Sam Jaywick heard somebody yelling, and his first thought was that his grandmother was trying to wake him up so that he could go to school. He wanted to pull the covers tighter and put the pillow over his head in the hopes that she'd go away and let him sleep. Then he realized that it wasn't her voice, made raspy and screechy by decades of smoking pot, that he heard. It was some guy shouting, "Get down, get down!"422Please respect copyright.PENANAMypekjd3dQ
That sounded like something Grandma might have said, all right, but it sure as hell wasn't her.
The other thing that made Jaywick realize he wasn't back in his dingy bedroom was that his head hurt like hell. Way worse than a hangover. More like his head was busted somehow.
The left side of his face was pressed against something hard and cold. He forced his eyes open. The lids fluttered some, and even when he was able to hold them open, he couldn't see anything at first except a vague, grayish blur.
After a while---he couldn't tell how long, but the yelling was still going on, for whatever that was worth---his vision cleared some and he could tell what he was looking at, at such a close range.
A floor tile.
Jaywick knew a floor tile when he saw one. He had run a buffer over enough of them, during a stint working as a janitor some years ago, before he'd decided to be a cop. There was something oddly familiar about this one, and after a while he was able to force his thoughts through the pain that was clogging them up and recognize it as one of the tiles from the library floors.
That was enough to bring it all flooding back to him: the guys in groundskeeper's coveralls waving guns around, the fight, the blows to his head.
He hadn't been shot, after all. Just knocked out could. And now he was awake again.
The bastards would be sor….
Nope. He couldn't move, wasn't going to be able to make anyone sorry they'd crossed paths with Sam Jaywick. Not now.422Please respect copyright.PENANANNbF3BQdfR
He closed his eyes. The shouting wasn't far away, but it wasn't over him. He was convinced the phony groundskeepers were the ones doing the yelling. Did they believe him dead or still unconscious at the very least? There was no good reason to let them know otherwise. He could only hope they didn't have somebody watching him who had seen him open his eyes.
When nothing happened---when he didn't get hit again or kicked or anything like that---he knew nobody'd noticed. He tried to keep his breathing steady and under control, too. That wasn't easy to do with his head hurting as badly as it did.
Think like a cop, he told himself. Think like a cop. What did the gunmen want? They weren't here to rob somebody, or they would have done that and gone already. They weren't spree killers, or surely they would have put some bullets in him. If they had been Arabs, his first hunch would have been that they were terrorists----but then he felt ashamed of himself for allowing that thought to cross his mind now. He didn't want to be Islamophobic.
Yelling but not shooting----that likely meant they were taking prisoners and rounding them up. Hostages. So, not a simple robbery, Jaywick told himself, but rather robbery on a large scale. A truly epic scale. Take over a whole college campus. Demand an astronomical amount of ransom. Yep, that made sense.
Jaywick's right arm was stretched out in front of him. That was the way he'd fallen when one of the bastards knocked him out. But his left arm was doubled underneath him, so they couldn't see that hand. He forced himself to try to move his fingers. He had to find out if his nerves and muscles still worked at all, or if he was paralyzed, maybe for the rest of his life.
His teeth clenched as he made the effort but his fingers didn't move.
Sternly, he warned himself not to let his disappointment and anger show on his face. He kept his eyes shut and his expression blank, as it would be if he were still out cold. After a minute, he tried again. Tried so hard he felt a bead of sweat pop out on his forehead, despite the cold floor on which he was lying.
This time the little finger of his left hand twitched.
Now it was a challenge not to show his excitement at what he had just felt. He renewed his efforts and bent the little finger, then the others on the hand. As he flexed them, he felt sensation nibbling its way down his arm and into his hand. After a minute, he was able to tighten the muscles all the way up into his shoulder.
That was more like it. It might take a while, but he was confident that he would be able to get up and fight again. He had to be patient, though, and not try to rush things. If he made his move before he was ready, he might wind up just getting himself killed.
Luckily, from the sound of things and what he had been able to figure out about what was going on, he thought he had some time before all hell broke loose. The gunmen who'd taken over the library---and maybe more of the campus, too, for all he knew---would have to make their demands known and wait for an official response from the authorities.
All those on the outside----Chief Holt, the Brookhedge cops who had been too good to hire him, the state police, probably even the FBI----they'd all be freaking about now. What they didn't know was that they had a secret weapon on the inside, a secret weapon named Sam Jaywick.
He had to smile a little at the thought, but not so much that anybody would notice.
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* * * *
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Holt woke up in the back of an ambulance. Someone said, "All right, let's get him to the hospital."
"Wait just a damn minute!" Holt tried to sit up but found himself unable to. He lifted his head enough to look down and see that he'd been strapped down on a gurney. "Lemme offa this thing!"
One of the EMTs who'd been tending to him earlier was sitting beside him on a bench. He put a hand on Holt's shoulder and said, "Take it easy, Chief. You passed out again, so we need to take you to the hospital and get you checked out thoroughly."
"I'm fine, damn you," Holt insisted. "I just lost some blond and got banged up a little. And, being old, I don't bounce back quite as fast as I used to. But I don't need to go to the hospital. We got ourselves a crisis here on campus!"
"There are people here to deal with it...."
"That's my job!"
"And ours it to make sure you don't die," the EMT said. Holt recognized the calm, reasonable tone the man was using. He had used it himself on irrational suspects, many times in the past.
So he had to let them know that he wasn't irrational. The other EMT was standing at the back of the ambulance, just outside the vehicle's open door. Holt looked back and forth between the two men and said, "Listen, I know you've got a job to do. But you cleaned the wound on my hand and bandaged it, didn't you?"
"Yes," the man beside him said.
"So I'm not in any danger of bleeding to death."
"You've already lost too much blood. You could be in shock."
"Do I sound like I'm in shock?"
"Well----no," the EMT admitted. He looked at the machines mounted above and behind Holt, which were beeping away. Holt realized he was attached to them, and he had an IV in, too, running fluid into him. "And your vitals are relatively stable. But you need stitches, and I'm sure the ER doc will start you on antibiotics, too."
"There's no reason all of that can't be done later, right? I'm in no danger of dropping dead?"
Holt stared intently at the EMT until the man shrugged.
"No more than anybody else your age, I guess," he said with obvious reluctance. "But you really need an MRI and a CAT scan to make sure there aren't any hidden injuries."
"They can do that later, too." With a curt nod, Holt indicated the strap across his chest. "Now, unfasten that."
The two EMTs looked at each other again, as they'd done in the groundskeepers' shed. Then the next one to Holt said, "Hell with it," and reached for the strap's fasteners. "You'll make my life miserable if I don't, won't you, Chief?"
"Count on it," Holt said.
"Assuming, of course, that you live."
"I will. I'm a stubborn old coot."
The strap fell free. Holt sat up. His head spun for a few seconds, causing him to grab hold of the rail on the side of the gurney with one hand, but the feeling quickly passed.
"Don't worry, I ain't gonna pass out again," he told the worried-looking young man beside him.
"It's not my responsibility if you do. You're gonna have to sign some paperwork, though."
"Late," Holt said. He swung his legs off the other side of the gurney and stood up. The machines had started beeping faster, but no alarms were going off. He held out the wrist where the IV was attached. "Unhook me."
Two minutes later, Holt stepped out the back of the ambulance and saw that it was parked in front of the groundskeepers' shed as he expected. The street was alive with flashing lights. In addition to the ambulance, two Brookhedge PD patrol cars were there, along with a fire truck and a state trooper's cruiser. Yellow crime scene tape was strung up all around the shed.
"Hey, Neil!"
Holt looked around. A short, stocky man in the brown and tan uniform of the Brookhedge Police Department trotted toward him. Holt recognized him as Mud Wallace, the chief of the local department.
"I thought they were taking you to the hospital," Wallace said a little breathlessly as he came up. Like Holt, he was in late middle age. Mostly bald, he had a broad, friendly, freckled face that usually looked a little sunburned no matter what the season. Right now that face wore a look of grave concern.
"I'll be okay," Holt said. He waved the bandaged hand in front of him. "It's just a scratch."
"That's not the way I heard it, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't glad to see you. You know this campus better than just about anybody."
"Damn right I do." Holt looked around the street again. "Feds not here yet?"
"They're on their way from Dallas. They've probably flown into Bergstrom by now and are driving out here in SUVs. The governor has requested assistance from Homeland Security, too, but I haven't heard when they'll get here."
"What's the situation on campus?"
Wallace looked extremely weary now.
"Not good. We've had reports of shots fire in six different buildings: the library, the administration building, the student union, and three instructional buildings."
"None of the dorms?"
Wallace shook his head and said, "No, I suppose they figured there wouldn't be enough students in the dorms in the middle of the day. They hit the places where they could corral the greatest number of hostages."
"That's the way it sounds to me, too," Holt said. "Have you blocked off access to those six buildings?"
"Don't tell me my job, Neil," Wallace admonished him tersely. "Perimeters have been established around all of them. That meant spreading my department pretty thin, but we managed, at least so far. That's not all. Your man Gibbs told me you were worried about bombs being planted around the campus by phony groundskeepers."
"Yeah, that's why they killed poor John Handel and all his crew." Holt inclined his head towards the shed as he spoke. "That the only explanation that makes sense."
"Well, when I heard that, I sent officers scattered all over campus to look for places that had been dug up recently." Wallace's face was haggard as he went on. "We found more than a dozen of them. I put guards on all of the locations just in case. Had to use some of your men to do it. I hope you don't mind me taking command that way."
"No, I'm glad you did," Holt said. "Who's in charge right now doesn't really matter, I guess. As soon as the FBI gets here, they'll take over like they always do."
"Yep. Anyway, we don't have any bomb detection equipment, but the Austin PD does, and so do the Texas Rangers. Austin's sending two bomb squad officers. They should be here soon, and so should the Rangers. This whole thing's really about to blow up, Neil." Wallace grimaced. "That was a bad choice of words, wasn't it?"
"There's nothing good to say about something like this. Now, what about the media?"
"I've been holding them back, but it ain't easy. They're like a bunch of rabid vultures."
Holt wasn't sure if vultures could get rabies, but he knew what Wallace meant, and he couldn't disagree.
"Are you in contact with the leader of this bunch?"
"Not yet," Wallace said. "You think he's going to want to talk to us? He already gave his demands in that little speech he made in the library, the one that's all over the Internet."
"He'll be in touch," Holt said. "Guys like him are always full of themselves. He'll want to put on a show. He's playing to the whole world, and he knows it." Holt rubbed his chin and frowned in thought. "That might be as important to him as the money. You never know with these loonies."
Wallace drew in a deep breath and asked, "What do you think the Feds'll do? Will they give him the money and let him go?"
"There are several thousand lives at stake. The students and faculty and staff inside those buildings, and probably a bunch of us out here if bombs start going off. Do you see any way to stop them?"
Wallace's freckles stood out even more than usual because his face was drained of color. He shook his head and said, "Seems to me like the only way is if some of those hostages are able to get the upper hand. But even if they do that, there's still a chance that bastard'll set off the bombs."
"Unless somebody stops him," Holt said.422Please respect copyright.PENANAzJWIqn3689
Now, where would Calhoun Weaver be right now?
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