The Shimmer by David Morrell Page B

'You're all damned.' I thought he meant the lights again, but it turned out he meant that the crowd was damned because the next thing he opened fire on everyone around him."
    "Some kind of religious lunatic," Medrano suggested.
    "He sure had a fixation on hell. 'Came from hell.' 'Going back to hell.' He said that a couple of times while he was shooting people."
    "Well, the fire that burned him gave him a taste of where he was going," Medrano said.
    "That thought occurred to me, too. Do you know who he was?"
    "Not yet--any ID he had on him was destroyed. By process of elimination, we'll figure out which car he used and track its registration number."
    "Unless he came on the bus."
    "With an AK-47 that nobody noticed?"
    "He could have carried it in something like a guitar case," Page offered.
    "Yeah, that's possible. You know, you do think like a cop. Well, if the shooter arrived on the bus, any evidence was probably destroyed by the fire. That'll make our job a lot more difficult."
    Page shivered, perhaps because of the cool breeze or perhaps because he looked toward the corpses again.
    "You could use a windbreaker," Medrano said.
    "Chief Costigan told me the same thing. Any word about how he's doing?"
    "An ambulance driver phoned me from the Rostov hospital. He's in surgery. What about you? How are you holding up?"
    Page rubbed his right side, where the gunman had kicked him.
    "I'm not looking forward to seeing the bruise."
    "That's not what I meant."
    "I know. There's a lot to sort through. For now, I'm just glad to be alive."
    "Ever been involved in a shooting before?"
    "Once. But nobody died. For certain, my wife was never in a shooting before. If it hadn't been for her, the guy might have reached me."
    "She did an amazing thing. We collected six spent pistol cartridges."
    "Actually, she fired eight times," Page said.
    "And yet she only remembers pulling the trigger four times. If you and your wife worked for me, tomorrow morning you'd be talking to a counselor, but there's not much I can do to help outsiders."
    "I understand. Thanks for your concern."
    Medrano turned toward the western sky, where the roar of a helicopter was rapidly approaching. "Good. Another medevac chopper."
    "I'll drive my wife back to the motel."
    The emergency lights revealed Tori's silhouette in the front seat of her Saturn. As Page headed in that direction, he heard the helicopter getting louder.
    Its lights suddenly blazed, but instead of landing in a nearby field, it hovered over the crime scene--not close enough to the ground to kick up dust or blow objects around and interfere with the investigation, but carefully maintaining a legal altitude.
    "What the hell's going on?" Medrano wondered.
    But Page had already figured it out, managing to detect four huge letters on the chopper's side.
    Medrano shook his fist at the sky. "That's a damned TV news chopper."

    Chapter 24.
    For a couple of seconds, Brent glimpsed the lights of a town below him. Then the helicopter roared over it, and all he saw was darkness again. At once a cluster of flashing lights appeared ahead.
    A lot of flashing lights.
    Through headphones, he heard the pilot's voice. "There it is."
    Smoke rose from a burned-out shell of a bus. Firefighters, police officers, and medical personnel swarmed everywhere he looked.
    "Do you see any bodies on the ground?" Brent asked the pilot.
    "Yes! There!"
    Body bags covered human shapes on a gravel parking lot. Brent counted twelve. Others were being placed in ambulances.
    His news producer was waiting back at the station, at the other end of a two-way radio. Brent flicked a switch and spoke into his microphone. "I made it here in time. They're just starting to remove the bodies."
    "Any other news choppers?"
    "None."
    "Good. You know what to do."
    "Did you find the background material I asked for?" Brent asked.
    "You didn't give me a chance to do any research. I need to know about this town."
    "There's not much," the producer's voice said through