Constant Fear

CHAPTER 29

Jake stopped at the door of the stairwell and listened. Anybody near the door-or on the opposite side-would hear it open. Patience was key. Slower was better. Excruciatingly slow.

As the head custodian, Jake had made it a point to keep door hinges well oiled and frequently treated them with WD-40. A carry-over from his pitching days, where a millimeter adjustment on the laces could mean a strike, Jake paid attention to the little things, the minutiae as well as the big picture.

Satisfied nobody was near, he moved the knob slowly, turning it only as much as necessary. He pried the door open with a gentle tug, holding the knob in place, knowing that the release might make a sound. With the AK-47 in his left hand, Jake only let go of the knob when the door was back in its original position.

He paused. Listened again. Had he given himself away? Hard to be sure. Dim light at this end of the hallway filtered in through a series of windows that overlooked the main quad. Farther down, shadows loomed to create excellent hiding places. Jake was exposed out here, a deer standing in a field of short grass.

The floor above was a mirror of the one below, minus the windows. Classrooms lined both sides of this long corridor. Jake glanced out the window. The grounds were quiet, the campus deserted. But that was misleading. The enemy was here, somewhere in the school, but hidden.

Jake moved out. He entered the classroom closest to him, using the stealth techniques he had practiced into muscle memory. From down the hall came a whistling sound, low tones haunting in the stillness. The whistling morphed into singing. The voice was tuneless, almost drunken. It sounded to Jake like Spanish. He wasn’t sure. Hard to tell with the echo. The sound took an irregular route, bouncing off the floor, walls, and ceiling. It was foreign, no doubt. And it was only one person. Good for Jake, bad for the other guy.

Jake poked his head out of the classroom far enough to get a visual. A lone figure, tall and lanky, with short hair, canvas sneakers, dressed in jeans and a green golf shirt, which was sliced with white horizontal stripes, strolled the hallway with his back to Jake. He kept his rifle, an AR-15, slung over his right shoulder as he poked his head in and out of a couple classrooms. He gave each room a cursory inspection at most. Jake got the sense he was here on orders to check out the different floors. Maybe he was looking for stragglers, students who hadn’t taken the evacuation order seriously. He probably started at the top and was working his way down. Didn’t seem like he was taking the job too seriously. He ambled from classroom to classroom, opening doors without caution, poking his head inside, and moving on to the next room. He never raised his weapon. He didn’t expect to encounter any threats.

The pattern of movement changed. The man went into one room smack in the middle of the hallway and stayed there. Jake knew exactly which room the guy had gone into, and what he was going to do in there. The time to strike was now.

Hugging the wall, Jake sidled down the hallway. He kept his AK-47 trained on a spot where the man would appear. A lot depended on how long this guy took to go to the bathroom. Jake tried to recall the Spanish words for “drop your weapon.” He thought it might be “baja la pistola,” but that could be meaningless if the guy spoke Portuguese or Italian.

At the bathroom door, Jake paused. He heard whistling coming from inside, and the sound of a toilet flushing. A surprise attack would give Jake the edge, but should he charge in or ambush the guy in the hallway when he came out? The bathroom might muffle sounds of struggle. Others could be nearby.

Weapon versus weapon-the other guy held the edge. Jake’s AK-47 might have been the most common rifle in the world, but the AR-15, best selling in the States, was no slouch. It was longer, weighed less, and could fire off more rounds in a minute than Jake’s assault rifle; it came at a cost about double what Jake had paid for his. It was easily 30 percent more accurate at a distance, too, but the advantage was negligible inside a building. It was the kind of weapon used by the ATF in Fast and Furious, the infamous “gun-walking” operation to Mexican drug cartels.

Jake made a couple quick associations. The man’s coloring could make him Latino, and the gun was the weapon of choice with Mexican drug gangs. This guy could be from some cartel. What business a drug cartel could have with a prep school in the middle of nowhere Massachusetts was a question for another time.

Jake put his shoulder to the door and gave it a push. No backing out now. A smart man would have left, given up the mission, retreated, and let the pros do the job. But this was not a question of smarts. It was about living and dying. It was about his son. On the mound, Jake had to be dominant, an alpha male fueled by confidence. Commit to the pitch. The door swung open. As it did, Jake, more or less, fell into the second-floor boys’ bathroom.

Jake aimed his gun at the first blur of movement he saw. It was the man. He stood at the sink with the water running. Nice. Jake had wanted him occupied. The man whirled in Jake’s direction; and as he pivoted, the strap of his AR-15 functioned as a slingshot to propel the weapon right into his waiting hands. He wasn’t going to aim. He was going to fire. Spray the walls with bullets. If the AR was converted to fully automatic, it would fire more than nine hundred rounds per minute. He’d hit something, all right-5.56x45 NATO-caliber bullets could shred concrete at this range.

Jake forgot all his Spanish as he squeezed the trigger of his rifle. He exchanged no words, no “Freeze” command or “Drop the weapon” in any language. No demand to put hands in the air. It was either act or die.

Jake had not converted his AK-47 to fully automatic. He had to pull the trigger separately to get off each round. Long ago, he’d learned not to bump fire; that was for the movies. While he could leverage the recoil of his semiautomatic to fire multiple shots in rapid succession, accuracy would suffer.

Jake squeezed the trigger. The bang made that characteristic whip-cracking sound, dampened by his earmuffs. Anything traveling faster than 1,100 feet per second at sea level breaks the sound barrier, and the AK-47 fired its bullets at 2,330 fps.

The first bullet from Jake’s gun struck the man in the neck, and the second entered the skull through the forehead. Pink mist sprayed out the back of his head. A thick gush of arterial blood spurted sideways from the neck wound like a horizontal geyser.

The man got off a shot, all right-one bullet that smacked into the wall to Jake’s right. Poor guy had no brain function to pull the trigger again. Bits of gray matter and bone, mixed with blood, speckled the bathroom floor, which Jake had personally mopped countless times. Somebody else would do this cleanup job.

The man fell backward to the floor. With nothing to brace his fall, the crack when his head hit the floor was profound.

Jake got clear of the door and spun around to engage other threats. Nobody came in. Nobody fired. He backed up a few steps, managing to avoid contact with the dead man, but his feet slipped a little on all the blood. He waited a minute, breathing heavily. Either nobody had heard the shots, or this guy came here alone. Jake relaxed some, and that was when his stomach gave it up. He managed to get to the toilet before all the contents emptied out.

Jake staggered out of the stall and gazed down at the only person he had ever killed. Dead eyes layered with a milky film gazed up at Jake from the floor. The man’s neck was pretty much shredded. Jake couldn’t see the back of his skull, but that was probably for the best. Blood covered a wide swath of the tiled floor, and the smell was enough to make Jake queasy again. His face felt hot. Skin clammy. He had murdered a man who would have killed him, but that didn’t make it an easy thing to do.

Keeping watch over the door, Jake searched for a wallet, lifting the man’s body to check each pocket for an ID. Nothing. What Jake did find was a square sheet of paper in the man’s front right pocket, folded several times over. Jake’s hands trembled as he unfolded the paper, and his eyes went wide when he saw the contents.

It was a map of the school campus. Someone had drawn lines through the Terry Science Center and the library, and Gibson Hall. This man had checked those buildings, Jake believed. And he was here in the Society Building doing the same. He was working counterclockwise, going from building to building. After the Society Building, he’d have to clear the dormitories and dining hall. Smaller buildings were dotted around, too. None of those buildings had any markings on them. Dead guy hadn’t cleared them yet. The campus could become confusing, but the man made sure he would have no trouble getting back to his colleagues. Around the image of the Academy Building, somebody had drawn a big circle. It might as well have been an x to mark the spot.

Jake knew where to look for his son.