The trunk bounced open and the Sniper reached inside, going for his new jet-black baseball cap. Tugging it low, he next slid his arms through a matching jacket. It was thin, but adrenaline promised to keep him warm. Finally, he reached for his trusty guitar case and prepared himself for war.
Slamming his trunk shut, he turned on a heel and trotted down the sidewalk. A couple blocks later, he stopped and stared at the house he had scoped out last night. Standing on the opposite side of the street, he watched as the family inside went about their evening—assuming nothing of what their evening would become.
A tingle of excitement flushed through his body.
Flicking his wrist, he checked the time and knew he had to keep moving.
Taking an obscure and round-about route in order to cover his tracks, he finally found himself staring up at the fire escape of the Park Hill Branch Library. It had closed for the day two hours earlier and the parking lot was now deserted.
Heaving his guitar case to the top, he shimmied his way to the roof. Settling near a vibrating and loud air vent he settled in, knowing it would be perfect to silence the sound of the single shot he vowed to take in a few short minutes.
Kneeling on both knees, the Sniper clicked open his case, assembled his rifle, and lay down on his stomach before tossing a white blanket—the same color as the rooftop—over his back for both warmth and camouflage.
With his rifle securely on the ground next to him, he dove his hand beneath his collar. Pulling out the chain around his neck, he kissed the white eagle medallion perched above the colors he swore he would die to protect, no matter the cost.
Now he waited in the dark, undetected.
With one eye open, he held his rifle in his hands and scoped the area toward his target. The crosshairs—the shape of the cross—acted as a reminder that Jesus, the son of God, was on the soldier’s side.
Then, his watch started beeping with the alarm he had set earlier. Alerting him to the time, he reached for the burner phone at his side and dialed 911.
“Hello, this is 911, what is your emergency?”
“I’d like to report shots fired.”
“Sir, what is your address.”
The Sniper revealed the location and quickly hung up the phone.
Chapter Forty
Dennis Hall was sitting down for dinner with his wife and two young children when he noticed his white walls begin blinking a bright red and blue.
He shared a concerned look with his wife before pushing back from the table. His wife’s hand landed on his arm, gripping it tight. There was fear flashing over her brown eyes but, not wanting to spook her children, she spoke with only a look.
“I’m just going to see what this is about,” Dennis told his wife.
She reluctantly released her grip and snapped at the children to quiet it down.
“Mommy, what is going on?” the older of the two boys asked.
“Just eat your dinner,” Dennis heard his wife say as he moved toward the front of the house. Peeking through the front window curtains, a sudden coldness hit his core when he saw two police cruisers parked in his lawn.
Dennis’s youngest came running toward him. “Stay in the kitchen!” He snapped his fingers and pointed. He watched his child’s eyes pop wide open before he darted back to the dinner table. Dennis turned back to the window. What the hell is going on?
“What’s going on, Dennis?” his wife asked.
“I’m about to find out.” With his heart pounding, he reached for the doorknob. This has got to be a prank.
“Don’t go out there, Dennis,” his wife pleaded.
Determined to get some answers to what this was all about, Dennis held his palm up to silence his wife and opened the door.
As soon as it cracked open, the police began shouting for him to come out and put his hands behind his head. Hiding behind the door, Dennis felt his limbs begin to shake. Four officers stood in a wide stance with their hands gripping their holstered handguns.
“I’m not coming out until you tell me what this is about,” Dennis yelled.
His heart shot into his throat when he saw four guns being drawn and pointed at him. Blood thrashed in his ears and he started to hyperventilate. This is a mistake. They have the wrong house.
“You have thirty seconds to come out or we’ll come in after you,” an officer shouted.
Dennis thought about his family, knew he was innocent of any crimes, and had only one logical choice—he had to face the cops.
Sucking a deep breath of air into his lungs, Dennis first showed the officers his empty hands while keeping his body hidden behind the wall. Slowly, he revealed more of his large body, inch by inch, until he was staring into the blinding spotlights pointing at him.
The police screamed for him to slowly approach, clasp his hands behind his head. “Now get on your knees!” they yelled.
As if moving in slow motion, Dennis bent his knees when, suddenly, a hot searing pain tore open his left lung, hitting him directly in the heart. He gasped as the velocity of the bullet that knocked him onto his back.
The dark sky above swirled as he lay on the cold concrete steps, coughing up hot blood. He heard his wife wail and, when he blinked next, she was there hovering over him.
“Dennis. Dennis.” She pinched his cheeks with tears falling from her eyes.
There was no pain. Only confusion. “I love you baby. You and the kids—” A bright flash of light filled his vision. Then a loving calm swept over Dennis as everything went black.
Chapter Forty-One
Everyone seemed as stunned and confused as I was. We hadn’t moved, our feet glued in place. The songs and prayers had stopped as our jaws dangled at the sight of the two opposing sides now facing off.
“Mom, what is going on?” Mason whipped his head around as he stood taller.
“I’m not sure.” I squeezed King’s hand.
“Don’t they know we’re here to pray in peace?” Mason kept insisting it was wrong. And I agreed, but there was nothing I could do to stop this from happening.
Chaos swirled around us in a dizzying array of tornadoes. Conversations were swept up in the wind storm and strong words were lobbed like grenades.
I whipped my head to the right.
A new charge of people ran toward the protestors.
Snapping my focus to the left, other people retreated to nearby pine trees for safety. Dogs barked and children clung to their mothers as they cried.
“This is going to get ugly,” King said.
“Why aren’t the police doing anything?” Mason bounced on his toes as I waited for him to decide he had to join the fight.
“What can they do?” King’s tone was loud enough to be heard over the shouts. “The protestors have as much right to be here as we do.”
“This isn’t right.” Mason breathed heavier.
I liked that Mason listened to King. He wasn’t wrong, even if I understood what Mason was saying. None of this seemed right.
When the sea of people parted, I caught sight of Natalie Dreiss. She was stunned, not sure what to do as she watched the peaceful event she’d come to support suddenly turn into something much different.
“Natalie,” I yelled, waving my white cross high above my head. When she didn’t hear me, I called her name again, finally getting her attention.
She blew out her candle and trotted over to us. I slung my arm around her shoulders as soon as she joined our group. “Can you believe this?” she said to me. “How dare they choose tonight to protest?”
Linking arms, we formed a wall. Me, King, Mason, and now Natalie holding onto each other to keep the others from falling.
As the energy of the two sides intensified, a blind man could see that this wasn’t just about what was right or wrong, but a clash between black and white. And as the white protestors shouted about racial injustice, the blacks telling them to take it somewhere else, it was the shirts the protestors wore that sent a chill down my spine.
Each of them had the slogan Soldiers in Arms for a More Prosperous America printed in bright bold red colors across their chests. They raised their picketing signs like pitchforks and a few wore helmets as if expecting things to turn violent.
Frisking the crowd with my eyes, I was just waiting to see Rick Morris.
Soon, the girls found their way to us and Erin sidled up to my side. “Sam, this is Croft’s doing.”
Nodding, I grinded my teeth thinking how Croft had played innocent with us. He knew what he had planned for tonight—the protest he was most likely assisting his students with. I couldn’t wait to confront him about this and close my fingers around his neck.
A loud roar erupted near the podium where I had last seen Pastor Michaels standing. Arms swung wildly through the air as large bodies dog-piled on one person. I couldn’t make out who was who, only that things seemed to be getting out of control quick.
I heard Susan gasp and, when I glanced at her, she was staring with her hand covering her mouth in disbelief. I didn’t know what I could do without putting myself in danger. I kept shaking my head. How could this be happening?
A handful of uniformed officers rushed the people fighting. More punches were thrown, more violent words tossed at the opposing side. Soon, the police had a couple people in cuffs but things only seemed to intensify when, suddenly, I recognized a face from our visit to the community college.
“Erin, look,” I said.
Erin lowered her brow. “I knew it,” she growled.
“But where is Croft?”
Erin turned and gave me a look. Against King’s advice, we took off in search of the professor.
“We just need a photo to place him here,” Erin said, pushing her way through the crowd.
We stuck together, not wanting to lose the only safety net we had. But Erin was right, we needed something—anything—to link Croft to this protest so we could build our case that he was in fact using his classroom to resurrect the Patriots of God.
Erin hit the brakes and swung her head around. Turning back to face the crowd, we couldn’t find Croft anywhere.
“He’s not here,” I said, pushing my fingers through my hair. And neither is Chandler.
“Who are you looking for?” a familiar voice said from behind.
I turned to find Nancy Jordan flanking us. “Don’t you have somewhere you need to be?”
“Don’t you?” She quirked a painted brow.
“Come on, Sam.” Erin reached for my arm. “We don’t have time for this.”
“He’s not here,” Nancy barked. She flicked her gaze to Erin. “Professor Croft isn’t here.”
“How do you know that’s who we’re looking for?”
Nancy’s eyes drifted to the protestors. “Isn’t it, though?”
“Have you been following us?” Erin stepped up to Nancy and glared down into her flashing eyes.
“I know what you’re up to,” Nancy sneered. “It would make one hell of story, too.”
My stomach clenched as I stared into Jordan’s eyes. I wondered how much she knew, how much was meant to get me to react simply to reveal my cards.
“What do you say? Work together on this, Sam?”
Erin was shaking her head as I let Jordan’s words bounce around my mind for a brief moment. “I’ll tell you what, you send me what you have and I’ll think about it.”
Nancy Jordan held out her hand. “Shake on it?”
“Just send me what you have.” I turned and scampered off with Erin.
“You can’t be serious.” Erin sounded disgusted.
“Maybe she has something we don’t.”
“I can’t stand that woman. There’s no way I’ll be able to work with her. You don’t really trust her, do you?”
“I just want to know what she has. If she knows as much as we do, I don’t want her to risk tipping off the man who might have instructed Tim to kill my son.”
King was on his cellphone by the time we regrouped. His brow was furrowed and the bags beneath his eyes were darker than when I had left him only a minute ago.
“I’m on my way now,” I heard him say.
King lowered his phone to his side. “Sam, something has happened.” I felt it before he said it. “There has been a police shooting.”
“What? Where?”
“Park Hill.”
“Is it the second shooter? Did they get him?”
King cast his gaze downward, his fingers going cold inside my hand. “I’m not sure what happened, but it sounds like a police officer may have killed an unarmed black man.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Detective Alex King arrived on scene with his stomach in knots. The last thing the department needed—no matter if the suspect was guilty or not— was for a black man’s life to be taken at the hand of an officer.
Emergency lights flashed, illuminating the night sky in a flickering red and blue.
He drove as close as he could get before parking his sedan. The block had been cordoned off and the roars from the neighborhood cracked the air like a whip as soon as he stepped out.
Suddenly, he was engulfed in a flame of chaos.
His muscles tensed and, by his own assessment, King swore the entire neighborhood was here thrusting their closed fists into the air. It was ten times the energy of what he’d just witnessed at the vigil, though eerily similar.
“You murdered my brother!” a man shouted toward the house.
“Police can’t be trusted!” another woman bellowed at the top of her lungs.
King heard everyone cursing the police and, as he approached the line, it didn’t take long for him to be called out for being on the wrong side of the line. “You fucking pig!” A woman spit in King’s face but missed.
King kept pushing his way to the police line and flashed his badge to the uniformed officer standing on duty. Ducking beneath the tape, King tracked down Lieutenant Baker.
“Don’t worry, they’re abusing anyone who wears the color blue, not just you.”
“And here I thought it was just because I was white.”
The whites in Lieutenant’s eyes glowed in contrast to his dark complexion.
“What happened?”
Lieutenant rolled his head toward the front of the house where he watched the tech team label evidence. “Received a call of shots fired. Four officers responded and, before we know it, we’re on the scene of what the ME is calling a homicide.”
“Let me guess, the officers were white?”
“Over there.” Lieutenant flicked his gaze in the direction of where four uniformed white officers were being debriefed by Detective Alvarez. “According to the wife of the deceased, he was unarmed.”
King slanted his eyebrows. “Was he?”
“Appears so.” Lieutenant sighed.
“Do we have a positive ID on the victim?”
“Dennis Hall, age 34.” Lieutenant sucked his lips into his mouth. “His record was clean. The vic doesn’t even have a moving violation.” Lieutenant glared at the crowd from under his brow. “I’ve never seen a situation so fucked up as this.”
King twisted his spine and turned to face the crowd. “Word spread fast. Any witnesses?”
“That’s where the story takes a turn.”
King returned his focus to his superior officer with both eyebrows raised.
“Even stranger is that none of our officers fired a weapon.”
King felt the air get knocked out of him. He stared into Lieutenant Baker’s chestnut eyes for a brief pause before flicking his gaze back to where the victim had been shot. He feared this was the second shooter—the cop killer. He felt guilty for not being able to connect the dots before another tragedy struck. But it had only been hours since he and Alvarez decided on that theory themselves.
King scrubbed a hand over his face. “This might be connected to yesterday’s shooting at the school.”
“The second shooter?” Lieutenant shared a questioning look which King confirmed.
> “Everyone had their sights on tonight’s vigil, and maybe our suspect anticipated that to be the case.”
Lieutenant Baker flashed King a skeptical look. “Why here? And why Dennis Hall?”
King stared at the front door of Dennis’s house, shaking his head. “If this is the second shooter from yesterday, I guess we now know he’s not just a cop killer.”
“How does this help me, Detective?”
“Because chasing a cop killer might be easier.”
“Easier?” Lieutenant’s brows furrowed and was looking at King like he was crazy.
King glanced behind him once again, staring at the angry crowd. “Now he doesn’t have to target cops himself when he has the city’s African American community to do it for him.”
“You mean to say he’s trying to turn them against us?”
“If he is, I’d say he’s doing a good job of it.”
“You were at Pastor Michaels’s vigil, right?” Lieutenant asked and King nodded. “Then tell me, what does that have to do with this?”
King realized then that Lieutenant Baker hadn’t heard about the protestors cutting the vigil short. But he did know about the second shooter at the school yesterday, and that was enough to make the connection. “The vigil ended early when it erupted in protest.”
“Decency doesn’t exist, does it?” The muscle in Lieutenant’s jaw twitched. “Who were the people protesting, and did they have a permit from the city?”
King thought back to earlier in the day when Sam brought his attention to the Patriots of God and, as he looked around tonight, there was no doubt in his mind that Sam was right. “I don’t know who they were but I can tell you what they were saying.”
“I’m all ears,” Lieutenant said.
King repeated a few of the slogans he’d overheard and their theme of racial injustice. “But it was what a survivor heard Timothy Morris spouting off as he marched through the school yesterday that has me truly worried.”
“I’m still following.” Lieutenant’s patience waned.
“Timothy Morris mentioned being a Patriot of God.”
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