by Ninie Hammon
All that gunfire and her Bishop right there in the middle of it! He’d have known there was a demon, of course, just like she did. Only he would have seen it. Maybe when he did, he run off and hid.
But she knew Bishop wouldn’t run away from no demon. He’d stand his ground.
All them kids is the priority to them po-lice officers—I know that, Lord. But they’s a ornery old man in that building, too, and I know you care as much about him as—”
There was another shotgun blast, and this time Theresa heard it. She wasn’t sure she heard it with her ears, though. And she felt cold after that, cold and scared.
The children jumped at gunshots she didn’t hear one more time, and then she watched the gray miasma around the school dissipate, vanish like creek fog hit by the morning sun. Theresa knew it was safe, now. The menace was gone, but she was in no hurry to get back to the school. No hurry at all. There was a knot in her stomach, a fear like she hadn’t felt in a long, long time. And she absolutely, positively, one hundred percent did not want to know what was causing it.
* * * * * * *
Jeff was at the minibar, making Emily a drink as she lay on her back with the sheet pulled demurely up to her neck. Jeff liked “the reveal” when he pulled it slowly off her body.
She was smiling an enigmatic smile, but truthfully couldn’t seem to keep her mind in the game, as her football coach father would have said. The wailing sirens that went on and on had set her teeth on edge. Whatever had happened was big. Though a suburb of greater Cincinnati, Harrelton had its own city council, fire, police and EMS departments and from the sound of it, every one of them had been called out to something. Maybe it was something dangerous, like a propane tanker turned over on the interstate, or a derailment of hazardous chemicals somewhere along the lone train track that meandered through the city.
Yes, city. Technically. But in reality, it had the feel of the small town in Iowa where she grew up, with parks, playgrounds, lots of “green space,” and some of the best schools in the state. Great place to raise a family, or so Dan had said after he preached the first time at Voice of Hope Community Church. The church had been teetering on the brink of explosive growth and the young, passionate pastor from Chicago with his lovely wife and precious daughter had been just the fire to light the fuse.
Now, officially a mega-church, it was poised for greatness. What was it Dan always said, “Positioned to do some serious damage for the Kingdom.”
“Sure you don’t want anything but wine?” Jeff asked and when her attention turned back to him she realized he’d been staring at her with a look of such feeling—longing? Love?—on his face she felt like her bones had turned to butter.
He was strikingly handsome. She thought he looked like Pierce Brosnan, with hair as dark and shiny as black agate and a cleft in his chin that added an extra touch of rakish sexiness. He was a junior partner with the biggest and most influential law firm in the state—the newspapers called them “king-makers,” and they had big plans for Jeff Kendrick. She’d felt a spark, something electric between them, the first time she’d sat across from him at an Arts Center board meeting. The fire got hotter with every meeting, until eventually she’d started orchestrating chance encounters. She found out later he had been doing the same thing.
“Wine is fine.” She patted the bed beside her. “Hurry. I’m getting cold.”
The sound of a low-flying helicopter filled the room as one zoomed by overhead, sounded like the wheels must have clipped the elm trees outside.
What was going on? Had Cincinnati been invaded by aliens?
Jeff caught her concern. He was so astute and attentive nothing escaped his notice.
Note to self: add that to the list of reasons why you love this man.
Love? She’d never used that word before, purposefully did not think in those terms. Did she…love him?
Emily literally gave her head a shake to fling the thought out of her mind. Now was not the time to be asking herself questions for which she had no answers.
“Would you like to turn on the television and find out—?”
“No!” Then softer, “no.” That would let the world into their private space, their magical time together and she wouldn’t have that. “I’m not that curious. Whatever it is, it’s not my problem.”
* * * * * * *
Jack was never sure if his memories of what happened after that were accurate, colored as they were by what he’d long ago dubbed “adrenaline-rush psychosis.” The adrenaline dump into the bloodstream during a life-and-death struggle narrowed a man’s field of vision so he saw the world like looking through a pipe. It made senses keener—you could hear better, see clearer. It could also cause your mind to play the same reality over and over. That was called “getting in a loop.” He’d seen an officer once shoot a man, then stand over the dead body and continue to yell at him to drop his weapon.
Jack didn’t do that, but he did stand lifeless for a time, as unmoving as a clay pot, without any clear thought of any kind in his mind. There was a hum in his ears, the sound of an old refrigerator kicking on in the night. Something inside him, something always taut, had snapped, leaving him momentarily flaccid and limp.
Some parts of the next few minutes played in his mind like the scenes flashing by when you fast-forwarded through a commercial. Other parts elongated and it seemed to take a thousand years between forming the intent to do something and actually taking action.
It seemed to take a millennium to lower and holster his pistol, a geologic epoch for Purvis to bark out a clipped, “One child down, repeat one child down!” into his shoulder mic.
But the sequence where Paco came to him, said something soothing that contained the words “through-and-through” and “not your fault” in it, and the subsequent evacuation of the injured child and the other children, played out like some manic video game.
When the hatchet of realization—I shot a child!—hacked into his chest, Jack went numb and Purvis stepped up and took control of the situation, seamlessly easing Jack out of a decision-making role and into a go-here, stand-there, do-this capacity, which he knew was all Jack was capable of.
The state trooper directed Peterson to administer first aid to the child, conferred briefly with the command post over the radio, then told Paco to move the children to the back of the room.
“Use your break-and-rake on that window,” he told Jack, and Jack robotically pulled his nightstick from its holster and shattered the window next to the teacher’s desk.
As Jack raked away the shards of broken glass from the frame, he saw a cordon of officers with riot shields form up on the grass outside and a stretcher with accompanying paramedics wheel down through it.
The injured child didn’t have time to wait for search-and-rescue teams to clear the building. It would be hours before the structure was declared safe—there could be other shooters hiding in any one of the other locked rooms. Every square inch of the structure would be systematically, meticulously searched—from the rafters to the floor tiles.
Randomly-firing synapses posed unanswerable questions
I wonder which shot it was that passed through the shooter and hit the little girl?
Peterson had rolled the little girl onto her back. Paco had grabbed a full roll of paper towels and Peterson had jammed it into her wound. Purvis turned to Jack.
“You take her out,” the trooper said.
He gets it. He knows I need…
Confirmed—Jack did, indeed, like this guy.
Jack lifted the child tenderly into his arms with Peterson in front, still maintaining pressure on what was rapidly becoming a blood-soaked roll of paper towels. The two marched together toward the window, lifted her up and over the sill into the waiting arms of the paramedics, who had her strapped onto the stretcher and rolling back through the cordon of officers in seconds.
Jack did remember that part clearly. The child’s limp body against his chest, her head hanging loose on her neck, chestnu
t curls dangling like the fringe on a table cloth.
He didn’t remember much else—evacuating the children down the cordon as he watched the Med-Evac helicopter set down in the middle of the baseball diamond beside the school. He saw someone break free from the cordoned off crowd of horrified onlookers and race to the paramedics shoving the stretcher. Officers caught him and started to drag him away, then let him go and he got into the chopper with the child.
His little girl. Jack had shot that man’s little girl.
Then he was standing beside a big gray police van in the school parking lot, a spectator as Peterson, Ramirez and Purvis gave brief, animated statements to the captain and major.
And in the space between one breath and the next, the world righted itself. The fuzziness lifted, the slo-mo/fast-forward reality vanished, the world was in crisp focus, no tunnel. Jack was back. When the captain gestured for him, his step was sure.
A trim, silver-haired man, the captain carried himself like the Senior Senator from Somewhere, but every officer knew he was all hat and no cattle. A blowhard posturing in front of a mirror, the man’s staunch, resolute facade disguised a limitless capacity for spinelessness. Jack met his gaze with his own eyes clear.
“They said a through-and-through,” the captain said.
“The shooter was firing a shotgun,” Jack said. “The little girl’s wasn’t a shotgun wound. Had to be”-he hesitated a beat, but when he continued his voice was firm.-"one of the three rounds I fired. That’s the only explanation.”
“Ramirez said the teacher’s aide didn’t even know the little girl was hiding in that closet.”
“No,” Jack said. “I guess nobody knew.”
The words sounded hollow, like they’d come up into the world from some deep, dark well.
Standing beside the captain, Major Charles Crocker said nothing, merely offered Jack the scraps of a smile. Crocker, “Crock” to fellow officers, was a round man without a hair on his head and legs bowed out so far you could drive a Buick between his knees. He was also sharp, tough and fair—one of the finest officers Jack had ever served with. He placed a hand briefly on Jack’s shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Jack,” Crocker said.
Jack understood the two-fold message in those three words.
The major was sorry it had happened—to the little girl and to Jack, too.
The major was also sorry that he was about to relieve Jack of duty, take his gun and his shield and plant him in a chair, riding a desk until a board of inquiry ruled that the use of deadly force had been necessary—or not. Standard operating procedure for every officer-involved shooting. Jack had been there, done that. But this time was different. He hadn’t just capped the shooter—he’d shot a little girl! Guilt would stitch this moment into his memory forever.
“Carpenter, consider yourself relieved of duty and placed on administrative leave…”—the major took a breath—“…as soon as you get back from securing the shooter’s house. Lieutenant Harrison only lives a couple of miles from there and I just dispatched him, but he’s asked for backup.”
Perhaps there was an accomplice. Not likely, but not a rock you dared leave unturned, either. More weapons, explosives? That was likely. Someone had to make sure the shooter’s place was locked up tight for the forensics guys. The Harrelton Police Department was small and right now it was stretched to the limits.
“Isn’t Harrison still out on medical?”
“Cleared for duty tomorrow morning…so I’m stretching it. With both of you. Meet him at the Sunoco Station at the corner of Lanyard and Gupton.” The major looked at a clipboard. “Drivers license says the shooter’s name is Jacob”—he paused and spelled the last name—“D.U.M.A.S.” He paused again for a beat. “And you can pronounce that any way you want.” He glanced at the clip board again. “He lives at 3747 Hurst Lane, out there in the Oakwood Subdivision.”
Jack nodded, grateful to have a task to do, a service to perform, glad he was still on the team, on the case, even if it was from a distance.
“Yes, sir,” he said and headed toward his cruiser.
CHAPTER 7
The frenetic activity around Daniel had a frenzied, insectile quality. Movement—Hurry! Hurry!—voices, racing steps, the thump and clatter of metal somethings, the beeps and hums of machines.
Everything and everybody whirled in a maelstrom, but he was in the eye of the hurricane. He alone was still, rooted to the spot where he’d been parked outside the treatment room when the paramedics rushed Andi at a dead run out of the Med-Evac helicopter and into the emergency room of Jefferson Memorial Hospital.
Waiting.
Waiting for somebody to push through the treatment room doors and tell him his little girl was going to be all right. Only a flesh wound, the doctor would say, and he’d pull off that stupid scrub mask and smile at Daniel. Nothing to worry about. She’ll be back playing soccer in no time, might even make Saturday’s game.
But those words were a distant sound he heard from somewhere deep and dark in his soul, a place where he could only barely make out a shaft of bright light high above where Daniel stood in the waiting room. Someone in that light was telling Daniel Andi’d be fine, just fine. But she wouldn’t be fine in the dark shadowed place where he was. Here, in this place where no light reached, children didn’t get better. They died and you stood next to a tiny casket and said comforting words to a devastated father—then looked into his face and discovered he was you.
Pain and loss were here in the dark place. He’d been here before—you didn’t do ministry for almost fifteen years without seeing it all—death, disease, heartbreak. But from the other side, the comforting side, the God’s-ways-are-not-our-ways side where you left the accident scene or the ICU waiting room or the graveside and went home to a house that smelled of pot roast and cherry pie and rang with the laughter of a healthy child.
Terror was here, too. Bigger and uglier even than what he’d felt during the wild drive to the school, leaping out of the car with the door left open, like he’d left the front door of the house, sprinting across someone’s lawn, leaping somebody’s begonia garden like he was running hurdles in high school.
He’d been amazed he could run at all, because he couldn’t get his breath, hadn’t been able to breathe all the way in since Clarice Shutterbaum said someone was shooting…shooting!
He’d elbowed his way through the crowd—ignoring the cries of “Pastor Burke!” and “Daniel!”—making his way to the front. Maybe the cop cut him some slack because of the clerical collar, didn’t realize he was a frantic parent just like the rest of them, thought he’d come to minister to the terrified teachers and children huddled under a maple tree beside the baseball diamond.
He’d escorted Daniel there as the big med-evac helicopter dropped out of the sky like a dragonfly on a pond. EMS personnel were shoving a stretcher from the school through a corridor of officers in riot gear, making for the chopper.
There was a small form on the stretcher, a child.
Andi.
It couldn’t be. Couldn’t possibly be. He was in total denial even as he fought the officer to run to her side. The paramedic on the chopper was Ben Avery! Daniel had performed his wedding ceremony not six months ago. He motioned and the officer let Daniel go.
Andi! Andi!
He’d called her name but there was no response. Blood, so much blood it dripped off the side of the stretcher and dropped in dollops on his shoe. Her eyes were closed and he could see the little blue veins in them. He didn’t ask Ben about her condition. Didn’t want to bother him. Distract him. But knew he’d smile and say—
Up there in the light, Ben would smile. Down here in the dark, he’d give Daniel the look Daniel’d pretended not to see on the paramedic’s face as he leapt out of the helicopter and shoved the stretcher into the emergency room. The look that was as dark and ugly as the place deep in his mind where he read it clearly. She’s not going to make it.
A nurse rushed out of the double
doors and blew by Daniel as if he weren’t there. He’d reached out to take her arm but didn’t. Didn’t want to bother her.
No, didn’t want her to give him the same look Ben had.
Andi had been so cold. Her little hand when he took it was like ice, with the pink nail polish on the fingernails that had some kind of stickers on them—too small on her blunt, chewed-off nails.
She’d been so pale, too! White. Her freckles stuck out on her face like the chocolate sprinkles on the cupcakes Emily made her—
Emily.
A hole opened up beneath Daniel. Just her name threatened to knock him over the edge into a place as dark as the other cavern in his mind, only this was not a place of frightened darkness. It bubbled and boiled with ugly, raging blackness veined with white-hot betrayal. In some real-world place, his wife was...while her daughter, their little girl lay on a hospital bed fighting for her life, Emily was in bed, too. A different kind.
He lifted the cell phone in his hand and hit redial. Again. How many times? He could see the layers of fingerprint smudges on the shiny face of the phone, one on top of the other.
The sound again, as lonely as a cold, polar ocean. The hollow ring…ring…
“Hi, Dan.” Emily’s voice. “Turned my phone on and I see you’ve been calling me—something’s wrong with the counter, though. It says fifty-four times.” She sounded irritated. “What’s up?”
* * * * * * *
Jack used his flashing lights and an occasional whoop of his siren to part the sea of humanity that stretched out for blocks in every direction around the school. Terrified parents. Eager rubber-neckers. Carrion-gorging media vans with satellite dishes on the top and bold Chanel 11 News First emblazoned with an NBC or CBS or CNN logos on the side.
He made it out of the throng. Made it through neighborhood streets where the sun shone so bright the world looked overexposed. Made it all the way to the on ramp of Interstate 71. But then he had to pull over.
