by Mason Cross
Hesitating briefly, I took my phone out and tapped it to activate the flashlight. The illumination cast a bright, narrow beam a few feet in front of me. I moved it around a little and located a foot in a leather shoe. I angled up and found it attached to a leg, and then a body, and finally a bloody face. There was a bullet hole in the forehead, the diameter of the wound and the powder burns telling me the weapon had been a handgun at point-blank range. The death rattle petered out as the flashlight beam passed over the eyes of the dead man. A tall man, balding and in his late forties. His comfortable slip-on shoes and V-neck sweater marked him out as a quasi-off-duty teacher. Mr. Bence, most likely. I swept the beam around, highlighting frustratingly small patches of the stage at a time. I hoped I would find nothing, but I’d heard two shots. I knew there was at least one more body to locate on this stage.
I walked forward slowly and closed my eyes as the beam caught first a pool of red and then curls of dark hair on the boards. The framed picture of Annie from Banner’s apartment flashed in front of my eyes. I followed the dark hair and found another head, facing away from me. Gently, I reached out and felt for a pulse in the neck. Finding nothing, I moved my fingers below the jaw and gently moved it so I could see the face. The eyes were closed as though sleeping. The bullet hole was in the right temple this time.
It wasn’t Annie.
79
7:24 p.m.
The body that lay before me was a good deal older. A petite woman in her midtwenties. Maybe another teacher, maybe a parent. But not Annie.
Not yet.
I sprang to my feet. The kid outside had said Wardell had Banner’s daughter. Two shots fired, two more bodies on my conscience. But it meant Wardell had spared Annie for the moment. She was his ace in the hole—he knew the building would be surrounded, knew nobody would enter right away if he had hostages. Nobody but me or Banner.
I closed my eyes and replayed the scream and the slamming door I’d heard on entering the hall, lined it up with my current position and scrabbled across the stage to get there, colliding with a couple of upturned pieces of stage furniture on the way. I found a brick wall, moved my palms around it until I found a metal door with a push bar. The door creaked open and dim light returned. I was in another cinder-block-walled corridor. This one had small plastic skylights that let in dirty streetlight.
The stage door exited adjacent a blank wall, so there was only one way to go. I gripped my gun and ran along the corridor until I reached another door. The clanging fire alarm grew louder as I approached another wall-mounted bell. I pulled the door open and found a stairwell. Which direction? Experience said up. Wardell liked high ground. I stopped and listened between the clangs of the bell.
Ring riiiiiiiiiing.
Ring riiiiiiiiiing.
Ring riiiiiiiiiing.
There. I heard the sound of someone crying out, suddenly cut off, as though somebody had clamped a hand over their mouth. The cry had lasted a heartbeat longer than the end of the last pulse of the bell. It had come from below.
80
7:31 p.m.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I can’t let you go in there.”
Banner produced her badge. “I’m FBI. It’s Special Agent Banner, not ma’am. And you’re not going to stop me.” Banner’s sharp tone was directed at herself as much as the young officer blocking her way to the front entrance of the school. If she’d been thinking, she’d have realized that this was the downside of summoning backup. Regulations, procedure. Due process.
Law enforcement had been stretched to breaking point across the city for election night. Officers from across the state and farther afield had been drafted in to cover the identified danger zones, the highest-profile areas where it was thought Wardell might choose to strike. Unsurprisingly, nobody had thought to include a small elementary school on that list, and so the full response was taking a while to mobilize. There were only three police cars, and the half-dozen cops were manfully dealing with the task of herding the crowds to the opposite side of the street so a perimeter could be established when reinforcements arrived. That left this one officer as the only thing standing between Banner and the school, and to her surprise and irritation, he wasn’t getting out of her way.
“I’m sorry, Agent Banner. FBI or not, nobody’s going in there. We’ve got reports of an armed suspect who’s taken some hostages. Ain’t nobody going in there until we get a negotiator down here.”
Banner put her badge away, looking around the scene. Still only those half-dozen first responders, though she could hear approaching sirens from multiple different directions. Within a minute, maybe less, there’d be a whole lot more obstacles in her way than this one cop.
“My kid’s in there,” she said simply.
The cop glanced at the school entrance, turned back to her. He shook his head in sympathy, spreading his hands. “Ma’am . . .” he began, forgetting her earlier admonishment and falling back on a half-assed recollection of whatever crowd control course he’d attended at the academy. He didn’t look like a guy who was comfortable with thinking for himself, or making exceptions to the rules.
The sirens were getting closer. Banner put a hand on his shoulder and said, “You’re going to have to shoot me.”
The cop looked like she’d slapped him.
“Now hold on . . .”
Banner walked quickly past him, up the steps, and pushed the door open. She glanced back and saw that the cop wasn’t even watching her. He was too busy looking around to see if anyone had seen him fail to stop her getting past.
81
7:33 p.m.
Wardell had dragged the brat down three short flights of stairs. The last flight had been a narrow steel stairway that had brought them down to the basement level—the boiler room, he guessed. The space was wide and low-ceilinged. Though it spread virtually open plan across the old building’s footprint, it was cluttered with thick pipes and abandoned crates and storage lockers. Steel uprights supported the ceiling, evenly spaced out. The power was on down here, but the illuminations were few and far between. Grimy fluorescent tubes unevenly spaced along the wall emitting little more than candlelight.
Wardell was pleased that the brat was presenting no major difficulties so far. After he’d shot the two teachers on the stage, she’d screamed at first, but then she’d gone quiet. Almost eerily quiet. He guessed she was in shock. Even so, he kept his right hand over her mouth as he put the gun down on top of a tall packing crate and reached for Whitford’s cell phone. Time was of the essence. He didn’t know how many of the escapees from the hall would realize exactly what was going on. That meant he couldn’t be sure anybody knew that he was holding hostages. Part of him relished the idea of a last stand against an entire SWAT team. In time, it would probably come to that. But for the moment, he certainly didn’t want just anybody barging in here. When he thought about the opportunity gone forever—all those people in that crowd—he felt it like acid burning through his guts.
He slotted the battery back in and switched the phone on, then dialed 911. The beeps of the phone seemed to rouse the girl from her state of shock. She began to squirm again and Wardell tightened his grip.
A male operator answered the call with the standard greeting, and Wardell said, “You record all of these, right?”
“This call is being recorded, yes, sir. What is the nature of your emergency?”
Wardell laughed. “Better men than you have tried to work that one out, partner. This is Caleb Wardell. No, this is not a hoax. I know you’re probably going to have to get people to check this out, so I’ll be brief and to the point. I’m at Barkley Elementary School. I’m armed and I have three hostages: a man, a woman, and a little girl. I’ll kill them all unless I get what I want.”
“Sir—”
“I didn’t ask you to contribute, son. Now, this last part is very important. I will not negotiate with anybody
but Carter Blake or Elaine Banner; they’re on the FBI task force. Anybody else tries to do it, I kill a hostage. I want Blake and Banner—just them—to enter the building. If they try to talk to me from outside, I kill a hostage. You got all of that? Good.”
Wardell ended the call and tossed the phone over his shoulder. That ought to do it. He reached to pick up the gun from the top of the packing crate, and as he did so, the angle of his right hand, the one over the kid’s mouth, shifted. Wardell grimaced as a sharp pain gripped his hand. The little shit had sunk her teeth into the webbing between his thumb and index finger. He felt the teeth meet in the middle, piercing all of the way through. He grasped at her as she started to wriggle loose, managed to slam her against the wall so that her jaws relaxed. The kid cried out and Wardell backhanded her across the face with his wounded hand, spraying his own blood over her and the wall.
“You goddamned little whore!” he yelled, wincing and realizing the strike had only made the pain in his hand worse. After the lights had gone out, he’d changed his mind about killing the kid before Banner got here. Now he was changing his mind back again.
The girl was scrabbling to her feet, sobbing. Wardell lunged for her as she fled, catching the edge of her flouncy costume dress with his good hand and tugging it so that she fell down. He dragged her back across the dirty concrete floor and hauled her to her feet, wrapping his left arm around her midsection—making sure to keep his hand away from those goddamn sharp teeth this time.
Out of breath, he carried her bodily back to the packing crate and reached for the gun. As his fingers closed around the grip, he heard another gun being cocked from above him.
He raised his head to see Carter Blake at the top of the metal stairs—a lot earlier than expected and drawing a bead on Wardell’s head.
“Drop the kid and put your hands on your head.”
Wardell froze; then the surprise abated and he hugged Annie tighter to his body. A grin broke out on his face. Maybe the situation called for a poker face, but he couldn’t help it. Blake had nothing. Okay, he had the gun, but he wouldn’t use it, not with the brat this close. Slowly, he shook his head.
“Second time you’ve made that mistake, Blake. Second and last.”
Wardell’s fingers closed around the butt of the gun on top of the crate. Blake tightened his grip on his own gun but did not fire. He was less than fifteen feet away: literally a can’t-miss. Wardell moved in one smooth, practiced motion without hesitation: He raised the gun, pointed it in the middle of Blake’s face, and fired.
82
7:37 p.m.
Instinctively, I lunged forward. But even as I did it, I knew it was futile. There was no way he could miss me, not from this distance. The crack of the gunshot was fierce in the low space. I saw the muzzle flash as I fell forward and wondered how long it would take me to feel the pain.
But then the pain didn’t come. I continued my tumble forward, losing height as I dropped from the top of the metal stairway. Wardell was wincing, and I registered that his right hand was covered with blood. He’d missed me. He’d actually missed me. He’d hurt his hand somehow and it had thrown his aim off. Not by much, maybe just enough to foul the last-moment adjustment he’d made as I jumped—so that my reflexive lunge had let me pass under the path of the bullet. He was still holding Annie, though, and still holding the gun, despite his obvious pain. But I was still falling forward, and I wasn’t about to stop.
My left foot landed square on the third step from the bottom and I sprang off it, diving right at Wardell as he brought the gun to bear on me again. I caught him high and to his right side, contacting my shoulder with his head and grabbing his wrist with my hand, so that the second bullet went high too, the gunshot just about rupturing my eardrums as it did so. The momentum knocked Wardell over backward, and he let go of Annie to free up his other hand to try and break his fall.
We slammed onto the concrete floor, me on top. Annie rolled as she landed and scampered back from us as though distancing herself from two wild animals fighting over a piece of meat. My right hand was trapped beneath Wardell’s back. The impact had made me drop the gun. My left hand kept hold of his wrist. With both of our other hands pinned, it turned into an arm wrestle. I dug my fingers into the flesh of his wrist and tried to lock my arm. He pushed back, edging the gun back down toward my face. It was a fairly even match. Fairly, but not exactly. I was in good shape, but Wardell had spent the last five years with little else to do but build muscle. Little by little, quarter inch by quarter inch, I was losing the struggle. I felt the muzzle of the gun bob against my hair. Wardell’s face, a mask of concentration up until now, started to twitch into an anticipatory leer.
I relaxed my grip on his wrist abruptly and simultaneously smashed my forehead into Wardell’s nose. I felt rather than heard the crunch of bone, and Wardell roared in pain. I took advantage by sliding my hand over the muzzle of the gun and yanking it down. Faced with a split-second choice between letting go of the gun or retaining his grip and allowing his trigger finger to be broken, Wardell chose the first option. I yanked the gun back and started to pull my right arm out from under Wardell as I adjusted the gun in my left, intending to turn it on its former owner.
I didn’t get the chance. Wardell brought his knee up dead center toward my groin, causing me to roll to the side to avoid an injury that would take me out of the fight. He balled his fist and batted the gun out of my hand sideways. It flew from my fingers and sailed into a pile of machine parts beneath the metal stairway. We broke apart and staggered back a couple of steps, like boxers. Our eyes locked for a heartbeat, and then as though choreographed, we both looked down, remembering my gun. It lay between us, equidistant. We came together again, more like sumo wrestlers this time, pushing against each other hard, neither giving ground.
Wardell tried my own trick on me, dropping one hand so that I lurched forward, then bringing the hand back as a fist. I angled my body to catch his forearm between my arm and ribs and used his momentum to swing him into one of the steel pillars. I relaxed the grip so that I could bend for the gun on the floor, but Wardell was already countering, slamming his fist into my back and knocking me off course. I ignored the sharp lance of pain in my lungs and pivoted, grabbing him at the shoulders and blocking his lunge for the gun. Over his right shoulder I saw Annie backed into a corner and staring at the scene, wide-eyed. That made up my mind: I liked my own chances better with the gun in play, but I couldn’t risk a stray bullet finding her.
I feinted as though I were going to pull the head butt move again and then renewed the pressure and kicked the fallen gun hard with the side of my shoe. It skittered side-on across the floor, disappearing beneath a stack of wooden pallets. Wardell laughed and pushed back off me, dancing away and wiping blood from his broken nose with the back of his hand. I took a step back, feeling more than a little unsteady on my feet. I hoped it didn’t show. Wardell looked entirely unruffled, despite the blood flowing from his hand and his nose.
“Better this way,” Wardell said, nodding in the direction the gun had gone. “You know, I don’t usually like to get my hands dirty. With you? I’m glad to make an exception.”
I shook my head. “Bring it on, psycho. I know you can’t handle it up close.”
He didn’t respond. Not with words. He took a step toward me, feinted, and then nailed me on the shoulder and the side of my head before I saw his hands moving. It felt as though I’d stuck my head out in front of a subway train. I shook the starburst out of my eyes and resisted the temptation of a blind charge. I hung back and let the shock drain out of the head blow, allowing the pain to rush in to fill the void. I grinned it out. “Weak. Don’t give up the day job.”
Wardell returned the grin, saying nothing. He came close again, feinting with the left this time. I was ready for it, blocked the true swing from the right and drove my fist into his gut. It hurt him, but it hurt my fist almost as much. It wa
s like punching a car tire. I took a lucky gamble on a right cross from Wardell, blocked it with my forearm, and slammed my elbow hard into his already-broken nose. The cry of pain was louder this time and angrier. He fell back a step, coming up short against a low workbench. His right hand fell back to steady himself and, too late, I realized I’d pushed him back into a virtual hand-to-hand armory. His fingers swept over an array of hammers, saws, and chisels. I charged him as his fingers closed around a heavy monkey wrench.
He was too fast for me, already swinging it at my head by the time I got anywhere near. I ducked, the cruel mouth of the wrench just clipping the top of my scalp. Continuing on its swing, the wrench crashed into one of the steel pillars, making a noise like the dinner gong in hell.
Wardell moved while I was off balance, sweeping his right leg across the backs of my knees and dropping me onto the concrete. He grabbed the wrench two-handed and raised it above his head, as though intending to cut me in half with it. I rolled to the side and felt a sting on my arm as the wrench smashed a concrete chip out of the floor. Every cell in my body told me to roll again, get as far away as I could from the next swing of the wrench. I stayed put. I might dodge the next one, and maybe even the one after, but sooner or later, the realities of my position dictated that I had only one tenable defense.
Wardell brought the wrench down again, launching his follow-up strike with supernatural speed. I saw the blunt, rusty steel head of it closing in on my face and knew that if I didn’t have perfect timing, I wouldn’t have anything at all. I heard the beginning of Annie’s scream. I brought both hands up from each side and caught the wrench between them, feeling the jolt travel all the way up to my biceps. A flicker of confusion crossed Wardell’s face, and I milked it to the full, pulling him off balance with the wrench and kneeing him hard in the solar plexus. He wasn’t ready for it this time, gagging as the breath was forced out of him.