Bryce Dunstan cowered, and covered his head with his right hand, as though that could ward off any bullet that might come his way. Ralph Erskine lay on the ground outside, spangled by broken glass, the life bubbling redly from him. A final gush came from his mouth, and then Erskine grew still.
From behind his splayed hand, Bryce risked a peek up. The gun was now pointing directly at his face.
‘You stupid old bastard,’ said the gunman.
And Bryce closed his eyes, squeezing them tighter as he heard the first shot, only opening them to discover why, against all expectations, he was not dead.
Burnel was watching the tall man, who had been forced to crouch down to avoid the possibility of being glimpsed by the deputy at the door. It increased his resemblance to a great pale insect, his head bobbing as he tried to hear what was being said by the deputy and Bryce, and see them through the gaps in the shelving. His right hand held the short machete against Paige’s throat, while his left was buried in her hair. Burnel saw that the tall man’s face was contorted with pain. He kept shifting position, and Burnel understood that he was profoundly physically as well as morally corrupt. The older woman, Kezia, had lapsed into shock and semi-consciousness. She mumbled to herself – not loudly, but just loud enough to concern the tall man, whose little eyes now latched on to her before moving to Burnel.
‘Shut her up,’ he said.
It was the first time the tall man had spoken, and he slurred his words, so they came out as ‘Shuzurup’.
Kezia was to Burnel’s right. He wasn’t sure what to do. He supposed that he could cover her mouth, but that might make things worse. What if she came out of her daze and panicked, or started kicking and screaming? Burnel didn’t know how far sound might carry from where they were. What if the cop heard her? But then, he thought, how much worse could the situation get? He didn’t believe they were going to make it out of there alive. Men like these were beyond his experience and understanding, but they smelled of blood and the panicked excretions of their victims.
‘Take it easy,’ he said to Kezia. He turned to her, twisting his body, leaning over to embrace her with his left arm, and then he heard the first shot. The tall man extended his upper body and raised his head, the better to see what was happening, the blade slipping marginally from Paige’s throat, although he kept his grip on her hair, dragging her with him as he tried to discover who had fired. He was still looking away when Burnel, his right hand concealed by his body, reached under his coat and slipped the Ruger from its holster.
The sound of a second shot being fired reached them from the door. Burnel moved away from Kezia, pushing his jacket aside with his left hand, lifting his right. The tall man didn’t even glance in Burnel’s direction until the gun was already out and pointing at him, but by then the last sands in his hourglass were falling. Burnel thought of the targets at the range, removing the tall man’s features and humanity from the equation, reducing him to a two-dimensional image hanging in space.
He had been aiming for the target’s upper body, but the gun bucked in his hand, or maybe it was just the way that Burnel was trembling. Whatever the reason, the bullet hit the tall man beneath the chin, and punched its way through his tongue and upper palate before blowing a path through his brain and exiting from the crown of his head.
The tall man was still falling as Burnel got to his feet. His ears were ringing from the shot. Paige was screaming, and Kezia was muttering louder, but the sounds seemed to Burnel to be coming from a great distance away. He walked as though he were being compelled to move. He could feel a pressure at the small of his back, like a hand pushing him on. He stepped into the aisle and saw the door with its shattered glass, and a figure lying on the ground outside. He saw Bryce crouching to the right of the broken pane, and the gunman to his left, his body partially in the aisle but already turning in Burnel’s direction. Burnel brought his left hand up to support the Ruger under the grip, and noticed that the weapon was no longer shaking.
He heard a shot from the front of the store, and a plastic soda bottle close to his head exploded, spraying him with liquid. Burnel didn’t try to hide. He didn’t look for cover. It was too late for that now. He and the gunman at the door were linked by unseen bonds. Burnel advanced, firing as he did so, but he didn’t trust his aim at this distance. He needed to close the gap.
He saw the gunman flinch and change position. Behind him, Bryce, who had dropped to the ground as the shooting began, was inching toward the body outside the door. Burnel guessed that he was trying to get to the deputy’s gun through the shattered pane. That was good. If Burnel died, then maybe Bryce would shoot the bastard who had killed him.
Two shots came close together. Burnel felt a tug on his jacket, and glass broke somewhere nearby. He fired again, and the gunman jerked like someone who has just received a powerful electric shock. His gun hand dropped to his side, and Burnel pulled the trigger once more, keeping his weapon as level as he could, surprised at how relaxed he felt, even with the adrenaline that he knew must be coursing through his system. The gunman jerked a second time, then turned and stumbled through the glassless door, tripping over the hand of the dead man on the ground, even as Bryce raised the deputy’s weapon but did not fire, seeing something in the gunman’s face as he looked back that told him his race was run, that any threat he had once posed was now negated, and Bryce should not trouble himself by inflicting any further damage on him and carrying this polluted creature’s death on his conscience.
The gunman was bent over as he staggered toward the van. He fired his weapon, but its muzzle was pointing at the ground. Bryce watched Jerome Burnel step out into the rain, his own gun still held steadily before him, his eyes unblinking as he followed implacably after his wounded quarry and shot him twice more, tracking him with the barrel as he collapsed on the oil-stained forecourt, then standing astride him and pulling the trigger over and over as the hammer clicked on the empty chambers.
Except Bryce Dunstan didn’t mention that part to the police later, just as he claimed that the killer had tried to raise his weapon and fire, forcing Burnel to shoot him in the back to finish him off. Not that the cops or the district attorney, or even the media, cared too much about delving into the minutiae of the victim’s death: they had a murdered sheriff’s deputy, and an ordinary man who had avenged his killing while acting to preserve his own life and the lives of others. They had a narrative, and a hero, and that was enough.
For a time.
22
Later, Jerome Burnel recalled that, as he stood over the dead man in the parking lot of the gas station, he was overcome by a fit of shivering, followed by a light-headedness that quickly became active nausea. He threw up in the weeds at the edge of the lot, then sat down hard among them and gently placed his gun on the ground, as though it were a dormant entity that might yet somehow be wakened into another burst of murderous activity by any sudden movement. But as the rain fell, it struck him that the police would want the gun as evidence, and leaving it on the filthy concrete of the forecourt might tarnish it in some way. He thought about putting it back in its holster, but he didn’t want to be armed when the police arrived. He checked his pockets, and discovered that he had nothing with which to protect the gun.
Jerome Burnel realized that he was sobbing.
Paige Dunstan walked across the forecourt and stood before him. She had her cell phone in her hand, and Burnel assumed that she had just called the police. Behind her, Bryce was placing a dish towel over the face of the dead sheriff’s deputy. Burnel watched Paige come, but couldn’t remember quite who she was, and found himself unable to connect her with what had just occurred. It was, he told the three men in the Great Lost Bear, like coming out of a movie and meeting one of the actresses from it on the street.
As for Paige, she noticed that the dead man had bled a lot. She was glad. She hoped that wherever the sonofabitch was, he was still feeling the pain of those bullets, and would continue to do so until Satan himself
grew bored of that particular torture and found another, more inventive one to replace it. The thought of what might have befallen her if he had managed to get her into the storeroom made her want to get to a toilet fast.
She turned her attention from the dead to the living.
‘I don’t even know your name,’ she said to Burnel.
‘Jerome.’
‘Thank you, Jerome,’ she said. ‘I’m Paige.’
‘I don’t know what I did,’ said Burnel.
‘What?’
‘It wasn’t me. I didn’t fire the gun. I didn’t kill those men. I watched someone else do it, and he looked just like me.’
Paige reached out a hand to him.
‘I think you should come inside,’ she said. ‘You’ll catch your death out here.’
Like him, Burnel thought, and his eyes alighted on the body lying only feet away. He heard himself giggle, and wondered if Paige had heard him too. He hoped not. That would be bad. He covered his mouth with his right hand to hide the sound. He caught his death. The man who looked like me threw it, and he caught it, right in the end zone.
‘Jerome, are you—?’
Lights were flashing to the north as the police approached. Meanwhile a car had pulled up by the pumps, and a woman and a man were asking if everyone was okay, but the woman was already filming the proceedings with her cell phone. Meet the Buttinskys, Snoop and Nosey.
The sight of them brought Burnel back, and he was almost grateful to them. If he’d started laughing aloud, he might never have stopped. Burnel didn’t want to be on film. He didn’t want pictures of him with puke on his shirt to appear on the news, but most of all he didn’t want to be on the news, period. Common sense was rapidly returning now that he had taken a step back onto dry land from the old Insanity River. He was concerned that the dead men might have friends, the kind to take it very much amiss that a jewelry salesman named Jerome Burnel, forty, married (for now), a resident of Portland, Maine, had splattered the brains and skullcap of one of their buddies all over a milk cooler, and put four holes in the other, including two in the back to finish him off. He thought about going over there and snatching the phone, but suddenly police cars and uniforms filled his vision, and guns were being brandished and orders shouted. He lost sight of the woman with the phone, but he would become very familiar with the video she had shot, just as many other people would. And all the while, a little voice whispered:
But what if they have friends?
What if they have family?
Burnel didn’t want to be a hero, didn’t believe himself to be one, but he became a hero anyway. He’d asked if his identity could be protected, but there was little hope of that, even before the woman from the car sold her video to the TV stations. He declined interviews, but still the journalists called him. He refused an accolade from the Portland Police Department at their annual awards breakfast, but it was later delivered to him by a young officer who shook his hand and thanked him for what he had done. People stopped him on the street and asked to have their picture taken with him. Customer orders soared, but he no longer felt comfortable making road trips while carrying any quantity of gems, just in case someone took it into his head to target him. As a consequence, he was forced to spend more time working from home, which meant more time in Norah’s company, and only she remained unimpressed by what he had done.
Because she knew.
‘Big shot,’ she would say, her words distorting the accompanying cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘Big man with a gun. Now you’re so afraid you can’t even leave the fucking house.’
And she was right: he was afraid. He didn’t like being known. He didn’t want to have to carry the gun anymore, but he’d need it with him if he left the house because everyone and his mother now knew that Jerome Burnel was in the jewelry business and—
What if they have friends? What if they have family?
The dead men’s bodies went unclaimed, and their corpses were eventually buried in the indigent section of Augusta’s West View Cemetery. Their drivers’ licenses, identifying them as Henry Forde and Tobin Simus, were high-quality fakes that wouldn’t have got past most cops but would have sufficed for casual use. Their vehicles – a ’98 Saturn and a 2000 Chevy Express Cargo Van – were recent cash purchases from dealers in Virginia and New Hampshire but title transfers had not yet been initiated.
The police returned Burnel’s gun. There was no question of charges being filed against him, although one state police detective, a man named Gordon Walsh, was curious about the final shots fired, and made Burnel go through his story a couple of times before leaving, if not satisfied, then not dissatisfied enough to investigate further.
Gradually, once the public had moved on, and if only to get away from his wife, Burnel went back on the road.
But the events at Dunstan’s Gas Station were only part of the story, and just one of the reasons why Jerome Burnel became a hero. When the police opened the back of the van they found, amid a wide variety of stolen items, a girl named Corrie Wyatt. She had restraints around her arms and legs, and a ball gag in her mouth. A chain around her waist anchored her to a ring that had been welded to the inner body of the van, possibly for that precise purpose. Wyatt directed police to a house in Gorham, where they found the bodies of Mason Timard, his wife Doreen, and their son Nathan, along with the remains of Todd Peltz and Barry Brown.
Later, Corrie Wyatt would be one of the few non-family visitors to Jerome Burnel at the state prison in Warren, along with Paige Dunstan. Dunstan stopped coming to visit Burnel less than a year into his sentence. She married and moved to Oregon following her father’s death from heart disease and the sale of the gas station, although she continued to write to him until shortly before she disappeared.
‘Disappeared?’ said Parker.
‘It was in the newspapers,’ said Burnel. ‘She was a librarian in Ashland. One day, she didn’t come home from work. Her husband was questioned, but he was in San Francisco on business when she vanished, and I don’t think he was ever really a suspect. If they ever found out what happened to her, then I didn’t notice, and I was looking.’
Corrie Wyatt’s visits had simply ceased a year after Burnel’s imprisonment. He received no explanation, for she had never written. One minute she was there, and the next she wasn’t.
23
Burnel still had a couple of mouthfuls of beer in his glass – enough to finish his story, if he needed some lubrication. Only a scattering of customers remained at the Bear. It had been a quiet evening.
‘About two months after the shooting, I got a call from my wife telling me to come home, that the police were at the house and wanted to talk to me,’ said Burnel. ‘She didn’t say why. I thought it had to be something to do with those two men. I figured that maybe they’d identified them at last, or what I was afraid of had finally come to pass, and their friends had found me.’
Burnel grew distracted for a moment. He followed the progress of a young guy who was heading for the men’s room, and immediately began picking at his skin. His lips moved, but no sound emerged. Parker could see Angel watching Burnel. He believed that Angel’s expression might have softened, but he could not be certain.
‘Mr Burnel?’ said Parker.
‘Huh?’
Burnel stopped picking.
‘I thought I recognized that man,’ he said. ‘Or he recognized me. But I was mistaken. Probably.’
They waited for him to continue.
‘Where was I?’ he asked.
‘The call from the police,’ said Parker.
‘The call. Right. I was in Kennebunk, so it didn’t take me long to drive back. On the way home, I kept thinking about what I’d do if it turned out that I’d been targeted for revenge because of the shootings. What if they were Russians, or Chechens? I’d heard those people were pretty mean, worse than the Italians. If that was the case, the police might have to hide me somewhere for my protection, and all I could think was that I didn’t want to be stu
ck in some apartment with my wife for months or years on end. By then our marriage really was in its death throes, and I’d have been tempted just to let the Russians or Chechens have me, as long as they promised to shoot me and make it quick.
‘But the police weren’t there to protect me at all. They had all of this … material, these pictures and films of children. They showed it to me. They asked me if it was mine, and I told them it wasn’t, but I could see that they didn’t believe me. I saw some of the policemen who had talked to me after the shooting, who’d patted me on the back and called me a hero, and I could tell how disappointed and disgusted they were. I was arrested, brought to the Portland Police Department, questioned, then taken to the Cumberland County Jail. The next day, I appeared before the district court, and bail was set at forty thousand dollars, because the district attorney said that the nature of my business, and the ease of transportation of gemstones, made me a potential flight risk.
‘But I didn’t have that amount to hand. Norah’s store had gone bust, and I wasn’t bringing in the kind of money that I had before. Looking back, I think I might have been suffering from PTSD, and my father had been forced to take back a lot of the day-to-day running of the business. Between us, we managed to pay bail, and they let me go.’
So Jerome Burnel’s name was now once again in the news, but for very different reasons than before. His house was daubed with red paint, and the tires on his car were repeatedly slashed. His wife moved out and filed for divorce. They agreed to price the house for a quick sale, and his share went toward paying his legal bills. He moved back in with his parents. He did not work. His father retired officially and permanently from the jewelry business, his reputation tainted by the crimes that his son was alleged to have committed.
Eventually Jerome Burnel went to prison.