Coombs saw him leave, pulled up to the parallel-parking spot, and spent three minutes getting straight, carefully plugged the meter, and then started walking around the perimeter of the park, looking down into it.
Jenkins, on the cell phone, said, “She's moving.”
Lucas and Flowers had moved to the glass doors of the building across the street from the bench. Coombs was walking slowly on the sidewalk, peering into the park.
She was still wearing the blue muumuu and was carrying a Macy's bag, looking fat and slow.
Widdler stepped out of Galtier into the sunshine, slipping on sunglasses. She was carrying an oversized Coach bag, black leather, big enough to hold eighty thousand. She crossed the street, walking casually. She was forty yards behind Coombs, and closing.
“Lucy doesn't see her,” Flowers said.
“We're okay, we're okay,” Lucas said.
A guy eating his lunch got off the park bench, tossed the brown bag in a trash container, and started across the street, talking on a cell phone, not looking back. A St. Paul vice cop. Del called: “I'm coming in.”
“We're in,” Shrake said. He and Jenkins were moving down the east side of the park, where they could cut Widdler off, if she made a run for it.
From Lucas's point of view, everything seemed to slow down.
Coombs plodding toward the bench, sitting down in slow motion, looking tired, the Macy's bag flapping on the bench…
Widdler closing in on her, from behind, twenty yards, ten, five, her hand going in her purse, back out.
Lucas: “Shit. She's got a gun.”
He and Flowers hit the door simultaneously, Flowers screaming, “Lucy, Lucy, watch out, gun…”
Widdler never heard them or saw them. Her world had narrowed to the target on the bench, the big fat hippie with the bushy hair and the Macy's bag, and there was nobody around and she was moving in fast, the woman might never see her…
Widdler had the gun in her hand, a four-inch double-trigger, double-barreled derringer that Leslie had given her to keep in her car. He'd said, “It's not accurate at more than two feet, so you pretty much got to push it right against the guy…” He'd been talking about a rapist, but there was no reason that Coombs should be any different.
The gun was coming up and somewhere, in the corner of her mind, she realized that there was a commotion but she was committed and then Coombs was half standing and turning to meet her and the gun was going and she heard somebody shout and then she shot Coombs in the heart. The blast was terrific, and her hand kicked back, and there was a man in the street and car brakes screeching and she never thought, just reacted, and she turned and the gun was still up…
And suddenly she was swatted on the ankle and a screaming pain arced through her body and she hit the ground and she registered a shot; she got a mouthful of concrete dust and her glasses came off and she rolled and Lucas Davenport was looking down at her…
Lucas nearly ran through a car. The car screeched and he was knocked forward and registered the face of a screaming woman behind the windshield, and he saw Coombs get shot and he was rolling and then he heard a shot from behind him, saw Flowers with a gun and saw Widdler go down, then he was up and running and looking down at Widdler.
Coombs was on her hands and knees, looking up at him, and she said, “I'm okay, I'm okay.”
And Lucas turned to Flowers, as he straddled Widdler, his heart thumping, Flowers pale as an Irish nun, and Lucas asked, “Why'd you shoot her in the foot?”
Then Widdler screamed, the pain flooding her, hit in the ankle, her foot half gone.
“No, no, no…”
Lucas said, “Get an ambulance rolling,” and he turned to Coombs, who'd gone back to her hands and knees.
“You sure you're…?”
Coombs was right there with Widdler's derringer. She pointed the tiny gun at Widdler's eye from one inch away and pulled both triggers.
The second blast was as big as the first one, and Widdler's head rocked back as though she'd been kicked by a horse.
Lucas dropped on Coombs and twisted the gun out of her hand, but before he got that done, Coombs had just enough time to look into Widdler's single remaining dead eye and say, “Fuck you.”
The St. Paul cops closed off the park and the street where the shooting took place, stringing tape and blocking access with squad cars. Local television stations put cameras in the surrounding condos, and got some brutal shots of Widdler's dead body, faceup and crumbled like a ball of paper, crime-scene guys in golf shirts standing around like death clerks.
Coombs went to jail for three days. In the immediate confusion over the shooting, Ramsay County attorney Jack Wentz showed up for the cameras and announced that he would charge Coombs with murder; and that he would further investigate the regrettable actions by state investigative officers, which led to an unnecessary killing on his turf.
Lucas, talking behind the scenes, argued that the shooting was part of a continuing violent action-that the killing of Widdler was an unfortunate but understandable reaction of a woman who'd been shot and hit, and the fact that she was wearing a ballistic vest did not lessen the shock. The close-range shooting, he said, combined with the real shooting of Widdler by Flowers, the fact that Coombs had seen Lucas knocked down by a car, that people had been screaming at her, that Widdler had been thrashing around on the ground next to her, had so confused Coombs that she'd picked up the loose gun and fired it without understanding the situation.
Wentz, replying off the record, said Lucas was trying to protect himself and the other incompetents who'd set up the sting.
The next day, the local newspaper columnists unanimously landed on the county attorney's back, and the television commentators followed on the noon, evening, and late-night news.
The Star Tribune columnist said, “Mrs. Coombs's mother and daughter were killed by this witch, and she'd just been shot in the chest herself-thank God she was wearing a bulletproof vest, or the whole family would have been wiped out by one serial killer. That Wentz would even consider bringing charges suggests that he needs some quiet time in a corner, on a stool, with a pointy hat to focus his thoughts, if he has any…”
The police federation said it would revisit its endorsement of Wentz for anything, and the governor said off-the-record that the county attorney was full of shit, which was promptly reported, of course, then disavowed by Neil Mitford, but the message had been sent.
The county attorney said that what he'd really meant to say was that he'd investigate, and the issue would be taken to the grand jury.
Coombs was released after three days in jail, with her house as bond. She never went back-the election was coming, and the grand jury, which did what Wentz told them to do, decided not to indict.
Rose Marie Roux told Lucas, “You got lucky. About six ways. If Coombs had wound up dead, you might be looking for a job-this being an election year.”
“I know. The thought never crossed my mind that Widdler'd yank out a gun and try to shoot her in broad daylight on a main street,” Lucas said. “And you know what? If it'd been real, if it hadn't been a setup, she'd have gotten away with it. She'd have walked across the street and gone upstairs to the Skyway and then over to Galtier and down in the parking garage, and that would have been it.”
Mitford, who had come over to listen in, said, to Rose Marie, “We pay him to be lucky.
Lucky is even better than good. Everybody is happy.” And to Lucas: “Don't get unlucky.”
The public argument would have gone on, and could have gotten nastier, except that Ruffe Ignace published an exclusive interview with the teenage victim of Burt Kline's sexual attentions.
Ignace did a masterly job of combining jiggle-text with writing-around, and everybody over fourteen understood that Kline had semicolon-shaped freckles where many people wouldn't have looked, and that the comely teenager had been asked (and agreed) to model white cotton thongs and a half-shell bra in a casino hotel in Mille Lacs. Ignace did not actually say that little pink nipples were peeking out, but you got the idea.