Page 37 of Wrong Way

"Owen Gallagher," he said. His voice came out rougher than he'd intended. "You're under arrest for three murders…and that’s just the start."

Gallagher still said nothing. His body had gone slack under Miles's knee in a sad sort of acceptance—in the posture of a man who realized there was no more fight to live for.

Miles made a fist and opened it, trying to work out the last of that faint tingling sensation. It did fade, but it was replaced by a strange, phantom pain.

He thought about how much current had moved through him before the breaker went. He thought about the fraction of time between when he'd felt it and when the lights had cut. He had been less than a second from the wire hitting the water with him still connected to the panel. Less than a second, possibly, from the floor going live with him standing in it.

But he was still here. Gallagher was still here, and hopefully, no one upstairs was dead. Thinking of that, he shook his head as if to clear it and then reached for his phone to call Vic.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The lights went out without warning.

One moment the auditorium was in its dimmed evening state, the stage dark now, the house half-lit and still moving with the last of the crowd making its way toward the rear exits. The next moment there was nothing. Not dimmed, not reduced. Nothing. Every light source in the building cut simultaneously, and the darkness that replaced it was absolute, the total black of a room with no windows and no exterior light sources, and it lasted only two or three seconds before phones started appearing throughout the crowd like scattered sparks, but those two or three seconds were enough.

The screaming started immediately. There had been screams consistently for a while now, but these were new, louder, and filled with true fear and panic. It wasn’t just one voice but many, overlapping and disorganized, and the crowd that had been moving toward the exits with something approaching order surged forward in a single collective push that had nothing orderly about it. Vic was at the center aisle, and she was hit from behind by two bodies at once, a man and a woman who had been walking close together and were now running, and she caught herself on the nearest seatback and held it.

"Keep moving, keep moving toward the exits!"

She yelled as loud as she could manage, which was not loud enough for the room. Around her, phone flashlights were multiplying and throwing wild, crossing beams across the crowd, which only added to the visual chaos. People were calling out for each other by name, children's names, a spouse, a friend. Someone near the back was crying in a sustained and unbroken way. Vic pushed herself upright and took stock of where she was and where the exits were and how many people were still between her and them.

Most of the crowd was out or nearly out. The rear doors were open, and the people still inside were concentrated in the middle section, funneling toward the two center aisle exits in a mass that was compressed but moving. Kowalski was near the doors on the house left side, directing people through with his arms. Two other cops were rushing in through the doors; their unit having just arrived. A police unit flashlight cut through the dark above the crowd's heads.

Just as she saw them, her phone buzzed in her pocket. She didn't even have to check it to know that it was Miles. She felt it in her gut, and beyond that was a flicker of hope that he had somehow caused the lights to go out, and this nightmare was over for now.

She moved toward Kowalski, fighting the current of bodies until she was at his shoulder.

"I need you to finish this," she said. "Get the rest of them out. The other unit outside, theater security, everybody."

He looked at her. "Where are you going?"

"To find Miles."

Kowalski nodded once and turned back to the crowd without asking anything further. He waved the newly arrived cops over to assist, and they fell in right away.

Vic went the other way, back through the crowd toward the stage, then around it to the staff door. She had her phone out and the flashlight on as she stepped through the staff corridor. It was completely empty, the ordinary overhead lighting dead and the emergency strips along the baseboard casting a dim red line along the floor. She moved through it fast.

She had heard no gunshot, which was something. She had heard no explosion, no impact, nothing that suggested a specific violent event in the basement below her. What she had heard was the power cutting, clean and total, and she again hoped that meant that Miles had been successful.

The not-knowing was its own particular experience. She had been a federal agent for eleven years, and she understood intellectually that uncertainty was part of the job, that you operated in conditions of incomplete information constantly, and you made the best decisions you could, and you moved forward. She understood that. She also understood that Miles was the only person currently unaccounted for in a building where a man had presumably been planning to kill many people by using poorly wired neon.

She pushed through the staff door and into the service corridor and found the stairwell at the end of it. The metal door at the bottom was standing open.

She went down and found the basement dark except for the phone flashlight she was carrying. She swept it across the space and found the wet floor first, the thin film of water catching her beam and reflecting it back at her in a flat, dull sheet. Then she found Miles.

He was crouched near the electrical panel on the far side of the room, one knee on the back of a man who was face-down on the wet floor with his wrists cuffed behind him. Miles had his phone flashlight propped against the panel housing to free both hands. He looked up when her light reached him. His face was taut and drawn, and there was something tight in the set of his mouth that she recognized as the aftermath of an adrenaline event rather than its middle.

"Hey," he said.

It came out flat and slightly rough. Vic stood at the edge of the wet floor and looked at him and felt the fear she had been carrying down the stairs complete its transit through her system and begin to drain away.

"Are you hurt?" she said.

He held up his right hand briefly. Even from across the room, in the crossing beams of their flashlights, the palm looked wrong, the skin reddened and shiny in a way that meant a burn. "A little," he said. "Nothing that needs a surgeon. Just a little shocked is all."

“Christ, Miles…that’s awful.”

She looked at the man on the floor. Owen Gallagher was breathing and appeared conscious, if barely. His right cheekbone was swollen, the skin stretched tight over it. His head was turned to the side and his eyes were open, tracking without apparent focus.