No Way Back: A Novel by Andrew Gross Page B

wasn’t over.
    Only then did she feel the burning on her face and put her hand there and notice the blood. Her blood.
    “Lauritzia, you’re hurt!” Taylor yelled.
    “We have to go!”
    She pressed their faces close to her as they stepped over the bodies to shield them from the horrible sight.
    “Everyone wait over there,” the policeman instructed them. “EMS is on the way. You too,” he said, guiding Lauritzia.
    But she could not wait.
    “Come!” she told them, lifting them off the ground and carrying them past the swarm of bodies. They were trembling and whimpering—who would not be?—but there was no time to delay. She took a last, quick look at the shooter. She had seen his face a thousand times. The tattoo. Only by the grace of God had they been spared.
    But these others . . . She glanced back sadly at the heavyset woman’s frozen eyes. Dios toma ellos almas.
    God take their souls.
    But by the time the police came she had to be long gone.
    “Children, quick!” she said, dragging them toward the garage. “We must get out of here now!”

CHAPTER TEN
    T hirty minutes later, the tears ran freely in the Bachmans’ kitchen. Tears mixed with horror and elation.
    “You saved their lives,” Roxanne said as she dabbed Lauritzia’s cheek with a cloth and hugged her. Held her as warmly and gratefully as if Lauritzia was one of her own. “There’s nothing we can do that can ever thank you enough.”
    Mr. B rushed home. They told Lauritzia over and over that she was a hero. But she knew she wasn’t a hero. She knew she was anything but that.
    Still shaking and in tears, Jamie and Taylor sat in their parents’ arms and told them how Lauritzia had pulled them to the elevator floor before they even realized what was happening, and how she had covered them with her body as the shooting broke out, shielding them from harm, and then got them out of there.
    “It must have been so horrible,” Roxanne said over and over, tears in her own eyes, unable to let them out of her arms.
    “ It was. It was,” Taylor said, her face buried in the crook of her mother’s arm. “Mommy, I saw this woman and she was—”
    “Don’t talk about it. Don’t talk about it, honey.” Roxanne pressed her daughter to her cheek, stroking her hair.
    Jamie, still white as a ghost, could barely speak at all.
    “Maybe we should contact the police,” Mr. Bachman said. He had rushed home from his law office in Stamford as soon as his wife called. “You got a look at him, didn’t you?”
    “Not a good one,” Lauritzia said. “I was on the ground. No, please, no police. That is not a good idea.”
    “Maybe later, Harold,” Roxanne said. “You can see how they’re all still rattled.”
    “Yes.” Lauritzia nodded. “Maybe later. If they need me.”
    “Anyway, there were witnesses all over,” Roxanne Bachman said. “We don’t have to involve the kids.”
    Mrs. B was tall and pretty, and usually wore her shoulder-length blond hair in a short ponytail. And she was very smart; Lauritzia knew she had once been in the financial investment business. That was how she and Mr. B first met. Now she did a lot of charity work for the school. And did yoga and ran marathons. And was the president of the neighborhood in Old Greenwich, where they lived.
    “It’s just all so horrible.” Roxanne couldn’t stop squeezing her kids.
    “They’re saying it was some kind of drug thing,” Harold said. His prematurely gray hair always gave him an air of importance, and Lauritzia knew he was important; he was a senior partner in a big law firm. “There was no immediate connection to any of the victims, but one of the people who was wounded has a record for selling drugs or something . . .”
    “Sí, it was horrible,” Lauritzia agreed. They would never know how horrible. Yes, those poor people, Lauritzia knew, feeling ashamed.
    “You ought to get that looked at,” Roxanne said of her wound. “I can take you to the emergency