”

“But she was dying.”

“These damn things are why she’s dead, Heather Mackey is dead, and why he’s dead,” Perkins said, pointing at Georgi’s body. “It’s a plague, Suit, a goddamn plague.”