by Siara Brandt
“What was that?” his wife asked, almost yielding for a moment to her tears.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “But I do know one thing. Whatever happens, we’re not getting in those trucks.”
Athan Clune pointed with his backpack and they headed for the backdoor.
“Get these people out of here,” the officer said to the hotel clerk. “We need to clear the inn.”
They were the only two police officers available to respond to the call from the Willow Grove Inn. They were supposed to be off duty, but calls were coming in from everywhere, so the station needed every man available.
The two officers didn’t know what they were dealing with yet. They’d gotten a call that someone at the inn had been attacked with a knife and there was some concern that the person responsible might be a terrorist.
They were looking at the suspect right now. He was standing on the other side of the glass doors leading to the pool room. The guy surely knew they were there, but he seemed oblivious to their presence. Or else he was just ignoring them. A pretty good sign that this was not going to be a simple arrest.
“If he is a terrorist,” Galton James said to his partner. “The guy he attacked is lucky he didn’t get himself decapitated.” They’d both seen the size of the knife laying on the carpeted lobby floor. They were waiting for a team to get here to bag it up for evidence.
“He told one of the guests who was in the sauna at the time that he came here to die and that his body was a weapon,” his partner said.
“That sounds like bomb talk to me,” Galt said, dreading the possibility as he continued to watch the suspect. “What’s your gut feeling? You think this is some kind of terrorist attack?”
“We have to consider it. The crazy bastard started spouting something about what would happen after he died. He claimed he would return as an unstoppable and fearless warrior for his cause.”
“I don’t see a bomb,” Galt said. “But that doesn’t mean there isn’t one.”
“Could be under his clothes,” his partner suggested.
“We won’t know until the special unit gets here. If they ever get here.” Galt narrowed his gaze. “Whatever we do, you know someone’s liable to start yelling religious discrimination.”
“Yeah,” his partner snorted under his breath. “Or maybe they’ll decide to call this workplace violence.”
“That’s always possible,” Galt replied absently. He was getting impatient as he stood there. About all they could do now was to wait and make sure the suspect stayed put and didn’t endanger anyone else.
They’d had special training for terrorism, but they weren’t used to dealing with this sort of thing. If there was even a suspicion of a bomb, then they had to wait.
“What’s he doing now?” Galt heard his partner ask. “Listening for something?”
The suspect was on the ground now and he had his rear end in the air. His head was down and it was resting sideways on the ground.
“No,” Galt said with a frown. “I think he’s praying.”
“I don’t think so.” His partner shook his head as the suspect started crawling with uncoordinated, jerky movements along the pool room floor.
“What the hell’s he doing n- Oh, hell.”
Both officers grimaced as the man retched up dark chunks of what looked like blood.
The man then pushed himself up from the ground. He raised himself to his full height and immediately started spasming out like he was having some kind of violent seizure.
While the two officers watched in alarm, the man pitched forward and hit his head on the corner of one of the lounge chairs. He dragged himself to all fours and started crawling again. When he lifted his face, they could see a big gash on his forehead. Blood was running down his face and it was smeared across the striped lounge cushion. The guy was white as a sheet, so the dark blood was a startling contrast.
As they continued to watch, the suspect got to his feet again. His eyes rolled back in his head. After his head flopped dramatically sideways, it dropped backwards, exposing the white flesh of his throat under the black beard.
As the officers drew their weapons and stepped closer to the glass doors, the suspect pitched sideways and landed with a big splash in the pool.
He didn’t move. He floated face down, completely motionless, his clothes billowing out around him while blood seeped into the water around his head.
“What the hell is going on?” Galt breathed. “Did he take poison or something?”
The two officers waited for a long time, wondering if maybe they should go in and help the man. But something was seriously wrong here and they had no idea what it was. For all they knew, it was some kind of suicide attack.
”Somebody’s gonna have to eventually fish him out of there,” Galt heard his partner say.
Yeah, but thank God it wasn’t going to be him.
Chapter 7
_______________
Driving by the Willow Grove Inn, Lochlain Sayres had seen the two police cars parked outside. By law, because he was a first responder, he was required to stop and attend to anyone who might be injured. Since there were officers already on the scene, he figured he could also report the incident up at Creyvan Ridge.
He didn’t know what was going on, but as soon as he pulled up with his blue light flashing, someone came up to his car and told him that two officers were inside right now with the suspect of a knife attack. There were several small groups of people sitting or standing in the shade under some trees outside the inn. Locusts were whirring on the hot air when Loch opened his door and stepped out of his car. He thought he heard someone say something about a terrorist attack.
“Anybody hurt?” he asked.
The hotel clerk pointed with his thumb over his shoulder. “That guy lying down over there. He was the one who was attacked. Can’t imagine why,” the clerk added sarcastically under his breath.
Loch got the first aid kit out of his vehicle and went to see to the injured man. The man’s wound, he found, wasn’t life threatening. In fact, it wasn’t much more than a scratch.
“You’re lucky,” Loch said to try and calm the man down. He looked like he needed it.
“Lucky?” the man echoed indignantly. “You call this lucky?”
Okay, Loch thought to himself. So much for comforting the man.
“When’s the last time you had a tetanus shot?” Loch asked him.
The man was staring down at the diagonal mark across his chest. He didn’t answer right away, so his wife answered for him. “It was last year when he was putting up a bird house. Instead of getting a ladder, he tried standing on top of an old wooden barrel. He fell through and since he had shorts on, he scratched his legs up, so they gave him a tetanus shot.”
Loch had to bite his lip to keep from laughing out loud when he envisioned the scene. The guy was way too heavy to be standing on old barrels.
Penndle finally looked up. “You see what he did to me? You sure I don’t need stitches?”
Loch shook his head. “No.”
The guy was making a lot of fuss for such a minor cut. He was sweating and his face was red.
“You sure you’re not hurt somewhere else?” Loch asked with a frown.
“It’s the heat,” the woman said. “He doesn’t tolerate it very well.”
Loch looked up when he saw more black helicopters overhead. He glanced over at the hotel and wondered to himself what the hell was going on.
That’s when they heard the first explosion from the direction of Willow Grove.
Tessa Jerell closed her eyes and tried to draw a calming breath. She stood rigid and motionless for a long time in the breathless heat, the misery carving so deeply into her soul that she felt almost paralyzed by the pain. She had tried desperately to suppress her emotions, to tamp them down where they could not been seen nor felt. At least temporarily. Until she could be alone. But so far she was losing the battle. It was all still seething through her with a blazing
intensity that kept her pinned there against the brick wall of the school bus garage.
Betrayal was an ugly thing. So was dishonesty. At the moment she felt the full weight of just how devastating those things could be. Mace had destroyed every last ounce of love that she had ever felt for him and she knew, without the slightest doubt, that she could never get it back again. That, perhaps, wounded her as much as anything else. He had made her fall out of love with him and she hated him for it. He had left a hollow place in her heart and now she was alone with nothing left but to mourn the loss.
That she had forgiven him only a year ago for the very same offense of adultery made it that much worse. It made her feel even more bitter towards him. The fact that everyone at work had known and no one had told her till now . . .
She bowed her head like a tree bending under the weight of a storm. The humiliating part was that they had all known from the beginning and they had kept it from her. No doubt they had discussed it many times behind her back. Their shared glances these past few months, their sly looks all made sense now.
She clenched her hands into fists as all those things fomented into one churning mass of emotions. None of them were good, but they had to be dealt with. Somehow. She didn’t have the luxury of falling apart right now. There were only a few minutes left until school was dismissed. The kids would be boarding the bus and she needed to get them safely to their homes. That had to be her priority right now. There was a shortage of bus drivers as it was because this early dismissal had come out of the blue.
The school was seven miles outside of Willow Grove, and so it was out of the way for a casual visit. When Mace showed up unexpectedly, she was nowhere near prepared to deal with him. She was still trying to process it all. From beneath her lashes, she watched him walk towards her, not trusting herself to speak when he stopped before her.
“What’s going on” he asked, not bothering with even the simplest of greetings. “Why is school letting out so early? Too hot?”
She shook her head, still not sure she could trust herself to speak. This was not the time nor the place for a confrontation, she had to remind herself.
“Yes, it’s the heat,” she finally managed. “And if you haven’t already noticed, the TV and the internet aren’t working. Neither are the phones.”
He gave her his usual half-perplexed look and grunted noncommittally, “Hmph.”
“What do you want, Mace?”
“Do I have to want something? I just stopped by to see you.”
Why? she wondered. He had just spent the morning with Regina Westcott.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, his body stiffening, the first sign that he suspected all was not right with his world.
Wrong? For starters, that their marriage was over. That she felt like there was a knife blade in her heart that was being slowly and cruelly twisted yet again. That he stood there before her with a pretense of innocence even though he was guilty as charged. It wasn’t fair that he seemed perfectly calm and composed while she felt like her insides had been put through a shredder.
She was so close to yielding to the terrible passions that were roiling deep inside her that the effort keeping it all suppressed caused her to tremble. But, she reminded herself, she had to be able to maintain some semblance of normalcy even if it was just on the surface. She didn’t have just herself to think about. She had the kids. Drawing up every last shred of self-control that she possessed, she looked straight at him and asked, “What makes you think something is wrong?”
Mace Jerrell tilted his head and frowned thoughtfully for a few moments before he replied “I don’t know” like he didn’t have a clue. And then he asked a question of his own. “Does this mean you’re going to be off work for a while?”
“Yes.”
Obviously it wasn’t the reply he wanted to hear. His lips compressed tightly and his eyes darted back and forth a few times. “I didn’t expect this,” he said half to himself.
She looked at him for the space of several heartbeats before she said quietly, “Neither did I.”
His gaze narrowed. He looked at her more closely and asked, “Did something happen at work?”
This time she could not keep a short, bitter laugh from escaping her. This time she could not pretend that it had not happened, or hope that things would get better, no matter how much she wanted that to be true. Her hope was gone and with it all the trust she’d been able to scrape up this past year.
She took a deep breath. She tried. She really did. But she was not completely successful in keeping the hostility out of her voice. “I was just wondering if my being off work was going to inconvenience you.”
He looked startled at her tone, as if she had caught him off guard, but he recovered quickly. “What do you mean by that?” he asked.
As she stood there with her heart pounding with misery and unhappiness, a flash of rage found its way to the surface, despite her efforts to keep it down, and she said, under her breath, “I mean, you won’t be able to come and go as freely as you have been if I’m around.”
He had been so sure of her, she thought resentfully. But he didn’t look so certain at the moment. Still, he kept up the illusion.
“I don’t know what you mean by that. Did I come at a bad time?” he asked, probing for a way to explain away her mood. Hoping to find one that didn’t involve him, or actual honesty. But she noted that underneath it all, he was not quite as indifferent as he would have her believe. He shrugged his shoulders slightly in an effort to relax his obviously-tense muscles. He thrust out his chin out, the first sign of his belligerence, and looked down at her.
“I meant to come by earlier and take you out to lunch. But I- ”
“But you were busy.”
“Yes. I had to help Blake with something.”
Helping his brother out was his usual excuse for his otherwise unexplainable absences. A part of her had always wondered about those absences, but she had generously tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. Now she knew better, and she intended to have this out later in private. But now- Right now all she could think about was how she was going to be able to keep it all inside until then. She could could barely stand looking at him, so she turned her face to the side and made a heroic effort to re-group.
Her pride, apparently, was still intact. It was about all that was left her, she thought bitterly. The last thing she wanted was for him to see just how much he had hurt her, so she drew herself up and turned to go to her bus. The less she said right now, the better.
Until he dared to tell her that he loved her.
She froze. And then she slowly turned around.
“Why are you acting this way?” he wanted to know.
Her cold glare finally seemed to get through to him on some level. There was a kind of dread anticipation growing in his eyes as he waited for her answer.
“Why? Because I know where you were this morning,” she said with slow deliberation.
“Where?”
Such audacity. A pretense of innocence until the bitter end.
“I know about all the other times, too,” she said, feeling a deep sense of relief at getting it out at last. This would have been better at home, but she couldn’t take the lies anymore. Lies never did anyone any good.
Amazingly, he managed to maintain an innocent expression on his face. He asked what she was talking about, which made her wonder just how practiced at lying he really was.
She looked up slowly. “Don’t do this, Mace.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Try to play with my reality. Try to make me believe what you want me to believe. Even if it isn’t true.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
And then he tried his usual ruse of switching tactics. “Look, I know this job gets to you sometimes. And it’s obvious that today you’re not having a good day.”
Denial. He was so good at it. But beneath the veneer of denial she saw the shadow of doubt in his eyes. He
shifted a little nervously. Evidence of his guilty conscience kicking in. If indeed he did have a conscience.
And then he nodded suddenly, his eyes gleaming with satisfaction as if he had just figured it all out.
“Ah. You’re worried about not working because the money won’t be coming in.”
If only it were that simple.
“Don’t worry. We’ll be all right,” he assured her.
“No,” she said under her breath. “We won’t.”
He slowly stiffened and drew himself up to his full height. “I’m trying to make you feel better, and this is the attitude I get?” That was good. Now he was acting like he was the wounded one. “Why are you being like this to me?”
He look around for some salvation, must have seen it in the waiting line of buses. “We’ll talk about this later.”
“I’ll probably be late.”
“Late? Why?” He looked at her suspiciously.
“Because Brian said he would look at the car.”
“Brian?” he huffed. “Is that what this is all about? You’re mad at me because I haven’t had time to look at your car? I’ll look at it tonight then when I get home from work.”
She looked straight at him. “Brian already said he would do it for me.”
“Yeah, and what else is Brian going to do for you?”
“Don’t judge me by your own behavior,” she shot back. She couldn’t help it. “Brian is only trying to help me out. And you’ve obviously had other things on your mind.”
“Are you sure you’re not the one who has something else on your mind.” His lips curled into a crude sneer, but behind it she could see the darker burn of jealousy smoldering in his eyes.
She lifted her chin. “Apparently it doesn’t matter to you whether I am driving a safe vehicle or not. Brian was horrified when he tested the brakes and saw how bad they were. He couldn’t believe I drove around like that through the winter.”
“Have you ever thought that he wants to work on more than just your brakes?”
“Have you ever thought of keeping it in your pants for a change, instead of chasing after anything that moves?”
