Total Mayhem

by John Gilstrap

  “Glen,” the boy said. “Glen Joyce.”

  “Hi, Glen. You’ve been shot. Did you know that?”

  He grunted against a wave of pain. “It occurred to me, yes.”

  “Okay, I need to help you, but it’s going to feel uncomfortable.”

  “Anything,” he said. “Just keep me from dying.”

  Gail didn’t respond to the request. She pulled the bandage scissors out of the first aid kit and slit Glen’s T-shirt from waist to neck, and then down both sleeves to bare his belly and chest.

  “Do we really know each other that well?” Glen quipped.

  Gail smiled. A sense of humor was always a good sign. It meant that he still had enough blood circulating to keep his brain sharp. But that could change quickly.

  She pulled the shirt completely free from his body and held it in her hand. “Okay,” she said. “Here comes the uncomfortable part.”

  “Can’t hurt worse than I already do.”

  Then Gail started stuffing the fabric of the shirt into the bullet wound.

  * * *

  Jonathan sprinted in the dark down Freedom Plaza Drive on his way to the Golden Buoy Hotel. He keyed his mic. “Hey, Big Guy, where are you?”

  “On my way to save your sorry ass,” Boxers replied.

  Jonathan looked back down the sidewalk but didn’t see him.

  He kept going. As he swung the turn onto America Avenue, he literally ran into a cop who looked and sounded dazed. “Hey, who are you?” The cop grabbed him by his vest.

  Jonathan badged him. “Neil Bonner, FBI.”

  “What are you doing in Bob Driscoll’s vest?” The cop fingered the trigger guard on his slung MP5.

  The decorative gas lamps provided just that much illumination.

  “He’d dead. I figured his rifle and mags could go to a better cause. Come with me.”

  The cop hesitated. The flickering light also highlighted his fear. “To do what?”

  “To stop the slaughter,” Jonathan said. “The shooter’s on the rooftop of the Golden Buoy.”

  The cop looked up the hill, then cranked his neck to look to the top of the building.

  Jonathan didn’t have time for this. None of them had time for this. “Look, Officer . . . What’s your name?”

  “O’Brien.”

  “Officer O’Brien,” Jonathan said, “I’m going up there, and I’m going to stop that killer. I’d love to have you along.”

  More hesitation.

  Jonathan tried again. It would be his last attempt. “You wear a badge, and that means people count on you to do the dangerous thing. This is your defining moment. Are you coming or not?”

  Jonathan pushed past O’Brien and started running again. It had been a long, long time since he’d encountered a shooter on his own.

  Watching the reactions of bystanders as he passed them with his rifle at low ready he was thankful that he’d thought to bring the vest. The word POLICE at the shoulder and across the back meant a lot when people were scared. How quickly they forgot the recent attack on a Northern Virginia’s Mason’s Corner Shopping Center that was spearheaded by bad guys dressed as police.

  That was one Jonathan could never forget.

  He never broke stride as he ran across the hotel lobby to the emergency stairwell. “Make a hole!” he shouted to the confused crowd. “Out of the way!”

  Many shouted questions to him, asking what was happening and what he was about to do, but he ignored them all.

  “I hope you arrest that son of a bitch and put him in jail forever!” someone yelled.

  Again, he didn’t respond. The lady probably wouldn’t want to know the truth of what he was about to do.

  As he passed the elevator shaft, he could hear stranded people in the cars screaming for help. Careful what you ask for, Jonathan thought. This was probably one of the first emergencies in the history of emergencies where the elevator was the safest place to be.

  The escape stairwell was well enough lit by the battery-powered emergency lights to see where he was going. “God help me,” he said aloud as he hit the first step. He had a long way to go, and it was all straight up. Over the air he said, “I’m running up the stairs to the roof of the Golden Buoy.”

  “Copy,” Boxers said. He sounded especially winded.

  By the time Jonathan got to the seventh landing, his legs and lungs were burning.

  He pushed on.

  Tenth floor. Top floor. Only one short flight to the rooftop.

  “Hey, Bonner,” a winded voice said from below.

  Jonathan turned. It wasn’t Boxers. He looked down to see Officer O’Brien only two flights down.

  “You slowed down a little after the fourth floor,” O’Brien said. “I expected more from Feeb.”

  Jonathan smiled. “Thanks for coming to the party.”

  “You only die once,” O’Brien said. “It might as well be in a blaze of glory.”

  Jonathan pivoted to the mission at hand. He’d arrived at the steel door to the roof. It was closed, but the knob turned. When he tried to push it open, though, it wouldn’t move. Made sense that the shooter would barricade access to his sniper’s nest.

  “Hey, Big Guy, where are you?”

  “Don’t wait for me,” Boxers said.

  This wasn’t right. Jonathan didn’t get it, but he didn’t have time to stew over it, either. He turned to O’Brien. “It’s blocked.”

  “We’ve got choppers in the air on their way here,” O’Brien said. “Maybe we should wait for reinforcements.”

  “Negative,” Jonathan said. “You’ve heard his rate of fire. Every second of delay is another body.”

  “So, you just want to add two more on the roof?” Jonathan felt a flash of anger, but he swallowed it. “Talk like that gets people killed, O’Brien. If you don’t think we can win, then stay behind.”

  Even in the dim glow of the emergency lights, Jonathan could see that he’d hit the shame button that he was aiming for.

  “Okay,” Jonathan said. “We’re going to go in on this fast and hard. Getting past his barricade is likely to be noisy, and if it is, it will draw his attention. Speed is our friend, have you got that?”

  “I’m not a coward,” O’Brien said.

  “Then prove it.” That came out more harshly than he’d wanted. “And to be clear, when I see this puke, I’m going to kill him. We’re not going to talk, I’m not going to put him under arrest. Are you good with that?”

  “You were in immediate fear of your life,” O’Brien said, the key phrase necessary to justify the use of lethal force.

  “Appreciate it,” Jonathan said. “Now, I’m going to open this door fast, move in, and pivot left. You go right. If you see him—”

  “Shoot him in the friggin’ face,” O’Brien said.

  Jonathan smiled. “You remind me of a friend of mine. Three . . . two . . . one . . .”

  Jonathan slammed his shoulder into the door. It gave a little, but not much. But boy, oh boy, did it make some noise.

  “Give me a hand,” he said. He counted out another cadence, and together they hit the door. It moved a little more.

  “It’s like yelling, ‘Hey, look at me!’” O’Brien said.

  Jonathan counted another cadence, and this time, the door opened enough to allow a man to pass.

  O’Brien started to lead the way, but Jonathan pulled him back by his vest. “No way,” he said, and he squirted through the door. He cut left and brought his rifle up.

  The sniper had stopped shooting. That was a good thing for the folks on the ground, but a really, really bad thing for Jonathan. He kept low and swung left, his rifle up and ready. Behind him, Officer O’Brien came through the same opening and headed right.

  Jonathan refused to give in to the urge to make sure the cop wasn’t doing something stupid. He wasn’t part of Jonathan’s team, and therefore, the only natural assumption was that he didn’t understand this level of tactics. But this wasn’t a training exercise. If anything, t
his was the worst kind of final exam.

  He scanned his sector of roof with both eyes open, but his right focused on the reticle of his red dot sight.

  I bet this guy has night vision.

  Jonathan would if he were in that position.

  Well, shit. That gave the bad guy all the advantage. But at least he wasn’t targeting the people down—

  He heard a whiz and a clap, and his left ear and cheek felt like they’d been set ablaze. Deafness enveloped his left side. He dove for the tar and gravel and rolled as a second shot slammed a hole through the cupola door where he’d just been crouching. He scrambled on hands and knees and threw himself behind a massive air handler. Depending on the sniper’s chosen gun, this would or wouldn’t be stout enough to stop a bullet.

  “O’Brien! What’s your situation?”

  The silence pulled his head around to O’Brien’s sector. The cop lay still, blood pouring from his head.

  “Shit!”

  A bullet blasted a hole through the air handler. One question answered. Maybe waiting for airborne reinforcements wasn’t a bad idea, after all. He tested his cheek and ear to see how badly he’d been hit, and his hand came away wet and red. “I’ve had worse,” he mumbled.

  Another hole blew out of the air handler’s steel case.

  “God dammit!” This wasn’t tenable anymore. Jonathan pressed his belly flat against the gravel and advanced an inch at a time toward the lower right-hand corner of the big steel box.

  The bad thing about a two-way shooting range like this was the two-way sight lines. As soon as you could see the bad guy, he could see you. Add the fact that there were essentially only two points in space from which Jonathan could expose himself—the left side or the right side—

  No, that wasn’t right. He pulled himself back to cover and scanned the real estate of the rooftop. His was one of many air handlers, arranged in staggered patterns from here to the edge of the roof. If he moved fast enough and kept low enough, maybe he could use the current steel air handler as cover as he dashed to one of the ones that stretched out behind him.

  There was no maybe about it. It would work or it wouldn’t, but staying here was out of play.

  Rising back to his haunches, Jonathan curled himself into a sprinter’s stance, and keeping as low as he could, he dashed thirty feet to the next air handler and slid to a halt. Again pressing his belly to the rough rooftop, he dared to take a peek around to where he thought the shooter must be.

  The view sucked. His sight picture was all about vents, air handlers, and utilities.

  Where the hell was Boxers? Shit like this worked a hell of a lot better when you were part of a team.

  Jonathan drew his feet under him, and with his rifle pressed to his shoulder, safety off, he frog-walked like an undertalented Cossack dancer, trying to get an eyeball on something that looked like his target without exposing himself.

  Movement.

  He caught it on his left periphery, but by the time he brought his muzzle around, it was gone. He froze in place and waited. In nighttime warfare, movement was what gave away most hidey-holes. One of the reasons humans are inherently afraid of the dark is because nighttime is so often owned by predators, whether they be rapists or hyenas. We’re inordinately attuned to movement in low-light conditions.

  And in this case, the shooter forgot that city darkness is never really dark at all.

  Jonathan figured that his guy was moving for position on the spot where he thought he had Jonathan pinned down.

  Then, there he was, night vision goggles and all. The shooter swung out from behind the cupola door for his final assault on the air handler. Jonathan settled his reticle on the attacker’s ear, and as he moved his finger to the trigger, the shooter dropped to his knees, and half a second later, Jonathan heard the boom of an unsuppressed rifle. Then, as the shooter started to fall, his head blew apart the instant before the sound of a second shot was able to reach him.

  Jonathan’s radio broke squelch, and Boxers’ voice said, “You’re welcome. And you’re clear.”

  Jonathan rose to his feet and jogged over to O’Brien to lend aid, but he was well beyond medical care. “Sorry, kid,” he said softly.

  The shooter’s body was next. He was as dead as pretty much anybody Boxers decided to kill, and Jonathan didn’t care. He rolled the corpse over onto what used to be his face and rummaged through his pockets. He got a wallet from the back pocket and a burner phone from the front.

  Then he stood and caught a glimpse of Big Guy’s enormous silhouette on the roof of the building next door. It was twenty feet taller than the Golden Buoy, the one with the decorative parapet that blocked the view to the street. Boxers waved, and Jonathan waved back.

  “Is it Kellner?” Big Guy asked.

  “Negative,” Jonathan said. “You didn’t leave a lot of face to look at, but what’s left isn’t his.”

  “Well, that sucks,” Boxers said. “Hey, I see a chopper heading in here pretty hot. The next fifteen seconds or so would be a terrific time for you to get out of there.”

  He was right. Jonathan stepped inside through the cupola door. On the landing there, he unslung his rifle, dropped the magazine, and unchambered the round before he laid it on the floor. Then he pulled himself out of Officer Driscoll’s vest and laid it next to the rifle.

  He walked down to the ground floor and exited out onto the sidewalk just as the SWAT team was swarming the front. One of them looked at Jonathan’s face wound curiously, but a glance at the FBI badge seemed to satisfy him.

  It was time to go home and shower. For many reasons.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Arthur Evers’s phone buzzed with a news alert from a commercial site he monitored. More and more, the buzz pissed him off because the stories they were touting had more to do with a celebrity pregnancy than real news. Plus, he was entertaining a lady in his apartment. Or, maybe she was entertaining him. He thought her name was Rebecca.

  “Oh, come on, Billy,” she said, looking up from her work. Nothing there could be as good as what’s happening here.”

  But he had to look.The thing about hookers was they they never really got a vote in anything.

  He rolled Rebecca off of him and wandered the two steps over to the chair in the corner of his room. He fished through the left front pocket for the smartphone that was always there. He unlocked it with his fingerprint and read the incoming message. His stomach knotted. In that instant, he damn near reversed his dinner.

  Shooter Kills or Wounds Scores in Capitol Harbor Sniper Attack

  Rebecca either sensed or saw his horror. “Are you okay, Billy?”

  Evers heard the question, but not really. It was as if his brain had frozen and could no longer process information. This was a disaster.

  “Get out,” he said, and he started to get dressed.

  “What’s wrong, sweetie?”

  He found his wallet, fished out three fifties. “What’s wrong is, you’re still here. Pack up your shit and get out of here.”

  “What turned you into such an asshole?” she protested as she collected the money.

  Evers didn’t bother to answer. He cinched his pants and padded barefoot from the bedroom to his living room, where he stood at the window and stared out into the night.

  What the hell had just happened? Why would Kellner and MacGregor go a day early and on their own? Without so much as a phone call to alert him.

  This was a disaster. He didn’t yet know the details of the hit, but the headline used the word scores, and that meant twenties. It was a huge hit.

  And in its wake every community would ramp their security up to Defcon One. His other teams wouldn’t have a chance. The other two hits scheduled for Halloween would have to be scuttled.

  In the window glass, he watched as Rebecca stormed from the bedroom to the front door. “Eat shit, asshole,” she said.

  He smiled. “I might just have to,” he said to his reflection.

  How was he going
to explain this to Al-Faisel? He’d paid for massive simultaneous hits, not one-offs, and tomorrow night—Halloween night—was supposed to be the grand finale. Not only did the Capitol Harbor hit come a day early, it wasn’t all that grand. In combination with the simultaneous hits of four bars in Lansing, Michigan, and the firebombing of the hospital in Westboro, Massachusetts, it would have been spectacular.

  Now, the Capitol Harbor incident on its own would be written off as a couple of crazy guys with guns.

  This time when a phone buzzed, it was a double-buzz, and it came from a spot behind Huckleberry Finn on his bookshelf. His burner phone, and the double-buzz meant a text message. This was madness. Exactly the wrong time to be firing electrons through cyberspace. Evers tilted the heavy Mark Twain volume forward and lifted the little folder phone. Sure enough, it was a message, in violation of his very specific standing order that they not connect to each other directly. His temper flared even darker when he saw the message was from ANON4, a.k.a. Frederick Kellner.

  He opened the message because the fact of it being there had already done all the possible damage if the government was somehow monitoring them.

  ANON4: Feds knew. Female agent challenged me directly. Had to move early for E+E diversion. Await instruction.

  Evers stared at the message, trying to figure out the meaning. He interpreted E+E to mean “escape and evasion,” but which feds? And how did Evers not know about it? If it was the FBI, Brooks should have told him. He sighed and closed his eyes. He knew what he was about to do was a bad idea, but he had no choice. He thumb-typed,

  BOSS1: There are lots of feds. Which do u mean?

  ANON4: FBI. Need instruction.

  Evers’s blood pressure spiked. He could feel it in his flushing face and in the pounding pulse in his temple. Kellner’s instructions would have to wait.

  Evers needed to talk to Porter Brooks right by-God now. The son of a bitch was not doing his job, and he needed to know why. Brooks’s burner rang fifteen times without answer.

  “I’m the wrong one to ignore,” Evers said. He clicked off, and then called Brooks’s home number.