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The panel made another sound as the weight lifted from it and the metal relaxed. Then something heavy hit the floor. A body, Shaw thought. Welch’s body.
Steps moved toward them. The jingle of cuffs. The creak of leather.
Ignoring North’s grappling attempts to stop him, Shaw slithered across the floor until he could see between the wall panel and the door track. A distant emergency light allowed him to make out the shape of Welch’s fallen body, but not more than that. Then another figure stepped into view. Only a silhouette, but Shaw registered the details: a muscular build, the shape of the shirt collar suggesting a polo, white-blond hair that caught the light like flax. The man stooped over the body. Then something clicked, the sound of a polymer frame against concrete. Welch’s gun, Shaw thought. The man straightened and turned toward the storage unit.
“Somebody in there?” Cassidy asked. “This is Chief Cassidy with the Auburn Police.”
His gaze seemed to home in on Shaw. It should have been impossible, but Shaw was convinced, in that moment, Cassidy had spotted him—that somehow he had located Shaw and was staring directly at him. Cassidy’s next breath sounded satisfied. He was nothing more than an outline, but it was enough to see his arm move.
Cassidy fired. At the same moment, North grabbed Shaw’s ankle and hauled him away from the panel. The weak light of the lantern seemed too bright for a moment, and then Shaw’s eyes adjusted. Where Shaw had been a moment before, the bullet had punched out a chunk of the corrugated metal. The clap of the shot was still ringing in Shaw’s ears. A second shot came, tearing another hole in the panel. North was shouting something, but Shaw couldn’t hear him. The whole storage unit seemed to be shaking, the metal rippling like a struck bell as shot after shot came. One bullet struck the floor inches from Shaw, and chips of concrete stung his face.
North yanked Shaw toward him again, and now the words he’d been shouting penetrated: “Come on! Come on!”
The whole storage unit had been shaking, Shaw realized. It hadn’t been a trick of his imagination, fear skewing his perceptions. It had been North, and he’d been kicking the rear panel loose. North was half-scooting, half-squirming through the narrow opening he’d forced between the panel and the support post, and he was trying to drag Shaw with him as he went. Shaw slid on his belly after North.
A moment later, they were on their feet in another darkened corridor. Alone. Shots continued to ring out, but they were coming from the next aisle over. North spun, trying to orient himself, but Shaw recognized the corridor. He grabbed North’s tee, hauled him away from the gunfire, and ran.
18
What came next had the quality of a nightmare—one of those hyperreal unrealities that North occasionally dreamed, where the rules of logic and reason no longer applied, where everything had been turned on its head.
The first panicked minutes after their escape, North had been convinced that all he had to do was reach Emery and John-Henry, and everything would be fine. But that hadn’t turned out to be true because the gunshots had called every available officer away from the search of the RV park. North and Shaw had barely avoided being mown down by nervous cops who were preparing to rush into the storage building. They’d been ordered to the ground, then cuffed, and then roughly searched while men screamed down at them. John-Henry had waded into the scrum, shouting orders and pushing men aside, but the Highway Patrol asshole had been there too, and he’d been louder. There had barely been enough time for North to tell Shaw not to say anything about what Welch had told them or what had happened with Cassidy, and then North and Shaw had been placed in separate Highway Patrol cruisers.
Inside the cruiser the silence had a compacted quality, like something that had been packed tight around North. So tight, in fact, that sometimes it was hard to breathe, like there was something heavy on his chest and he couldn’t get enough air. Like being buried alive, he thought, and he felt dizzy. He tried to focus on the silent drama playing out under the RV park’s security lights: John-Henry and the Highway Patrol asshole in each other’s faces, mouths moving in shouts North couldn’t hear. Emery was there too, at the edge of the shadows, amber eyes slitted with rage.
And Cassidy, of course. The hero of the hour. He sat on the back of an ambulance but refused a blanket, and he spoke in short snatches with men who approached him to offer a word. He was good at what he did; North had to give him that. The grace to look exhausted after a shoot-out, after gunning down a man. But also, a kind of resolve, a fortitude. He’d done what he had to do. It was a grade-A performance; North bet he’d get a hell of a Christmas bonus. In his mind, North played back the events: the first shot, and then the shout ofStop! Police!after Welch had been good and dead, and then Cassidy picking up Welch’s gun to fire at them.
The interview came next: hours under the buzz of fluorescent lights at the Auburn police station, while the Highway Patrol asshole—his name was Lieutenant Mendez—stared at North and asked the same questions again and again.Tell me what happened.Why did you believe Welch was hiding inside the storage building? Why didn’t you inform an officer? Why didn’t you return and report when you believed you’d discovered Welch’s location? Did Welch say anything before attempting to kill you?And then, of course, the classic:Let’s go over it again from the beginning.
No, Welch hadn’t said anything. No, he hadn’t been able to see what happened between Chief Cassidy and Welch. No, he didn’t know if Welch had attempted to shoot Cassidy first. He forgot, once, that in this version of events, Welch had been the one shooting at them inside the storage unit, and Cassidy had arrived in time to save them. That stupid fucking text message they’d sent—In storage. Back of building. Welch here with a gun—only seemed to bear out the story. By the time Mendez let him go, North had a headache throbbing between his eyes.
It didn’t help that he found Shaw sitting on the station’s stoop, eating ice cream out of a paper cup. It looked like chocolate. Maybe chocolate brownie. Shaw looked up, beamed, and said, “Leah bought me ice cream.”
“Sure,” North said as he sat. “Why the fuck not?”
It was close to one in the morning, and the little city of Auburn was still. Sluggish curtains of air moved in a fitful breeze, and in the tiny harbor, under the blanching cone of a security light, the water moved sluggishly too. The concrete still held a hint of the day’s heat under him, and he could smell Shaw’s sweat and, more distantly, the garbage-water smell from the dock. Shaw offered him a spoonful of ice cream. Cold, chocolate, and sugar rushed through him. He let his head rest on Shaw’s shoulder, and Shaw riffled his hair.
“Let’s go back to the motor court,” he said quietly. “I can drive.”
North shook his head against Shaw’s shoulder.
“I’m a very good driver,” Shaw said. “You said so yourself.”
“John-Henry?”
“He was waiting to talk to Lieutenant Mendez.”
“Emery?”
“I don’t know. Do you want me to call him?”
North shook his head again. What he wanted was for the world to make sense again. To be home—his home—with Shaw and the puppy, and to go to work and listen to Pari and Shaw scream at each other about a missing almond croissant, and then do some shouting himself about how he was going to start his own agency and nobody would be allowed to bring any fucking almond croissants to work. He wanted to do good, solid work to build Borealis. He wanted the occasional night off in front of the TV. He wanted to grill on Sunday and, when he passed Jadon to grab another beer from the house, give the dumbass a dead-arm. What he didn’t want was to be here, in this upside-down universe, where Shaw had almost gotten killed. Again.
Shaw’s fingers combed his hair. “I know,” he whispered. “But it’s almost over.”
“Is it?” North asked. But he sat up and rubbed his eyes and said, before Shaw could answer, “My guess is they’re going to try to shut this down. They’ve got Welch. That’s two murders wrapped up. They’ll let John-Henry try to find Ezell if he can, but this is the end of it.”
Shaw wrapped both hands around the paper cup of melting ice cream, his silence dense and unhappy. Finally he said, “Why didn’t we tell them what Welch said?”
