His niece, Ashley, was fifteen now. Something of a troubled child. Tattoos, body piercings, pink hair. She would probably use the money to buy designer drugs-bath salts or something. Frankly, right now, Eddie wished he'd never set foot in this bank, because something was very, very wrong with those two women. One of them had twin trails of black dried blood scabbed from her nostrils to her chin. And both her eyes were deeply bruised. One was swollen shut. She still had both her ears, but otherwise the little lady looked like she'd gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson.

Ashley had always been a troubled child. Even as a toddler, bad things seemed to happen around her. Over the years, he had given quarters, pocket change, then dollar bills, fins, saw-bucks, on up to twenties, and now, at age fifteen, the fifty-dollar bill was apparently the new norm. Eddie had been saving for hair plugs, and throwing fifties around like he was J. D. Rockefeller wasn't going to get him a headful of flowing locks.

His sister always took Ashley's side if anybody dared say giving a troubled teenager all this cash might not be in the girl's best interest. Or suggested the child might need guidance. Or therapy. Perhaps a father in her life. No, his sister just said kids'll be kids, and why don't you just relax, Eddie? Just relax. Well, he didn't understand why he should have to give the little thug fifty bucks, but his mother had chimed in too. She said, "Just do it, Eddie. Family is important."

The dark-haired mousy-looking woman pushed the beat-up woman through the vestibule. The woman went sprawling into the lobby, facedown, probably worsening her injuries. Everybody in the bank looked up to see what was going on. Eddie wondered where the guard was. Surely the bank had on-site security. The dark woman stayed in the vestibule. She was doing something to the outside doors. Eddie decided that she probably wasn't cleaning them. That probably wasn't Windex and paper towels she had pulled out of the gear bag she had brought in. No, it looked to be some kind of locking device.

The bloodied woman had gotten back up to her knees. It was a struggle. The woman had clearly had the h.e.l.l beat out of her. Plus her hands were cuffed in front. The woman managed to get herself upright. She turned and addressed the entire bank.

"She has a gun! Behind me! She has a gun!"

The patrons, the tellers, everyone including Eddie Palmer (but not the guard, where was the guard?) looked at Jill as though she were a lunatic. n.o.body wanted to believe this could be real. Especially Eddie, but he knew it was. Because of Ashley. Because Ashley had brought him in here today, and anything even remotely tied to his niece Ashley invariably turned to s.h.i.t. His quick little dash into the bank to get a crisp U.S. Grant had certainly turned into a big steaming pile of doo-doo. Maybe if Eddie himself weren't so a.n.a.l-retentive. Wouldn't two battered twenties and a dog-eared ten-spot have done the job just as well? It was only going to end up crumpled in some dealer's greasy front pocket anyway. Why did Eddie have to be like this? And why did Ashley have to poison everything around her?

Finished securing the outer double doors, the mousy woman (whom Eddie no longer thought of as mousy, but bad) turned around. She kicked open the vestibule door, her oversized gray cardigan lapping open behind her, and she stormed into the lobby. The open sweater exposed the sawed-off shotgun broken across her waist and the rest of the a.r.s.enal secured to her body. It reminded Eddie of that high school ma.s.sacre in Colorado. Instead of the Trenchcoat Mafia, this lady was part of the Cardigan Mafia. Dylan Klebold by way of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.

Everything was unfolding in slow motion now, and Eddie had time to reflect that Ashley probably would have made a good girlfriend for Dylan Klebold. Ashley would screw pretty much anything, and getting laid probably would have adjusted that troubled boy's att.i.tude quite a bit.

The guard finally showed up. He was an older man with a snow-white handlebar mustache. Eddie saw that he was pulling up the zipper on his uniform trousers as he emerged from the back. He turned to the b.l.o.o.d.y woman with a look of perplexity. She screamed at the guard.

"Shoot her! She's got a gun!"

The b.l.o.o.d.y woman motioned over the guard's shoulder, where behind him the bad woman whip-locked the double barrel shotgun into one piece. She did this action one-handed and raised it into firing position.

The b.l.o.o.d.y woman saw that the guard just wasn't going to react in time. She dove for his holstered weapon. Her cuffed hands fumbled with the restraint strap.

But it was too late. Far too late. The bad woman was on them. She fired the shotgun point-blank into the guard's back. The man's body lurched forward and collapsed in a b.l.o.o.d.y heap, taking the beaten woman down with him. The bad woman stepped over both of them and retrieved the guard's gun. She waved it at the beaten woman.

"What? Is this what you wanted?"

The woman turned and fired the guard's gun at a bank employee, killing her. Eddie thought the murdered woman might have been the manager.

"Did anybody else want to see this?" the woman said, bringing the gun around in a deadly arc. n.o.body wanted to see it. In fact, pretty much everybody in the bank was on the floor, huddled into corners, under desks, bodies wrapped around chair legs. Eddie Palmer was one of the very few still standing. Frozen into place.

Eddie-quite calmly-turned the withdrawal slip over and wrote on the back of it. He wrote: Dear Ashley, f.u.c.k you, Uncle Eddie. And then he folded it into a neat square and tucked it into his front pants pocket. He was sure the CSI people or maybe the Coroner's office would find it and make sure it got to the proper recipient. Then he dropped to the floor and curled up into a tight ball.

CHAPTER 23.

Outside, on the streets of Morgan City, a Sheriff's office cruiser squealed onto the main street of the business district. Another cruiser, lights and siren blaring, turned in from a side street. Another cruiser, riding full-out code three, joined the first two.

These units caught up to more responders up ahead. More joined these. Fire trucks. Ambulances. A police helicopter loomed over this incredible fleet of emergency vehicles. The news vans and choppers were en route.

And out in the glaring hot California day, an anonymous black van carrying the Cameron County Sheriff Department's Special Weapons and Tactics team rolled through the city streets. Fast. Insistent.

Inside, the eleven team members (ten men and one woman) were dressed in varying shades of white, gray, and black-their daytime urban BDUs that would look more natural on a business rooftop than greens or tans. They held on to overhead straps as the vehicle swayed and sped forward.

Fast. Insistent.

The team faced forward in the van, where a dry-erase board was mounted. Lieutenant Joe Cowell faced his team, gesturing to the whiteboard.

The board showed a diagram of the Cameron Citizens Bank, surrounding structures, and landscape. Several areas were marked in red, including an exterior spot marked SNIPERS DENTON/SESAK.

Jacob Denton studied the diagram. The area inside the drawing of the bank was filled with black dots, and the words hostages, number unknown. In Jake's mind, these black dots were obstacles to his target. It was a mind game. It had always been a mind game. Like Oswald had taught him. They weren't people, they were obstacles. And the objective wasn't a human being, it was a target.

Except that wasn't true today. The target would be a woman who had been a guest in his home. The obstacle would be his wife, Jill. His wife who was apparently pregnant, but had not told him so herself. But everything had been staged for him. He had been summoned here. Drawn here. He was being manipulated. So he did not know for sure.

His eyes moved from the bank and the obstacles. He stared at the red dot on the whiteboard that marked the sniper's position on a rooftop across the street from the bank. And for a second the red on white blurred. It became fresh red blood spilt on crisp white snow. Jacob remembered how that snow had once been clean, unspoiled. And he could hear the jagged heavy breathing of a boy struggling to break through the ice-crusted snow to keep up with his father. And he could hear the man say to the boy, "You have to do it, son. She's suffering."

The boy and the man had come to the end of the blood trail. The vast plane of snow behind them was broken and spoiled from their long trek.

The trail ended just outside a small enclosure in the foothill rocks obscured by the limbs of a spruce tree.

The boy pulled back the spruce limb to see the she-wolf resting in blood-soaked snow. Around her, three wolf pups suckled from their dying mother. The boy backed up, horrified. He backed into his father.

"You have to do it, son. Killing's hard sometimes."

The boy nodded, his chin quivered a bit, then steadied. Richard Denton held back the spruce branch for Jacob.

"It's time."

A tear fell down the boy's cheek. He brushed it away, raised the rifle and took aim.

The shot echoed through the foothills and across the broken field. And then another. And another. And another.

The boy would grow into a man. And the man would realize that he had been branded that day. There was no going back from a killing. And there was no living with it.

CHAPTER 24.

The bank was eerily quiet. All of the customers and staff were gathered inside the tellers' cage. All of these hostages lay side by side, facedown on the floor. Susan paced back and forth through them, shotgun at her side. It was a Stevens model 311 .410 break-action double barrel shotgun with the stock cut off and formed into a hand grip. It was easily concealable under the armpit. Not necessarily the weapon of choice when robbing a bank, but Susan had her reasons.

One reason was the psychology of it. The shotgun, especially with the sawed-off side-by-side barrels and the modified quasi-pistol grip, was intimidating. It encouraged compliance. People know it spreads. They know the risk of death or traumatic, disfiguring injury is significant. It was a bad-a.s.s-looking weapon, relatively light to carry with the shortened stock and barrels; but ultimately, with those modifications, it was really useful for only one thing, and that was blowing people's heads off.

The other reason was psychological as well. Her father had carried a weapon just like this. She had seen it. Held it once. The Stevens was no longer in production, but easily obtainable on the secondary market. She modded this one herself. She had been studying rifles and marksmanship for quite some time now, but she had also become a scholar of pain, a student of brutality. That's where the Stevens came in. A rifle was an elegant, precise instrument, but a shotgun was a blunt, brutal weapon. Perfect for this moment of retribution. Her daddy was carrying this weapon the day they shot him.

Susan executed the break-action of the shotgun to expose the loading breech. She ejected the spent sh.e.l.l she had discharged into the guard's back and replaced it with a fresh .410 gauge round so that both barrels remained lethal.

And so she paced, fully loaded shotgun at her side. She was waiting for the forces outside to take their places.

She stopped and stood over Jill. Planted her foot squarely in Jill's back. Jill turned her head to look up at Susan. What?

"Close your eyes."

Jill stared up at her.

"Just do this for me, Jill. Close your eyes."

"I'm not going-"

"Please. Author to author. Friend to friend. Captor to hostage. Close your eyes."

Jill kept her eyes open, and Susan pushed the muzzle of the shotgun against the back of her skull, forcing her head back down.

"Close enough. Okay, you're in the bank one day. You need to make a withdrawal because you left your ATM card at home. A lunatic comes in, bolts the doors, weapons drawn. You're a smart girl. You know what this means. You and everyone in there are hostages. Do you remember seeing something like that on the news, Jill?"

Susan waited for a response. When she got none, she pushed the muzzle of the shotgun even harder against Jill's head, prodding her.

"That was in Sacramento, wasn't it?" Jill said, paraphrasing the script from the day she spun a similar scenario for Susan.

"Atta girl," Susan said, and gave the back of Jill's head a teeth-rattling love tap with the gun barrel. "Some poor security guard tries to save the day and gets a shotgun blast for his trouble. It happens everywhere, Jill. All over the country, all the time. Only this time, it's your bank, and you're in there with the lunatic. She's just killed two people in front of thirty witnesses. You're all side by side, facedown on the floor."

"She won't kill us, will she?" Jill asked.

Far off, Jill could hear sirens, the throb of helicopter blades. Men's voices shouting outside. Somewhere inside the bank, a phone was ringing. Over and over. Ringing. An amplified voice outside, saying pick up the phone.

"Jill, to be honest, I have no idea. Either way, you've seen her face. You know who she is. It doesn't look good for you."

Jill squirmed under the muzzle of the shotgun, trying to turn her head, to see Susan's face. To get a read on her.

"And then you hear it. Sirens, in the distance, growing louder. A silent alarm, perhaps, or someone heard the shots. Help is on the way. You allow yourself a glimmer of hope. The police have arrived. But your gunman friend grabs the man next to you, hoists him to his feet and drags him to the door."

Jill sobbed, knowing what was coming next.

Susan grabbed the meek little bald man curled up in a tight ball on the floor and dragged him to his feet.

"No, Susan, please, no. Don't take him. Take me. Please, we're the ones you're mad at."

"A police negotiator tries to initiate conversation, but your friend isn't listening. Instead, she shoots the man in the head and pitches him out into the street."

Tears were streaming down Eddie Palmer's face as Susan forced him toward the door at gunpoint. In a way, he'd seen this coming his way from the moment he looked up and saw the two women come into the vestibule.

Jill, like Eddie, had resigned herself to a dark fate to be met on this day, but she just couldn't abide the thought of her doom affecting any more people. She just couldn't stand it.

With Susan's attention focused on getting the man to the door, Jill struggled to her feet, fighting the pain from her splintered rib. Her cuffed hands clawed for purchase as she pulled herself up on top of the tellers' cage barrier. She struggled to her feet once more, reawakening dormant pain from the old injury to her leg. She ignored her leg's protest, and leapt from the counter, her body on fire with pain. She landed on Susan's back. Jill got her cuffed hands over Susan's head and around her throat. She rode that b.i.t.c.h like a bucking bronco. Susan angled the shotgun back and fired, trying to shoot Jill off her back, but the explosion only put a hole in the ceiling and deafened them both. Jill worked her cuffs into Susan's neck, throttling her and yanking her from side to side.

Eddie watched the show, a possible reprieve from the blast that had been promised for his head. Her air supply cut off, the bad woman was losing steam, winding down. She collapsed. The shotgun clattered across the tile floor. Jill remained on Susan's back, straddling her, and with the handcuffs still under Susan's throat, she yanked back viciously.

Some of the hostages were standing up now and looking over the barrier of the tellers' cage. One or two cheered Jill on. Eddie spotted the shotgun and inched toward it, thinking he just might escape Ashley's poisonous influence yet. Some of the hostages watched him.

One girl urged him on, "Get it! Pick it up!"

Susan was coughing, choking. Drawing on the last reserves of energy left inside her oxygen-starved body, she placed her hands against the floor and pushed herself up and onto her knees. Jill held on, using her cuffed hands as a garrote. Susan grabbed Jill's forearms and heaved forward, propelling Jill over her head and onto the floor. Jill landed on her back with a solid thud, in front of Susan.

Eddie picked up the shotgun. He had never touched a gun in his life, and really, he didn't even like violent movies. But he found the trigger easily enough. His finger just went there naturally. And he swung the Stevens in the direction of his captor. But Susan, her breathing harsh and ragged, was already on him. Her chest was against the twin bores of the weapon. He was not one for violence, but Eddie Palmer did something that neither his sister, his mother, nor his niece Ashley would have ever thought him capable. He squeezed the trigger. But the firing pin struck only an empty chamber. The Stevens double barrel had double triggers. The forward trigger, the one Eddie's finger just naturally found, had already discharged the right barrel. If there had been time, Eddie probably would have figured out that the rearward trigger would unleash holy h.e.l.l from the left barrel. But Eddie wasn't a sportsman. And time was too short. Susan grabbed the Stevens by the muzzle and forestock and shoved the weapon into Eddie's chest. She held on, and Eddie went down on his a.s.s, his visions of heroism dissipating.

All of this in a matter of seconds. Jill was already coming back for more. She was at Susan's back just as she was taking the Stevens away from Eddie. Susan knew Jill was there behind her, to take advantage of the skirmish. And as she shoved the shotgun forward to knock Eddie down, she yanked back viciously to keep the gun in her possession, and with that same backward pulling motion, she slammed the cut-off stock into Jill's face with a loud crack of the already-broken bone and cartilage in her nose. Jill collapsed. It was over for her. She had no fight left.

Susan swung the shotgun around and ordered the hostages in the tellers' cage back down on the floor. She took a minute to catch her breath, then dragged Jill, who was only barely conscious, over to a desk. She used her key to refasten Jill's cuffs around the desk leg. Susan grabbed the bothersome little bald man whose name she would never know and headed for the door. He was a weak man. Compliant. A little streak of bravery for a second there. Too bad for him he was too stupid to work the offset double triggers.

She unlocked the doors and threw them open. Outside was bright and she squinted against the setting sun. Officers had set up barriers to control the growing crowd and media presence, so Susan and Eddie had the sidewalk and street right outside the bank to themselves. Like a little stage.

She kept Eddie close in front of her. A human shield. She had studied hostage situations and police response. She didn't believe that enough time had elapsed for the authorities to have a plan in place. Certainly the FBI wouldn't be on scene yet. There was no shoot-on-sight authorization. All they knew at this point was that there had been a silent alarm at the bank, communication could not be established, and the doors were locked. They didn't know who had taken the bank or why. She a.s.sumed Denton had found the deposit slip and the fingernail. So they knew what was likely going on inside, they could guess, but didn't actually know. They had no proof. She was ready to show her hand.

Susan brought the sawed-off shotgun out from behind her back.

From the street, beyond the perimeter, she heard an officer yell, "Gun!"

But before that single syllable had escaped the deputy's mouth, Susan had pulled the rearward trigger on the Stevens, and Eddie Palmer's head vaporized.

She pitched the body in the street and ducked back in the bank before anybody could quite comprehend what had just happened.

Susan Weaver had played her hand.

Back inside the bank, Susan unlocked Jill from the desk and relocked the cuffs around her wrists. She yanked Jill to her feet.

"The lunatic returns. Only this time she pulls you up, holds you in front of her and presses the gun to your temple."

Susan tossed the shotgun aside. The Stevens had been for crowd control. And to show the police she meant business. It would be too unwieldy for the close-up work she had planned next. She drew a snub nose .38 from her side and put the revolver to Jill's head.

Jill closed her eyes, waiting for the bullet.

"You won't be seeing it on the news this time around, because this time, you are the news. You're a human shield for a subhuman animal. You're completely unaware that somewhere out there, out in the quiet and the dark, in a place you'll never see, a man waits. All he does is handle situations like this. In all this h.e.l.l you've been through, only he can make it right."

Susan c.o.c.ked the gun. Jill winced in antic.i.p.ation.

"You think he's out there, Jill? I bet he is. Your guardian angel. And he can save you. With one shot. With one perfectly placed shot. Think he can do it now, with his precious pregnant wife in the way?"

"You're already dead, you just don't know it."

"I've been dead since I was six years old," she said and shoved Jill forward, toward the door, her fate.

CHAPTER 25.