The Killing Kind

30

The ersatz Mr. Gunderson and his security escort- whose name, Hendricks learned, was DeShaun-rode in silence down the elevator toward the gaming floor, the day’s events rendering small talk impossible and leaving grim glances and awkward shuffling in its place.

Hendricks watched the floors tick by, hope and fear playing tug-of-war with his guts. When the count reached one, the floor rose to meet him-and made Norm’s boat shoes pinch. Then the doors slid open with a ding so cheery it seemed sarcastic, and Hendricks’s worries, aches, and pains evaporated-or, more accurately, were rendered so unimportant as to go unnoticed.

The gaming floor had been transformed into a war zone.

The comparison wasn’t an idle one: Hendricks was a man familiar with combat. In his time in Afghanistan, he’d seen his share of bombed houses and burned-out cars, men once warriors wailing at their wives and children being reduced to so much charred meat. Collateral damage, the reporters back home called it, as though it were a side effect, or some minor and acceptable transgression. A sanitary term for a modern war. But war wasn’t sanitary, and war wasn’t modern. It was bloody and it was savage. And looking into the tear-filled eyes of those left with nothing but their grief to cling to, Hendricks had learned the lesson so few back home could grasp: no damage was collateral. Every limb lost, every hovel burned, every wife left husbandless, and every child orphaned created ripples of anger and resentment. Create enough of them, and we’ll one day wind up with a wave that will wash us off the map.

Leonwood had created his share this day.

And by not stopping Leonwood in time, Hendricks had, too.

The gaming floor was nearly empty, but far from quiet. Though no one was there to play them, banks of slot machines clanged and whirred and called out to nonexistent passersby like the soulless, faceless carnival barkers they were. Balloons, some speckled red, drifted past on AC currents, a morbid parody of good cheer. Broken glasses, cocktail napkins, and upturned buckets spilling chips were everywhere, though those shell-shocked few who zombie-walked among them were too dazed and horrified for opportunism to kick in. A few bodies lay akimbo on the ground, ashen and unattended to, the living taking priority over the dead. Armed men were stationed throughout the massive room-some stock-still beneath their flak helmets, hands resting on their gunstocks, while others ushered the crying wounded toward the massive lobby doors.

Hendricks watched awhile from inside the elevator, stunned into immobility. He didn’t understand at first how so many could be hurt-the shooting had taken place in an enclosed banquet hall, not on the gaming floor-but then a woman with a sticky purpled bruise on her upper arm staggered past, and he recognized the imprint of a sneaker tread.

These people had trampled one another.

Leonwood had opened fire and started a stampede.

When the elevator doors began to close, Hendricks realized DeShaun no longer stood beside him. He’d stepped out when the doors first opened and was now looking back at Hendricks expectantly, a hand extended to prevent the door from shutting all the way.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I forgot you hadn’t seen this yet. I should have warned you. You okay?”

“I’m fine,” Hendricks said weakly, not sure if his tone was an affectation for his cover’s sake or not. He cleared his throat and tried again: “I’m fine.”

“C’mon, then. Let’s go find your wife.”

Together, he and DeShaun traversed the gaming floor- oddly brothers now, it seemed, bonded by the horrors that surrounded them. They stopped to help a man with a bleeding gash through his eyebrow-DeShaun blotting at the injury with the sleeve of his Pendleton’s sport coat, Hendricks linking elbows with the man to lead him back to daylight. When they stepped outside into the covered drop-off circle, the man was taken by an EMT to God-knows-where.

After a moment’s consultation with a uniformed cop, DeShaun indicated a makeshift pen to one side of the parking lot-two ambulances and a couple hundred people contained inside. “They’ve set up a sort of nerve center over there, where evacuees not badly injured can check in and find each other. I’m sure your wife will be there.”

“Thank you,” said Hendricks-and he meant it, too. Never mind that he was lying to this kid, or that he was painfully aware of the two dozen news cameras aimed his way as they ambled over to the barricade. The cameras were still some distance off-kept at bay by police tape patrolled by what must have been half of Kansas City’s uniformed PD-but Hendricks wasn’t fooled. They were close enough to pick him up just fine. A pretty picture for his growing file, perhaps, provided the Feds elected to confiscate the footage. He did his best to look away.

When they reached the penned-in area, they were greeted by an FBI agent in an agency windbreaker and aviator sunglasses, her dirty-blond hair pulled through the back of her matching agency baseball cap. She and DeShaun exchanged a solemn nod, after which DeShaun placed his hand briefly on Hendricks’s shoulder-a simple if heartbreakingly kind gesture of goodwill and reassurance.

Hendricks’s eyes met the agent’s, or tried. Proper eye contact is key to selling any con-too little and the mark reads the swindler as shifty, too much and he comes off overeager and creepily intense. But with the woman’s eyes hidden behind two reflective slabs of glass, her stare was cold and alien and gave up nothing of her receptiveness or her intentions. Hendricks felt exposed, uncertain-a feeling only bolstered by the three dozen sets of eyes amid the milling, haggard crowd that turned hopefully toward him, only to drop away, disappointed, as they realized the new arrival was not the one they waited for.

“Name?” the agent asked, her pen hovering above the clipboard in her hand. Hendricks glanced down at it and saw two lists: one printed and dotted with check marks- no doubt the hotel registry; one scrawled on a scrap of loose leaf-the day-trippers for whose visit there was no record, Hendricks supposed. He wished his cover allowed him to claim membership in the latter camp, whose identities were harder to confirm-but DeShaun still lingered within earshot.

“Gunderson,” Hendricks said quietly-hoping neither Patty nor Norman was close enough to hear.

The woman scanned her list. Her earpiece crackled loudly. Then she looked at him as if for the first time, her glasses bouncing his own image back at him in duplicate. “I’m sorry,” she said, frowning-distracted or suspicious, he wasn’t sure. “What was the name again?”

Hendricks’s heart pounded in his chest. His mouth went dry. A ripple of unease spread through the crowd. He wondered if its source was Patty Gunderson. If she’d just told the folks around her the man at the gate was an impostor.

“Gunderson,” he repeated. He felt his fight-or-flight response kick in and readied himself to make a run for it if it proved necessary.

Then he realized the guard’s distraction and the crowd’s unease had nothing to do with him. All the nearby emergency responders’ radios had crackled to life at the same time-the gate agent’s included. Seconds later, half the cop cars on the security perimeter lit up and took off at once.

The agent in front of him stood with the index finger of her writing hand held to the earpiece in her ear as though straining to hear what was being said-or perhaps simply not believing it. As Hendricks watched, she dropped her clipboard and her pen. Her left hand went to her neck and worried at the gold cross she wore around it.

“What happened?” Hendricks asked.

“There’s been some kind of accident,” she said. “One of the ambulances leaving the scene. They were escorting a patient, when…” She trailed off, her sentence lost somewhere in the middle distance with her gaze.

“An accident,” Hendricks echoed. It was clear to him from her reaction that whatever happened had been anything but.

“They…they didn’t make it to the hospital. Two officers, the driver, and an EMT.”

“And the patient?” Hendricks prompted, afraid he already knew the answer. “What happened to the patient?”

“He’s gone,” she said, anger strengthening her tone. “But he won’t stay that way. Not for long.”

About that, Hendricks thought, she was right-but not in the way that she meant.

He was sure the man in question was the one who’d tried to kill him. That Hendricks had failed to finish him as he’d so foolishly hoped. That he’d somehow bluffed his way onto that ambulance and then murdered his way out of it.

And that now that this man had Hendricks’s scent, he wouldn’t stay gone for long.