The young man elbowed Katherine again, snapping her head to the side. She saw stars and rolled into the still-spinning treadmill as the man scrambled toward the blond woman who had his gun. He was on his knees when the compact, dark-haired woman leaped over two treadmills and jumped on the attacker, forcing him back to the ground with a thud and a solid punch to the jaw.
“Stay down!” She looked to be about a third of the size of the guy, but the woman grabbed his shoulders, forced him to the floor, and yelled into his face. “Calm down! Stay down!”
As if by magic, the man’s body went limp and he relaxed completely.
The blond woman was holding the gun on him, but her hands weren’t even shaking. She glanced at Katherine. “Ma’am, you doing all right?” She spoke with a pronounced Southern accent. “He hit you pretty hard. Think you might be bleeding on your forehead a little.”
The dark-haired woman glanced at the woman with the gun. “You a cop?”
“No.” The blond woman laughed a little. “Just grew up with a lot of good ol’ boys. You doin’ okay?”
“I’m good.” The dark-haired woman didn’t move off the man. “Please tell me someone is calling the police.”
Katherine rolled up to sit and propped herself against the front of a stair-climbing machine. “I’m okay.” She watched their attacker lying completely still under the small woman. “I think I’m okay.”
Almost everyone in the gym had fled and most were milling around outside on State Street. Katherine could see them through the windows.
A man in a bright blue shirt ran over to them. “We called 911.” His muscles bulged from beneath his shirt, and the word Trainer was emblazoned on the front. “What can I do? Do you want me to hold him, Toni? How can I help?”
The blond woman didn’t move an inch, and the dark-haired woman the man had called Toni didn’t budge.
“I think we’ll just stay exactly right where we are until the cops come.” Toni kept her hands pushed into the man’s shoulders, but the young man who’d wrestled so fiercely with Katherine had gone limp. He showed not a hint of resistance.
The trainer looked at the woman with the gun. “Uh… miss?”
“It’s Megan, sweetie. Megan Carpenter. I’m good here,” the blond woman said. “I’m new at the gym, but I’m fine with guns and I can wait with these nice ladies for the cops.” She glanced down. “This is a real fancy extended magazine, young man. I don’t think this model is legal in California.”
The young trainer was running his hands through his curly brown hair. “Oh my God. Holy shit. Patrick and Jan are gonna kill me.”
Katherine cleared her throat. “If you’re talking about the owners, I doubt you’re going to get in trouble. No one could have predicted this.”
Except Katherine had.
She had seen the man pull the gun from his sweatshirt. She’d seen him raise it and shoot people. She’d heard screams and glass shattering.
But it hadn’t happened yet.
Katherine glanced at the clock. It was 4:49. In four minutes, everything about her life had changed.
She looked at the two women, Megan and Toni. All three of them were exchanging nervous glances and trying to pretend not to notice the others’ scrutiny. Katherine had never seen either of the women before that day, but she could read the question on both their faces.
What on earth just happened?
Chapter 2
Baxter gave Katherine his best stern face. “Tea.”
“Coffee.”
“Darling, this is not the time for your typical morning brew. You’ve been through a shocking experience. The last thing you need is caffeine.”
“Tea has caffeine.”
She was being contrary. She knew her husband was right, but it was so rare for Professor Baxter Pang, tenured professor of mathematics and cochair of the department, to be bossy that Katherine was almost enjoying it.
Baxter lectured her in an elegant Hong Kong accent that had remained crisp through decades of living in the United States. “Darjeeling has approximately fifty milligrams of caffeine as opposed to the typical stew-like mixture you make in your french press, which easily contains three times as much.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Tea.”
He would have looked more intimidating if his dark hair weren’t in need of a trim and sticking up at odd angles at the crown.
But the accent… The accent still worked.
“Fine.” She sighed. “Tea.”
“Excellent.”
One of the benefits of being married to the same man for twenty years was that he knew exactly how you took your tea even if it wasn’t your drink of choice. As Baxter fussed over the kettle, Katherine tried to plan her day.
She’d arrived home to find an extremely distracted husband with a mobile phone stuck to his ear. The news of the shooting had been everywhere, even penetrating her husband’s mental bubble.
Every teaching assistant Baxter’d ever had would tell their friends that though Professor Pang was unfailingly polite, he lived in a world of his own making, filled with theoretical mathematics and cross-continental chess games with his younger brother in London. He might smile and nod if you told him something related to current events or pop culture, but he likely had no idea what you were talking about. He enjoyed jogging along the boardwalk near their house and playing racquetball with a few of his colleagues once or twice a week.
It wasn’t that Baxter set out to be uninformed, it was simply that current events were rarely more interesting to him than mathematics.
Katherine said, “I have to go to the police station today.”
He glanced over. “Why? You spoke to the police yesterday.”
“I don’t know how much I told them was very useful. I hardly remember any of it, to be honest. This is the formal statement.”
“Should you go with an attorney? We can call Kimi.”
Kimi Nomura was their family attorney. She helped them write trusts and make wills and occasionally looked at a contract. She’d probably never even been to a police station.
“I don’t think Kimi really deals with criminal stuff, Bax. I’ll be fine.”
“If you say so, darling.”
Katherine tapped her fingers on the table and tried to sift through her thoughts. “Have you heard anything more about the… perpetrator? The man they arrested?”
“No.” He frowned a little. “They made a point of not saying his name on the television, which I thought was odd.”
“I think there’s a theory that much of the motivation for these kinds of mass shootings is notoriety for the perpetrator. If that’s the case, avoiding the man’s name makes sense.”
“It’s an interesting theory.” Baxter poured water over the loose tea leaves in the glass teapot. “Psychology.”
Katherine said it before he could. “Soft science.”
“They’re just not as exact in their research.” He brought a scarred wooden tray to the table in the breakfast nook that looked over the north edge of Moonstone Cove.
Katherine smiled. “Well, people are messy.”
“Hmmm.”