“Actually, boss, there is,” Overman said as he closed the door behind him.
Hodges turned toward the table at one side of the room where a coffeemaker sat, along with cups, sugar, and creamer.
“Let me get some coffee going—”
He heard Overman moving up behind him but didn’t have time to turn around before Overman’s arm looped around his neck and jerked back. Overman’s forearm pressed against Hodges’ throat with ferocious strength. Hodges was a fairly big guy and had worked outside all his life, so he was no weakling. But even though he tried to fight back, he couldn’t even begin to budge that terrible, choking grip. His head started to spin as he flailed around.
“I’m sorry about this, Charlie, I truly am,” Overman whispered in his ear. “You’re a good guy and you don’t deserve it. But I do deserve what I’m going to get today, and I can’t let you stand in the way of that.”
Hodges was able to force a strangled gasp from his tortured throat, and then a second later Overman’s muscles bunched and twisted and Hodges heard a sharp crack that resonated through his brain.
He had just enough time to realize it was the sound of his neck breaking before he knew nothing at all.
* * *
Matthias Foster lowered the groundskeeper’s body to the floor, then grasped Hodges under the arms and dragged him behind the desk. He had to pull the corpse’s legs around and sort of fold Hodges double to make sure he couldn’t be seen by anybody who came into the office, at least not right away.
Then he took the ring of keys off Hodges’ belt and clipped it to his own. He stepped into the garage area and flipped the lights on. He didn’t think he’d have long to wait, and sure enough, he didn’t.
The office door opened, and Sam Torres, a stocky, middle-aged member of the crew, came in with a puzzled look on his face. By this time, Foster had a hip propped casually on a front corner of the desk.
“Hey, kid,” Torres said. “How come the big door’s not open yet? Charlie always has it rolled up by the time the rest of us get here.”
“Some sort of problem with one of the mowers,” Foster replied. “He’s in there working on it now.”
Torres scoffed.
“I know the engines on those mowers better than he does. He should have waited and let me take a look at it.” He headed for the open door between the office and the garage. “Hope he hasn’t messed it—”
That was when the heavy wrench in Overman’s hand came down hard on the back of Torres’s head and cracked his skull. He pitched forward onto his face. Foster leaned over him and hit him a couple more times to make sure he was dead. Then he rolled Torres onto his back and began stripping the coveralls worn by the groundskeeping crew from the dead man. That would get some blood and brain matter on the concrete floor, but it already had so much grease and dirt on it, Foster didn’t think anybody would notice right away.
Anyway, he didn’t intend to give anybody a chance to notice that something was wrong this morning. He went into the office, stuffed the coveralls in a desk drawer, and returned to the garage to drag Torres’s body into the storeroom in the back where the trimmers, leaf blowers, and other smaller tools of the trade were kept. As he stepped out into the garage again, he heard voices from the office.
The other three members of the groundskeeping crew had arrived.
Foster put a friendly smile on his face as he walked into the office. The expression wasn’t completely feigned. He liked these guys and had enjoyed working with them the past couple of months. If it hadn’t been such a cliché, he would have thought of them as the salt of the earth: Jerry Brenner, Evan Underhill, and Walt Thompson.
“Hey, Overman,” Thompson greeted him, using the false name Foster had adopted for this job. “Where’s Charlie and Torres? I saw their vehicles out there.”
“In the garage,” Foster said, inclining his head toward the door, “having trouble with one of the mowers.” The story had worked just fine once. No reason it wouldn’t work again. They had to work on the zero-turn mowers often enough that the lie was completely believable.
Like most guys who worked with their hands, once these three heard there was some sort of mechanical problem going on, they couldn’t resist going to take a look and offer their advice, just as Foster had known they would. They trooped into the garage just as obediently as if he had ordered them to, walking right through the small amount of brains and blood that had leaked out of Sam Torres’s head without ever noticing what they were doing.
Brenner looked around and said, “Where are they? I don’t see them.”
Foster took a small, flat, semi-automatic 9mm pistol from a pocket on his coveralls and pointed it at them.
“Don’t move, boys. I don’t want to hurt any of you, but I will if I have to.”
They looked more surprised than angry at first, but that didn’t last long. Then, glaring at Foster, Brenner said, “What the hell is this?”
“Take it easy,” Foster said, keeping his voice calm and steadying. “I just need you guys to help me with something, and if you cooperate, nothing bad will happen to you.”
“You’re crazy,” Underhill said. He was the youngest of the two, a grad student here at Kelton who was working to help pay his tuition. Since they were the closest in age, Foster had gotten to be friends with Underhill and knew his story. Underhill’s parents were fairly well-to-do but not nearly as rich as the families of most of the students here. That was why he needed to work, since tuition was sky-high.
Underhill went on, “Rick, you need to put that gun away. You shouldn’t even have a gun here on campus. You know they’re prohibited. Hell, we put up the signs that say they’re prohibited!”
“If you’re planning on robbing us,” Brenner snapped, “you’re gonna be disappointed, you little punk. I’ve got like seventeen bucks on me, and I’ll bet these other guys don’t have much more than that.”
“I don’t have that much,” Walt Thompson said with a sigh.
Foster shook his head and said, “I don’t want your money. You can keep it. All I want is your coveralls.”
Now they looked confused again.
“Our coveralls?” Underhill said.
“Yeah. Take ’em off.”
The three men exchanged puzzled, wary glances. Underhill said, “Why don’t you tell us what’s going on here?”
“Sorry,” Foster replied. “I can’t do that.” He gestured with the 9mm. “Get out of the coveralls. Now.”
With obvious great reluctance, the three men began stripping off the work clothes. Foster used his free hand to point at a wheelbarrow and ordered, “Just pile them in that.”
They did so, and then, wearing just their underwear, socks, and shoes, they stood and stared angrily at Foster, whose gun had never wavered from them.
Nor did it now when he used his left hand to slip a cell phone out of his pocket. Without looking at it, he thumbed it on and placed a call. When Hank answered on the other end, Foster said, “All right, we’re good.”
“Be there in thirty seconds,” Hank replied.
It was actually less than that when Hank, Jimmy, Carlos, and another member of the group named Royce came through the office and into the garage. When the three groundskeepers saw the new arrivals, the outraged expressions on their faces began to fade into looks of fear.
“What the hell is this?” Brenner said again. “I don’t like this, Overman.”
“Trust me, it’ll be all right,” Foster said reassuringly. “We’ve got what we wanted. All you have to do now is turn around and get down on your knees. I’m sorry, I know that concrete floor is rough, but it won’t take long. We’re just going to tie you up and gag you so you can’t cause a commotion. Somebody will find you after a while.” He motioned with the gun. “Go on, do what I said.”
Slowly, the men turned their backs. They knelt on the floor near the mowers. Three of Foster’s followers moved up behind them.
Suddenly, Underhill’s nerve broke. He yelled, “No!” and trie
d to lunge to his feet. Jimmy was too fast for him, pouncing and getting his left arm around Underhill’s neck. His weight bore the grad student back to the floor.
Royce and Carlos moved in fast on the other two, grabbing them in similar choke holds. They brought up knives in their right hands and plunged the blades into the men’s bodies, aiming just off center to the left between the shoulder blades so the tip would penetrate the heart and kill almost instantly. Brenner and Thompson died without a struggle. Jimmy had a little more trouble with Underhill, since he’d been trying to get to his feet, but he died only seconds after the other two.
“Leave the knives in place for a minute, until the heart’s stopped pumping,” Foster said. “No point in getting more blood on the floor than necessary, although by the time anybody gets around to looking in here, it won’t matter.”
The others waited, as ordered, then withdrew the blades and stepped back. Foster nodded in satisfaction.
“Drag them into the storeroom and then get those coveralls on,” he said. “We have a lot of work to do.”
CHAPTER 19
Pierce Conners broke into a trot as he cut across Nafziger Plaza toward the Burr Memorial Library. He was supposed to meet his political science study group there at eight-thirty, and he was late. Not that it really mattered—they were just planning to go over some notes—but the group’s self-appointed leader, Moammar Fareed, usually got mad if anybody was late.
Pierce had already been bitched at enough the night before. He didn’t want Fareed on his case this morning, too.
“How could you post that video like that?” his girlfriend Dominique had demanded. “You made that racist skinhead look like he didn’t do anything wrong!”
“Well, as far as I could see, he didn’t,” Pierce had tried to explain. “The other guy tried to hit him from behind. Rivers just stopped him, that’s all. He didn’t even really hurt the guy. Besides, I don’t think he’s a skinhead. He just keeps his hair cut short because he was in the military.”
Dominique had not been convinced.
“He caused the whole thing just by being here,” she insisted. “Hell, Pierce, the guy’s a walking, talking, breathing symbol of white oppression! You saw how he got in a fight with members of the resistance.”
“After a whole mob of them came at him with clubs and bike chains.” A frown had creased Pierce’s forehead as he sat next to Dominique on a padded bench in the student union building. “Besides, I don’t like the way they wear hoods. Black hoods, white hoods, I don’t see the difference.”
“Well, then, you’re blind. Freedom fighters have always had to hide their identities to protect themselves. You know good and well those damn white supremacists are settin’ up death camps in Utah and Wyoming and are planning to send all the black folks there, just as soon as they steal enough elections to control the government completely.”
The previous semester, Pierce had written a paper on voter fraud, and he knew from his research into the subject that in virtually all of the provable cases, the fraud had favored the candidate representing the Democratic Party. People on the left liked to argue that the Republicans engaged in voter suppression, which was also a form of fraud, but Pierce hadn’t found any actual evidence of that. On the contrary, the only instances of voter suppression and intimidation he’d been able to find were cases where Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and other progressive groups had prevented conservatives from voting, sometimes by violence. As someone who had always considered himself very leftward-leaning, politically, but who was also devoted to the concepts of fairness and equal rights, those discoveries had been rather troubling for Pierce.
Not troubling enough to make him believe that his core values were wrong, however.
Pierce was off the concrete path and cut through the plaza to the library. The groundskeepers didn’t like it when people cut through and trampled on the grass, and Pierce could understand why they would feel that way. He would rather risk their wrath than Fareed’s, though.
Besides, he had seen what appeared to be all the members of the grounds crew over by Colohan Hall just a few minutes earlier, digging several holes in the turf along the building’s front wall. He wasn’t sure why they would be doing that, but as long as they were busy with something else, they wouldn’t be worried or upset about him taking a shortcut through the trees in the plaza.
He reached the edge of the big, park-like area, hurried across the broad walkway that bordered it, and went up the steps to the columned porch that ran along the front of the library.
Once inside, he went down the escalator to the vast lower level, which contained not only “the stacks,” shelf upon shelf of bound periodicals and older, noncirculating books with narrow aisles between them, but also a large area of tables, chairs, and conversation pits where study groups could gather. Small study carrels lined the walls. Sets of shelves containing current books and periodicals zigzagged among the conversation pits and created at least an illusion of privacy as well as muffling voices so one group was less likely to disturb the others.
Pierce saw the other four members of his political science study group in the area where they usually gathered, where there were two love seats and two armchairs with a low table sitting in the middle. Fareed was on his feet, stalking around the table and talking animatedly, as usual. He was a wiry young man who shaved his head but kept a layer of dark beard stubble on his face. As he spotted Pierce approaching, he stopped waving his hands and glared angrily at the newcomer instead.
Chunky, purple-haired Margery Dorne didn’t look happy to see Pierce, either. Margery was never happy, though, so Pierce wasn’t surprised. She was one of the most perpetually outraged people he had ever met . . . and that was saying a lot since Pierce’s father saw racism everywhere he looked.
The other two members of the group just looked like they wanted to get on with it. Jenny Trumbull had been a cheerleader in high school, but a couple of years at Kelton had changed her. Now she wore her blond hair in dreadlocks, seldom washed it, and wouldn’t be caught dead in makeup. Clark Mitchell was short, pudgy, round-faced, and wore glasses, the stereotypical nerd, but he was highly intelligent and fiercely devoted to Jenny, although she never paid him anything more than perfunctory attention.
“Well, here’s the traitor now,” Fareed greeted Pierce. “What have you done this morning to empower the oppressors of your people and mine?”
Pierce had worried about Fareed being annoyed with him for being late. He should have known that Fareed would have seen the video he’d posted and had the same reaction to it that Dominique had had. For a second, he wanted to just turn around and walk out. He didn’t need this grief from his study group after he’d already endured the griping from his girlfriend.
But he ought to give them the benefit of the doubt, he told himself. They weren’t exactly his friends, but he felt a certain bond with them since they had been studying together for a couple of months.
“I didn’t empower anybody,” he said patiently. “I just posted something that was true. I can’t deny the evidence of my own eyes, and neither can any of you.”
Fareed let out a contemptuous snort and said, “Your own eyes. Like so many, you look, but you fail to see the truth. Evil men such as Jake Rivers must be opposed and stopped, no matter what it takes.”
“He wasn’t doing anything,” Pierce said stubbornly.
Jenny said, “He attacked one of our brothers in the struggle against the white, capitalist patriarchy.”
That was rich, Pierce thought, since Jenny was about as white as anybody could get, and capitalism had served her family quite well, considering that her father owned car dealerships, department stores, and was a partner in both an NFL and an NBA franchise. He was worth close to a billion dollars, which was why he could afford to send his daughter to a high-priced institution like Kelton College and never miss the money.
“You’re right, Jenny,” Clark said dutifully. “That guy’s just the worst, attacking one
of our brothers like that.”
Pierce said, “You’re talking about the guy Rivers bumped into. That wasn’t an attack. It was just an accident, the kind of thing that happens dozens of times a day in the halls. He just went after Rivers because he recognized him. I was there, dudes. I saw the whole thing.”
Fareed shook his head.
“None of that matters. Nothing can be allowed to distract from the narrative! You know that. Jake Rivers is evil and must be driven from our midst.”
“Yeah, well, why don’t we just lynch him, then?”
They all stared at him. Margery gasped and said, “How dare you be so insensitive!”
“I’m the black guy, remember? I’ve got more right to say it than any of you. But I’m not going to let my race, or my political beliefs, blind me to the facts. Rivers hasn’t done anything to deserve all this hate that’s being laid on him. That’s the way I see it.”
“You should hate him just because he’s white,” Jenny insisted.
“Yeah,” Clark added, glancing at her to see if she liked him agreeing with her that way.
“You two are white,” Pierce pointed out.
Jenny sniffed.
“I identify as post-racial.”
Clark nodded.
“Me, too.”
Pierce knew he was wasting his time. Their opinions were set in stone, and nothing would ever change them. He said, “Let’s just get on with studying, okay? We’ve got that test coming up Friday, and I’d like to do well on it.”
“Tests are aggressions,” Margery said under her breath. “Just another way for the patriarchy to keep oppressing us.”
“The system keeps us in its iron grip,” Fareed said, holding up a hand and clenching it into a fist to demonstrate. “But one day all the oppressed people of the world will join together and explode.” He opened his fist emphatically. “Then there will come a reckoning for the sinful Western society and all its ills.”
“Yeah,” Clark said, venturing to express an opinion without waiting for Jenny so he could follow her lead. “The revolution! What a glorious day that will be. And we’ll all be fighting to liberate the world together, won’t we, Moammar?”
Trigger Warning Page 11