The Killing Kind

25

When Engelmann heard Thompson’s warning shots, he tensed. His knife bit at Hendricks’s neck, spilling blood across the tablecloth, but neither severing arteries nor puncturing windpipe. Engelmann’s head jerked toward the sound, and Hendricks made his move, twisting his body beneath Engelmann and using Engelmann’s startled reaction against him. Momentum rolled Engelmann sideways, and he fell backward-one leg still on the floor, the other flashing shoe-tread Hendricks’s way.

Hendricks flopped over onto his back, and planted a sharp kick on the side of Engelmann’s load-bearing knee. Something snapped, and Engelmann crumpled. As Engelmann headed for the floor, Hendricks snatched a rocks glass from the table with his good arm. Scotch, soda, and chipped ice sprayed a comet trail behind as Hendricks swung the glass with all he had at Engelmann’s stunned face. Engelmann tried to throw his hands up to protect himself, but the trajectory of his fall carried his face toward the glass, and his flailing limbs failed to cooperate.

The base of the glass smashed into Engelmann’s left eye with a crack of glass and bone. Blood gushed from his eye socket. Hendricks’s hand welled red as well, the glass shattering in his grip. Engelmann’s one good eye showed nothing but white, and he went down, dead or unconscious, Hendricks didn’t know.

That’s when Leonwood opened fire.

Thompson heard the muffled pop pop pop pop pop of Leonwood’s suppressed automatic, and hit the floor. The podium exploded into a thousand wooden shards. The heavy drapes along the wall behind it were sprayed with blood. The crowd-which had instinctively contracted when Thompson fired into the ceiling-now struggled to get away from Leonwood, pushing in every direction but his.

The guard who’d ID’d Leonwood went for his weapon. Leonwood cut him down. The civilians onstage who were too slow or too stunned to hit the deck took rounds to their heads, their chests, their necks. The two guards who flanked the stage tried to draw on Leonwood, too. Both were dead before their guns cleared their holsters. His magazine was empty before the first shell hit the ground.

Her senses alive, Thompson heard the thud of Leon-wood releasing his spent magazine, and then a click as he replaced it with a new one. Her nostrils prickled with the smell of the thick carpet scorching beneath the ejected casings.

“Jesus, Thompson-what the hell is going on down there?” Garfield said, worried. “We can’t see a goddamned thing!”

“Leonwood just opened fire!” came Thompson’s shouted reply.

“You got a shot?”

Thompson crawled toward the nearest table. Its floor-length tablecloth hid her from view but would do nothing to protect her from gunfire if she were spotted. She peered over the tabletop at the melee beyond: the upturned furniture, the broken bodies and shattered glassware, the writhing mass of people trying to flee. She couldn’t even see Leonwood from where she hid.

“No,” she said, despondent. “I’ve got nothing.”

“I’m trying to clear the stage,” Garfield said, the strain evident in his voice, “but there’s no response on the comm.” He shouted to someone off-mic, and then said: “Local SWAT is five minutes out. Hold tight. Stay safe. Help is on its way.”

Thompson cringed as Leonwood loosed another volley of gunfire. “These people are sitting ducks,” she said.

“Hang on,” Garfield replied. “I’ve got an idea.”

Thompson’s mind flashed back to North Philly, to the flash-bang grenade. He’d gotten lucky that day.

“Garfield, whatever you’re thinking, don’t-”

“Relax,” Garfield interjected. “I got this.”

And then two thousand balloons in every color of the rainbow descended from the sky, blanketing the destruction below.