Trigger Warning Read online

  “Well, if you subtract the families who truly can’t afford it and the ones who are too uncaring to pitch in—because they never pitched in to pay their fair share of taxes, did they?—and the families who might have more than one kid attending here, can’t forget them—I figure that leaves us with about two thousand families that need to come up with some cash. They only have to average fifty grand apiece, and I know there are a lot of them who can do more than that.

  “So here’s how it’s going to work: the government will set up a special bank account—I don’t care where, that doesn’t matter—and your parents or guardians or what-have-you are going to transfer money into that account. And I want documentation of where every penny comes from, that’s very important. No tax dollars ripped off from the middle class are going into this account. Only money from the oligarchs who have taken over this country. When the account reaches one hundred million dollars, which it has until five o’clock this afternoon to do, no later, that money will be transferred into the account I specify and the documentation showing where all the money came from will be delivered to my representatives as well. If everything checks out and nobody tries any tricks, we’ll leave, and a short time later you’ll all be free to go on about your business.

  “How are we going to get away, you ask?”

  Nobody had, but Jake was more than a little interested in that question himself.

  “Nobody’s going to try to stop us,” the gunman went on. “We’ll be taken to the airport in Austin where a jet will be waiting to fly us out of the country. When we’ve landed where we’re going—and the flight shouldn’t take much more than about three hours—it’ll be all over and you’ll be safe. But until then . . .” He cocked his head a little to the side and grinned. “Well, until then, we’re all going to be in a little bit of danger. Because, you see, my friends and I have planted bombs all over this campus, and all it’ll take is one signal from a detonator to blow Kelton College—and all of you—right off the freakin’ map.”

  CHAPTER 26

  McRainey must have passed out at some point from shock and loss of blood. He remembered calling for help over the walkie-talkie, and then the next thing he knew one of his guys was kneeling in front of him, cursing in surprise for a moment before saying, “Good Lord, Chief, what happened here?”

  McRainey’s wounded hand still hurt like fire, but the pain in his head and chest had receded to dull aches. He lifted his good hand and pointed.

  “Charlie Hodges . . . dead behind the desk. Don’t know where . . . the rest of his guys . . . are . . . They’re probably . . . dead, too.”

  “I’ve called for an ambulance, Chief.” The young officer’s face was blurry and McRainey didn’t recognize him at first. Then his vision cleared a little and he could make out enough of the guy’s face to tell that he was Jeff Bagley, who had been working here at Kelton under McRainey for several years.

  Bagley went on, “Who’s this guy?”

  McRainey realized he was talking about the dead man with the knife still sticking up out of his chest.

  “He tried to . . . kill me. Guess he figured . . . I was a harmless old man.”

  Bagley blew out a breath and shook his head, said, “Not hardly. Did he kill Mr. Hodges?”

  “Don’t know. Must have . . . or had something to do with it, anyway.”

  McRainey wasn’t breathing as hard now. He could tell that despite his injury and the infirmities of age, he was getting his body and his mind back under control again. Iron will and the habits of a lifetime had a lot to do with that. He wasn’t going to let some punk get the best of him, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to allow trash like that to put him under.

  “I’ll be all right, Jeff,” he went on. “You’d better be careful. The bastard could have friends around here somewhere.”

  “Yeah, Chief, I think you must be right,” Bagley said. He looked like he was worried about more than McRainey’s condition now. “I heard reports on the walkie while I was running over here. We’ve got shots fired all over campus, sounds like.”

  McRainey bit back a groan. Hodges’ murder wasn’t a random killing, then. Kelton College was under some sort of coordinated attack by persons unknown. This was the sort of thing everybody in law enforcement had learned to dread over the past few decades of increasing political violence.

  “Have there been . . . any explosions?”

  Bagley shook his head.

  “Not that I know of. You think it’s terrorists, Chief?”

  “Must be, if there’s more than one or two of them.”

  “There have to be at least a dozen. From what I could tell over the walkie-talkie, our officers were responding, but there aren’t enough of us to cover the whole campus in a situation like this.” Bagley swallowed hard. “Besides, we aren’t equipped or trained to deal with terrorists.”

  And neither was the Greenleaf PD, McRainey thought. Some of those officers had probably had a little SWAT training, and they had some tactical gear, but up against a large force that wouldn’t be enough.

  “Call the DPS,” McRainey said. “Tell them we need state troopers, Rangers, whatever they can send us. Better call the FBI, too. The Feds will want to get in on this.” He closed his eyes for a second. “We’ll have Homeland and ATF swarming all over.”

  “Better them than us, Chief, no offense. This is above our pay grade.”

  That rankled McRainey, and the irritation gave him more strength.

  “Nothing that concerns the safety of this campus and its students is above my pay grade,” he said as he sat up straighter. “Get out there and find out what’s going on, then report back to me.”

  “But Chief, you’re hurt—”

  “And you’ve already called for help. The EMTs ought to be here soon—”

  As if on cue, two men in the tan and brown uniforms of the local emergency medical service hurried into the office, both of them carrying bulky kits containing gear and equipment. McRainey recognized both of them.

  “Chief McRainey!” one of the men exclaimed. “We didn’t know you were the victim.”

  “I’m better off than that guy,” McRainey said, nodding toward the man he had killed. “You don’t need to waste any time on him.”

  “Yeah, I can see that.” The EMT knelt beside McRainey and picked up his handkerchief-wrapped hand. “Do you have any other injuries?”

  “I took a whack on the head, but I think I’m okay.”

  “Get the chief’s vitals,” the man said as he carefully unwound the blood-soaked handkerchief.

  “And you get out there and find out what’s happening!” McRainey told Bagley again.

  “I can tell you some of that, Chief,” the EMT said. “You have shots fired in multiple buildings, and there are reports of casualties as well.”

  McRainey couldn’t hold in the groan this time. With his good hand, he motioned for Bagley to go on.

  “You’re gonna need a bunch of stitches here,” the EMT said after he had uncovered the cut on McRainey’s palm and taken a look at it. “We need to get you to the hospital. I’ll bandage it better—”

  “Can’t you just, you know, glue it shut or something? You can do that, can’t you?”

  “Not a cut that’s this deep and serious.”

  “Then just clean it up and bandage it the best you can and give me a shot of antibiotics or something. Because I’m not leaving the campus. Not with all hell breaking loose like this.”

  “Damn it, Chief, you’re not going to be able to do anybody any good here. As much blood as you’ve lost, you’re liable to pass out again at any time.”

  “Then give me a shot to bump me up enough that won’t happen. I’m not going to the hospital, I tell you.”

  “What I ought to do is give you a shot that’ll knock you out, then we can do what needs to be done.”

  McRainey glared at the man and said, “You do that and I’ll look you up when this is all over. You don’t want that.”

  The two E
MTs looked at each other. The one who had been taking the chief’s pulse and blood pressure shrugged, as if to say that the decision was up to his partner.

  Before they could make up their minds, Jeff Bagley ran back into the office. The young officer had his cell phone out.

  “Chief, you need to see this,” he said. “It’s streaming live all over the place.”

  He dropped to a knee and held up the phone so McRainey could see the screen.

  The shot was shaking a little, which told McRainey that the hand of whoever was shooting this was trembling, no doubt from fear. The angle was upward, because the person with the phone was on the floor. The shot showed a fairly young man, dressed casually like most of the students on campus, standing near the base of an escalator with what looked like a Glock 9mm in his hand. McRainey could see enough of the surrounding area to recognize the location: the lower left of the Burr Memorial Library, a few hundred yards from where they were right now.

  The young man with the gun was talking. The audio quality wasn’t great, but McRainey could make out most of what he was saying. It was the usual left-wing drivel about how the evil one-percenters were responsible for everything that was wrong with the world.

  As it happened, McRainey actually did believe that there was too much income inequality in the country. For the most part, though, it wasn’t the high earners who drove the economy and paid 95 percent of the taxes who were responsible for it.

  In McRainey’s opinion, the blame lay with the Democrats, and some politicians who called themselves Republicans, who had increased taxes again and again and again, who had loaded down the average working stiff with astronomically high health insurance costs, who had overregulated many small businesses to the brink of extinction. Those were the people who had done their best to grind the middle class out of existence, so that most of the population would be condemned to sucking on the government’s teat forever and therefore would have no choice but to continue voting those politicians, and others of their stripe, into office in perpetuity.

  Those were the vermin in human form who had created the income gap.

  None of which had much bearing on the current disaster, so McRainey tamped those thoughts down as they flashed through his brain. He watched the man with the gun blather on, and his heart began to hammer harder when the guy mentioned bombs planted all over the campus.

  McRainey didn’t doubt the truth of that threat, not even for a moment. Anybody crazy enough to start shooting up a college campus was crazy enough to plant bombs, too.

  Plant ...

  “That’s it,” McRainey said suddenly as he reached out and grabbed Bagley’s arm with his good hand. “That’s why they killed Charlie.”

  The second EMT had stood up and drifted off into the garage area of the groundskeepers’ shed. He came back into the office now with all the color washed out of his face.

  “It’s not just Mr. Hodges, Chief,” he said in a hollow voice. “There are some dead guys in the garage, too, and . . . and they’re all stripped down to their underwear.”

  “It was the uniforms they wanted,” McRainey said. “In those coveralls, everybody figured they were just the regular groundskeeping crew. That allowed them to spread out all over the campus and plant bombs.”

  “I saw some of them digging over by the Language Arts Building earlier,” Bagley said. “You think—”

  “Got to be.”

  Bagley jumped to his feet.

  “We can find all the places they’ve been digging—”

  “No!” McRainey said. “They probably have anti-tamper triggers on all those explosives. Stick a shovel down in that dirt and you’re liable to blow yourself to kingdom come!”

  Bagley stared at him and asked, “Then what are we going to do?”

  “Get out there and warn everybody else on our force. Make sure any Greenleaf cops who show up know what’s going on, too. And when the state cops get here, let them know. They’ll be better equipped to deal with it than any of the locals.”

  Bagley nodded in understanding.

  “How about you, Chief?”

  “I’m fine, damn it,” McRainey said as he gestured sharply again. “Now go on—”

  He stopped as his head spun crazily. All that blood he’d lost was catching up to him again. He felt his eyes rolling up in their sockets. His head tipped back as he heard the EMT kneeling beside him exclaim, “Chief! Chief McRainey!”

  Then consciousness was gone again, as McRainey descended into a nightmare vision of explosions spreading all across the campus of Kelton College, leaving a crimson sprawl of bloody death and destruction in their wake.

  CHAPTER 27

  Dr. Alfred Montambault pressed his back against the wall in the narrow gap between two sets of shelves and tried to will his heart to stop beating so hard. The pounding of his pulse inside his head was so loud he was certain the man with the gun had to be able to hear it, too.

  The man with the gun was prowling around the Special Science Collection on the third floor of the library. Montambault had been in here by himself when chaos erupted below. He had no idea what was going on, but he had heard several muffled gunshots from one of the lower floors.

  At least, he believed they were gunshots. He had never heard a gun go off in real life, only on television and in the movies, and he knew those were created by special effects departments and might not be what firearms sounded like when they were going off in real life.

  He was pretty sure somebody was shooting, though, and the very idea of being around someone firing a gun was enough to make a cold ball of anxiety form in the pit of Montambault’s stomach. His fingers trembled.

  Then, as he stood up from the table where he had been working on his laptop and turned toward the open double doors at the entrance to the collection, he’d heard quick footsteps in the hallway outside.

  Something, some primitive instinct Montambault didn’t even like to think about, had made him duck back out of sight. Moving as quietly as he could, he had hurried around the bookshelves until he reached a spot where he couldn’t see seen easily from the entrance. He could watch the open doors through a narrow gap between shelves, though.

  Because of that, he had seen the stocky, young Hispanic man who had stalked into the room with a pistol of some sort in his hand.

  Montambault knew at that moment that the man was there to kill him. Not him specifically, maybe, but anyone he found here. What other reason would anyone have for brandishing a gun like that?

  The man turned right instead of left when he came through the door. That took him away from Montambault. After that, Montambault couldn’t see him anymore, but he could hear him and could tell that the man was searching through the shelves on the other side of the room to see if anyone was there. When he was finished on that side, he could come over here, Montambault was sure of that.

  And then he would kill Montambault.

  The professor considered making a run for the door, but he didn’t think he could do that quietly enough to escape detection. And even if he made it out of this room, that would put him in a corridor that led to the reception area for the Special Collections department, where there was an elevator leading down to the lower floors and up to the offices on the fourth floor. There was nowhere to hide in the corridor. Montambault would make a good target and would be gunned down before he could reach the reception area.

  Instead, he thought about the storage closet in the back corner of this room. If he could reach it, maybe he could hide. It was unlikely the gunman wouldn’t at least glance in there, but there was a stack of boxes in the closet containing books that had been culled from the shelves, Montambault recalled. Maybe he could arrange them so they looked like they filled up the space, and he could hide behind them.

  An odd thought crossed his mind as he stole in that direction making as little sound as he could.

  He wished Jake Rivers were here. Rivers was a crude, obnoxious, violent young man . . . but he probably had some idea ho
w to handle a man with a gun. More than Alfred Montambault did, that was for sure.

  He thought about his ancestors then, too. Ever since he had been old enough to understand the evils of imperialism, he had been ashamed of the role some of his forebears had played in colonizing Africa. They had been brutal rapists and exploiters and killers.

  But if one of them had been able to come down through the mists of time and stand between Montambault and that gunman right now, he would have welcomed the old reprobate with open arms.

  That wasn’t going to happen, of course. Montambault knew with a sickening certainty that he was on his own here.

  He hadn’t reached the storage closet yet when he heard a footstep not far away. The gunman had finished searching the other side of the room sooner than Montambault expected. He knew he couldn’t make it to the closet in time to hide, so he drew back into the gap between two sets of shelves and tried to make himself as small as possible.

  He had always been slender, and the shelves were deeper than most because they were built to hold oversized technical volumes. They stuck out from the wall perhaps eighteen inches. The gap was wide enough for Montambault to stand with his back against the wall, and he hoped that if he sucked in his stomach and kept his back and shoulders flat, he might be concealed well enough for the gunman to miss seeing him.

  He held his breath as the footsteps echoed hollowly and came closer. If the gunman came along the aisle between the wall and the shelves, Montambault was doomed. If the man simply looked along the aisle and didn’t see anybody, he had a chance . . .

  The steps stopped. A long moment of silence dragged by. Then a man’s voice said, “Yeah, this is Pete. The third floor is under control. We herded everybody who was up here into the reception area in the middle. We’ll wait for your orders.”

  Montambault wanted to heave a sigh of relief but still didn’t dare. The man hadn’t seen him. Now there was at least a chance the man would leave this room without looking around anymore. Montambault could find a better place to hide and wait for someone to come and rescue him. The police had to have received reports of the trouble by now. They would be on their way, and they would deal with the threat. That was what they were paid for, after all.