The Lightning Stones

by Jack Du Brul

  The cool ease with which he handled the deadly looking black gun brought a flush of unexpected arousal to Jordan’s cheeks. She looked at him in hopes he hadn’t noticed. He had, but his expression didn’t change, for which she was grateful.

  “This was Abe’s father’s,” Mercer said. “He brought it back from World War Two. Abe hated the thing. He hated all violence, but he also couldn’t part with it, so he’s been lugging it around from one campus to the next just like that stupid cement frog and the picture of Jerusalem over the mantel.”

  Mercer took another look around the study. If there were any clues as to what Abe Jacobs had been doing in the mine to get him killed, they likely weren’t here. Abe kept all his important research material and files in a campus office near his lab. At least he always had. The look on Jordan Weismann’s face was one of doubt and uncertainty. She had to be wondering how a former student of stolid old Abe Jacobs could be so comfortable around a handgun. He wished he had time to explain, but the mental clock in one corner of his mind continued to wind down. The gunmen couldn’t be that far away.

  “I need to check out Abe’s office on campus. Do you know where it is?” He took Jordan’s hand, and they started out of the house.

  She shook her head. “No, I’m sorry. I just got here yesterday. Uncle Abe was in a hurry to leave, so I didn’t get a tour of the school or anything.”

  “Okay. I’m going to stash you someplace, and then afterward you are getting out of town. Where are your parents? Still in Pittsburgh?”

  “No,” she said with a defiant edge to her voice. “My mom died three years ago from cancer, and my dad and I aren’t exactly close.”

  Mercer paused just shy of the open front door and swung Jordan around so that he was looking her in the eye. “I don’t know you from Adam, but you were a friend of my friend and that’s good enough for me. Take some free advice and do yourself a favor. Unless your father is some sort of monster, there will come a time in your life where you are going to regret not having him around. I lost both my parents when I was twelve, and not a day goes by that I don’t think about the relationship we were supposed to have. Reconcile with your father.”

  Her eyes tightened, and a crease formed between her well-maintained brows. “My life is none of your business.”

  Undeterred, Mercer said, “I’m sure Abe gave you this same advice on more than one occasion. He had no family, so I know he took on students as surrogates. I was one and so were you. He was a father figure and now he’s gone, Jordan, and your real father is the only one you have left.”

  He was about to go on, but movement over her shoulder drew his attention. Jordan was tall enough for him to need to push her out of the way a little to clearly see the tree-lined street. A compact car—a Honda Fit—was driving by much too slowly for the time of day. Mercer had never seen the driver and the man had never seen him, but they both recognized each other as being someone out of place.

  The driver was in his late twenties, blond and fit looking. His eyes widened at seeing a couple stepping from the house. Mercer tried to hide his surprise at seeing Abe’s house being cased by an ex–Special Forces type. The driver turned his attention back to the road and buried his foot in the floorboards. The little car didn’t have much in the power department, but it was nearly lost from view by the time Mercer launched himself at his SUV.

  He had noticed the car had an Indiana license plate. It had doubtless been stolen by the gunman as he made his way south from the Minnesota mine. The man’s apparent youth also suggested he wasn’t a seasoned professional and was therefore not likely to be alone here in Killenburg. The lead man, the man Mercer had vowed to kill, was here too. Most likely at Abe’s office while he sent his subaltern to search the less conspicuous house.

  Mercer felt the SUV’s passenger door slam as he jammed the key into the ignition. Jordan Weismann whipped an arm across her shoulder to buckle her seat belt. She didn’t look over at Mercer, but he could see a tightening of her jaw and the ferocity at one corner of her eye. He knew women enough to know that asking her to get out would be a complete waste of time. Intellectually she knew the risks. He assumed she had never faced a barrage from an automatic weapon, so in a practical sense she had no idea what she was doing, but she had made a choice, and Mercer wasn’t going to talk her out of it.

  The big V8 roared to life, and arcing jets of slushy snow blasted from beneath all four wheels. Mercer balanced the heavy pistol into his partially unzipped bomber jacket.

  “Do you have a plan?” Jordan asked, finally turning to look at him as the Yukon plowed through part of a snowbank in pursuit of the little Honda.

  “Run this guy down and find out why he killed Abe and the others,” Mercer said.

  “Are you sure he’s one of them?”

  “I never got a good look at them all, but the way he just reacted tells me everything I need to know. He’s one of the shooters.”

  The SUV had an automatic transmission, but Mercer worked the column shifter like a NASCAR driver, eking out the engine’s maximum torque and using the motor to assist the brakes through the neighborhood’s tight turns.

  The light green Honda juked around a sharp corner a second after Mercer spotted the nimble little four-door. He cursed. It was like chasing a jackrabbit. The Honda Fit was more agile, had better acceleration, and the driver had the advantage of knowing where he was going. Mercer felt like he was guiding a hippopotamus, the Yukon lumbered so. It rolled into the corners like a sailing ship heeling in a gale wind.

  The fleeing Honda took yet another sharp right turn, and Mercer suddenly understood what the gunman was after. He had flushed the SUV away from the target house, and now he was doubling back.

  Mercer cranked the Yukon’s wheel hard over and slotted the big SUV between a couple of pine trees and the corner of a mid-block house. The Yukon turned the front fence into so much wooden kindling as it blew through. They had no problem with the snow, bulling over drifts like a tank. They passed the house, and a nice glassed-in back atrium where the startled owner had been enjoying the morning paper and a coffee before an SUV barreled through his backyard. The truck tore apart a more substantial back fence and sped across some other poor suburbanite’s lawn. This one abutted a raised ranch with a back deck draped in snow like white bunting. Mercer guided the truck through a high-speed slalom, avoiding copses of trees and an aboveground swimming pool. He didn’t see a large plastic sandbox buried in the snow and tore across it in an unexpected explosion of sand particles as fine as diamond chips.

  They careened past the ranch house and raced across the owner’s front lawn. There were no more fences to crash through, but Mercer managed to accidentally clip the trailer hitch of a boat sitting in the driveway. In their wake the trailer’s front jack collapsed, and a nice eighteen-foot bass boat tumbled to the frozen ground and capsized.

  In a four-wheel drift that taxed the Yukon’s suspension, Mercer threw the truck back onto Abe Jacobs’s street. He’d managed to cut deeply into the Honda’s lead but not nearly enough. The car was stopped in front of the Tudor house, driver door open, and the man was running from the house back toward the car. He saw the Yukon’s sudden appearance, only a half dozen houses away, and dove back into the idling car.

  The driver didn’t wait to see his handiwork. The street was too wet with snow melted by the municipal salt trucks to peel out the tires, but he managed to get the car twitchy as he rocketed up through the gears.

  For a breathless second, Mercer glanced at the house, and noticed the front window was broken. Then came a shattering explosion that blew the remains of the living room window across the lawn like a cannon blast from a ship of the line discharging grapeshot. The front door resisted the overpressure for only seconds before it, too, blew off its hinges and flew like a playing card into the street. Mercer stopped the SUV. Flames quickly engulfed the front of the house, licking at the stucco and igniting the decorative oak beams.

  The explosive device the H
onda driver had thrown through the window must have contained an accelerant. Gasoline would be easy enough, thought Mercer. Abe Jacobs’s quaint Tudor home was about to become a charred pile of cinders and ash. The conflagration grew before their eyes. Smoke and then flame started pouring from the upstairs window above the front room. The house, and whatever clues Abe might have left behind, were moments away from being a total loss.

  6

  Mercer pulled his cell from his back pocket and slammed down on the accelerator once again. He tossed the phone to Jordan. “Call 911.”

  “About the fire?” Jordan asked, her fingers poised.

  He knew the consequences would be dire if he was wrong, but he couldn’t take the chance. “No. Tell them they need to lock down Hardt College. There are armed men on campus.”

  With so many school shooting tragedies in recent years, it was a threat law enforcement would not take lightly.

  She hadn’t yet spoken to a police operator when Mercer drove through the campus gates. There were few students out, thankfully most were in class, but a few people were walking the paths between the stately buildings. The structures were an odd assortment of clapboard and brick, Federal style and classical, built not so much to blend with each other but to showcase architectural taste at the time they were erected. One dorm had the glaze of blued glass and orange-dyed anodized aluminum popular in the late 1960s, while another was simple unadorned brick that had likely gone up during the austere war years.

  Mercer saw a sign for the Lauder Science Center with an arrow pointing off around the imposing plantation-style mansion that had once been the entirety of the college. The roads were plowed enough so that Mercer couldn’t tell if the green Honda was already here, but he felt certain it was. The road curved past some neglected gardens and around several more academic and administrative buildings, the largest of which was labeled Nichols Gymnasium—Home of the Brown Boars.

  Mercer couldn’t imagine a more uninspired name for a sports team. To add insult to injury the mascot on the sign looked more like a South American tapir than a European boar.

  They rounded a hill and continued following the signs for the science building. It had to be one of the school’s newest construction projects. It stood four stories and was sheathed in dark glass with modernist touches including a grand atrium held up with struts like a giant Erector set. Inside they could see a large mobile in the shape of the solar system. Rather than traditional internal stairs, enclosed glass ramps looped along the outside of the building like the handles of an Etruscan vase. Jordan and Mercer watched students inside the ramps bustling along, and it reminded them both of gerbils in those elaborate plastic Habitrail cages.

  Without warning, the students near the entry started running in panic. An instant later, Mercer saw beyond the large windows that the green Honda was racing into the building. It slipped right through the main doors and was careening across the tiled atrium, headed for the main ramp up to the second floor. The tube was more than large enough to accommodate it, but students either had to flatten themselves to the curved glass walls or try to race ahead of the car.

  Mercer watched it speed up the ramp. Two students, a male and female, were struck and hurled against one of the tube’s large curved windows. The coed left a smear of blood on the glass as she slid to the floor. Two more alert students who had pressed themselves flat to avoid the hurtling car quickly crossed the tunnel to help.

  Mercer didn’t yet know the driver’s intention. But now that the other man knew he was being pursued, he would have no choice but to change his original plans. If Mercer had to guess, and he’d been thinking about little else during his long drive, the gunmen were here to steal anything pertaining to what they had already taken back in the mine. If that failed, their next priority would be to destroy any remaining evidence. The car might have been used to haul away material like notebooks or geological samples, but the eight or ten gallons of gasoline in the fuel tank could also ensure a fire of epic proportions.

  There was a wide plaza in front of the science building. Some students were still running out the main doors, while others stood and stared after where the little Honda had vanished. They all reacted when Mercer ground his fist into the SUV’s horn and steered the truck up the four steps onto the plaza. He now saw marks in the snow where the Honda had sped up a handicapped access ramp that was too narrow for the big GMC. Students scattered and Jordan was beginning to scream. Mercer ignored it all and guided the truck toward the entrance doors, slowing enough to give stragglers time to get clear before he rammed the truck into the opening. Though there were double doors, the entry was too narrow for the SUV. Aluminum jambs buckled and glass shattered when Mercer rammed the vehicle through.

  More people reacted to the pandemonium. One hysterical woman stood with her hands clutched to her mouth and shrieked maniacally. Others ran for a set of internal stairs. The last of the students who’d been in the ramp made it to the atrium and scattered.

  “What are you doing?” Jordan yelled.

  “Not sure,” Mercer told her.

  The ramp was too narrow for the SUV, but following the Honda wasn’t Mercer’s intention. The sides of the truck were scraped down to raw paint, and both mirrors had been torn off by the entry doors. There was little additional damage Mercer could do to the SUV by slamming its nose into the tunnel entrance. The four-by-four actually made it deep enough that the front fender wedged against where the ramp began to curve out and up. There was no way the Honda could make it past them. Nor could he open either his or Jordan’s door. He fumbled for a button to hydraulically open the rear gate.

  “Go,” he told Jordan. “I’m right behind you.”

  She needed no further prompting and quickly wriggled between the two front seats and legged over the back bench seat. In the rearview mirror Mercer saw her jeans stretched tight across her backside before his attention was grabbed by a new rush of frightened students running down the ramp, casting panicked glances behind them.

  They reached the stuck SUV but paused at the obstruction for only a moment. Like lemmings, the students climbed over the hood and on top of the roof, forcing down the rear tailgate before Jordon could escape the trapped vehicle.

  “Mercer,” she cried from the cargo area.

  The last student leapt onto the truck’s hood, looking goggle-eyed at Mercer before scrambling up the windshield and onto the roof. Seconds later he slid down the back of the SUV and vanished across the science building’s atrium.

  Mercer was just reaching for the tailgate button again when the Honda came roaring down the ramp. There was a passenger sitting next to the driver this time. It was the team leader. He was in his forties with weathered lines around his eyes and a strong jaw. Any woman would have considered him handsome. His hair was just a little longer than a military buzz cut, and under a dark coat and thick sweater his chest and shoulders appeared broad.

  That was all he saw of the gunman. Mercer might have thought he had trapped the killers in the building by blocking their escape, but the Honda’s young driver was nothing if not adaptable. He cranked the wheel to the left, and the nimble car smashed through a laminated wood handrail and then the ramp’s curved glass wall. The panes exploded in an eruption of shards that dusted the ground below. The car chased after the glittering avalanche. It had been doing less than twenty miles per hour and yet flew a remarkable distance before crashing to the ground in a dustup of white powder that cushioned the eight-foot drop. The driver kept the momentum going, the front wheels spinning wildly as the vehicle grabbed and fought to find traction.

  Mercer swore. He hadn’t anticipated that. While the Honda reached a shoveled pathway and its tires found purchase, he dropped the GMC into reverse and pulled the SUV free of the ramp with the piercing whine of nails on a chalkboard.

  He threw the Yukon into a tight K-turn, knocking over an abandoned reception desk and a bunch of ferns in a concrete planter.

  “Hold on!” His warning came too
late to prevent Jordan Weismann from being tossed around like the marble in a can of spray paint.

  He jammed the gas pedal again and laid on the horn. By now all the students had wisely sought cover away from the chaos, and he had a straight shot for the main doors. Mercer misjudged slightly, and the big truck pinballed through the tight opening, breaking more glass and leaving behind curls of chrome trim on the floor.

  The shooters were pulling away, but not too quickly. Their crazy stunt of launching the car off the ramp must have damaged the Honda somehow. It was going nowhere near its top speed. Mercer and Jordan had a chance. He took off after the gunmen, his eyes slitted against the glare of a newly shining sun. The Honda was headed for a back gate out of the fenced campus, and Mercer calculated angles and speeds and felt he had a good shot at catching them before they reached it. Jordan wedged herself back into her seat next to him, her expression as determined as his. It took just a few moments for the rampaging V8 to close the gap. Mercer felt the comforting weight of the P-38 still nestled in his jacket.

  He hadn’t taken any professional driving courses, but he’d talked to enough law enforcement to know how to spin out a car while in pursuit. The maneuver had more to do with momentum than the relative weights of the cars, but here, with a GMC SUV versus the little Japanese import, the advantage was all Mercer’s.

  Until the Fit’s sunroof slid open and the team leader emerged, cradling a wicked-looking black machine pistol with a thick silencer. Just the day before Mercer had faced a full-on assault of four such weapons while driving a massive bucket loader. The shooters couldn’t miss, then. Here, the ground was even rougher, there was only one gun, and despite its size, the Yukon was tiny compared to the Caterpillar 990 loader.