The Knowing Box Set EXTENDED EDITION: Exclusive New Material

by Ninie Hammon

  SCENE #2

  WHY DID JACK SHOOT AN UNARMED MAN?

  Every police officer who has ever had to fight for his life has made the acquaintance of rogue time—that space between one heartbeat and the next when the world cranks down into slow motion and every action takes a thousand years.

  The hail hammering the brass dome high above Jack Carpenter’s head suddenly seemed to land in individual plunks, each distinct from the next, and the glittering reflections of lightning flashes became translucent cream spreading out on the polished marble floor at his feet.

  But even in rogue time, Jack was only able to form one clear thought: “How in the Sam Hill did he get a gun into the federal courthouse?”

  The bald man facing Jack across thirty feet of shiny marble stood directly in the middle of the rotunda wearing a huge, black raincoat that dripped puddles of water onto the great seal.

  “Don’t do it,” Jack said. “Nobody has to get hurt here today. Just lift you hands and clasp your fingers behind your head.”

  The man made no move toward the pistol he’d stuffed in the waistband of his jeans that he’d displayed for Jack to see. But neither did he raise his hands.

  Thunder rumbled like the roar of nearby cannons and the lights high above blinked off, then instantly back on.

  Jack held his service revolver steady in both hands as he crouched, his left side toward the gunman—a smaller target. He sighted down the barrel, not that he needed to sight. The man was roughly the size and shape of a soft drink machine and faced him dead on, so close Jack got a good look at the singularly odd expression on the man’s face.

  Yup. Psycho.

  He’d pegged the guy as a nutcase when he’d started shouting as Jack and Daniel walked across the almost empty rotunda beneath the dome of the Cincinnati Federal Courthouse. Something in his voice. That, and the fact that what he said didn’t make any sense.

  “You, cop! I figure getting shot could ruin your whole day. What do you think?”

  Jack had turned toward the man and that’s when the guy had spread out his raincoat, with both hands on the lapels in a look-at-this motion like a flasher, to show Jack the revolver stuck down in the front of his pants. It appeared to be a .357 Magnum, a hand cannon.

  Jack had reacted instantly, pulling his service revolver from its holster with one hand as he straight-armed Daniel hard, shoving him out of the way with the other. Good training.

  “You think you’ll ‘rise to the occasion’ do you, soldier?” Sergeant Blankenship had said to him—had yelled at him—all those years ago. “Think when it hits the fan you’ll find resources of strength and agility and mental clarity you didn’t even know you had?” The sergeant had leaned closer and rasped into Jack’s face. “No, you won’t. Nobody rises to the occasion, son. Everybody—to a man—defaults to the level of his training. When you don’t have time to think what to do, the only thing that’ll save your ass is whatever you do automatically without having to think about it.”

  Jack had shouted “gun!” automatically, too, and the word had echoed and fractured, bouncing off the marble floors and walls. After a moment’s hesitation, the word and the sight of a policeman crouched in the middle of the rotunda with his weapon drawn scattered the crowd like roaches hit with the kitchen light, amid a clatter of high heels on marble and little squeaks of screams.

  Gratefully, it was a small crowd. Who takes little Suzie to see the federal courthouse with hail the size of hockey pucks raining down out of clouds so black a puddle of darkness was spread out beneath them. Some of the automatic streetlights outside had already switched on and it was still the middle of the afternoon.

  “I won’t tell you again,” Jack said. “Clasp both hands behind your head.”

  Jack saw out of the corner of his eye that the security guards and a Cincinnati Police Department officer had arrived, guns drawn. Two were crouched behind the stone pillar on the south side of the building. A third was closer, no more than thirty feet away. He was standing behind the black marble base that held aloft a forty-foot bronze statue—a winged female figure in a nightgown holding an empty basket above her head, her left hand beneath it like a waiter balancing a tray. An olive branch in her right hand stuck out in front of her like there was a marshmallow on the end of it she was trying to roast. He could see another officer shooing people out of the rotunda.

  “You won’t shoot me.” The man let go of the raincoat and held his hands palm out toward Jack. He lifted them slightly, surrender style, and nodded toward the gun Jack could still see in his belt—a weapon he clearly was not reaching for. “I ain’t pointing no gun at you and you wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man.”

  Then the odd look on the man’s face became even more pronounced. He almost seemed—what? surprised?—when his right hand began to lower and move toward the gun. Not in a smooth motion, but in a weird herky-jerky fashion.

  “Hey, wait,” the man said, alarm in his voice. His eyes grew wide, shocked. “I don’t want no trouble.” He lifted his left hand higher in obvious surrender even as he inched his right closer to the gun. “No! It wasn’t supposed to go down like this.” That remark didn’t appear to be directed at anybody in particular but what he said next was clearly a plea to Jack. “Please, don’t hurt me!”

  “Nobody will get hurt if you clasp your fingers behind your head. Do it now.”

  The man suddenly went for the gun. He grabbed the handle with an odd little cry and began to pull it out of his waistband.

  Jack fired.

  The gunshot merged with the greater roar of a mighty clap of thunder so close that surely lightning must have struck the building itself. The room went dark except for the light that shone in through the glass doors on the mezzanine half a floor below, spilling across the marble rotunda the long, misshapen shadow of the let’s-have-a-picnic statue.

  One beat. Two, maybe. Jack remained frozen, his revolver pointed at the man who now lay crumpled face down in a heap on the marble floor.

  Then the lights flickered once and came back on. Jack still held his pistol pointed at the gunman as the other officers raced across the empty expanse of marble to the man whose blood was coloring the great seal of the state of Ohio a dull red.

  One officer reached out and put his hand to the carotid artery at the man’s neck. He waited, then looked up at Jack and shook his head. Jack only relaxed slightly, would keep his gun trained on the man on the floor until the other officers took the man's away. Standard operating procedure.

  One of them rolled the man over on his side. Jack couldn’t see the whole expanse of his body, but he could see that the gun was no longer stuffed down the front of the man’s pants. How could that be? The man couldn’t possibly have drawn the gun before Jack fired.

  Then the officers rolled the man over onto his back. Jack’s gut yanked into a knot so fast it took his breath away. One of the officers turned toward him, but Jack didn’t need to hear what the man had to say. He could see it for himself.

  “He’s not armed,” the security guard said. “There’s no gun.”

  Jack lowered his own weapon and replaced it in his holster as the officers patted the man down, just to be sure. But under the huge raincoat he was fat, wearing tight jeans. There was nowhere on his body he could have hidden a weapon. Then where…?

  One of the officers removed a wallet from the man’s back pocket, opened it and pulled out a driver’s license.

  “Name’s George Witherspoon,” he read off the license. “You know him?”

  Jack shook his head. The man was a stranger. And Jack had just shot and killed him.

  Lightning flashed again, made a sparkle pattern on the floor, and Jack glanced over at the security screening area just inside the front entrance. Three men in suits stood there looking at Jack. One of them was Chapman Whitworth.

  Jack felt Daniel’s hand on his shoulder.

  “Are you ok?” Daniel asked.

  Jack turned to him. “You saw it, didn’t you? The gun. You
saw he had a gun stuck down his pants.”

  Jack didn’t like the desperate sound of his own voice.

  “I’m sorry, Jack—no, I didn’t. The way the guy held his raincoat open like he was showing you his superman suit underneath, I couldn’t see anything.”

  Realization dawned on him slowly, ponderously, like lifting something heavy, and Jack tasted fear in the back of his throat as bitter as bile. Nobody else saw the gun. Nobody else could have seen it. The man’s raincoat hid it from the view of everyone except the person standing directly in front of him. That was Jack.

  “If you say you saw a gun, you saw a gun,” Daniel said, his voice quiet so only Jack could hear.

  “Then where is it?” Jack demanded, keeping his own voice low as well. “Where’d it go? How could it—?”

  “The normal ‘how-could-its’ don’t count anymore,” Daniel said. “That’s not the world we live in now.”

  “Are you saying you think—?”

  “What Theresa said about Whitworth and the ax…he can do things. And he has made his intentions toward us—toward you in particular—pretty clear, don’t you think.” What Daniel didn’t say was "I told you so’" and Jack was profoundly grateful for that. It had, after all, been Jack’s idea for the three of them—Daniel, Theresa and himself—to confront Whitworth head-on. To let him know they weren’t going to back down, that framing Theresa for murder and Daniel for rape, and dragging out that old video of Jack carrying gasoline into Twin Oaks twenty-six years ago had not cowed them and would not stop them.

  “We need to show him he doesn’t scare us,” Jack had said, and even at the time he must have known that was all bluster. Whitworth did scare them. Jack couldn’t even remember now how he’d managed to convince Theresa and Daniel to go along with him to sit down eye-to-eye with the devil himself. Why hadn’t he had sense enough to see Whitworth would just use the occasion to take more shots at them. And clearly that’s what he’d just done—at Jack, specifically, this time. He’d taken a shot and hit in the center of the bull’s eye on Jack’s chest when there was no gun to shoot with. Just like he said he would.

  Jack looked at Whitworth, who had been joined by a growing crowd of onlookers intent on getting a peek at the drama. This time, Whitworth grabbed his gaze and held it. The effect was akin to touching an electrified fence. A jolt of--what? Power? Malevolence?—flashed from Whitworth’s eyes into Jack’s as straight and sure as the laser sight on an assault rifle. And suddenly Jack’s mind was all confusion, a cacophony of dissonant sounds that seemed almost to be speech—but not quite. A mental noise that grew so loud it filled Jack’s whole head and seemed to flow out his ears in a red mist to cover and obscure the room.

  Someone shook him.

  “Didn’t I tell you not to do that?” the voice seemed to come from a great distance, but the effect of it was a slap in the face. A breaker flipped and the electric charge was gone. “Not to look him square in the eye? You got to listen to me, boy, or ain’t none of us gone get out of this alive.”

  Jack turned to Theresa Washington, looked into her kind, loving face and was surprised at how badly he wanted to cry.

  ***

  Theresa Washington wanted to take Jack Carpenter into her arms like she done when he was little and tell him wasn’t nothing to be scared of.

  “God’s got this,” she wanted to say. But she didn’t. Not because she didn’t believe it…though there was times she flat out did not…but because this wasn’t ’xactly the time or the place for a hug.

  Dozens, maybe hundreds of people had materialized out of nowhere as soon as the danger had passed. All of them milling around the body on the floor, waiting for the ambulance or the coroner or whoever it was who had to declare the man officially dead so they could get him out of here.

  Police officers were going through the crowd taking down names and phone numbers so they could get in touch with folks later to ask them questions about all this. She knew what them folks was gone say. What else could they say, given what they seen?

  And she wasn’t gone be no help at all.

  After she and Jack and Daniel left Chapman Whitworth’s office, they’d rode the elevator down to the first floor together in silence, just like they’d ridden up. Didn’t nobody say a word. The boys—she still thought of them as that though they was men full grown—was staring straight ahead tryin’ not to let on that they was still shaking from their first encounter with a demon dressed up in a human being suit. Well, the first encounter they remembered, anyway. She hadn’t had nothing to say neither, of course. She’d just been picturing Bishop, how his strong presence would have changed everything and how she was certainly a poor second choice to be tryin’ to do what had to be done.

  When the elevator had gotten to the bottom floor, Theresa’d said she needed to go to the bathroom and Jack and Daniel said they’d go get the car and bring it around out front for her so’s she wouldn’t have to get wet.

  She’d been in the bathroom when she heard the gunshot.

  Daniel stood beside her and watched with her as Jack talked to other police officers off to the side of the crowd while state troopers made their way through the throng. She could hear snippets of what the folks around them was sayin’.

  “… shot down an unarmed man,” said a voice so squeaky it set Theresa’s teeth on edge.

  “… his hands up, begging for mercy—pleadin’ ‘don’t shoot me!’”

  Theresa figured probably didn’t more than one or two of them folks actually see what had happened. But they was all claiming to now, making like they hadn’t been hiding behind them big pillars with they eyes squeezed tight shut, beggin’ the God they hadn’t talked to in years to keep ’em safe. To hear them tell it, every last person here had been up in a balcony watchin’ the whole thing from box seats.

  Her eyes were drawn inexorably toward where Chapman Whitworth stood by the front security checkpoint, looking all uninvolved and innocent, acting like he’d just been watching ’stead of orchestrating it all. How the monster had pulled it off, she had no idea. Far as she knew, a demon couldn’t make something completely disappear. But she had no doubt that Whitworth was responsible somehow for the death of the man lying at her feet—and for getting Jack in a pot load of trouble. He was making good on the promise he’d made not half an hour ago in his office.

  ***

  Daniel Burke could see that Theresa was looking at where Whitworth stood by the door. Daniel kept his own eyes judiciously lowered. That wasn’t a whole lot better, though. On the white marble floor in front of him was part of a bloody footprint where one of the policemen or the EMTs had stepped in the puddle of blood around the dead man and was now tracking it all over the rotunda.

  The images of what had just happened had tracked bloody footprints all over Daniel’s mind, but they weren’t likely to be as easy to clean away as blood off white marble.

  It had happened so fast. People said that all the time about car accidents. One minute they were driving down the street and the next BAM!—a car came out of nowhere, instantly appeared and there was no time to react.

  Jack had reacted, though. Daniel hadn’t even figured out what was going on before Jack’s hand hit him in the shoulder with the force of a sledge hammer and the blow knocked him sideways off balance. He’d hit the marble floor hard, could still feel throbbing in his left knee, and slid across it like a little kid knocked off his ice skates. By the time he came to a stop, Jack had drawn his gun and was crouched with it clasped in both hands, aimed at a man in an oversized raincoat.

  There’d been words. Jack said something. So did the man. Daniel couldn’t remember now what they’d said. And then Jack had shot him.

  Jack had shot him!

  The crack had reverberated off the marble floor and walls like a sound bouncing around in an oil drum. He’d heard that sound only once before in his life. He’d heard the gunshot that had killed Emily.

  Daniel’s mind recoiled from the memory with such violenc
e that he must actually have taken a step backward because Theresa turned from Whitworth toward him.

  “You gone be all right?” she asked.

  No. Absolutely not. Daniel was not now, nor would he ever again be all right.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” he said. Then he nodded toward Jack. “He’s not.”

  Daniel wanted to yell, “Stop!” He wanted the whole world, all existence, to freeze in space where it was so he could fix this. Make it go away. Make it …

  He was just an average guy, for crying out loud. He wasn’t some character in a Lifetime movie, or an adventure show where the hero solved everybody’s problems in exactly fifty-five minutes counting commercials. He was real, a normal person—though Theresa always said normal “ain’t nothin’ but a setting on a dryer.” Ok, then, he was an ordinary man—with a mortgage payment he had to make today or there’d be a $25 late fee, with a wart on his shin he’d used that clear stuff to get rid of but it’d come back, with friends and a job and…and a little girl at home who’d just lost her mother.

  Emily really was gone. And she was gone because of all this, what was happening right now. Crazy, insane, certifiable, nuts as it would sound if he tried to explain it to anybody, it was real.

  There was no Get Out of Jail Free card. No mulligans, no do-overs. Win, lose or draw—and there would be no draw here—Daniel was in it to the end.

  A man in a gray uniform carrying a clipboard appeared before them.

  “I need to see your drivers' licenses, please,” he said, “or some other form of identification.”

  “I’s in the bathroom, didn’t see nothing,” Theresa said as she dug in her purse for her wallet.