Part 26 (1/2)

Zeke took a breath and decided not to fight her.They weren't used to having this many people downtown at once, and it would be hard for Savannah to find her friends in this throng without texting them.

”Just watch where you're going,” he said.

They were half a block from the town hall when the first band began to play. People howled and applauded and groups of young people put their arms around each other and swayed together. Zeke figured there must have been six or seven hundred people-not exactly throngs, but a ma.s.sive gathering for Lansdale. Glancing around, he saw faces and the backs of heads, sweats.h.i.+rts and T-s.h.i.+rts and jackets, and then a quick flash of yellow glimpsed between moving bodies.

Skyler?

”Daddy, I see Vanessa!” Savannah said, tugging his arm. ”Can I go hang with those guys?”

”Just a second,” he said, rising to the tips of his toes and moving around, trying to get another glimpse of that yellow flash, hoping to find that it had been Skyler's hat.

”They're just over there in front of the bookshop,” Savannah said. ”I have my phone. Can I just catch up with you in a bit?” There! Another glimpse of yellow.

He hesitated, turning toward Savannah and then glancing over at the little bookshop across the street, its windows dark, the closed sign on the door. A group of kids cl.u.s.tered on the sidewalk there and he thought he did recognize Vanessa amongst them.

”All right,” he said. ”But don't leave this block. I'll text you in-”

”Thanks, Daddy!” Savannah cried in triumph, waving at him as she pushed away through the crowd.

The band's first song ended. In the moment between the last chord that rolled out of the speaker system and the beginning of the audience's applause, Zeke heard the roar of car engines coming fast.

He turned and saw the headlights, frowned as he saw the pair of dust-coated, jacked-up pickup trucks with their blacked-out windows-

-began to shout as he saw the figures that crouched in the beds of the pickup trucks and the guns they held in their hands, a rainbow of multicolored festival lights gleaming off of the barrels and the truck hoods and the winds.h.i.+elds.

The band charged into their second song, a country-rock anthem everyone in the crowd knew by heart, but people had already begun to shout, and when the first gunshot split the night and echoed off of the storefront windows, they began to scream.

”Savannah,” Zeke barely whispered.And then he shouted her name.

Hurling himself through the crowd, shoving people aside, he caught sight of her at the edge of the lawn, nearly to the sidewalk. She'd raised her hand in a wave to her friends across the street but stood frozen there as she turned toward the roaring engines and the gunfire that erupted in the very same moment, silencing the music but not the screams.

Zeke had his arm outstretched, reaching for her, no more than five feet away when the bullet punched a hole through her chest. Her white denim jacket puffed out behind her, the fabric tugged by the exiting bullet.

Savannah staggered several steps backward but remained standing for a second or two, a sad, mystified expression on her face as a crimson stain began to soak into the pale blue cotton of her top.