Trigger Warning

by William W. Johnstone

  Gritting his teeth against the pain, he tried to find his walkie-talkie. It wasn’t on his belt anymore, having gotten knocked off during the fight. McRainey bit back a groan of despair. His sight was blurry as he peered around, but he spotted the walkie lying just under the corner of the desk, within reach. He took hold of it and lifted it with a trembling hand.

  Maybe he could figure out later who the guy was and why he’d killed Charlie Hodges. That was his job, after all. But he couldn’t do that if he sat here and bled to death. He thumbed the talk button on the walkie and said, “This . . . this is Chief McRainey . . . I need help . . . at the . . . groundskeeper’s shed . . .”

  CHAPTER 23

  “Were you waiting right here for me to show up?” Jake asked Natalie as he stepped off the escalator at the bottom.

  She laughed.

  “Get over yourself, big man! You think I have nothing better to do than wait for you? No, it was just a coincidence that I was walking by here and happened to look up and see you. Once I did, I thought I might as well wait for you so you wouldn’t have to look for me.”

  “That’s a good story,” Jake said with a grin. “I’ll reserve judgment on whether I believe it or not.”

  “You just go right ahead and do that. Come on. I have my work spread out on one of the tables over here.”

  She led him into the study area. Jake was tall enough that he could see over some of the low sets of shelves dividing that part of the library’s lower floor. He spotted a familiar face and recognized the kid who had given him the unedited video, Pierce Conners. Pierce was sitting with a group of students, one of whom was a young Middle Eastern guy.

  Jake knew a lot of people would say it was racist of him, but whenever he saw somebody like that, he always felt himself tense up inside for a second. Too many people who looked like that guy had shot at him or tried to blow him up. Once you’d lived with something like that for months, it took a long time for the instincts developed during such an experience to fade.

  Natalie’s laptop was sitting open on one of the tables with a number of papers and some thick books sitting around it. Jake gestured at the books and said, “I figured you’d be completely paperless. Aren’t old-fashioned books supposed to be bad for the environment?”

  “Old-fashioned is right. Most of these books were written eighty, ninety, or even a hundred years ago. Some of them even more. Nearly all of the old texts and statute books and legal histories haven’t been digitized yet. Maybe they will be someday, but for now I have to use what exists.”

  “That makes sense.” Jake started to pull her chair out for her, then stopped and said, “Wait a minute. I’m not supposed to do anything polite like that, am I?”

  “Holding a woman’s chair for her is a patriarchal microaggression . . . but I’ll let it slide. This time.” Natalie’s smile and the twinkle in her eyes took any sting out of the words.

  As she sat down and Jake walked around to the other side of the table, her expression grew solemn and she went on, “How did the meeting with President Pelletier go?”

  “Well, he didn’t have security remove me from the campus, so that’s one thing to be grateful for, I suppose. I’m not sure I know what I want anymore. He got plenty upset with me, though. The spit was flying.”

  Natalie laughed, then immediately looked contrite.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t do that. It’s not funny, the things that have happened to you recently, Jake. It’s just that I can see the poor old man. I’ll bet his face got really red.”

  “It did,” Jake said. “I got out of there before he could have a stroke.”

  “Well, I’m glad. That would have been terrible.”

  “Yeah. I don’t have anything against the guy personally. We just don’t see eye to eye. No surprise. My politics don’t seem to agree with anyone’s here at Kelton. I’ll bet there are a few conservatives besides me, though. They just haven’t owned up to it yet, and I can’t say as I blame them.” He looked intently at Natalie. “You and I have never actually talked politics, you know.”

  “I know,” she said. “And I’d just as soon keep it that way.”

  “That’s all right. I don’t mind liberals, as long as they’re fair and honest. I just haven’t run into many who fit that description.”

  “I never said I was a liberal . . . or a conservative.”

  Her voice had a bit of a sharp edge to it now, so Jake held up his hands and said, “All right, point taken. And you’re right. The last thing I want to do is turn into one of those people who filter everything though an ideological lens. I say we concentrate on the things we know we agree on and not worry about anything else.”

  “And what is it we agree on?”

  “Well, that kiss was pretty nice . . .”

  “Yes, it was,” Natalie said, and Jake was both surprised and gratified to see that she was blushing a little. It was an unexpected reaction these days, but a charming one.

  She looked down at the laptop, then said, “All right, I have work to do. This wasn’t a date. You said you usually study at this time of day.”

  “Yep.” Jake took out his phone. “I actually uploaded some notes on here so I can go over them.”

  He opened the app and started reading. Natalie flipped through documents and books and from time to time scribbled something on a piece of paper or typed something into the laptop. The silence between them stretched out, but it was a companionable one and Jake found himself enjoying it.

  If you had to study, he thought, you might as well do it sitting across a table from a beautiful redhead.

  * * *

  Matthias Foster came out of the men’s room on the first floor of the administration building in jeans, a pullover shirt, and a light jacket instead of the groundskeeper’s coveralls he had been wearing earlier in his pose as Rick Overman. The civilian clothes had been in a taped-up cardboard carton he had carried into the building as if he were delivering something.

  No one had glanced twice at him.

  After changing, he had stuffed the coveralls in the trash can in the bathroom. By the time anyone discovered them there, it would be too late to make any difference.

  In several different locations across campus, his men who had pretended to be part of the groundskeeping crew were carrying out similar actions. When they left the buildings where they had changed clothes, they would drift toward the Burr Memorial Library, the way Foster was doing now.

  He had been working at Kelton College for a couple of months, so it was possible that some of the students and faculty members he passed on the way thought he looked familiar, but he hadn’t made any real friends on the campus and no one paid any attention to him as he walked toward the library. They probably took him for a student. He was young enough to pass for one, although he was older than most of the student body. But there were always older students at a college, sometimes a lot older than him.

  And he actually had been a student at Kelton, not all that long ago. He had earned an academic scholarship, a full ride. He’d arrived on campus full of ambition and anticipation, ready to not only further his education but to make a difference in the world as well. Kelton was populated by those who shared his progressive ideals, his zeal to change the world for the better, his loathing for everything old and reactionary.

  It hadn’t taken him long, however, to realize that they loathed him, too, because he was poor. Their commitment to diversity and equality didn’t extend to boys from squalid little oil-field towns like the one Foster came from, no matter how smart they were. With his passion for learning and disdain for sports and hard work and his “liberal notions,” he had never fit in, back in his hometown. It should have been different at Kelton, but although the reasons were different, most of the people there seemed to despise him, as well. He had joined all the right groups, said all the right things, and firmly believed what he was saying, but none of it seemed to make any difference.

  The world was filled with assholes, no mat
ter where you went, and there were only two things that really made any difference to them: money and power. For the most part, those two things went hand in hand. If you had enough money, you had power. Simple as that.

  Matthias Foster was smart. Always had been. It didn’t take him long to realize what he had to do.

  He had almost reached the library when the burner phone in his shirt pocket chimed to let him know he had a message. He stopped and frowned. Everybody was supposed to be in position and at “radio silence” now, which included text messages. Foster took out the phone and checked the screen.

  His heart jumped a little when he saw the message was from Curt Nevins, who he had left keeping an eye on the groundskeepers’ shed, just in case anyone came poking around there. He opened the message and read: Chief McRainey going into shed! Will stop him!

  “Oh, no,” Foster said under his breath. He tapped into the phone: Eliminate at all costs!

  Foster checked the time. Zero hour, if you could call it that, was less than fifteen minutes away. But there was still time enough for Frank McRainey to discover all those bodies in the shed and rouse the campus. Foster believed that he had allowed for enough contingencies that it shouldn’t matter if McRainey did that, but it was better not to run the risk. Things could still go wrong, despite all of his planning.

  Nevins didn’t respond to the message, so Foster didn’t know if he had gotten it or not. He would just have to trust to luck and hope that Nevins would take care of the threat. There was no time to do anything else.

  Foster slipped the phone back into his pocket and went briskly up the steps, across the porch, and into the library.

  The self-checkout stations were to his right as he went in the main entrance. Beyond them, a long reference desk where student assistants worked, something that hadn’t changed in decades. One of his people was behind that desk, put in place at the first of the semester like a dozen others in various positions of trust and responsibility across the campus. At least two of Foster’s followers were in all the main buildings, and like him, they were prepared to risk their lives to accomplish the objective.

  He had an even larger number of allies here at the library. It was the centerpiece of the entire plan, with more students, faculty members, and staff on hand during a normal day than in any other single building at Kelton College. He was confident in the people he had in the administration building, the various classroom buildings, and the residence halls, but taking the library was the crux of everything.

  How could it be anything else, since he was here? He was the mastermind of everything that was going to happen today.

  He went into the first-floor men’s room and locked the door behind him with a key provided by one of the maintenance crew who was part of his group. Nobody was at the urinals, but a student was coming out of one of the stalls. The guy didn’t make eye contact with Foster, since men seldom acknowledged another man’s presence in a restroom. He just went to one of the sinks to wash his hands, which made it easy for Foster to take him from behind, reaching around to lock an arm around the young man’s throat so a twist and a heave snapped his neck. The young man sagged, deadweight now even though he was still alive. He wouldn’t be for long, though, since his lungs no longer worked. He would die of suffocation within minutes.

  Foster dragged him into one of the stalls, propped him up on the toilet, and left him there.

  Then Foster pulled the trash can away from the wall at the end of the row of sinks and climbed up on it. He lifted one of the ceiling tiles and reached inside with his other hand, closing it around the canvas bag the same maintenance man had placed there last night. He pulled the bag out and jumped down to the floor again.

  Inside the drawstring bag was a Glock 9mm pistol with a loaded magazine already in the butt, plus eight more loaded magazines. There were other ammunition caches scattered around the library if they became necessary. His people had been working on this for weeks. Planning and patience, those were the keys to an operation like this.

  Somebody banged on the bathroom door and said, “What the hell?”

  Foster tucked the Glock into his waistband at the small of his back, under the jacket, and stashed the loaded magazines in various pockets. Then he unlocked the door and said, “Sorry, man, we had a bad plumbing problem in here.”

  The guy was in a hurry and didn’t seem to notice that Foster wasn’t dressed like a maintenance man. He pushed past, heading for one of the stalls. Foster took out the Glock and slammed it on the back of his head, knocking him to his knees. Another hard, swift blow made the guy pitch forward, out cold.

  Foster left him there, put the gun away, stepped out of the restroom, and locked the door behind him. The student would be unconscious for a little while, but stuck in the locked bathroom like that, he might actually be one of the lucky ones. Where he was, he stood a lot less chance of getting shot.

  Of course, he might still get blown up . . .

  With a pleasant half-smile on his face, Foster walked away from the restroom and toward the escalators. One of the campus cops was strutting around near them with an angry, arrogant expression on his face, a living symbol of the establishment oppression that Foster had once wanted to do away with, too, before he’d realized that what he really needed was something else entirely. The guy glanced at Foster but didn’t really pay attention to him. Foster was used to that.

  On the way to the escalator, he also passed a couple of his guys. They made eye contact only for a fraction of a second, and the nods they gave him were so tiny and quick most people would have missed them, but they were enough to tell Foster that they had retrieved the weapons that had been hidden for them. He reached the escalator and started down to the lower floor.

  Actually, there were more people down here than on the ground floor. This was the real hub of the library, where students came to study or work on projects or just hang out. When he was halfway down the escalator, Foster looked around and spotted the members of his inner circle spread out around the big room. Hank was to his left, over near the stacks. Jimmy to the right. Carlos straight ahead, sitting in an armchair pretending to be doing something on his phone.

  And there was Lucy, sweet Lucy, right where she was supposed to be. She glanced up, and their eyes met across the intervening distance. Foster frowned slightly as he realized she didn’t look as eager and ready to neutralize any threat as he had hoped she would be. It was way too late to be having any second thoughts or cold feet about the plan now. Foster knew that, and knew that no matter what Lucy’s state of mind was, the rest of them had no choice but to carry on.

  Because this was the time, he thought as he slipped his phone from his pocket with his left hand and checked the hour. He entered nine digits of a telephone number but not the tenth one that would complete the call. This had been checked out thoroughly. Cell service was actually pretty sketchy inside the library, but it was good enough for his purposes.

  He held the phone in his left hand and reached behind him, under his jacket, with the right. As he stepped off the escalator at the bottom, he pulled the Glock free, pointed it at the ceiling, and triggered two shots. The gun-thunder was deafening in this confined space, but Foster had earplugs in to protect his hearing with their decibel-activated circuitry. They allowed him to still hear sounds at a nondamaging level, so he was able to hear the sudden, terrified screams that instantly followed the shots.

  “Everyone do as you’re told!” he shouted loud enough for his voice to carry across the entire lower floor. “Otherwise we’re all going to die!”

  CHAPTER 24

  Cal Granderson was still muttering to himself as he walked around the first floor of the library. Chief McRainey was the boss, sure, but that didn’t give him the right to banish Granderson here. That was what it felt like, for sure, banishment. The library was the dullest place on campus.

  A student walked past Granderson on the way to the escalators. Granderson looked in that direction but was only vaguely awar
e of the guy. His brain was full of resentment over the way the chief had treated him, and in front of a civilian, too! That just made it worse.

  Granderson had thought it over—he hadn’t thought of much else since the incident—and he was still convinced that he had done the right thing. That deliveryman had broken the law and deserved the ticket, and once he started arguing with a duly appointed representative of the law, he deserved whatever happened to him. Simple as that. Couldn’t have people being defiant to law enforcement. That way lay anarchy.

  Except, of course, in cases where the law was just being used as dupes by a fascist government. Then it was a true patriot’s duty to resist, be it by hashtags or other, more direct methods.

  Earlier, while he was taking a turn through the lower level, Granderson had spotted Jake Rivers sitting at a table with a good-looking red-haired woman, which was annoying enough to start with. Granderson thought the woman was one of the professors here, and that just made it worse. He didn’t believe that students and teachers should be involved with each other like that, although there was a long history of such things happening on campuses everywhere. It was against the Kelton College code of conduct, though, which meant, in a way, that Rivers and the woman were lawbreakers. Granderson wished there was such a thing as giving a ticket for illegal fornicating. If there was, he would have slapped one down in front of Rivers and the woman in the blink of an eye.

  It just wasn’t fair that a guy could be such a racist, sexist, homophobic bigot and still get a woman who looked like that.

  Granderson was brooding about that, as well as the deliveryman and Chief McRainey, when the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt just in front of the stun gun crackled to life. He unclipped it and lifted it in time to hear the strained tones of the chief’s voice as he called for help at the groundskeepers’ shed. Granderson’s fingers tightened on the walkie as he picked up on the pain in McRainey’s voice. Something was very wrong.