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  “Force,” Carlos said. “The same sort of oppression they deal out to us.”

  “You know they’d put us all in death camps if they thought they could get away with it,” Hank added.

  Ben nodded and said, “Sure they would. Racist, sexist, homophobic bigots, that’s all they are. Every single one of them. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

  Foster laughed.

  “That’s an old, old line, buddy. Where’d you read that?”

  “It was in one of your posts online, wasn’t it?” Ben asked with a frown.

  “You know what, maybe it was. I say so many things, it’s hard to keep track of them. And you know what they say, there’s truth behind every cliché.”

  Ben turned toward the range counter with the guns spread out on it.

  “So let’s do some shooting.”

  “Hold on, hold on,” Foster said as he held up a hand. Still smiling, he went on, “I need to ask you about something first.”

  “Sure. Just don’t ask me if I’m committed, because I am. I am ready to go through with this, I give you my word on that.”

  “So I can trust you?” Foster asked.

  “Absolutely. One hundred percent.”

  “Then I know you’ll tell me the truth when I ask you why you drove into Austin last night.”

  Ben frowned a little.

  “You didn’t say we couldn’t. We’re supposed to go on about our business normally until the time comes, right?”

  “That’s not exactly an answer.”

  “Well, I just needed to buy a few things, that’s all. There are more places to shop in Austin than there are in Greenleaf.”

  “You went to a shopping center, all right,” Foster said, “but you didn’t go into any of the stores.”

  Ben was starting to look angry now.

  “How the hell do you know that? Have you been having me followed, Matthias? I thought you trusted all of us. You wouldn’t have brought us in on this if you didn’t.”

  “I do trust you. I trust you to tell me who that guy was you met in the parking lot, and what was on that flash drive you gave him.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ben said with a stubborn shake of his head. “I didn’t meet some guy, and I didn’t give anybody a flash drive.”

  “Really?” Foster reached in his pocket, took something out, and flipped it through the air to Ben, who reached up and caught it instinctively. He lowered his hand, opened it, and stared at the little flash drive in his palm. Foster went on, “Sorry if it’s a little sticky. It got some blood on it.”

  Lucy’s eyes widened. She took half a step back toward the counter with the guns on it and said, “Matthias, what . . . what is this?”

  He lifted a hand toward her gently.

  “Nothing for you to worry about,” he said in reassuring tones. “I’m just trying to find out how loyal Ben is to the rest of us.”

  “You know damn well I’m loyal,” Ben said angrily. He waved his left hand toward the counter. “Didn’t I help you get some of those guns right there? Didn’t I put my own ass on the line by delivering drugs for you?”

  “Weed,” Foster said with a scornful note in his voice. “Hell, in some states what you did wasn’t even illegal, man.”

  “Getting those untraceable guns was.”

  “And I appreciate it. We all do. But I still want to know about that flash drive. It’s encrypted, so we couldn’t get into it . . . yet . . . but we’ll crack it sooner or later, if I decide to go to that much trouble. Not sure that would be worth it, since I’ve got a hunch there are a bunch of names on there. My name, and Hank’s and Jimmy’s and Carlos’s. Maybe even pretty little Lucy’s. What about it, Ben?”

  “I still don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what else to tell you, Matthias.”

  “All right.” Foster laughed and spread his hands. “What the hell. Whatever’s on that drive, it can’t hurt us, and neither can the guy who had it. So it’s all moot, right? You’re still with us. If you’d really betrayed us, you’d be in the wind by now. You wouldn’t have come out like this. You don’t have the stones for that, my friend. No offense.”

  Ben grunted.

  “Yeah, I think maybe I am offended. But I don’t care. You’ve gotten things mixed up, Matthias, and you’ll realize that sooner or later.”

  “Maybe. Yeah, I’m sure you’re right.” Foster turned to the counter, picked up a 9mm semi-automatic pistol, and tossed it to Ben. “There you go. Let’s see what you can do with that target practice you were talking about.”

  Ben had caught the pistol deftly. With practiced ease, he thumbed the button in the side of the weapon, dropped the magazine from the butt, and looked at it to be sure it was loaded. He slid it back into place, pulled the slide back to eject the round that was in the chamber, and then let it go back forward to load another round.

  Then he stepped over to the counter to face the targets, but he stood there only for a second before he turned quickly and pointed the gun at Lucy’s head. She gasped in surprise and fear and took a step back.

  “Drop them now!” Ben said. “All the guns you’ve got on you, throw them on the ground! I’ll kill her! I will!”

  None of the other men seemed surprised. Foster, in fact, was smiling as he shook his head and said, “No, you won’t. You’re one of the good guys, Ben. FBI, Homeland . . . Hell, maybe even a Texas Ranger. You’re not just about to shoot some innocent girl in the head, and we all know it.”

  Ben grimaced and swung the gun toward Foster. He jerked the trigger.

  Nothing happened.

  “A gun being loaded doesn’t do any good if the firing mechanism has been disabled,” Foster said. “You should have checked that, too.”

  Wide-eyed with sudden terror, Ben threw the inoperative pistol aside and tried to twist toward the other guns on the counter. Before he could reach any of them, Jimmy, Hank, and Carlos opened fire with the pistols they had drawn from under their shirts. The bullets, some .45 caliber and some 9mm, plowed into Ben’s back and pitched him forward. He fell short of the counter and lay on his face, twitching as blood pumped from the holes in his back. The spasms lasted for maybe ten seconds and then stopped.

  Foster hadn’t fired a weapon of his own. He stepped over to Lucy, who was pale and shaken, and lifted a hand to cup her chin as he smiled.

  “I’m sorry about that,” he said. “But you know I never would have let him hurt you.”

  “I was . . . bait,” she said.

  “Not exactly. He could have tried to shoot any of us. I just wanted him to show his true colors . . . and he did. And now we know.” He put his arm around Lucy’s shoulders. “Come on. The guys will take care of cleaning this up. You and I can go back to town and leave them to their work.”

  “Somebody might have heard all those shots.”

  “It’s a shooting range. That’s what we do here.” Foster smiled. “Target practice.”

  CHAPTER 11

  When Jake answered a knock on the door of his dorm room the evening of his abrasive meeting with President Andrew Pelletier, he was surprised to see his grandfather standing there in the hall. “Cordell,” he said, using the old man’s first name like he often did, “what are you doing here?”

  “I came to see you, of course. And to bail your stubborn ass out of trouble. You gonna let me in?”

  Jake stepped back out of the doorway.

  “Sure. Come in.” Even though he was several inches taller and considerably heavier than his grandfather, he still felt a little intimidated by the old man. “I guess you, ah, heard about the trouble a few days ago.”

  “Be hard not to,” Gardner said as he closed the door behind him. “I don’t do that, whatchacallit, social media stuff myself, but everybody who works for me does. You made yourself famous, boy. Or infamous, depending on who’s doin’ the talking.”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Jake said firmly. “I was d
efending somebody else, at first, and after that I was sticking up for myself. I seem to remember both of my grandfathers telling me that’s what I’m supposed to do. When somebody else starts a fight—”

  “You make damn sure you finish it,” the old man growled. “Yeah, I can’t argue with that. My secretary showed me some of those videos people shot on their phones. You did the right thing, son. Even so, I was gonna let you handle it yourself. Let you navigate those treacherous waters. Figured you’d learn more that way.” Gardner swept back the lapels of his Western-cut jacket and hooked his thumbs behind his belt. “But that was before I found out you were about to have a whole swarm of locusts descend on you. Lawyers, I mean.”

  “Yeah, I figured that out,” Jake said with a smile. “They plan on coming in and stripping me clean just like locusts.”

  Gardner blew out a disparaging breath.

  “You don’t have a whole lot to be stripped away from you. You’re not rich . . . yet.”

  “I don’t care if I ever am,” Jake said.

  “Spoken like a boy whose family has always had plenty of money.”

  Jake would have argued with that, just on general principles, but he supposed it was true. His father had been a very successful lawyer in Houston, and they had always had plenty of money, or at least so it seemed. Then drugs, booze, and hookers had leeched off most of the available funds, which revealed just how fragile a foundation the family’s finances had been built upon. Seeing his mother go through that was one of the reasons Jake had taken her last name and cut all ties with his father. He didn’t know where the man was now or if he was even still alive, although Jake suspected that Cordell Gardner kept up with his son, disowned or not.

  “What do you want?”

  The old man laughed harshly.

  “You sound like you’re not glad to see me.”

  “I’m always happy to see you, you know that. But I know that you’re not in the habit of just dropping in on people without a good reason.”

  “That’s true, I suppose,” Gardner said with a shrug. “Like I said, I heard rumors you were about to get hit with a bunch of lawsuits. Considering what I saw in that video, I’m not surprised.”

  “No charges were filed against me,” Jake pointed out. “The college didn’t even take any real action against me. The president just urged me to withdraw.”

  “You told him where he could stick that, I imagine.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, no charges were filed against you because there’s too much evidence that you were acting in self-defense when that mob of hood-wearin’ bullies attacked you. The stuff that came before, the trouble with that fella who was beating up his girlfriend, there doesn’t seem to be any footage of that floating around, so it would be hard to prove anything in court. Your word against theirs. But that’s why there are civil suits, so things you can’t prove in criminal court might get addressed by a jury. The burden of proof’s a lot lower, and hell, most civil cases are decided by the emotional state of the people in the jury box, not by the evidence.”

  “So what do you think I should do?”

  Gardner snorted.

  “I think you should say thank you to the old man who got you out of this mess. I got some contacts in the county courthouse to look into the matter, found out who was going to file suit against you, and sicced a fleet of lawyers on ’em to make settlement offers. Some accepted the offers right off the bat, and the others got spooked into it when my paper-pushers started playin’ hardball. I’m not sayin’ that there might not be more crawling out of the woodwork later on, but for now, anyway, it’s over.”

  “Just like that?” Jake stared. “You bought them off?”

  “I took the most efficient, least-expensive way in the long run. Oh, there were still some of the little bully boys you gave a thrashin’ to who wanted to take you to court and punish the big bad fascist, but once they had some dollar signs dangled in front of their faces, their progressive beliefs faded like a freak dusting of snow in Corpus Christi.”

  Jake shook his head in amazement. His pride made him say, “I didn’t ask you for help, you know.”

  “I don’t sit around waitin’ for family to come begging,” the old man snapped. “Now, what’s this about Pelletier asking you to withdraw?”

  Jake waved a hand.

  “Forget it. I didn’t go along with his suggestion, so it doesn’t matter. I’m going to stick it out and get my master’s degree.”

  “Decided you want to finish your education and improve your mind, did you?”

  “No, I’m just too damn stubborn to let anybody run me off, especially a bunch of whiny little snowflakes.”

  That made a grin break out on Gardner’s rugged face. He clapped a hand on Jake’s upper arm and said, “There you go, boy! I never liked anybody trying to tell me what to do, either.”

  Jake felt a little awkward about it, but he said, “I do appreciate what you did. Don’t get me wrong about that. I would have fought every one of those bastards in court—”

  “Damn right.”

  “But I can’t afford much in the way of lawyers. The only thing is . . . Won’t they think they beat me, since they took the settlements and got paid?”

  “They can think whatever they damn well please. A bunch of pajama boys struttin’ around and thinking they’re tough doesn’t mean a blasted thing to me.” Gardner smiled. “And some of them—the most obnoxious of the bunch—are going to get hit with some lawsuits of their own in the next week or so. If they can sue you for defending yourself against them, you can sue them for attacking you in the first place.”

  “Won’t the settlements make it seem like I was admitting that I was wrong? With that on the record, lawsuits like you’re talking about would be hard to win.”

  “Yeah, they would, if we pressed it. I just want them to get served with that paperwork, see the figure the suit is asking in damages, and dribble down their legs while they’re countin’ the zeroes.”

  Jake looked at his grandfather for a moment, then laughed.

  “You are a vicious old man.”

  “How do you think I made so much money?”

  Jake didn’t answer that. Instead he said, “Why don’t we go out and get a beer? You can bring your driver and your bodyguards along.”

  “Spend the evening in some college hangout? Thanks, but no thanks.”

  “It’s not exactly the malt shop anymore,” Jake said.

  “Maybe not, but I’ll still pass.” The old man pointed to the desk, where open books were spread out and a computer and a tablet were both on. “And you’ve got some studying to do, from the looks of it. Get back to work. I didn’t go to all that trouble just to have you flunk out.”

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  “I’m not. I know you’re carryin’ a 4.0 average.”

  “You have spies everywhere, don’t you?”

  Gardner just grinned, waved, and left the room.

  Jake went back to the desk and tried to concentrate on what he’d been working on, but it wasn’t easy. He was both relieved and annoyed that his grandfather had stepped in to save him from a barrage of lawsuits that would have sucked up all his time and money and ensured that he wasn’t able to continue at Kelton College. His pride was a little wounded, but his practical side knew it was a good thing.

  Another knock sounded on the door. Jake pushed his chair back, stood up, and stepped across the room to open it. He expected to see his grandfather standing there again and said, “Changed your mind about getting that beer, I—”

  “Actually, I didn’t, because nobody’s asked me to go and get a beer,” Dr. Natalie Burke said. “But now that you mention it, I think it sounds like an excellent idea.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Jake didn’t want to be impolite and stare, but it was difficult not to do so. Dr. Burke—or rather, Natalie, since Doctor sounded too stuffy for somebody who looked like she did—wore a pair of tight, tan jeans and a lon
g-sleeved green silk shirt. Her hair fell in reddish-gold waves around her pretty face.

  Still, he didn’t want to be rude, so he used her title as he said, “I didn’t expect to see you here, Dr. Burke.”

  “Why? Do you think there’s something inappropriate about it? Female students and faculty have to follow the same guidelines as the males, as far as relationships are concerned.”

  “I didn’t know we had a relationship, other than being acquainted. And aren’t you forgetting about the gender-fluid and all the other two dozen alternative lifestyles?”

  She laughed.

  “So you have read the guidelines.”

  “Yeah, but I haven’t exactly studied them rigorously.”

  “That’s all right. If you happen to violate one of them, someone will let you know, in no uncertain terms. Possibly even with a megaphone.”

  “And the scarlet letters R, B, S, and H?”

  Natalie frowned a little and cocked her head to the side for a second before she understood. Then she said, “Ah. Racist, bigot, sexist, homophobe. You left out C for cishet. You are cishet, aren’t you?”

  “That’s what they used to call straight?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then yeah, you can add the C in there.” Acting on impulse, he added, “What about that beer? Unless it’s frowned upon for faculty and students to fraternize.”

  “Do you care about being frowned upon?”

  Jake shook his head.

  “Not really.”

  “Well, neither do I.”

  “Let me get my jacket.”

  Jake didn’t much like going out without being armed, especially after the recent troubles. As a private institution, Kelton College had the right under the law to prohibit carrying weapons of all kinds. Public universities, which received tax funds, had to abide by the law of the State of Texas that allowed citizens to bear arms. The news media, the academic world, and the left in general had freaked out over that legislation, shrieking that the state’s colleges and universities were going to become the site of frequent bloody shoot-outs.

  Of course, that hadn’t happened, just as all of the liberals’ doomsday predictions about all sorts of things from global warming to the population explosion had failed to come to pass. When a provision was added to the law allowing Texans to carry openly, it was the end of the world as we know it, according to some. People would be blasting away at each other constantly. That couldn’t be allowed to happen. Just think of the children.