by Matt Lincoln
From that vantage point beneath the desk, I was now parallel to where the guy was now bleeding from his shoulder on the floor, the gun still in his hand.
I could tell by the look in his eyes that he was searching for me, not having seen me yet. I shot him again, square in the chest this time, and the life left his body.
That left only the skinny one to deal with. He was in a virtual standoff with Jimmy now, the two of them each holding their guns up in the air.
“Hands up, weapon down!” I barked, jumping out from under the desk and landing in a standing position on the guy’s other side.
He looked around wildly, from Jimmy to me and back again, a panicked look in his eyes beneath the ski mask.
“Don’t even think about it,” I muttered, seeing that he hadn’t dropped his gun yet.
“I… I…” the guy stammered.
“My friend, you’re going to get yourself shot if you don’t stand down,” I pointed out, glaring at him.
“What’s the alternative?” the guy asked, his voice hard and angry. “Turning myself in and then getting taken out by them for squealing? No, I think I’ll take my chances with you, thanks.”
He raised the gun again, shot Jimmy before the poor kid even had a chance to respond, and ran in the opposite direction.
I shot after him, and I heard him cry out, but he kept on running.
I stopped long enough to make sure that Jimmy was still breathing. He was unconscious but alive, blood pooling on the carpet around his abdomen, where the shot had landed. Then I took off to try to catch up with the goon.
I ran through the web of bookshelves, realizing that the guy could be anywhere in the room by then. I tried to listen for footsteps or anything to indicate there was another person nearby, but my ears were still ringing painfully from all the gunshots, and it was hard to make out any other sounds over that and my pounding heartbeat.
I ran through the bookshelves, weaving around them to see if he was hiding somewhere until I got to the front of the room.
“Ethan!” a voice hissed over all the ringing. “Ethan!”
I whirled around to find Tessa and Martha crouched beneath a front desk by the door.
“What are you doing here?” I started to ask, but Tessa just pointed to my back right.
“Behind you!” she cried, and I whirled around to find the goon moving toward me. He was hobbling on his bad leg, the one I had shot before.
I shot him, and he shot at me, but I ducked down first. My bullet landed in his gut, and I added another one for good measure.
He stumbled forward onto the floor in a pool of his own blood at my feet, limp and lifeless.
20
Ethan
All the guys were dead then, and sirens blazed from the street down below.
“Did you call them?” I asked Tessa, nodding my head in the direction of the flickering police lights coming from outside the window.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “We didn’t have time before that guy showed up.”
She glanced at the dead goon on the floor and looked like she was about to throw up before quickly looking away again.
“Well, there’s no doubt they heard us down below,” I muttered, shaking my head. The whole town would know something was up in short order, and this would be in papers all over the state. I just hoped that it wouldn’t make national news. The last thing MBLIS needed was more attention to deal with right then.
“So loud,” Martha breathed, holding her hands over her ears.
“Yeah, it takes some getting used to,” I chuckled, thinking that even I wasn’t used to shots ringing out in such close quarters. “I think I should go check on the kid. If you guys could go down and talk to the police, let them know that the shooters are dead, that would be helpful.”
Tessa nodded and urged Martha up to her feet gently. Then the two of them disappeared back into the hallway as I jogged back through the labyrinth of bookshelves to find Jimmy, the security guard.
He was lying there holding his bleeding stomach when I found him, but I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that he was still conscious.
He jumped when he saw me, as if he was half expecting that goon to show back up and shoot him again. But once he realized that it was me, he relaxed again, his lanky shoulders slumping back down.
“Hey, kid, how are you doing?” I asked, leaning down next to him and taking a closer look at his stomach. It was a nasty wound, but he was conscious, which meant that the bullet likely hadn’t hit any major arteries or organs.
“I’ve been better,” he chuckled weakly.
“You did good,” I said, clapping him on the shoulder and squeezing tightly. “Really good. How did you know that we were in trouble? Did you see those guys come up here?”
“I saw them on the security cameras,” he muttered, running a bloody hand through his sandy hair and leaving some red streaks behind without realizing it.
“Security cameras?” I repeated. Martha hadn’t mentioned anything about that.
“Yeah, we don’t really look at them much,” Jimmy admitted sheepishly. “Ever, really, if I’m honest. But after talking to you, I thought I might as well check. See if there was anything in the history.”
“Where are these cameras?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at this. It would be worth taking a look through them to see how long and how many times these guys or others like them had snuck into the nautical museum over the past few months.
“There aren’t very many of them,” the kid sighed. “Just one each on the front and back doors and one on the ground floor lobby, and a third in the main area up here.”
He gestured out toward the submarine-like lobby area on the second floor to illustrate.
“How far back did you look?” I asked him.
“I was going to look back to last night since you asked us about that,” Jimmy said with a small smile. “But before I had a chance, I saw them coming inside. Then I grabbed the gun and came up here.”
“Alright, Jimmy,” I said, squeezing his shoulder again. “Well, you did good. Mind if I take a look at those security cameras for you later?”
“Sure thing,” he said, reaching into his pocket with a sharp wince and handing me his ID card. “This should open it for you. I have a feeling I’m not gonna be back for a while.”
“You could say that,” I said, glancing down at his wound again. It didn’t seem to be bleeding much now, which was good, but the sooner the police and any medical personnel got up here, the better.
As if on cue, I heard a mass of footsteps coming toward us through the sea of bookshelves, and Tessa reappeared, closely followed by several police officers and two paramedics with a gurney. Martha trailed the group, looking like she was hoping she would wake up from this nightmare any minute now and find her life back to normal.
“Here, here they are,” Tessa said breathlessly, pointing at Jimmy and me.
“We heard you took a real chance there, son,” an older police officer with a sergeant’s badge told the young security guard, stopping in front of us and arching an eyebrow down at him.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Jimmy said, averting his eyes from the older man’s.
“You should consider a career in law enforcement,” the man laughed, his low voice rumbling and echoing throughout the library pleasantly.
Jimmy, surprised, looked back up at the officer and his face broke out into a wide smile.
“I… I’d like that,” he stammered, and the man bent down and patted him on the shoulder.
“Apply to the academy, and say Sergeant Wallace sent you,” he instructed. “You’ll do fine.”
“I will,” Jimmy grinned, wincing again at the pain, and the paramedics forced their way forward through all the officers and Tessa.
“Come on, we’ve got to get him to the ambulance,” one of them, a woman who looked to be in her early thirties, said quickly.
“Is anyone else alive?” the other paramedic, a younger man, asked, lookin
g around uncertainly at the bodies of the goons who had attacked us.
“No, all three of them are dead,” I said, rising from where I was crouched next to Jimmy, smoothing out my pants, and holding my hand out to Sergeant Wallace. “Agent Ethan Marston with MBLIS, sir. Pleased to meet you, though I wish it were under different circumstances.”
“Ah, yeah, I talked to your boss earlier,” Wallace said, taking my hand and shaking it heartily. “She had good things to say about you.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” I said dryly, thinking that Diane might just about kill me for getting myself wrapped up in all this mess just when the hunt for the Hollands was heating up.
“She said trouble has a way of following you everywhere,” the sergeant said with a dark laugh, looking down at the bodies of the two goons. “She wasn’t kidding, was she?”
“No,” I sighed, running a hand through my hair wearily. “No, she wasn’t.”
“Why don’t my guys do a forensic run, and you and I can have a chat?” the man suggested, waving a few geeky looking guys in forensics gear who I hadn’t noticed before hiding at the back of the group forward. They hesitated but then busily got to work excavating the crime scene.
“Sure thing,” I said, nodding curtly to him. “Can you make sure to send whatever they find to our lab techs at MBLIS in Miami? Diane should be able to send you their info if you’re still in touch with her.”
“Of course,” Wallace said with a nod in my direction. Then, to the forensics techs, “Now’s your time to shine, boys. The big guns are going to be inspecting your work.”
He said it jovially, but the guys looked nervous, and one of them even stopped what he was doing to shoot us a borderline terrified look.
“It’s okay,” I assured them with a wave of my hand. “Bonnie and Clyde—that’s what we call our lab techs—they’re nice people. You’ll like working with them.”
“You call your lab techs Bonnie and Clyde?” the forensics guy nearest to me muttered. “That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.”
“I guess not,” I chuckled, and he jumped when he realized that I had heard him. “But the nicknames are tongue-in-cheek, I promise.”
“Come on,” Wallace said, motioning for me to follow him. “Martha here said we could use her office.”
“Thanks, Martha,” I said, nodding to the old woman as I passed her. She still looked like she wanted to wilt into one of the bookshelves.
“I’ll stay here with her, watch over what’s going on here, if you don’t need me,” Tessa suggested, giving Martha a nervous look.
“That’s probably for the best, thanks,” I said, nodding to her in thanks as I followed Wallace and a couple of the officers out into the main library area.
It’s not that I didn’t want Tessa with me. I did. It was more that I was afraid that Martha wasn’t in the best place to run this museum on her own, and someone needed to do it. No doubt the visitors were all downstairs terrified at what was going on and thinking they might be shot any minute now. Someone was going to need to reassure them, and by extension the whole town, that everything was okay. By the look of her, Martha was in no state to do that.
Out in the submarine area, everyone had been evacuated. There wasn’t a soul in sight, except for myself, Wallace, and the officers. I wasn’t sure if the tourists were still in the building or not, but I hoped that that poor intern Pierce wasn’t too overwhelmed by all this. I wouldn’t be surprised if he quit after this. It was probably more than he signed up for, just for a bit of college credit.
We made our way back to Martha’s office, and Sergeant Wallace settled in behind her desk while the officers and I sat in the chair across from it. No one bothered to turn on the lights, which Martha had liked to keep off so her stalkers wouldn’t know she was there.
“So,” Wallace said, settling his hands on his stomach, which poked out over his belt in his uniform. “Why don’t you tell me what you’re doing here, Agent Marston? And Officers Bauer and Collins, of course.”
I nodded hello to the other officers and then launched into the story of what had brought me to Newport News and the nautical museum.
I gave him the short version, which turned out not to be all that short after all, but the alternative was practically reading him a novel. I left out anything sensitive about MBLIS and our cases, especially the Hollands, but I gave him enough to know that it was important that I wrapped things up here as quickly as possible and got myself back to Miami to help my colleagues.
“Yeah, I got the sense that there was something going on there,” the man huffed when I got to that part. “They sounded busy.”
“You could say that,” I said, running an anxious hand through my hair again. I was itching to get back in touch with Diane or Holm and see if they’d figured anything out about their own run-in with some goon, no doubt one of the Hollands’ in their case.
“Look, though, you’re not gonna run out on us while some nutbag is running loose in our town, are you?” Wallace asked, giving me a stern look.
“No, of course not,” I assured him, leaning forward for emphasis. “I’ve been cleared to see this thing through, no matter how long it takes. Though the quicker, the better, you’ll understand. There are always more cases to juggle.”
“Of course,” Wallace said, nodding to me.
“So you’re a sergeant?” I asked, wondering where the chief of police was and why he wasn’t here dealing with this personally.
Both of the officers snickered, and Wallace rolled his eyes.
“Yeah, I know, I’m not technically the big guy,” he said, clearly following my meaning. “But Chief Resnick’s old and getting real close to retirement. He doesn’t have much time for the field anymore. And I’ll be taking over when he’s finally gone. You know how it is. Sometimes you really have to tear the uniform off of ‘em.”
“Yeah,” I said, chuckling under my breath. “I know how it is.”
I certainly hoped that no one would be saying that about me when I got older. I thought that maybe Holm had a point about retirement before it got that far, but I shook my head and pushed the thought away. No way was I going to retire any time soon, even if that meant they had to force me out like this poor chief.
“So what can we do to help?” one of the officers, Collins, I think, asked me.
“Well, I know there’s some security footage that Jimmy—that’s the security guard’s name—told me about,” I offered. “If some of your guys could go through it, look for anything out of the ordinary, that would be helpful.”
“Of course,” Wallace said, waving in the officers’ direction. “You can head that up, can’t you, Bauer?”
“Sure thing, boss,” the second officer said, nodding to his boss before turning his attention to me. “Is there anything, in particular, I should be looking for?”
“Well, if you could check the footage from last night, say around nine or ten PM, that would be great,” I said almost sheepishly. “Tessa and I were here last night, and… well, let’s just say I had a hunch that we weren’t as alone as we thought we were.”
“Understood,” Bauer said with another nod. “How far back should we look in the footage?”
“I’d say about five months,” I said, thinking this through in my head. “Henry left about four months ago, and Martha says the threats started about three months ago. So five should give us a decent cushion to make sure we’re catching the whole time frame involved.”
Bauer took a deep breath and then let it out slowly.
“I guess I’d better get started, then,” he said, clearly realizing that he had a late-night ahead of him, at the very least. “And maybe stop for some coffee on the way.”
“There’s a log of which employees use their ID cards to open which doors and when,” I added quickly. “The same one we used to discover that we weren’t alone in the library. Looking at that should help you narrow down important days and times to look at, I think. We’re pretty sure they’ve been
using Henry’s ID card.”
“That’ll be a place to start, then,” Wallace said, nodding to Bauer. “I’ll allot you some officers to help. The more eyes on the thing, the more likely you’ll be to catch something.”
“I appreciate it,” Bauer said, looking more than a little relieved that he wouldn’t be taking this project on alone.
“I’m afraid for the first month or so, there won’t be much to go off of with the log,” I pointed out. “Since Henry was still here and they couldn’t have used his ID card, most likely. But start with last night and work your way backward. That way, we catch the most recent stuff first, if there’s anything to be found.”
“Understood,” Bauer said, swallowing hard and looking just a bit green.
“You up for this?” I asked him, and he nodded definitively.
“We’re a small operation, Agent Marston, but we know what we’re doing,” Sergeant Wallace assured me. “We don’t get a lot of crime here, and certainly haven’t gotten anything of this nature in a good long time, if that, but we’re well trained and ready to help. Just say the word.”
“I appreciate that,” I said, smiling at each of the policemen in turn. “And I’m sorry that this whole mess has landed in your lap. I’ll do my best to take care of it on my end, so you don’t have much to worry about.”
“Oh, we’ll have enough to worry about, so don’t you mind that,” Wallace chuckled, shaking his head. “Nobody in this town’s going to want to leave their homes for weeks after this mess. A shooting! In the museum, right downtown! We’ll have a lot of mopping up to do with all this and getting the public to trust us again.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said honestly, though this lined up with my impression of the town. It didn’t seem like a lot happened there, crime wise, though it wasn’t exactly a sleepy little place.
“Tourism will take a hit,” Collins muttered. “That’s bad news for all of us around here. The entire economy’s based on that.”
“Now, Collins, don’t you worry Agent Marston about that,” Wallace said, giving the officer a stern look. “His job isn’t to keep our economy going. It’s to keep our city safe from whoever these people are.”