by Gayle Wilson
She just wanted to get away. Away from Steven. Away from the blood that continued to spill out onto the white tiles.
She’d made it up into a crouch before she remembered Jean and the bomb. She turned her head, trying to locate the girl.
Jean was standing slightly behind them. Her mouth had opened, her widened eyes fastened on the dying boy. The block of explosives was still cradled in her hands, but so far she hadn’t attempted to pull wires or turn switches or to do whatever she had to do to set the thing off.
Lindsey’s head continued to turn, trying to find the person who’d fired the shot that felled Steven. Jace stood at the foot of the stairs leading to the second floor. His knees were bent, both arms extended in front of him, hands wrapped around the butt of a pistol.
“She has a bomb,” Lindsey screamed.
As the words echoed through the empty lobby, she realized her warning had brought the girl out of her trance. Then, almost simultaneously, she realized there was no way in hell Jace could reach Jean in time to stop her from setting it off.
Instinctively, she sprang to her feet, lunging at the girl. Jean reacted by backing away, but she still made no effort to set off the explosives.
Emboldened by that and by the adrenaline flooding her system, Lindsey grabbed both sides of the package to pull it to her. Finally understanding what she intended, Jean tried to retain her hold, but in that fraction of a second surprise had bought her, Lindsey was able to wrest the thing away.
She brought it around with her as she turned toward Jace. He had managed to close perhaps half the distance between them, coming at a dead run. Behind him Rick Carlisle brought up his weapon to take aim at the girl by her side.
For Lindsey, the realization that she might be holding a bomb was beginning to sink in. All she wanted to do now was get rid of it. To have someone who knew what they were doing take it out of her hands and dispose of it. If that someone were Jace—
She caught movement in her field of peripheral vision and turned her head in time to see Jean start toward her. “Do it, and I’ll tell him to shoot you, too.”
“Don’t.” Jace’s shout came almost on top of her threat. “Step back. Now.”
He’d slowed enough to bring his weapon up again. Jean’s face crumpled, anger replaced by fear and then surrender. And just as she always had, she did as she was told. She took a step back as Jace continued to advance.
That threat eliminated, Lindsey once more turned imploringly to him, holding out explosive. “Is this real?”
“Just stay calm.” He slowed, almost to her.
“Is it real, damn it? Just tell me.”
“It may be. It looks like C4.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Plastic explosive. Something the army uses because it’s relatively stable.”
Stable sounded comforting. If it was true. “How stable?”
“It’s probably not going to explode just from holding it.”
Not going to explode…Probably… Whatever comfort she’d taken from the first was destroyed by the delayed import of the other. “What do I do with it, Jace?”
“You give it to me.”
It was what she thought she wanted. To have someone who knew what he was doing take this thing out of her hands. And now Jace was telling her he was about to do exactly that.
“What are you going to do with it?” She wanted to give it to him—God knew how much—but there was something about this she didn’t like. Something she didn’t trust.
Jace was no more a bomb expert than she was. He obviously knew more than she did about explosives—anybody did—but disposing of bombs wasn’t his job, any more than it was hers.
He’s a cop. It’s his job. Whatever this is, it’s his job. Just give the thing to him.
“I’m going to dispose of it.” His voice was too calm.
“Do you know how?”
“Do you?”
She shook her head. Her hands had started to tremble both from fear and the overload of adrenaline. First that had made her brave. Now it was making her sick.
“Then give it to me.”
He put his gun back into the holster under his suit coat. He took a step toward her, holding out both hands, palms up, perhaps six inches apart. They looked strong. Capable of anything. And rock steady.
And all she had to do was to place the explosive on top of them, then step back, and let Jace take care of all this. Let him take care of her. She lifted her eyes to his. They, too, seemed steady. Reassuring.
She took a breath before she moved her hands, raising them so that they were only a couple of inches above his, still outstretched before her. Then she began to lower the block of plastic explosive, the trembling of her hands becoming more acute the closer she came to putting it on his palms.
Suddenly the wail of multiple sirens, all of them seeming to converge on the school, made her freeze. With the cacophony, they both turned to look out through the glass doors of the main entrance. She watched, her hands still hovering above Jace’s, as a half dozen county vehicles roared into the parking lot.
Taking advantage of the distraction, Jean bolted toward the commons. Without thinking about what she held in her hands, Lindsey turned, her eyes following the running girl.
“Stop her,” Jace shouted.
Surprised, Lindsey turned to look at him. Rick, she realized. He’d been talking to Rick, who still stood, arms extended, tracking the progress of the girl with his weapon.
“She can warn them,” Jace said. “Shoot her.” And then in almost the same breath, he said again, his voice low and calm, “Put it down, Linds.”
Behind her she could hear Jean’s sneakers slapping against the tile. She was probably across the commons by now. Going to warn whoever had fired the shots they’d heard upstairs?
“Put it down,” Jace urged again.
She expelled the breath she hadn’t known she was holding and placed the explosive on his palms.
“Now let it go and step back. Then run to Rick and stay there.” He raised his voice, his eyes holding hers, “Rick?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell them I’m bringing this outside. I’m going to walk it to the middle of the parking lot and put it down. I don’t want anybody to approach me. Tell them that after I come back to the sidewalk, they should cordon off the lot and get somebody out here who can disarm it.”
“You got it.”
“Release it, Lindsey, and step away,” Jace said again.
“Don’t let anything happen to you.”
“I’m not planning on it. You tired of staying with your folks yet?”
She nodded, her throat thick with emotion.
“Good. Now turn this loose and go to Rick.”
“Jace—”
“I can’t get it out of the building until you move out of the way. We need to do that, and then we need to find out what they’re doing in the lunchroom. They’ve probably got students in there, Lindsey. Maybe a lot of them.”
She nodded, moving her hands away from the sides of the homemade bomb. It ought to have been a relief to give it over to Jace, but it felt instead as if she were abandoning him. Choosing the coward’s way out.
“Now go,” he ordered.
“I love you.” She hadn’t meant to say that. Hadn’t been aware she was thinking it before the words were between them.
Not that it wasn’t true. She just didn’t know whether saying that to him now was a kindness or one more burden to be added to those the situation had imposed on him.
For a long heartbeat Jace didn’t say anything. In the now absolute silence, she could hear Rick conveying the instructions he’d been given via his radio to the deputies outside.
Finally Jace nodded. “Go on.”
This time, having nothing else to offer him, she obeyed. Only when she was enclosed tightly by Rick’s left arm, which had opened to welcome her as she’d approached, did she look back.
Jace was halfway to the m
ain entrance, the explosive carefully carried on his outstretched hands. Before he reached the row of glass doors, one of the deputies stepped up to open the central one, moving to one side as Jace came through.
Suddenly Rick released her, shoving her hard to the side. The blow was powerful enough that she fell against the wall. Shocked, she turned to see Rick bringing his weapon up again to focus on something beyond the opening that led to the commons.
Still crouching beside the wall that had broken her fall, her gaze shifted to find whatever he was targeting. A figure ran toward them from the open lunchroom door. Her identification of Justin Carr was instantaneous.
In his hands was what appeared to be a rifle. She had time for only those two thoughts before the weapon he carried began to spray bullets toward the place where she and Jace had been standing only seconds before.
Rick hadn’t moved, other than to return fire. The sound of the exchange echoed through the lobby. The intermittent bursts from Justin’s weapon. The heavier bang, bang, bang of Rick’s gun as he methodically squeezed off round after round.
Bullets struck plaster and tile, shattering both and sending debris raining down. Instinctively Lindsey tried to protect her eyes and face, shielding them by putting her arms over her head.
There was literally nowhere to go. No cover she could reach without exposing herself. Hunched against the wall, she waited for an opportunity to get out of the line of fire.
Then the deputy’s hands flew out to his sides. Without any attempt to break his fall, his body slammed backwards, his head striking the floor hard enough to bounce.
She turned away from the relative safety of the wall and started to crawl toward Rick. Bullets swept the tile a few feet in front of her, so close that she felt bits of it sting her legs. They drove her back to the wall, but as she had realized before, there was literally nowhere to go.
Justin was still advancing, but he was no longer concentrating on the deputy. And no longer firing, since it must be clear by now that she was unarmed. He held the weapon nonchalantly. Confident of his control.
“Don’t do this, Justin. Don’t make it worse.”
She hated the pleading note in her voice. Hated that she’d been so wrong about him. Hated that she’d been lied to and lied to and had bought into all of them.
“Act Three. Like in Shakespeare. Who do you think will be left alive, Ms. Sloan? Who’s the ranking character? Who’s going to be around to restore order when this is over? You?”
“This isn’t a play.”
“It’s all a play, Ms. Sloan. You know that. The old king is dead. Long live the king.”
Some infinitesimal shift in the posture of his body warned her he was about to apply the pressure needed to send another burst of bullets from the muzzle of the powerful weapon he’d used to shoot Rick. And this time she would be the target.
Her eyes left his, looking beyond his thin body, now silhouetted against the wall of glass at the front of the school. Through the still-hazy air of the lobby she could see the flashing lights of the cruisers parked beyond the entrance. And then she focused on another figure, this one also outlined by the sunlight coming through the glass doors behind it.
Jace. No longer carrying the explosive on his outstretched hands. Instead both were wrapped around his weapon, knees once more bent, arms extended.
She would never know if she’d made some sound. A gasp or an intake of breath. Or had her eyes betrayed what she saw?
Justin turned, bringing the gun around with him. His finger must have tightened over its trigger before he had even identified the threat. An arc of bullets shattered the glass of the office, including the blood-smeared panel in the door, tracing an unmistakable pattern. One leading directly to the man now standing in front of the outside entrance.
Thirty-One
Jace blocked the image of Lindsey crouched on the floor from his mind, concentrating on his target. To his right, glass shattered as the boy began to swing around to face him.
His movement narrowed the kill zone by changing the angle of Justin’s body in relation to Jace’s stance. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to hit his torso, presented now in profile like some nineteenth-century dueler. And if Jace missed, his shot could strike Lindsey, directly behind Carr.
There was no time to yell at her to get out of the way. Nor would she hear him over the noise of the automatic weapon and the growing symphony of sirens outside.
In that terrible split second’s realization, Jace knew that all he could do was to wait until Justin completed his turn, unwittingly positioning himself again so that his body would shield Lindsey from Jace’s bullet.
As he waited for that to happen, time telescoped so that it seemed as if the boy were moving in slow motion. As did the path of destruction wrought by the assault weapon he brought around with him. Jace tracked its progress strictly by sound, listening as bullets impacted the glass wall of the front office and then swept ever nearer to where he stood.
Carr’s turn occupied a heartbeat. Maybe two. Yet in that span a thousand images invaded Jace’s mind. The weeks he’d spent in the hospital after he’d been shot. The endless pain and, far worse, the resulting disability. The loss of control over his life. The long rehabilitation, undertaken in a failed attempt to get his job back. And then, finally, the decision to start over. To flee to a place where there were no ghosts. No echoes from a past he’d rather not remember.
He’d come here, a place as foreign to him as another country. And yet somehow he’d come full circle. To this moment. This wait.
As the heartbeat thundered in his head, memories began to speed like the shifting patterns in a kaleidoscope. Meeting Lindsey. The nights they’d spent together. The resurgence of all the fears he thought he’d left behind.
As the kid’s shoulders began to square, aligning for the shot Jace had to make, he fought the almost irresistible need to take his eyes off his target for one more look at Lindsey. Her face still stained with tears. Her eyes telling him far more than the words she had whispered.
But time had returned to those normal split seconds. All you were ever allowed in which to make the decisions that really mattered.
To squeeze off the shot that would end Justin Carr’s worthless existence.
If he failed in that, there were a dozen deputies outside prepared to do it. They’d take care of the boy if he didn’t. Eventually. What Jace had to do was take care of him now, before he could turn around and gun down Lindsey as he’d gunned down how many others today.
Now. The command of his brain had been coldly rational, calm even, despite the stakes. Jace’s finger closed over the trigger. Fragments of plaster and shards of tile from the wall to his right hit the side of his unprotected face and neck.
He saw the boy’s body jerk in response to his shot before his mind relayed the information that he had exerted the necessary pressure. He continued to squeeze off rounds, watching the impact of each as they struck Carr’s body.
After the third, Justin’s knees buckled. The lean of his body changed the trajectory of his bullets. Instead of striking the wall, they gouged chunks of tile from the floor before ricocheting off into a dozen different directions.
Please, sweet Jesus, Jace prayed. Not for himself, but for the woman crouching on the other side of the vast, echoing lobby. He couldn’t bear it if they had come this far only to have her hit by one of those distorted slugs. Or more cruelly, by a piece of flying debris. He’d seen men die from one of those same pointless ironies in this kind of shoot-out.
Jace pumped one more round into the falling boy, watching as first the weapon and then his body stuck the floor. Arms outstretched above his head, Justin didn’t move again, although Jace waited a long time, long enough that the fog of smoke and shattered plaster began to clear and the echoes of gunfire fade.
At last his gaze lifted from the boy’s lifeless body to find Lindsey. She was still hunched against the wall, arms over her head. His eyes traced over her, se
arching for a telltale stain of red. When he didn’t find it, he began to breathe—once and then again—until the familiar pattern was reestablished.
He became aware of the shouting behind him. The doors opened and men rushed past, the soles of their shoes crunching over the debris field of the lobby. One of them stooped down over the body of the boy, but Jace walked past them, his weapon extended as if the threat still existed.
Intellectually, he knew it didn’t. Not from Carr. He’d put too many shots into the area that would have been outlined in black on a shooting range target. In Jace’s mind that’s all he’d done—put his shots into that vulnerable area of the human body, the one that contained the vital organs. Kill zone.
Using the wall behind her for support, Lindsey struggled to her feet as he approached. He allowed his left hand to release its grip from under the right and then let both of them fall, finally lowering the Glock.
Lindsey closed the last few feet between them, throwing herself into his arms. His left encircled her, crushing her to him. Only with the warmth of her body did the ice that had encased his heart begin to thaw.
She was alive. And she was safe.
Jace was again aware of the sounds that swirled around them. Squad cars and emergency vehicles continued to arrive out front, the scream of their sirens blending with the shouts of the men already pouring into the building. Half a dozen, weapons drawn, rushed through the lobby toward the lunchroom.
You aren’t in charge of this operation, Jace told himself. The deputies knew there were probably other explosives in addition to the one he’d carried outside.
Whatever the plans for the assault had originally involved, the ringleaders were dead. He had no doubt that Justin Carr and Steven Byrd had been the driving force behind this and everything else that had happened in Randolph. The evil genius he’d long suspected and discovered too late.
Their reign of terror would be over with the rescue the SWAT team was mounting. All that was left for him to do was take Lindsey outside. Walk with her into the sunshine. Away from the blood and the bodies and this place, which for her, as Seneca had been for him, would never again be the same. Whether she could come back here or not was something only Lindsey could decide and that might take a while. In the meantime…