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  Instead, Jake could count on the fingers of one hand how many times he had seen someone open carrying in normal, day-to-day life. Everyone he knew who had been carrying concealed continued to do so, as he himself did in the places where he was allowed to . . . and where, technically, he wasn’t allowed to. With an inside-the-waistband holster and the comfortably fitting shirts he wore, nobody had to know he was armed unless it was necessary.

  He also had several small but deadly combat knives he carried on occasion. He knew some older men, including his grandfather, had carried at least a pocketknife every day of their lives for fifty years or more, until the rise of the nanny state and its metal detectors had created too much of a hassle for them.

  Jake had a couple of guns in his dorm room. They weren’t supposed to be there, but he wanted to have them handy anyway. He didn’t try to take one of them with him tonight, though. Instead, as he slipped his jacket on, he felt the comforting weight of the folding knife in one of the pockets. The blade, when it was opened, was a little less than three inches long, but in the hands of an expert—and Jake was an expert—that was more than enough to be deadly.

  He smiled at Natalie as he closed the door behind them and started along the hall toward the stairs, which Jake habitually took instead of the elevator, both for the exercise and because he didn’t care for tight, enclosed places.

  “Where would you like to go?” he asked Natalie.

  “The Shamrock is close,” she said. “Is that all right with you?”

  “Sure,” he said. The Shamrock was only a couple of blocks off-campus. It advertised itself as an authentic Irish pub but was really only about as authentic as any bar and grill that was owned by a corporation could be.

  Still, it was pleasant enough, or had been the one time Jake was in there, the beer was good, and the bar food wasn’t bad. The lighting was subdued enough that it would be nice to sit with Natalie in one of the booths and talk. They were likely to be noticed, but he didn’t care for his own sake—he had never been the type to give a damn what anybody thought about him—and since she was the one who’d suggested the place, she was probably all right with that, too.

  Jake got beers for them at the bar, and they took them to an empty booth toward the back of the big room laid out around a horseshoe bar. They sat down across the table from each other, and Natalie raised her bottle.

  “To a world that will someday be normal again,” she said.

  “That’s an odd toast,” Jake said, “but I can’t argue with it.”

  They clinked bottles together and drank.

  “If you want normal, though, you’re not going to find it on a college campus,” he said. “Not these days. If Kelton is any example—and from what I read online, it is—those places are hotbeds of crazy.”

  Natalie shrugged and said, “They’ve changed a lot, even in the short time that I’ve been teaching. Things that seemed over-the-top and ridiculous a dozen years ago are commonplace now.”

  “You’ve been teaching a dozen years? I find that hard to believe.”

  She smiled and said, “Maybe I’m a little older than I look. If you call me a cougar, though, I’ll report you for hate speech.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” Jake said. To tell the truth, even though she was older than him, they seemed about the same age. He had always been an old soul, his grandfather had told him once. And everything he and his mother had gone through with his father had aged him even more.

  “You suddenly look very solemn,” Natalie said. “This is supposed to be the banter part of the evening.”

  “Sorry. I was just thinking about some things. Family, mostly.”

  She drank some more from the beer bottle and then said, “I know who you are.”

  Jake cocked an eyebrow and said, “I told you my name, so . . .”

  “I should have said, I know who your grandfather is. I told you the first time we met that there are rumors about you, about how you must be related to somebody important. I’d say Cordell Gardner certainly qualifies.”

  Jake’s forehead creased.

  “How’d you know about that?”

  “I teach criminal justice, remember? You have to know a little about police procedure and how to poke around and find out things.”

  “I don’t like to talk about it,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t want people thinking I’m getting breaks or being treated differently because of who my relatives are.”

  “But you are,” Natalie said. “And that’s just the way of the world, Jake. People who have more wealth and power, or whose families have more wealth and power, are treated differently. Some people who are obsessed with trying to make everything in the world fair don’t like that, but there’s nothing really they can do about it. They’ve been trying to for hundreds of years but haven’t been able to.”

  “Maybe so, but I don’t have to take advantage of it.”

  Although that was just what he was doing, Jake thought with a trace of a bitter taste in his mouth that had nothing to do with the beer. He was going to allow his grandfather to make those lawsuits go away, even though it still felt to him like he was admitting that he had done something wrong. The old man was a bottom-line sort of guy, though. The cheapest and most efficient way to accomplish anything was the best way, as far as he was concerned.

  “Why don’t we change the subject, at least sort of?” Natalie suggested. “Still on family. Tell me about your parents and your brothers and sisters.”

  “No brothers or sisters. I’m an only child. My father was a lawyer in Houston. My mother . . . well, my mother married my father. I hate to sum up anybody like that, but it’s about all you can say about her.”

  “Is she from Houston as well?”

  He shook his head.

  “New Orleans. Her father owned a trucking company there that carried freight all over the country. He passed away a long time ago.”

  “But your folks are still alive?”

  “My mother is. I honestly don’t know about my father.”

  Natalie nodded.

  “I caught it when you said he was a lawyer. What happened?”

  Jake gestured with the hand that held the beer bottle.

  “Big scandal. He got disbarred because it came out he’d been heavily involved with drugs and had a lot of gambling debts. He was paid off to tank some big cases he worked on. He probably should have been sent to jail, but they wound up just not letting him practice law anymore. My mother divorced him and took back her maiden name. I decided to follow her example. I’d lost all respect for my father, and I didn’t want to be carrying around his name. So I got it legally changed and took the name of my maternal grandfather instead. Big Joe Rivers was a good man, for all I’ve heard about him. I barely remember the man, myself.” He scowled across the table. “And how the hell did you get me talking so much about myself? I never do that!”

  She smiled and said, “I’m easy to talk to, I guess.”

  “You are, at that.”

  “Any other relatives?”

  “Determined, aren’t you?”

  “Nosy.”

  “Well, you’ve run up against a brick wall now. My mother had two brothers, but they’re both dead. One went nuts and died in an asylum—I know, I’m an insensitive lout, but at least I didn’t call it a loony bin—and my other uncle was killed in an explosion.”

  Natalie raised her eyebrows and said, “An explosion?”

  “Yeah. The blast blew up him and his wife. I was too little to know anything about it at the time, but later on I heard rumors that it was mob-related.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “I’m sure Uncle Barry and his wife thought so when they got blown up.”

  “And now you’re being terrible. I think I’ve heard enough about your family.”

  “And I’ve said more than enough about ’em, that’s for sure. Tell me about yours instead.”

  “My family?” She smiled. “I come from a long line of ma
dmen. We’re Irish, you know.”

  “The best kind of mad,” Jake said as he grinned and raised the bottle in his hand.

  CHAPTER 13

  They split an order of potato skins to go along with the beers they drank—three for Jake and two for Natalie. She really didn’t talk much about her family, and he didn’t prod her for information. That was her business. Just because he had let down his guard and spilled some of the more sordid details of the Rivers and Gardner clans, that didn’t mean she had to do likewise.

  She did share some amusing stories about her teaching career, mostly concerning the difficulty of navigating the hazardous waters of academia. Over the past few years, especially, it had gotten more and more difficult to say or do anything without offending somebody.

  “I swear, there’s a special interest group for everything,” she said. “And if you do something to upset one of them, then all the others pile on you as well. You wind up with a firestorm on social media.”

  “A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” Jake quoted. “That’s kind of the way I look at social media most of the time.”

  “That’s a wise approach. I imagine it helps keep you sane.”

  “Well,” Jake said with a smile, “there’s probably a lot of debate in some circles about just how sane I really am.”

  “The administration takes social media very seriously, though, and the news media as well. They can’t stand any bad publicity, so if there’s very much of an uproar about anything . . . well, they cave, to be blunt about it.”

  “How does that make the faculty feel?”

  Natalie blew out a breath.

  “Most of the faculty agree with the professionally outraged. They’re part of the whole deal. More than once, I’ve had faculty members come to me with letters of support they were all signing because of some so-called microaggression against black students or gay students or Muslim students.” She laughed, but there wasn’t much humor in the sound. “A while back, the Union of African-American Students refused to let students who were actually from Africa join.”

  Jake frowned.

  “Wait. What?”

  “That’s right. Black students who came here from Africa specifically to go to college at Kelton were told they weren’t black enough to join the African-American students’ group.”

  “Well, that’s kind of . . . odd.”

  “Then the Islamic Students’ Association demanded that prayer rooms be set aside for them in every building on campus. I can almost understand that one, since they pray at certain times, but they wanted the space in every building.” Natalie shrugged. “The administration complied, of course, although it wasn’t easy. This is an old campus, without much room to spare. But they kicked up a fuss and got what they wanted.” She drank some of her second beer. “Then there was the business about the rainbow.”

  “People are offended by rainbows now?”

  “No, no, that wasn’t it,” Natalie said, raising a finger. “The Gay Students Alliance—well, that’s not the official name of the group, that has about a dozen letters in it now, but people call it the Gay Students Alliance—anyway, they painted a rainbow mural on the side of an older building they knew was scheduled to be demolished. Then they demanded that the building be protected and claimed that tearing it down would be a hate crime. It was just a storage building next to the old power plant, and it’s in such bad shape that it’s not being used for anything anymore. If a strong enough wind came along, it would likely fall down on its own. But now it’s a monument to the gay, lesbian, transgender movement, as well as the other stuff that gets lumped in with that these days.”

  “I suppose the administration went along with that, too.”

  “Of course,” Natalie said. “President Pelletier and the others didn’t dare be perceived as anything less than one hundred percent supportive of the movement.”

  “I guess all people have rights,” Jake said with a shrug.

  “Certainly they do. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to see anyone being discriminated against. But they lose their minds over the smallest things, things that were never meant to harm or disadvantage anyone. Like tearing down an old building that’s no good to anybody. The alliance knew that was scheduled to happen, so they picked it for their mural just to force a confrontation.”

  “So it gets them publicity and makes them look like the good guys while the college comes off as heartless and homophobic.”

  “Exactly. I’ve seen it happen over and over again. No matter who gets offended over what, they pitch a hissy fit and demand safe spaces.”

  Jake smiled.

  “You know who Audie Murphy was?”

  “The name’s vaguely familiar,” Natalie said with a puzzled frown, “but I can’t place it.”

  “Farm boy from here in Texas. He went off to fight in World War II and wound up as the most decorated soldier in the history of the country. After the war he became an actor, mostly in Western movies. A better actor, generally, than most people gave him credit for.”

  “What does he have to do with what we’re talking about?”

  Jake took another drink and smiled.

  “When all these college kids started getting upset with everything and demanding safe spaces, I heard somebody say something I’ve never forgotten: When Audie Murphy was nineteen years old, like a lot of these precious little snowflakes . . . his safe space was behind a .50 caliber machine gun.”

  “Well, that’s cute,” Natalie said with a smile of her own, “but it wouldn’t mean anything to the students here. They’re opposed to war, most of them have never even touched a gun, let alone fired one, and just the idea of guns makes them feel a little queasy.”

  “People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

  “Another quote. Orwell, right?”

  Jake shrugged.

  “He usually gets credit for it, but I believe there’s some question about whether or not he actually said it. That doesn’t really matter. It’s true, whether these kids want to accept it or not.”

  “These kids,” she repeated. “And exactly how old are you, Jake?”

  “Twenty-four,” he said, then took another pull of the beer. “But my grandfather claims I have an old soul.”

  “Well, as long as you don’t start telling them to keep off your lawn, I suppose you’re all right.”

  “I know I’m kind of out of date,” Jake admitted. “I’ve never cared that much about fitting in, though.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with going your own way. Most people, whether we like to admit it or not, act like sheep a lot of the time.”

  Jake raised an eyebrow.

  “I thought I was supposed to be the cynical one.”

  “I teach criminal justice, remember? You can’t study the kinds of awful things people do to each other in this world without getting a little . . .” She trailed off and shook her head. “Never mind. This was supposed to be drinks and some light conversation, maybe a little flirting. We didn’t set out to solve all the problems of the world.”

  “Solving the world’s problems is above my pay grade,” Jake said. “Now, the flirting, that I might be able to handle.”

  “I’ll just bet you can,” she said.

  By the time they left the Shamrock, Jake was as comfortable with Natalie Burke as he had been with any woman for quite some time. The fact that she was older, and a professor, while he was a graduate student, didn’t bother him. As far as he could tell, she wasn’t put off by those things, either. After all, he reminded himself, she was the one who had shown up at his dorm room tonight. She never had said why she was there, however.

  He knew he was risking things turning awkward, but his curiosity led him to say, “Why did you come to Olmsted Hall tonight, anyway?”

  “To see you, of course,” she answered in a straightforward manner. “I wanted to talk to you again. You’re an interesting
person, Jake Rivers. I’m not sure what to make of you, and mysteries have always intrigued me.”

  “Have you figured it out?”

  “Figured you out?” She laughed. “Not at all. You’re full of contradictions. You’re a warrior, but you’re also a philosopher. You quote Shakespeare. You’re young, but you look down on people your age and venerate soldiers from a war that was fought three generations ago. You’re quiet-spoken and gentle, and yet you’ve been one of those rough men ready to do violence on other people’s behalf. When you need to be, you still are a rough man.”

  “I don’t go out of my way to look for fights.”

  “Exactly. You’re like . . . a warrior monk.”

  That made him throw back his head and laugh as they walked along the concrete path at the edge of Nafziger Plaza toward his dorm.

  “Believe me, I am nothing like a monk,” he told her.

  She stopped in a patch of shadows, and so he did, too. He couldn’t see her face very well as she spoke, but he could hear the husky intensity in her voice as she said, “You mean you’re not celibate?”

  “That, too,” he said.

  Unless he had read all the signals wrong, she wanted him to kiss her, so he put his hands on her shoulders and leaned toward her. She tipped her head back, and despite the poor light, he had no trouble letting instinct guide him so that his lips found hers. She rested the fingertips of her left hand on his chest and slipped her right arm around his waist.

  It was a good kiss, with just enough heat and urgency that they both tightened the embrace, but with the natural restraint of a first kiss. It definitely held the potential for more, Jake thought.

  After a long moment, he drew back. He started to make some comment about hoping he hadn’t broken any of the college’s rules, but then he sensed that this wasn’t the right time for that. He didn’t want to break the mood that seemed to have come over both of them.