As the professor launched into another piece of science artwork that Liam had to wait to see where this was going before he could try to replicate it on his own page, he saw a face in the window of the door into the classroom. Just a glimpse at first like someone passing by. He was pretty sure he saw a scar, and it made him stare longer at the door’s window rather than at the mildly suggestive drawing on the chalkboard of what he now recognized as another type of fern leaf.
Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe he was seeing only what he expected to see after thinking that scar face was following him earlier. Maybe he simply underestimated how much it aroused his unease again from the connection to two nights ago and witnessing a man’s death. Because, deep down, he knew he should feel guilty for going blissfully about his day so soon after seeing a horrific incident like that.
He turned his attention back to the front of the classroom and what appeared to be the drawing for some kind of biological cell or something.
Again, the same face. This time, when Liam looked to the door, he locked eyes with the man staring back at him. The scar was unmistakable. It wasn’t any sort of lustful expression. It was a chilling expression of deadly seriousness.
Scar face didn’t move. He stayed outside the door, staring at Liam. No matter how much Liam tried to turn his attention back to the front of the classroom, he couldn’t focus with that guy staring at him. Liam turned back to him again, and he gave a questioning shrug to the guy. But scar face didn’t return any sort of response. He simply kept staring until finally he lifted a phone to his ear and took a phone call. Only then did he turn away.
What was going on? Did he suddenly have a stalker?
The guy moved around as he spoke on the phone, but every so often, scar face looked back into the room directly at Liam. He unquestionably had eyes for Liam.
And Liam had enough. When the guy was on a pacing round, he closed his text book and threw it into his bag, and he stood up to leave. He hurried as he excused himself down the aisle and forcing students to move their legs. He wanted to get out of sight before scar face showed his ugly scar in the window again.
He had two options. It was an auditorium classroom with entrances at both the front of the class and two fire doors at the back, which led out onto a floor one up from where scar face was standing outside, clearly now waiting for him to come out.
Maybe the guy was a cop and that’s why he was so weirded out. A cop who wanted to talk to him about the homeless guy again. That was logical. Logical enough that he almost turned around and went out the front to, if nothing else, get to the bottom of it for good. He had nothing to hide.
But, if it was the cops, why didn’t the guy talk to him on the street? No, there was something weird. His gut screamed with it, a warning that he recognized from one other time in his life. Something bad was about to happen. He took the back exit into an empty hallway.
Outside the classroom, one floor up from scar face, Liam turned in the direction of the stairwell. He rounded the corner. The stairs were at the end of the hallway, but in between, the hallway was dim. There were no windows in this section of the building, and all the classroom doors were closed. He walked past one of them, and he saw a professor standing in front, giving a lecture to students. The next he passed, the classroom was dark and empty. And so was the next.
It probably wasn’t odd. Probably. This early in the day, it’s likely that not every classroom was filled.
The air became still, heavy and thick as the light seemed to suck out of the hallway. A thin sheen of sweat broke out on his forehead, and the skin of Liam’s arms tingled into gooseflesh. He was being watched. He walked faster. At any moment, he expected a face to appear in one of the empty classroom windows.
This was stupid. Liam took a deep breath as he made his way toward the stairwell. When he drew closer to the heavy fire door, he glanced behind him and was relieved when he saw nobody there. See? Maybe it was just all in his head.
He put his hand on the steel push bar of the door, and he shoved it open. A force like a punch hit his chest and shoved him across the hall to hit the brick across from the stairwell door.
The wind knocked out of him when he hit the wall, and he fell forward onto his knees, trying to suck air back into his lungs. His backpack fell from his shoulder, and the contents scattered. The stone skittered out onto the floor. The stone was the first thing he grabbed off the floor even as he gasped for air.
Shoes moved into his field of view, and he followed the legs of their owner up to see scar face glaring down at him.
“Well, well,” scar face said. “You’re not so hard to see after all. You’ve given some very close associates of mine a real bugger of a time trying to find you.”
Liam scrambled back, but he could only go so far until his back slammed again into the wall.
Scar face only grinned. “Sit still, Mr. Coyle. This is only going to hurt you more than it hurts me,” he said.
“Coyle?” Liam stared up at the guy. “This is a mistake. My last name isn’t Coyle.”
Scar face paused long enough that Liam thought he might turn around and leave him alone. “That’s right. They call you Yates now.”
Liam forced himself to stand. “Who are you? How do you know my name?”
“I’m a man about to get paid.” He lifted his hand up, and a blue flame moved between his fingers.
As scar face reached forward, Liam gripped the stone tight in the palm of his hand. For a split second, it was as if Liam watched this whole thing from someplace else, an observer sitting in a room. He thrust his hand out, and a swirl of light coalesced around his fist that reached out six feet in front of him to slam into scar face’s chest.
The expression on the man’s face was one of surprise. The blue flame at his fingertips died out, and he looked down at his chest. It was then that Liam realized that, somehow, the light had plunged into the man’s chest like a spear. A perfectly round hole pumped blood down onto man’s stomach in keeping with the beating of his heart. The blood splattered onto the floor.
The man fell to his knees, the pool of blood spreading around his body.
Liam stood against the wall, staring at the dead man. There was no doubt that he was dead. He didn’t move. He was face down on the floor, his eyes open and unblinking. A live person didn’t lay like that.
He turned his hand over to look at the stone in his palm. The stone, as crazy as it sounded, had something to do with it.
The lights returned to normal. When it did, Liam knew for certain the man was dead.
A door opened down the hallway. Without thinking, Liam moved. He grabbed his backpack and shoved whatever was within reach back into it, along with the stone, then he bolted for the stairwell door. He took the stairs two, three at a time until he reached the first floor. Just as he put his hands on the door leading out, he heard someone scream from the floor above.
Outside finally, Liam walked fast across the quad with his head down. Everyone he passed, he ignored. In the distance, he heard police sirens. It was too soon, wasn’t it? Would the police be on their way already?
His stomach churned, and he thought he was going to be sick. He even stopped at a cement trash can set up in the middle of the quad next to a bench, because he thought he might puke. He stood with his hands braced on either side of the trash can, hunkered over, waiting.
On his hand, he saw a spot of blood.
Quickly, he wiped at it with the heel of his other hand and it smeared away in a rust-red streak. Then he saw another spot on his shirt. Several red dots in a random pattern like a macabre field of stars.
Liam was unable to get the air into his lungs quick enough, and he felt dizzy. He tried to cover his shirt, but there was no way. And it was on his arms too. He stepped off the cement sidewalk into the grass and stopped next to a tree where he dropped to his knees. He still felt out in the open. Exposed. A blond girl walked by and looked in his direction, and he turned to sit down in the grass and dirt w
ith his back to the tree trunk.
Think!
He forced himself to take deep, even breaths just like they taught him in therapy. But windows faced out from the classrooms nearby, and he imagined a hundred faces peering out at him.
That wasn’t helping.
Breathe. Deep breath in for a count of four, long exhale for another count of four. He did this again and again until he felt his heart rate slow to something like normal.
His mind returned to the sight of blood—and the other time he’d seen that much blood spilling onto a floor.
But he couldn’t dwell on what just happened. He needed to figure out what to do now because of it.
He needed to get ahold of himself. A thousand thoughts at once.
He needed a bathroom, to clean the blood off himself if nothing else.
Liam rose to his feet, and turned his back to lean against the tree again as a group of students passed him by. He pulled out his cell phone and pretended to be listening. It took effort to stop his hands from shaking. When they moved along, he turned out onto the path again.
Straight ahead was the library, and he made for it as quick as he could, his backpack slung over one shoulder and his arms crossed in front of his chest. Once inside, he went into the bathroom.
There was someone at the sink, washing his hands, and he glanced up at Liam when he walked in. Liam felt like the guy was watching him, so he turned and went into the first empty stall and locked the door.
In the small space of the stall, he stood and covered his hands over his face, and he stood that way for a long moment until he heard the guy leave the bathroom. Then he listened for the sound of anyone else. When he heard no one else, he walked out of the stall and stood in front of the mirror.
In a spot on the shoulder of his Oxford shirt, he saw another spot of blood. A larger splotch was on the hem where it caught there and continued onto his blue jeans.
Then he looked at his face.
He had blood spatter there too. Quickly, he turned on the water and splashed it over his face, and he gave his face a vigorous scrub with water almost too hot. But he didn’t care. He had to get this guy’s blood off his face.
The guy that he killed.
Oh God, he was going to be sick. He rushed back over to the stall and hung over the toilet seat, and all the coffee he drank earlier spilled out of his guts and turned the clean toilet water a mucousy brown that still smelled, in some strange way, like a highly acidic coffee. His backpack slumped to the floor, and Liam let it fall. Normally, it would disgust him, his bag on a bathroom floor, but germs picked up in a bathroom were the least of his worries.
A toilet flushed in the restroom. “You all right in there?” The sound of some guy’s voice caused Liam to freeze.
Liam reached back and closed the stall door and locked it. “I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. I’m sure.” Liam still sat over the toilet with his elbows resting on the seat, his forehead pressed into the palm of one hand. “Bad eggs,” Liam said.
“Okay.” The guy didn’t sound convinced, but he didn’t press on.
When Liam was sure he wasn’t going to throw up any more, he flushed the toilet and turned to sit on the toilet seat. There, he waited until he heard the other guy in the bathroom finish up washing his hands—God, did this guy ever do the twenty-second lather up—and then he seemed to take forever to dry his hands under the air dryer. After he heard the door open and the guy walk out, Liam remained where he was for a few minutes longer in case someone else was hiding out in a stall or they came in.
What if that guy told somebody? The cops would be looking for him. Someone found the body upstairs, and Liam was sure he’d seen cameras in the hallways of the classroom buildings. What place didn’t have cameras these days? He had to assume that the cops would be looking for him.
Should he call the police himself?
Fuck no! Would they believe him? He didn’t even believe what happened, and he was there.
He needed to get to his dorm. If he got to his room, then things might be okay.
Even as he stood still in the stall of the men’s restroom, he had the sense that nothing was going to be all right from that point on. He’d killed a man.
But scar face was going to kill him, right? That made it self-defense. That made it somehow all right.
Didn’t it?
Liam finally walked out of the bathroom stall, and he checked himself in the mirror one more time for any other spots of blood. When he was sure there were none, except for those still soaked and stained into his shirt—there was nothing he could do about those without making it worse—he hefted his bag back over his shoulder and walked out of the bathroom.
Immediately, he went back outside, trying to avoid any kind of direct contact with other people. At least, he didn’t want to give them enough time to look at him long enough to figure out that the dark-red spots on his clothes were blood, and he used his backpack slung around on his shoulder so that it covered the worst-stained parts of his clothing. Even so, he couldn’t help but feel like the red stains were a beacon to everyone else and that those cursory glances he witnessed from others meant they knew his whole history and everything that happened to him in the past half hour.
But once outside and walking briskly in the direction of his dorm, he wondered if there were more—other people like scar face. He reached into his backpack and palmed the stone again, and he eyed everyone he passed with a sideways glance of suspicion. Nobody stared at him like scar face had earlier that morning. But maybe whoever else was following him was better at hiding it than scar face.
Scar face said he was going to get paid. That meant someone was actually paying to have him killed. But who?
More importantly, why?
And could the stone even protect him again if the need arose? It worked once before, so why couldn’t it work again?
Unless it was a one-time charge kind of thing. Could it even save him a second time?
He pondered so many questions like he thought he could figure out the answers. But there was no figuring out these questions. All of this was new to him, and if he hadn’t seen it happen for himself, he never would have believed it could happen. And even if there was a second time, who’s to say he would be so lucky as before as to have someone after him who was clearly inept at taking out a guy minding his own business in a college class. The next time might be more covert.
Other pressing matters came to light as Liam walked hurriedly in the direction of his dorms. The police sirens grew louder, seemingly coming from all directions. Clearly they were headed toward DePaul’s campus.
He had to cut through an alleyway next to his dorm as cop cars flashed their lights at an intersection. They were putting the area on lockdown. It was clear they thought there was an active situation still playing out on DePaul’s once-tranquil campus. Even so, Liam managed to walk back to his dorm room without incident. That gave him some small sense of comfort as he unlocked his door and went inside.
Chicago, IL - Gold Coast
At the greasy spoon where Patrick ate his breakfast, a television blared in one corner. He wasn’t paying much attention to it, instead focusing on his phone. The video from the previous night, the release of his SEAL teammate Hollis. He played it over and over, and he was probably on his hundredth viewing of the short video. As he forked together hash browns and eggs, he sat with the phone’s screen inches away from his face to focus intently on a different section of the video.
He worked with the assumption that he would be able to pick up on something. These were highly trained officers in the military. Navy SEALs, the soldiers responsible for taking down high-value targets throughout the world. He had no doubt they each were well aware there was a camera. They had to know they were being watched by someone. Surely one of them would offer some sort of clue, something that Patrick could pick up on and tell somebody with the ability to free them.
But Patrick tossed
the smartphone onto the table. There was nothing. Even their surroundings were nondescript. The walls looked like typical mud brick, the type found in a majority of Afghan housing. And the men, his team members, except for Hollis as he was being released made no other movement. They were perfectly still to the point that it reminded him a little too much of how he felt when the woman and the first man he met in the diner worked their magic on him. Were they suffering the way he did when he was frozen? Even that short amount of time was torture. If they were being held in the same way, their captors didn’t need to enact any other atrocities upon them. Being barely able to breathe was agony enough.
It pissed him off even more that he was unable to rely on his own skill to find them. Not being able to access his talent for finding people to help his team was like losing his thumb on one hand.
Like hell Cyril and Thaddeus weren’t involved in their kidnapping. More and more of the pieces were falling into place that pointed clearly to those two as the cause for all of this. When he found out that they were involved—and who, exactly, they were—he had every intention of seeing their guts splayed out all over some torture room floor, preferably one of the black sites that the agency was so good at creating plausible deniability over.
The waitress came up to him with a pot of coffee and asked if he wanted a refill. He nodded and moved his cup closer to her, and as he did, he turned his attention to the television screen hanging on one wall.
Murder on DePaul’s campus. The headline took up the bottom part of the screen. The news reporter holding a microphone said that DePaul University’s campus was on lockdown after what police were calling an active and developing situation that left one man dead, the identity unconfirmed. An overview of the scene from a helicopter. If he listened, he could hear the sound of the helicopter overhead not far from the diner where he sat.
Murder. Was it Liam? Is that how this all ended? Panic shot through him. Had he just gotten Liam killed?
The Stone (Lockstone Book 1) Page 15