Hard Return

by J. Carson Black

  He wasn’t crazy about Kristal’s boyfriend, either, the kid who was walking her to the car. He watched as they kissed. She gently pushed her hand down and against the kid’s crotch.

  A slow burn started in his throat and flushed his face.

  If she lived in his house, if he lived in his house, he would have had a serious talk with her. A very serious talk.

  But Cyril Landry was on the outside. He could do nothing about his daughter’s behavior.

  He couldn’t expose her to those who would still be looking. He doubted anyone was, but that was not a guarantee. He couldn’t be there to do his duty as a father because he would be putting her and his wife in danger, along with his brothers and sister. So Kristal would just have to figure it out. He would have forbidden her to have sex with that boy, Luke Brodsky, and she would have had no choice but to obey. But now he could only watch over her and hope she figured out that they needed to use birth control. Abstinence was preferable, but he’d prefer she use birth control rather than end up with a kid, which would tie her to Luke for a long time.

  It was a helpless feeling to watch her through binocs and not be able to warn Kristal about all the things she would have to deal with. A kid without a father to protect her, at the most vulnerable time in her life—all those raging hormones. Trying to pick a college, and who knew what else? Her grades had never been good, and he’d found out that in middle school she had been bullied and she had been mortified when he’d rectified it by going to the bully’s parents.

  His wife didn’t speak to him for a week.

  That was the way it had always been, two against one, but he didn’t mind it so much. He knew they loved him. Cindi once said that he “exasperated” them both. That was the word she used. But she also understood that he would die for them. Left unsaid was the fact that he would kill for them, but Cindi knew that, too. They both knew he had stood watch over his family like the sentry on the ramparts.

  But now his wife didn’t know if he was alive or dead.

  The DOD told Cindi he was dead, so that was what she probably believed.

  The two kids were getting hot and heavy, in broad daylight out by the car. The boy was leaning into Kristal, holding her against the Yaris. Their crotches almost rubbing. Tangled together.

  Three in the afternoon.

  Other kids walking to their cars.

  So many kids, funneling into the parking lot.

  He looked away.

  Barbara Carey looked at her watch. She’d seen Joe Till drive his old truck off the property at exactly noon, as he did five days a week.

  When she hired him, he’d told her he needed time off between noon and five p.m. on weekdays. He told her he would be back before evening feed. In exchange for this, he worked weekends. On weekends, he was available twenty-four seven, and could be there every day of the week except between noon and five p.m.

  There wasn’t much to do with racehorses in the middle of the day. It was their siesta time and hers, so the strange arrangement worked out fine. She suspected he had another job to make ends meet. She knew as well as anyone that work on a horse farm didn’t pay a living wage.

  He didn’t share that part of his private life with her, so this was purely conjecture on her part.

  The other job was probably a condition of his probation. If he was on probation. That was the case with her brother Ben. They decided where you worked and when. She didn’t ask. You had a good worker in the racing business, you don’t ask too many questions.

  Barbara knew she was falling for Joe Till. She’d lived a long time, through two marriages, one ending in young widowhood and the other in divorce. She was no fool. She had cautioned herself not to fall for him. Reminded herself she didn’t know him very well.

  Very well? Hardly at all. Just that he was a good horseman. Okay, a spectacular horseman. And a good lover. A spectacular lover.

  He was a good friend, too, as far as that went.

  She trusted him for the most part, so she wouldn’t rock the boat. She didn’t want to rock the boat.

  Barbara stuck to her guns on that all the way up until five o’clock in the afternoon, when the news filtered in.

  CHAPTER 3

  Three p.m.: thirty or more high school kids were strung out along the asphalt apron of the parking lot, ambling along, some in groups, some by themselves, talking, joking, grandstanding. Shoulders slouched, some of them sullen, some lonely, many of them thumbing their cell phones. Beeping to unlock their cars. Pretty girls. Handsome boys. The sunlight lying flat on the parking lot, shadows lengthening, smog burned off, deep blue sky, palm trees, bright green lawn.

  Friday. Week over. Everyone happy to go home.

  His daughter and her boyfriend making out against the yellow Yaris, oblivious.

  Then:

  Hard loud claps, rapid fire—

  M-16.

  Kids in a group hitting the ground like dominoes, others stopping, turning, twisting, trying to run. Some wandering aimlessly, in shock.

  Crawling.

  Screaming.

  A slender dark figure advancing through the lot, shooting at anything that moved. Reports in rapid succession—bangbangbangbangbang.

  Landry saw his daughter duck down behind the engine block of the car—good. Her boyfriend crouched above her, covering her with his body, head, and arms. The shooter in black, body armor head to toe, shooting methodically, a gunslinger walking down the street. Casings raining behind him.

  Detached.

  Nonchalant.

  Landry retrieved his rifle from the storage compartment of the Econoline, twisted the can on the barrel, loaded five subsonic rounds. One in the chamber. No time for the bipod.

  The shooter dumping ammo, waving his rifle back and forth, creating a swath. Mowing down anything in his path. Now he was past Kristal’s car. If he turned back . . . Kids were running, screaming. Falling, drenched in blood. A blond girl crouched over her friend’s body—sheltering her. The shooter aimed—casually but in control—and the top of her head vaporized. She collapsed in a heap on top of her friend’s body. A boy running for cover was hit between the shoulder blades. He skated crazily for a moment in the blood of the two girls, before he fell.

  The man with the rifle moved forward. Calm and methodical, picking his shots.

  This is not your average school shooter.

  Kristal and Luke by the car. Luke frantically pushing Kristal under, trying to scuttle in behind, still covering her with his body—great kid.

  Another terrifying burst.

  Landry dragged a sandbag to the vertical flap in the van’s right back door. Sandbag in place, rifle on top: prone position, push the flap aside.

  The way he was parked, the loophole didn’t true up with the target. This won’t work.

  Contingencies, none of them good. He could bash out the taillight with the butt of his rifle, but a van with a broken taillight would be noticeable. He looked around. The sound of gunfire, so far, had kept people inside. Anyone driving by might see the barrel but he’d have to take that chance. Open the back doors. Risky, but doable. He pushed open the right side first, not too far, then shoved on the right. There was a gap of about a foot and a half, enough so he could train the rifle and follow.

  No time to worry if someone saw the barrel protruding from the van.

  He had one good shot. After that, there might be an infinitesimal alteration in the rifle’s accuracy. If the barrel heated up too much. Betsy had a tendency to run hot, but otherwise, she was perfect. Nineteen times out of twenty, her performance was precise to the nth degree. But Landry knew he couldn’t take any chances.

  The first shot had to be good. It would be. The shooter was no more than eighty-five feet away. Landry had made kill shots at a mile—and more.

  It was his choice, how to take down the shooter, with less than a sec
ond to make it. Even with body armor, one shot to the outside torso would drop him. It wouldn’t kill him, but it would stop him. It would put him right down. A live shooter would help the investigation, and give Landry answers.

  A shot to the head would make sure he was dead.

  His daughter.

  It would be the head shot.

  He peered through the scope—

  And saw the blood lighting on Luke’s back like a half dozen locusts.

  The boy’s body went still.

  Someone yelled. The shooter turned his head. His back to Kristal, who was now all the way under the car. The bad guy’s back to Landry, finger on the trigger, and he started shooting again, neck bent slightly forward. He wore a bulletproof vest, and a helmet, but he’d left the sweet spot open: where the base of the skull met the vertebrae.

  Acquire the target.

  Breathe.

  Slow squeeze on the trigger.

  The shooter went down, dead before he hit the ground, his oblongata pulverized by a bullet moving at eight hundred feet per second. The vertebrae popped, shards of bone disintegrating in an instant. There wasn’t even a blurt from the assault rifle.

  Like turning off a light switch.

  Blood spread out from under him, shiny, dark, and black. Like crude oil.

  The satisfaction of taking the shooter out was brief and followed by a tsunami of pain.

  So many of them down.

  Sirens. Landry pulled the doors shut and peered through the flap. People were coming out of the building, a little late. Like the Munchkins in Oz after the witch died. A rent-a-cop. School officials. The loudspeaker blaring. Dead and wounded.

  The cops will be here in less than a minute.

  His daughter was crying. Slippery with the blood of her boyfriend. Screaming for help, strangling on her tears.

  She was alive, but the boy, Luke, was dead.

  That was how it always happened: the kid just gone.

  Luke had been a good boy after all.

  Landry wanted to hold her. Tell her he was alive and that he had watched over her as a good father should. He wanted to but he knew it would only bring danger to her and her mother.

  He needed to go.

  His van was parked across the street from the school in the side parking lot of an auto repair shop and nose-in to the back of a Chinese food place, so neither would be able to claim it. The Econoline was just one junker among many waiting for repair in the California sun.

  Landry heard sirens, and two cop cars shot by on the street between his van and the school. People were already gathering in a knot near the automotive shop.

  He rummaged through the toolbox, found the rat-tail file, twisted the silencer off Betsy, and dropped the file into the barrel. He placed the rifle loose in the compartment of the Econoline. He wanted it to rattle around a little.

  A few stops and starts—and a turn or two—would suffice; the rat-tail would scratch new marks inside the barrel. If the police stopped him—if they confiscated the rifle and ran her through ballistics—they would have nothing to match it to.

  He was about to drive out onto the side street, his usual entrance and egress, when he heard the shriek of brakes and a car bounce up onto the curb behind him, smashing into a light post. The car behind it stopped dead in the road, blocking both lanes. The driver tried to start the car but the engine flooded.

  He heard the whoop of another cop car and saw two patrol units stopping dead behind the disabled car. His usual exit was blocked.

  The only way out was covered by cameras surrounding the school. He knew the location of every security cam. If he turned left, there was no way to avoid them.

  The area was already saturated with law enforcement; they would have already set up a perimeter.

  Twenty-seven years in the life told him to turn into the teeth of the storm. So he turned left.

  CHAPTER 4

  Landry had done his homework on his daughter’s school.

  Gordon C. Tuttle High School was relatively new—only fourteen years old. In that time, the population in this area had boomed, and the administrative buildings of the school had been expanded beyond its original boundaries. He had the blueprints and so he knew that Security was housed in an annex across the street.

  Landry drove the half block down to the school’s maintenance yard and parked in the lot with the other personnel vehicles.

  He reached into the back for the jumpsuit and ball cap he always carried with him, as well as a pair of wire-rimmed eyeglasses and a lanyard with a generic card bearing the name “John Anderson.” Instant janitor. He changed his footwear. One was a typical work boot. The other was an orthopedic boot, the kind a person would wear after surgery.

  He rummaged around in his toolbox for a cordless drill (he had two) and broke the drill down until it exposed the electric armature. He pulled the magnets from the armature and used a hammer to bust them into a powder. He poured the resulting magnetic dust into a rag, folded the rag carefully, and put it in his coverall pocket.

  Doing all this kept him from thinking about Kristal’s terror and Luke’s death. Landry didn’t know how he could have reacted any faster, but if he’d been able to, Luke might still be alive.

  Could’ve, would’ve, should’ve. There was no point in going down that road. Stay in the moment, formulate a plan. Check it twice, and hold on to your sanity.

  Landry closed up the van and entered the building. He glanced around for the security room. There was a knot of people—some of them police—outside the administrative offices. He could hear the crackle of their radios.

  Listening carefully, he learned that the parking lot where the shooting had happened—the crime scene—had been secured. There were cops, SWAT, ambulances, investigators, FBI. All of them on scene. The parents were to gather in the auditorium on campus, where they could meet their sons and daughters—

  The ones who were alive, anyway.

  He wondered if Cindi was there yet. If she had met up with their daughter.

  Walking gingerly on the orthopedic shoe, he headed down the hallway to the office. Law enforcement didn’t give him a first glance.

  The place was chaos. A glass partition divided the general space from the offices in back. Knots of people talked in hushed voices. There was a large police presence—they were already interviewing people. One woman was at her desk. He caught her eye and mouthed “Electronic center?”

  She looked at him, but he could tell her mind was elsewhere. “I’m afraid—”

  “I was sent by the FBI to make sure the electronic center is working . . . It’s important.” He paused for a moment to let that sink in. But she didn’t seem to be comprehending much. He added, “Can you direct me?”

  “What?” Still confused. Distracted. Devastated. Still in shock.

  “The electronic center. It would be a room, probably in Security. Can you direct me?”

  She nodded, finally comprehending. “It’s that way!” She motioned to the north. “Around the corner. The first door on the right.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  As he walked past, she asked, “Are you with the FBI?”

  “My company is the subcontractor.”

  “Oh.” She turned away, back to a knot of people who had drifted into the picture.

  He limped his way around the corner and found the room. He could have found it on his own, but he wanted to fit in to the chaos, be a working part of it, interchangeable with other pieces—one of the crowd. That way no one would think of him as unusual.

  The hall was overflowing with people. He nodded and pointed to his toolbox, pushing his way through the crowd to the hallway leading to the electronics room. When he turned the corner he was surprised to see the hall was empty. The cops had not made it here yet. But they would, soon. He used a credit card to open the door,
closed and locked it behind him. He had three minutes to do what he needed to do.

  First things first: use a pair of locking pliers to clamp the door dampener above his head. This would prevent anyone, key or no key, from opening the door.

  Outside he could hear babble, movement. An individual voice. They were on their way. He located the security-camera box and realized pretty quickly that all he’d have to do was pull a few memory sticks and drop them into the toolbox. Done, he stood the recorder unit on its side, took the rag containing the magnetic dust from the pocket of his jumpsuit, and tipped the filings down inside the recorder. He gave it a couple of blasts from a can of compressed air so the dust would circulate throughout the unit. The mag dust would guarantee there would be no further surveillance.

  There was a cupboardful of supplies above. He found the memory sticks and inserted blanks in place of the ones he’d taken.

  It took him ten seconds to close the toolbox and look over the room and wipe the area down.

  Done, he picked up his toolbox and went to the door. He listened for noise and heard babbling.

  Landry opened the door and walked out into the hallway. There were a lot more people now. A lot more babble. He saw the FBI. He saw the police. There were numerous grave-faced officials and probably some politicians. Some of them were on the way up the hall, walking and talking with one another. A radio crackled and they all stopped, a knot of concerned men still in shock.

  Landry assumed a concerned expression. He was a harried worker with a toolbox, still limping with his orthopedic boot, shocked to stunned silence by the carnage that had happened at a school.

  He was almost to the T in the hallway when a man called out. “Hey!”

  Landry knew the man was calling to him.

  Shit.

  He turned around.

  A man in a dark suit walked toward him. He looked like FBI—all business.

  Landry waited. His entrails turning to ice.