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to her cheeks.
    Get out.
That’s what her dad had always told her about Ransom River. Half the folks who lived there might think it was paradise, but for her it had become a landscape of strip malls and stagnation, bullies and heartbreak.
    And when she said,
How come you and Mom don’t leave?
he’d say,
We’re old. It’s different.
Then he’d grin, a sideways smile, a smile that wanted to be careless but always had something behind it. And when she called him on it, he’d quote Satchel Paige:
Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on
you.
    She had tried. She thought running, training, being strong, getting an education, keeping her eyes wide open, and always having one foot on the gas, one thumb out to hitchhike out of this town, would take care of her.
    She’d gotten nowhere. Something had been gaining on her all along. And here it was.
    She gritted her teeth and fought the need to let her shoulders jerk.
Don’t give them anything.
Pull down the shades. Don’t let them see a crack they can exploit. She squeezed her eyes shut to stop any further tears.
    Outside, a news crew packed up their van. Everybody jumped in and they floored it—straight across the street into the mall’s parking garage. The van’s back doors were open. The cameraman sat in the rear, filming.
    The police perimeter took shape. The phalanx of patrol cars retreated from the curb directly outside to a safer distance. Uniforms and plainclothes officers now stood behind their vehicles. A policewoman jogged toward the shoppers outside the mall, one hand on her utility belt to keep it from bouncing. She urged them back.
    The officers outside looked sharp in the morning sun, moving with dispatch, their uniforms dark blue against the green grass. So close, tangible, separated from her by millimeters of glass and a hundred feet of air, right there.
    That’s not who she saw. Not who she could almost feel, who was whispering in her memory.
    The tears welled again.
Hell.
    Behind her, barely visible, a ghostly reflection from the glass, Nixon grabbed Reagan’s sleeve. He leaned close and shook it, as if to get Reagan’s full attention.
    She leaned against the window, exposed, surrounded, motionless, and her mind filled with a knife-edge of a voice.
Don’t go quietly.
    Of all the people surrounding her, the one she longed overwhelmingly to see was a man who might not even know she was alive. She forced herself to stare at the officers below. Her necklace, the turquoise stone, shone back at her. Seth had given it to her. Of all the things she had lost, all she had jettisoned when she went away, that was one thing she’d kept. Given to her on a hot night when things were good, when the world had opened up and shown her she could breathe, that there was a rapture to being alive. And all it took to light the sky was one person.
    Just one, Seth Colder, the joker, the wild card, the school friend who grew up to show her what was what, that love felt as brilliant and sharp as the blue knife of an acetylene torch. But that was long gone. Burned out, swept away.
    She resisted the desire to touch the necklace. What was this surge of sadness and longing? She was on the verge of losing it. Thinking of
Seth,
for Christ’s sake? Cut
that
out, Rory.
    Except that as she stared out the window, listening to the gunmen mutter and argue behind her, she couldn’t stop thinking:
Seth would know what to do. Seth would know how to end this thing.
Seth had been a cop.
    A bullhorn voice emanated from the hallway. “This is the Ransom River Police Department. Put down your weapon. Open the doors and come out with your hands behind your head.”
    They thought there was only one gunman inside.

7

    I n the hallway, Lieutenant Gil Strandberg lowered the bullhorn. Since the shotgun blast, nothing more had been heard from Judge Wieland’s courtroom. Nobody had answered his order to surrender.
    The Ransom River PD and two bailiffs had set up a perimeter at the end of the