Total Mayhem

by John Gilstrap

Jesus, he’s got a suppressor.

  Where the hell was he?

  Had to be high ground. In Nebraska.

  The water tower!

  Two minutes into the slaughter now, Tom knew where the shooter had to be. It was the right compass point, and it was the right height. The red light that sat atop the bulbous structure had been winking to him all along.

  What was that, an eight hundred-yard shot? Barely even a challenge if the shooter had the right gun and a thimbleful of training.

  Tom had slid his butt into the first cruiser’s driver’s seat before he realized what he intended to do. Really, by process of elimination alone, it wasn’t a hard decision. Staying here was untenable. Running away, knowing what he knew, was a choice he could never live with. So, that meant taking the fight to the shooter.

  He needed a gun. He rolled back out of the cruiser and stooped to the dead officer’s side, forcing himself not to look at the dead man’s eyes. He pulled the cop’s body toward him so he could access the holster on his hip. It was a leather job with a thumb break, and it cradled a midsize Glock. He guessed it to be either a 19 or a 23, and as the weapon slid free from its holster, Tom lifted two more snap closures on the cop’s Sam Browne belt and helped himself to a couple of spare mags. If he’d read his gun-related websites properly, the three magazines gave him something like forty-five rounds to bring to whatever fight lay ahead.

  The cop’s name was Feitner, according to the plate pinned over the right breast pocket.

  Officer Feitner had died with his engine running. Tom slid behind the wheel, dropped the transmission into gear, and started nudging fleeing spectators out of the way with his bumper. The spider-webbed windshield made it nearly impossible to see where he was going, but in times like these, the pedestrians were 60 percent liable for their own safety, and they needed to jump out of the way. He’d made that number up, of course, but so far, he hadn’t run over anything that sounded like a person. He avoided using the horn to keep from drawing attention to himself.

  The clock was ticking.

  The gunman—whoever he was—was going to be less than happy to see the police vehicle he thought he’d killed up and living again. Tom was fully aware that he was personally the most valuable target for the shooter to shoot. He was rolling the dice that the sniper had gotten distracted and moved on to other targets. And what the hell? If he was wrong, he’d probably never know it.

  The Indian Spear municipal water tank sat atop six tall supports, rising from the lot adjacent to the football field. Tonight, it occurred to Tom that it bore a striking resemblance to the Martian creatures from The War of the Worlds, and it posed every bit as terrible a menace. A chain-link fence separated the two properties, and as he closed the distance, he jammed the gas pedal to the floor. If a spectator got in his way now, there’d be another victim to add to the list.

  The speedometer had just crossed fifty mph when the cruiser slammed through the fence. The deceleration forces were more than Tom had anticipated, and when the air bag deployed, it startled the crap out of him.

  The cruiser was done, and fifty yards still separated him from the shooter’s platform. Tom gathered the pistol and spare mags in his right hand, and with his left, pulled the handle for the driver’s door and pushed with his shoulder. The fence had wrapped itself around the cruiser’s body, pushing back against his efforts to force the door open. Every push resulted in a rebound, but after four tries, the opening was big enough to allow him to tumble out onto the twisted tangle of steel mesh.

  He paused on his way out.

  A shotgun stood tall to his right on the bench seat, but it was locked into place, and Tom didn’t know how to unlock it.

  “Way to go,” he grumbled. “Bringing a pistol to a rifle fight.”

  Woulda coulda shoulda.

  From ahead and above, he could hear the outgoing fire now. It wasn’t the kind of booming he expected from a rifle, but rather quiet, percussive snaps, and there was no muzzle flash.

  Suppressor.

  The wrecked chain link felt spongy under his feet as he rolled out of the cruiser’s door, and it clattered loudly as he scrambled on his hands and knees to what used to be the top of the fence and the water tower property beyond. He’d made too much noise and now presented too excellent a target to spend any time dawdling.

  He didn’t know who the hell the shooter was or why he’d decided to murder people, but unless someone stopped him, the murdering would continue. Tom could not let that happen.

  As he sprinted across the grass toward the massive legs of the tower, he realized with a start that the lights here were still on. They were security lights, designed to provide enough illumination to make vandals think twice about graffiti or other forms of mischief. Not bright by any means, but bright enough to reveal a man sprinting across the ground.

  As he ran, Tom focused his attention exclusively on the base of the ladder. He’d done his own mischief on this property back when he was a kid, so he knew the ladder didn’t even reach all the way to the ground. It stopped about ten feet short to keep people in general—and kids in particular—from getting access. He wondered if the town fathers had ever considered the possibility that the tower might become a sniper’s perch when they made the ladder hard to climb.

  Tom wasn’t at all surprised to find a stout hardware-style A-frame ladder at the base of the tower. It stood at the bottom of the access ladder, clearly put there by the shooter. Tom stopped at the A-frame long enough to stuff the Glock trigger-deep into the waistband at the front of his jeans, and then he started to climb.

  Aware that this was the most impulsive, stupidest thing he had ever done, he kept climbing because at this point, he didn’t know what else to do. This attack was still only a couple of minutes old. He’d come this far, and people were still dying. How could he turn back now? Even if he did, how would he ever live with himself?

  “Six tours in Hell,” he mumbled, “all so you could get yourself killed at home.”

  The ladder was a straight shot—no turns or landings—until he got to within twenty feet from the top. There, it ended at a six-foot-square landing from which a caged ladder rose vertically to a three-by-three-foot opened trap door in the expanded metal walkway that surrounded the belly of the water tank. He started the final climb.

  Tom’s plan—if you could even call it that—was to make his way around the circular tank to the eastern side, the side that faced the stadium, and pop the shooter. The scuttle hole in the floor of the walkway lay on the southern side of the tank, so once he was up on the expanded metal, he’d work his way around to the right, and after a quarter of a circle—

  Wait. Where were the gunshots? Since he’d first been able to detect the sound of the suppressed rifle, the pace of fire had been steady. Not hurried, but relentless. Now, he didn’t hear any shooting at all.

  “Oh, shit,” he hissed. He’s done.

  And this ladder was his escape route.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  Tom was ten feet off the landing when he saw the movement through the openings in the expanded metal. Whoever it was, he was moving quickly, anxious to get out of here.

  Should have waited for him on the ground.

  He had exactly one chance. If he could catch the shooter unaware, as he was transitioning from the platform to the ladder, he’d have a shot. It wasn’t much of a chance, but it was a chance, dammit.

  He had only a few seconds. No time to climb back down to the landing, and if he dropped, he’d make too much noise. This, right here, was his Alamo. This was where he was going to have his gunfight, hanging on to the ladder with his left arm while he Matt Dilloned one-handed shots at the figure who appeared in the opening.

  Leaning out from the vertical ladder, Tom drew the Glock from his waistband. He hadn’t brought it up all the way when the silhouette appeared in the opening. The silhouette was no more than an inkblot against the night sky. And the inkblot had a rifle.

  Tom fired without aimi
ng. He couldn’t see his sights in the darkness, anyway. The Glock bucked in his hand twice. Four times. Six. The noise and muzzle flashes were his entire world. Eight. Ten.

  Then, for just half an instant, he felt a heavy impact at the top of his breastbone, followed by a searing heat that consumed everything.

  And then he felt nothing.

  Chapter Two

  The little village of Fisherman’s Cove sat along Virginia’s Northern Neck, a largely ignored east-west peninsula of land that was bordered by the Potomac River on the north and the Rappahannock River on the south. Real estate agents had the audacity to call it a suburb of Washington, DC, but such claims were borderline criminal. It was a two-hour one-way commute on a good day and five or six hours on a bad one. At a time when urban sprawl was consuming Northern Virginia at a rate of thousands of acres per year, Fisherman’s Cove was a throwback to older times. The downtown, such as it was, still thrived with the kind of businesses that catered to local residents and fishermen, and zoning regulators’ ears were well tuned to a populace that had zero interest in malls and big box stores.

  Jonathan Grave had been born in Fisherman’s Cove, and except for his college years and his decades of deployment to most of the world’s shitholes, it was the only home he had ever known. Now that he’d left the Army and its Special Forces in his rearview mirror, it was the home of his future. As far as he was concerned, there was no finer spot on the planet.

  He’d just finished his four-mile run and now stood on the near edge of the town’s marina, drinking in the beauty of the October morning. The sun hadn’t risen more than a hand’s width over the horizon, and it lit the water with a light that made the fog on the surface look alive.

  “By God, I believe you’re breathing hard, Dig,” said a familiar voice from behind.

  Jonathan turned and smiled at Doug Kramer, Fisherman’s Cove’s chief of police, who was approaching up Water Street. Built as if the love child of a bullet and a fireplug, Kramer was one of those guys the charts would say was fat, but it was the kind of fat that would break your fist if you punched it.

  “Next time, I’ll give you a call and we can race,” Jonathan said.

  “Only if it’s to the pasta table,” Kramer said. “Haven’t seen you in a while. Buy you a cup of coffee?” He nodded toward Jimmy’s Tavern, a hundred yards to the east.

  They started walking. “Business good?” Doug asked.

  Jonathan felt his poker face fall into place. “Pretty good. Clients keep calling, and the ones we’ve got keep re-upping. We’ve even hired a couple of new investigators in the last few months.” His answer referred to the official part of his company, Security Solutions, the side that provided private investigation services for some of the world’s most recognizable corporate names. There was another side to the business, though—a covert side—that few people knew about it. Sometimes, Jonathan got a sense that Doug Kramer knew more than he should.

  “How’s your business doing?” Jonathan asked, turning the conversation around.

  “Mine’s always been a growth industry,” Doug replied. “Burglaries are up, and there’s been a spike in assaults.”

  Jonathan recoiled. “Really? This town always seems so bucolic to me.”

  “Well, this part of town is,” Doug said. “I guess it helps to have the police department in the middle of everything on Church Street. But when you get a mile or two out of town, the place gets less romantic. The folks in the country are hurting.”

  This news bothered Jonathan. In the grand scheme, Fisherman’s Cove was more rural than urban, and he’d always admired the ability of its residents to eke out solid livings through their farms and their fishing boats. “Hurting how?” he asked.

  “Hurting like everybody,” Doug said. “You look bothered.”

  “I am bothered. This is my home. Those people, whoever they are, are my neighbors.”

  Kramer threw out a dismissive puff of air through his lips. “Every town has its underbelly, Dig. You can’t give a handout to all of them.” After a beat, he chuckled. “Okay, maybe you can afford to give them all a handout, but it wouldn’t be smart, and they wouldn’t appreciate it.”

  Jonathan Grave was the only billionaire to his knowledge within a hundred miles, give or take. As much as his wealth embarrassed him and as hard as he tried to give it away to charitable causes, there was a practical cap to such things. As it was, he was the primary benefactor for Resurrection House, a school for the children of incarcerated parents, which sat a little farther up Church Street on the plot of land that had served as Jonathan’s childhood home. He’d deeded that, plus the mansion that sat on it, to St. Katherine’s Catholic Church for one dollar, on the condition that the residential school would be founded and maintained in perpetuity.

  As a criminal’s kid himself, he understood how easily the sins of the father and mother can poison the lives of their progeny.

  He struggled to keep his philanthropy private, but secrecy was tough in a small town. Again, it seemed that Kramer knew things that Jonathan would rather he not.

  Kramer continued, “Most of the stuff in the hinterlands is domestic crap. Drunk parents and kids wailing on each other. The fact that the harvests are all done and the cold weather is on the way has ’em laying in more alcohol than usual, I guess. Lots of drugs, too. Opiates, mostly. These aren’t the folks you interact with very often.”

  When they got to Jimmy’s, Kramer pulled the glass door open for Jonathan. Known locally for its fresh seafood and killer barbecue—and a bartender with a heavy hand—it was strictly a bacon-and-eggs place in the morning. Jonathan led the way into the underlit interior and headed straight to the bar, where paper cups were stacked like an inverted Christmas tree next to a stainless-steel urn of coffee. He poured two cups and handed one to the chief.

  “Still take your coffee like candy?” Jonathan teased. He added a little cream and a sugar packet to his own and stepped out of the way.

  Kramer added a glug of cream and four sugars to his brew. “They tell me that real sugar is better for me than the fake stuff,” he said.

  A woman’s voice yelled from beyond the bar, “Help yourself to a table. I’ll be out in two shakes.” That would be Irma, the day manager and only waitress. Aged somewhere between sixty and ninety, she had a voice that made Whoopi Goldberg sound like a soprano and a service ethic that was built around the philosophy that customers should do what they were told.

  They took seats near the window, overlooking the boat slips at the marina.

  “Still hate the water?” Kramer asked.

  “I don’t hate the water,” Jonathan said. “I hate being in or on the water. But I love looking at it.” It had been a signature element of his life since childhood. Since then, he’d logged countless hours afloat, but more times than not, it was in unfriendly places where drowning was the least of his concerns, and probably the preferred way to die. If only to change the subject, he asked, “JoeDog been spending her time with you the last few days?” Joe was the once-stray black Labrador retriever that was exempt from leash laws and slept pretty much wherever she wanted, though Doug’s and Jonathan’s pads seemed to be her favorites.

  “She was there last night, but took off as soon as I opened the door this morning. Maybe she’s got a boyfriend.”

  “Well, hello, handsome,” Irma shouted as she emerged from behind the bar. She wiped her hands on a towel as she approached. Skinny as a pillar, she nonetheless sported a world-class wattle under her neck that filled the void left by her open-collared white-ish blouse. Cigarette smoke clung to her like putrid perfume.

  “Why, Irma,” Doug said. “You have the hots for me.”

  “Not you, flatfoot,” she said. “I mean the sweaty guy sitting across from you. Haven’t seen you in a while, Digger. Been off saving the world or some such?”

  Jesus, did she know, too? “Doing my part, I suppose.”

  “Want the usual, Chief?” she asked Kramer. Apparently, small talk was over.
“Three eggs, sausage patties, side of pancakes?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Lord almighty, Doug,” Jonathan said. “There’s a thing now called nutrition. Heard of it?”

  “Leave him alone,” Irma said. “Meals like that pay for the free coffee. I suppose you’re gonna want some egg white and bean sprout shit, right?”

  Jonathan laughed.

  “I expect a man to eat like a man in my place. I don’t care how broad your shoulders are or how flat your gut is. So, what do you want with your eggs, yolks and all?”

  “I’ll have eggs and toast,” Jonathan said.

  Irma kept looking at him.

  “And bacon?”

  She nodded and turned back toward the kitchen. “Have ’em out in a jiffy.”

  “I only want one egg,” Jonathan called after her.

  “Too bad,” Irma said without turning. “And if you don’t want me to bring you five, you’ll quit pokin’ me.”

  Kramer pulled on his coffee. “I don’t care how tough you think you are. Irma could take you out.”

  “One-punch fight,” Jonathan agreed. “You were talking about our crime wave.”

  Kramer rolled his eyes at the phrase. “I’ll tell you what, though. People are freaking the hell out over these terror attacks. They want to know what I plan on doing to keep it from happening here.”

  Jonathan scoffed. “Just play the odds,” he said.

  “They hit six high school football games simultaneously!”

  “I’m not downplaying the awfulness of it,” Jonathan said. “In fact, I don’t see what could be worse for the national psyche. And all of them in Middle America, where people think they’re safe. But still, the chances of the bad guys picking our town are pretty miniscule.”

  “You know that, and I know that,” Kramer said, “but from the parents’ point of view, Angler High School faces exactly the same risk as any of those other schools that were attacked.”

  “Statistics don’t work like that, Doug. By that logic, everybody has an even chance of getting struck by any unfortunate thing that can happen.”