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near the south east exit, Number Two—about twenty yards east of Starbucks. Request Emergency Response team ASAP.”
    â€œTen-four, thirty-six.” The dispatcher’s voice came across louder than Ronnie would have liked. She held her hand across the speaker to muffle the noise.
    â€œI’m closing on Number Two shooter now. They are active ... repeat, they are active. Request medical be put on standby.”
    Four well-spaced shots cracked around the corner—echoing in the open court. Fitful silence followed, then another shot. A gurgling whimper, as if someone was being strangled, rose amid mournful screams.
    Two women wearing white hijabs and indigo dresses ran past, half stumbling, bent at the waist to avoid being shot. Neither was armed and the abject terror on their faces made Ronnie shoo them on, toward Ms. Martha and safety.
    Ronnie counted twenty-seven pops before the shooting slowed. She did the math. The Browning had a thirteen-round magazine. Most forty-fives held seven or eight.
    â€œ Maldita Sea! ” she spat, slipping into her native Spanish. She gathered herself to make a move.
    Both shooters were reloading at the same time.

    Seth— Tum-afik Pedram —Timmons pressed the release on the side of his Browning. The empty magazine clattered to the floor as he fished a fresh one from the waistband of his blood-spattered slacks. The world around him seemed a whirling image of pink gore and the whites of wide, pleading eyes.
    His first targets had smiled like fools when they’d seen him approach. Don, a bald man with a graying goatee and the stomach of a fat toad, hoisted his paper cup as if to offer a toast. Seth pressed the gun to his face and pulled the trigger. There’d been no reason to single out the soft-spoken Don. Meeting Timmons’s gaze had been enough to get his brains blown all over the slender woman sitting alone at a table behind him. Seth ran with her sometimes at lunch. Her name was Jane Clayton. She flinched at the shot, put a hand to her cheek in dismay, wiping off bits of Don. Her eyes blinked rapidly as she tried to make some sense of what had just happened.
    Seth walked up and shot her in the neck, watched her topple like a bowling pin, and then moved on to shoot another victim.
    He didn’t look up from his work, but could hear the flat crack of Gerard’s pistol. They stuck to a well-rehearsed plan: stay on opposite sides of the food court to make themselves harder targets, shooting one or two on each side of a larger group, then picking off the ones in the middle as they milled around like frightened deer.
    Some, like Marcia Dubois, mouthed Seth’s name in quiet shock. Her cubicle was across from his, covered with photographs of her three teenage daughters. She cowered, turning her head to one side, begging for mercy.
    Timmons showed none.
    Firing with one hand, he reached into the messenger bag at his side and brought out an olive-green object the size of a baseball. Before he could move, a tall African American woman held her plastic tray in front of her like a shield and rushed at him with a desperate scream.
    Caught by surprise, Timmons shot from the hip, wasting three rushed rounds before he finally stopped her attack. The woman’s bravery incensed him and he shot her twice more in the chest just to watch her body jerk.
    Gritting his teeth, he pulled the cotter pin from the grenade and lobbed it into a knot of people huddled in the center of the food court. The flat metal spoon flew away from the device and fell against a dining table with a metallic, bell-like tinkle... .
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    Ronnie watched the M67 grenade sail toward the cowering group. She surely knew some of them, but had no time to process their faces before she dropped to the floor, plugging her ears as best she could against one shoulder and the heel of her left, non-gun hand.
    The detonation flung tables, food, and chairs skyward, kicking the air out of her lungs.