Today's Reading
Attached to a swanky hotel and built in the Gilded Age, this theater was pretty in a gaudy, self-important way. Not her taste. Way too many nooks, crannies, and columns for a sniper to hide behind. Not to mention a thousand sight lines to the middle of the stage, exactly where Mitch stood. Methodically, she catalogued where she would and wouldn't set up shop to take out a target.
There weren't really any good angles to target a person standing behind a podium from the floor of the theater. The VIP boxes lining the sides of the space above the orchestra level were too cliché. Although this wasn't the Ford Theatre, Lincoln's assassination was still a stain that this town's theaters bore with a certain shame. Plus there would only be a single narrow hallway to access the boxes or leave them in a hurry. Too much chance of getting trapped by hotel security.
Maybe the balcony stretching across the back of the space? She could lie on her stomach behind the last row of seats near an exit door. Use the seats for cover and shoot around the end of them. Egress would be a breeze. Out the exit and straight down a wide staircase into the usually crowded hotel lobby, where she could blend in and simply walk out the front door—
Something flickered at the edge of her vision, and her attention snapped back to Mitch. Or rather to the brilliantly lit space directly in front of him. The spotlights were so bright that individual motes of dust visibly floated in the beams of light.
There it was again. A flicker of lime green. If this were a warm summer evening, she would attribute it to a lightning bug looking for a mate.
But this was no backyard barbecue, and that flash of green no innocent insect.
Her gut shouted a warning even as her brain identified what she was seeing.
Surely not.
But a little voice in the back of her head began chanting fearfully, No, no, no, no, no...
Not here. Please, no. Not her family. Not her child... She had to be wrong.
But what if she was right? What if that was a targeting beam from a laser gun sight? In the past few years, green and blue lasers had supplanted red ones as the preferred colors in daylight conditions.
She reached for her purse and the handgun she always kept inside, then swore under her breath as she recalled too late that Nancy and Constance had insisted she leave her purse with theirs on a table backstage. Frantically, she looked around the theater in search of the threat. She had no way to fight back. No way to protect her children.
That laser targeting beam had been slightly above Mitch's head. It was coming from the balcony, then. She looked up at the second-story protrusion and its dozen rows of upholstered seats. The whole balcony was dark, shrouded in shadows. No way to spot a shooter up there without specialized night optical equipment, even if she could make it to her own weapon in time to suppress the would-be killer's fire.
Her gaze snapped back to Mitch.
The laser beam flashed again, steadily this time. From her vantage point to the side of the stage, she saw the tiny green dot flash on his chest and then rise toward his face. Time stopped as she lurched forward.
Not Mitch.
Not my baby.
She bolted forward with speed born of a mother's terror, a special speed of pure panic. The green dot landed on the spot between Mitch's eyebrows. It wavered, then steadied as Helen launched herself airborne, leaping at her son with the intent to take the bullet for him.
Must get between my boy and that laser.
She slammed into her muscular son, who had multiple inches on her in height. Mitch staggered into Nancy, and all three of them went down in a pile just as a quiet, oh-so-familiar spit sounded beneath the exclamations of surprise from the crowd. The accompanying 'whoosh' of disturbed air as a round flew past—close—made her blood freeze in her veins.
Time resumed its course, and more shocked cries erupted around them.
"Are you okay?" she asked Mitch urgently from a range of about six inches.
...
