the girl’s fingers continuing to text at warp speed.
A heavyset woman carrying two shopping bags next to Lauritzia smiled at her sympathetically, as if to say, It’s no use. I’ve got my own.
Lauritzia was twenty-four, dark-haired, with pretty dark-brown eyes that were the color of the hills at dusk where she was from, and she had worked for Harold and Roxanne Bachman since she had moved here from Mexico two years earlier. For the first time, she’d been able to put the hardships of the past few years behind her. She loved Mr. and Mrs. B; they’d been so good to her. They treated her like part of their family. They took her on vacations, encouraged her to call them by their first names, which she still wasn’t comfortable with. They even paid her tuition at the community college where she was taking classes. Maybe one day she would have a degree. In retail merchandising. Perhaps she’d even open her own store. In the meantime, she looked at Taylor and Jamie as if they were her own. Like her younger cousins, whom she had always taken care of back home. With what had happened to her own family, they were practically all she had now. For the first time since everything started, she actually felt she had a new life. A life she trusted. Not to mention a home.
The elevator door had opened, but the kids just stood there.
“Let’s go, Jamie, please.” Lauritzia pushed them forward. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed a Hispanic-looking man in sunglasses leaning against a railing. She thought he seemed to be watching them. Things like that always gave her a shudder. “Taylor, take my hand.”
They stepped inside, along with the woman with the shopping bags and two or three others. The doors closed and the elevator stopped at the second floor. A young couple got on, along with two black guys in the usual team sweatshirts and baggy pants.
“Kids,” Lauritzia said, pulling them to the rear, “let everyone in.”
“Lauritzia, can we stop at Five Guys?” Jamie asked. His favorite burger place.
“We’ll see.”
The doors closed and the elevator went down to the first retail floor, then on to Level 1, where they had left the car. Lauritzia let her mind drift to what she would make them for dinner. The Bachmans said they were going out. She had some chicken she could thaw. And there was leftover macaroni.
Maybe Five Guys wasn’t the worst idea …
The doors opened on the ground level. “C’mon, guys.” Lauritzia placed her hands on their shoulders and started to push them forward.
That was the moment when her life was rocketed back to her own private hell.
A man stood in the doorway. A man who looked like a thousand men she had seen in her past: dark skin, black hair knotted into a roll, sunglasses; the all-too-familiar tattoo running down his neck.
She saw him reach inside his jacket.
Lauritzia knew. Even before she watched him search through the elevator for her eyes, scanning through the other people getting off.
Before she saw him pull out his weapon.
She knew.
And in the horror of what she knew was about to happen, her thoughts ran to the one thing she knew she could not lose.
“Taylor, Jamie!” As they stepped forward, she lunged for them, pulling them behind her as the first deadly pops rang out.
People began to scream.
The chilling sputter of the gun was a sound that had riddled through Lauritzia a thousand times back in her own town, as common as church bells. A sound she knew all too well, and that had cost her everyone she once held dear.
If this is my time, let it be so, she said to herself. But Jesus, Mary, please, not the kids.
The familiar sounds of panic rang all around her. The gunman was quick on the trigger and did not wait. Jamie and Taylor screamed, not fully realizing what was happening. Lauritzia forced them to the floor, pressing herself on top of them, praying that whatever evil was being done, it would leave and not take them.
Just spare the kids, she begged God. Please, do not take these kids!
She pressed her face against Taylor’s, saying her own prayers, and tried to stifle the girl’s cowering sobs. Someone fell in front of her, and she waited for the bullets to hit, for the end to come.
But suddenly there was a different sound. Not the ear-splitting sputter of a machine pistol. But two loud pops.
Then there was only silence where a moment before there had been mayhem. Silence and that awful, smoke-filled smell that always came before the wails.
She looked up. The tattooed young killer was on his back, dead, his semiautomatic pistol at his side. A young policeman came up with his arms still extended. What happened next was the aftermath she knew all too well: the awful smell of lead rising like smoke. The anguished screams and moans. The hushed murmurs of shock and disbelief.
The woman with the shopping bags who had smiled at her was dead, her once kindly eyes frozen and wide. One of the black guys was moaning, his T-shirt soaked in blood. The young man who got on with his girlfriend on Level 2 was holding on to her body, moaning in disbelief. “Kelly … Kelly …”
Beneath her, Jamie and Taylor were sobbing.
The policeman finally took his gun away from the shooter. “Is everyone all right?” Then, shouting into a radio, “Emergency. Emergency! Shooting at the Westchester Mall. Level One. We need EMS immediately—everything you’ve got. Suspect down.”
Other people wandered up and began to help the shell-shocked people out of the elevator. Lauritzia lifted herself up, and then the kids, who were whimpering in shock. I have to get them out of here, she knew. Before anyone comes.
Before they ask her questions that she did not want to answer.
“Is it over? Is it over, Lauritzia?” Jamie kept muttering.
“Yes, yes,” Lauritzia reassured him. She hugged them with all her might. “You are safe.” But she knew it wasn’t over.
Only then did she feel the burning on her face and put her hand there and notice the blood. Her blood.
“Lauritzia, you’re hurt!” Taylor yelled.
“We have to go!”
She pressed their faces close to her as they stepped over the bodies to shield them from the horrible sight.
“Everyone wait over there,” the policeman instructed them. “EMS is on the way. You too,” he said, guiding Lauritzia.
But she could not wait.
“Come!” she told them, lifting them off the ground and carrying them past the swarm of bodies. They were trembling and whimpering—who would not be?—but there was no time to delay. She took a last, quick look at the shooter. She had seen his face a thousand times. The tattoo. Only by the grace of God had they been spared.
But these others … She glanced back sadly at the heavyset woman’s frozen eyes. Dios toma ellos almas.
God take their souls.
But by the time the police came she had to be long gone.
“Children, quick!” she said, dragging them toward the garage. “We must get out of here now!”
Thirty minutes later, the tears ran freely in the Bachmans’ kitchen. Tears mixed with horror and elation.
“You saved their lives,” Roxanne said as she dabbed Lauritzia’s cheek with a cloth and hugged her. Held her as warmly and gratefully as if Lauritzia