Assault with a Deadly Lie

by Lev Raphael

  “How many rounds?” I asked Stefan, unable for some reason to recall the PPK’s capacity.

  “Seven.”

  Seven chances. But not with a better gun like a Glock or Sig Sauer….

  “Can he get through the door?” Celine wondered. And then she answered her own question in a murmur: “All he has to do is shoot out the lock.”

  We weren’t hiding inside a bank vault. As heavy and thick as it was, the door was just an office door.

  It was very cool in Celine’s office but my forehead and neck were sweaty and the room seemed filled with whatever floral perfume Celine was wearing.

  I heard the distinctive ding of the elevator and then someone bellowed “Where are those faggots?”

  It was followed by a scream, the boom of a gunshot, then a shout of “Get back here you bitch!” and a second shot. The echoes in that high-ceilinged space were tremendous and the blasts were as loud as anything I’d ever heard in a movie—and far more terrifying. I closed my eyes and almost dropped the framed poster whose sides I was gripping, but Celine hissed at me, “Get ready!”

  On the far side of the door, I heard Stefan breathing even harder than I was. And then the far-off ululating sirens of police cars came blasting up around us with the force of a gale, and I was sure I could hear the distinctive rumble of a fire truck. Was I imagining it, or had all those vehicle engines made the building shake a little?

  Maybe we’d survive. Maybe they’d storm the building before he could get to us.

  Stefan moved quickly to the window, wisely keeping his gun out of sight. “There are five cop cars down there and they’re already setting up barricades to keep people back. The crowd’s enormous. Some of the cops are crouching down behind the cars.”

  It had sounded like more than five cars to me, and must have been, because from what seemed like the other side of the building, a distorted voice crackled over a megaphone: “Drop your weapon and come out with your hands up before anyone else gets hurt.”

  They didn’t know exactly where he was, I thought.

  Stefan stepped back to his spot by the filing cabinet. Celine murmured to me, “Get ready, I think they’re going into hostage mode. It’s on us now.”

  “Does he have hostages?”

  She shrugged and turned her head back toward the door. We heard more screams out there, partitions crashing, chairs falling over. I was briefly glad that the main directory with all our names and office numbers we had before the renovations hadn’t been replaced, but that wouldn’t buy us much time. There were only six offices with nameplates on this floor, and I knew he had found us when Stefan’s door crashed open. Posters rattled on the wall between Celine’s office and Stefan’s, and everything else in the office we’d locked ourselves into shuddered.

  Celine flinched and Stefan ducked down as if he were actually in his office just a few feet away.

  Cursing and smashing followed on the other side of the wall. Quinn was probably enraged that the office was empty. There was another crash and I saw a laptop hurtle past our window and down to shatter below. Police outside fired up at the building. We all dropped to the floor and I almost rolled onto the framed poster as we heard shots burying themselves in the soft sandstone walls before someone shouted from outside “Cease fire! Cease fire, you morons!”

  Quinn didn’t fire back and we could hear his heavy tread heading toward us, to where we were waiting for the final confrontation. It had to be final. Either he died, or we did.

  I felt very stiff, as if I’d been locked inside a cold storage unit. I stood up, grabbing the poster, and planted myself firmly right next to Celine who held the fire extinguisher like an axe. She suddenly changed her position, lowering it to her chest. She pulled out the pin that locked the operating handled, telling me, “I’ll spray him in the face and try to blind him. Then you hit him with Hitchcock.”

  I peered out from behind the poster and saw that Stefan had just resumed his crouching position, the gun firmly in both hands, his knees slightly bent, his arms extended.

  The door thumped as if a furious beast had rammed into it. The pounding came again. And again.

  “He’s kicking the door in,” I whispered, unable to imagine the kind of fury that would make someone do that.

  The door shuddered again and again. Then the brass door plate and knob flew off as the battered door burst open in a shower of wood splinters, smashing against the file cabinet where Stefan was waiting but now invisible to me. I was frozen and expected to die in that very instant.

  Breathing loudly through his mouth, a colossus in black stepped into the room, filling my vision. The man’s sharp profile told me it was definitely Quinn. He was easily six feet two and well over two hundred pounds of muscle and rage armored in black boots, pants, t-shirt, wool hat. He held a big black gun that looked like a Glock 20. How many rounds did he have left?

  Quinn was standing only a few feet from us, but before Celine or I could make any kind of move to try to stop him, we heard a gunshot from off beyond the door. Quinn grunted and stumbled forward one step. As if part of me were an architect studying blueprints, I realized that Stefan must have shot Quinn in the back and the bullet had probably hit one of his ribs, driving him forward from the waist and knocking him off balance. But why wasn’t he wearing a protective vest?

  Before Quinn could straighten up and turn, Stefan stepped forward and shot him in the back of the head. The black-clad figure toppled to the floor, knees first. Then his head crashed down and hit the uncarpeted tile flooring with a grotesque cracking sound that made me gag.

  The Glock had slipped from Quinn’s hands as he fell, sliding across the floor and under Celine’s desk. I waited for it to go off like a bomb, even though I knew it wouldn’t. My face and hands were wet with sweat or tears, my ears filled with the roar of my own pulse—or was it the two rounds Stefan had fired?

  The framed poster started to slide from my hands and I grabbed it tightly before the glass could shatter, leaned it carefully against the wall behind me, wiping my hands on my jeans, afraid now to look at our persecutor, even though he had to be dead. In my mind, the door seemed to be crashing open over and over.

  Another shot followed, making me jump.

  I looked up to see Stefan standing close to the prone body, his face cold and implacable. Holding the Walther in both hands, he fired into Quinn’s back four more times, emptying his gun. Quinn hadn’t shown any signs of life after his head smashed onto the floor, but I didn’t think of telling Stefan to stop. I was too stunned to say anything, and each spent cartridge flipping out of his gun and clattering on the floor was like the lash of a whip.

  Quinn’s body seemed to jerk a bit with the impact of each shot—unless I was imagining it, wishing for it—and I felt a sour taste in my mouth. Blood had seeped onto the floor from Quinn’s nose or mouth. I wasn’t sure which.

  My ears were ringing, and the very faint haze left by Stefan’s gun irritated my eyes.

  I had never before seen anyone killed right in front of me, and Quinn’s lifeless body looked as massive as the toppled statue of a dictator. The room stank, filled with the acrid tang of gunpowder and what I realized was the metallic reek of my sweat-soaked clothes. I felt trapped inside a new nightmare.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Celine murmured.

  I heard moaning outside of the office, out amid the cubicles, but I couldn’t move to help anyone at the moment. The supine corpse loomed in front of me like a cliff wall, enormous, forbidding. I didn’t see how I could ever get around it.

  Stefan’s lips were moving, but this time he wasn’t praying. Voice breaking, he said, “Father Ryan—He told me—”

  “Told you what?” I asked.

  As if speaking from a distance, Stefan murmured, “‘Don’t hesitate. Keep shooting.’”

  Celine shook herself, set aside the fire extinguisher, headed around Quinn’s corpse to the window, yanked it up and yelled to the cops below, “He’s dead.”

  Celine tu
rned to Stefan, who was trembling now, eyes shut. She walked over, touched his shoulder with one hand and his arm with the other, and said quietly, as if comforting an anxious child in a thunderstorm, “You can put the gun down now, honey.”

  Epilogue

  The toll at Parker Hall was five dead, one wounded. Quinn had killed two history professors on the first floor near the entrance, one of whom had tried to tackle him after the other was shot. On the floor below ours, he’d shot a graduate student before he could successfully barricade himself in the copy room. On our floor, he had killed poor, texting Estella and shot Juno Dromgoole in the shoulder as she was trying to hide amid the cubicles. That’s who had been moaning. The other few faculty who had been in the cubicles escaped being shot, but one suffered a stroke during the ordeal and was unlikely to recover.

  The fifth fatality was Quinn himself.

  When the police raided Quinn’s apartment in downtown Michiganapolis, they found a scene right out of a stalker movie: a room where an entire wall was papered with articles and photographs of Stefan and me, both together and individually. There was also a crazy diary in which he’d made all kinds of elaborate plans to destroy us, including the call that set the SWAT team on us. There wasn’t any hint, though, of why he hadn’t worn a police vest on his killing spree, and whether or not he expected to be arrested or killed. A police investigation was launched, but I had no hopes it would be definitive or even a hundred percent truthful.

  Had his wife called Quinn after I left her house to have him follow me? Or was he keeping tabs on her? Or simply following me again? We’d never know. All I cared about was that we were free. The persecution was over.

  Despite killing a cop, Stefan became a national hero overnight because the headlines dubbed Quinn a “psycho.” A bill to commend Stefan for defending himself was introduced in the state legislature, but quickly quashed by the governor, who obviously thought any more attention to the story would hurt tourism in our state.

  Stefan wisely refused to do any media interviews, which may have been one reason why the district attorney did not charge him with anything, not even carrying a concealed weapon. That particular part of the story was successfully kept quiet. I’m sure the university’s lawyers and PR people worked overtime on suppressing whatever they could, and no reporters bothered to investigate whether Stefan’s gun was his or if he had a license to carry. And outside of the police, nobody but me, Celine, Stefan, and Father Ryan knew the provenance of the gun that he’d used to kill Quinn.

  The Walther PPK was off the books, had never been registered. It was a war souvenir that Father Ryan’s grandfather had brought back from Germany in 1945, and was actually worth several thousand dollars because it was in excellent condition. I don’t know if the converted-to-Catholicism son of Holocaust survivors defending himself with what might have been a Nazi’s gun he obtained from a priest is ironic, or just bizarre. I guess it doesn’t matter.

  Everyone wanted the story to disappear. But if there had been a trial, most likely for second-degree murder because Stefan had killed a cop, he would have had an unlikely assortment of defenders aside from Vanessa Liberati: everyone from the NRA to the ACLU, since both organizations were among the many that issued public statements praising his heroism. The ACLU used his story to call for more gun control, and the NRA used it to call for arming all university professors. Stefan could have been the darling of Fox News and MSNBC.

  A trial would have brought protest marches and demonstrations and Facebook pages dedicated to his acquittal, and t-shirts and bumper stickers and endless tweeting. That kind of publicity would have made Michiganapolis and the university look terrible. And possibly hurt St. Jude Church and Father Ryan as well.

  The publicity storm based on what was known led to Stefan’s memoir hitting the best-seller lists all over again.

  Right after the SWAT raid, Father Ryan had suggested we take a cruise or trip to get away from the scene and clear our minds, and that was even better advice now. It was the height of summer, but we decided to escape to Europe anyway despite the hordes of other tourists we’d likely encounter. Marco stayed with Binnie down the street for a month while we made our leisurely way from Venice to Nice to Bruges, soaking up sun, wine, and culture. Stefan relished the churches, I favored the museums; we both adored the food, and Stefan with his good ear for languages picked up an amazing amount of both Italian and Flemish, which startled the natives who couldn’t believe he was from the U.S.

  Traveling Americans sometimes recognized Stefan from covers of Time and Newsweek, but if anyone did try to get him talking about the “Michigan Massacre,” we walked away. Near the end of our vacation, dining on Belgian beef stew, we discussed writing books about what had happened. He’s still thinking about his.

  Mine, of course, is done.

  If you enjoyed this book, please review it online. Even a short review makes a difference and would be appreciated. Word-of-mouth is crucial in publishing.

  You can read what Lev has to say about writing and publishing at his blog “Writing Across Genres” (http://www.levraphael.com/blog/).

  Feel free to drop by and chat. You can also follow Lev on Twitter (https://twitter.com/LevRaphael) or Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/levraphael).

  To send him an email, go to his website (http://www.levraphael.com).

  Author’s Note

  Mary Chantier, Owen Deatrick, and Mike Peplowski were invaluable in my research for this book, answering many legal, forensic, and weapons-related questions for me. I’m deeply grateful for their time and expertise.

  Also by Lev Raphael

  Fiction

  Dancing on Tisha B’Av

  Winter Eyes

  The German Money

  Secret Anniversaries of the Heart

  Rosedale in Love

  Pride and Prejudice: The Jewess and the Gentile

  The Vampyre of Gotham

  Mysteries

  Let’s Get Criminal

  The Edith Wharton Murders

  The Death of a Constant Lover

  Little Miss Evil

  Burning Down the House

  Tropic of Murder

  Hot Rocks

  Nonfiction

  Edith Wharton’s Prisoners of Shame

  Journeys & Arrivals

  Writing a Jewish Life

  My Germany

  Book Lust!

  Writer’s Block Is Bunk

  Coauthored

  Dynamics of Power

  Coming Out of Shame

  Stick Up for Yourself!

  Stick Up for Yourself! Teacher’s Guide