“Five minutes,” Virgil said.
It took him ten. When he got to the school parking lot, he went to the side door and found it locked. Thinking that he might have misunderstood, he walked around the school to the back entrance by the baseball field and found that was locked as well.
There were no visible lights in the school. Now worried, he called the phone Bacon had used, and after four rings was switched to the answering machine. He hung up, then banged on the door with a fist, then seeing no light and getting no answer, began kicking the door.
Still no answer.
Now very worried, he thought about calling the sheriff’s office, but if Bacon were really in trouble, there’d be no time — and not knowing what officer would respond, or his level of competence… he didn’t want to go into a dark school with a scared guy with a weapon.
He jogged back around to his truck, unlocked it, got his pistol and a heavy, fourteen-inch-long nut wrench that he used to tighten the trailer ball on the truck. He hustled back to the door, pounded a few more times. There was a small window in the door, maybe six-by-eight inches, with chicken wire embedded in the glass.
Between the window and the wrench, it was no contest. Having carefully knocked out all the glass, Virgil reached inside and pushed down on the door’s lock bar, and it popped open. Just inside, he found a rolled-up newspaper, like an old-time newspaper delivery boy might have done it. It was pinched in the middle, as though it had been used to jam the door open, and then had been pulled out. He dropped the wrench by the newspaper — clang — and hurried down the hall to the back entrance to the little auditorium, but he had to go through the gym to get there, and the gym door was locked. No window here: the doors were solid, thick yellow oak.
He turned back, trying to figure out where the main entrance to the auditorium might be, following the light from his flash. He took another two minutes to find it, and again, the doors were closed, but there were windows. He no longer had the wrench, but the butt of the small flashlight worked nearly as well, and he knocked the window out, went through the door.
There was a light switch right at the door, and he flicked it on. The ladder was standing in the middle of the auditorium, up to the spot where the camera had been.
Bacon was nowhere around — and the camera was gone. Virgil could see a few bands of tape hanging down, as though Bacon had cut the camera free, but hadn’t bothered to peel the gaffer’s tape off the light rack.
That didn’t seem like him.
He went back to the hall and shouted, “Bacon! Will Bacon! Where are you?”
No answer.
After a fast run through the auditorium, just to be sure Bacon hadn’t fallen, and crawled someplace, he went back to the main hall looking for stairs that would take him up to the third floor.
He jogged past the scorched front hall outside the district offices, and just past the offices, found a flight of stairs going up. At the third floor, not knowing quite where to find the janitor’s room that would lead him to the attic, he dashed along the halls in the light of the flash, turned a corner, then another one, felt like he might have missed it, and found it on the third side of the square.
The door was metal, and was locked, but the lock was fitted into an oak frame. He’d never done anything like it before, but Virgil pulled his pistol and fired three careful shots into the wood next to the lock. The sound was thunderous down the hard empty hallways: the third shot did it, breaking enough of the wood frame that Virgil was able to pry the door open.
He found the lights, went up the stairs into the attic. There was a lock on Bacon’s apartment door, but Virgil simply kicked it. Nobody home.
He was about to head back out when he felt the vibration: somebody was in the attic.
“Bacon?”
No answer. But somebody, he thought, was out there, and he was trapped. He moved to the far back wall, not because it was any more protective than any of the other thin walls of the makeshift apartment, but because he’d remembered that at the end of the wall there was a stack of boxes full of algebra texts. Boxes of books would be tough to shoot through, even with a rifle.
“Bacon? Bacon, is that you?”
No answer, but he did hear a shuffling from out in the attic. Rats? Sounded too heavy. He touched his jeans pocket, where he usually carried his cell phone, and got the instant mental feedback of the phone plugged into the charger in the truck.
He squatted, hoping that he was behind the algebra texts, and said, quietly but loud enough to be heard in the silent attic, “This is Virgil Flowers. I’m at the high school, and there’s somebody here with a gun. I need a couple cars in a big hurry.”
He had no chance to elaborate, because a burst of three gunshots broke the silence from the attic, the cracking explosion of a .223, unlike the boom of a shotgun, or the deeper report of a .30–06. Splinters smashed across the room. The shooter had made one mistake — he was shooting at what he could see, rather than where Virgil might be. Then another three cracks, and more splinters like shrapnel, and Virgil, scared to death, had the feeling that the shooter might be about to rush the room. If he did, he’d probably come in low.…
Virgil was a good shot with a rifle, an excellent shot with a 12-gauge, but couldn’t hit a barn with a pistol, even if he was inside it. He didn’t like pistols, and thought of them as generally useless. If you’re going to shoot somebody, he thought, take the proper equipment. Like a 12-gauge. And he had one… out in the truck.
Another three rounds from the .223, sending splinters of dry wood whipping across the room. Virgil did a quick calculation: if the shooter had a standard military magazine, that would mean… only twenty-one more rounds? Great.
With the last sequence of three shots, Virgil could see that the shots were coming through at an angle, hitting the far wall of the room closer to him than the shots coming through the inner wall. He decided that the shooter was near the door, but probably still a few feet back from it, getting his guts up for a rush. He got to his knees and fired three quick shots at the wall four feet from the door, at an angle, and was rewarded with a “Goddamnit…” and then the other twenty-one rounds, hosing down the room. Virgil was flat on the floor, as close as he could get to the wall with the protective book boxes on the far side, his hands stretched toward the door, his gun ready for anyone coming through.
Then he heard a magazine clatter to the floor of the attic, and the metallic ratcheting of another magazine going in, nine or twelve more rounds flaying the room, in fast bursts of three, and a vicious burning pain in his scalp. He looked sideways, figuring the angle of the incoming rounds, and fired three more shots at the wall.
The other man ran away — Virgil was certain it was the killer, because of the three-bursts, and was equally convinced it was Randall Kerns. Virgil heard him pounding down the attic, then heard him on the stairs. He waited for just a second, realized that his scalp was on fire, put his hand to his head and came away with blood. He felt again, and found the splinter under the skin, and let it alone.
He’d need a doc to pull it out and make the necessary repairs, he thought. He didn’t seem to have any bigger holes, but scalp wounds bleed like crazy. He got to his knees, then into a crouch, and moved to the door, then slowly, carefully followed his pistol to the stairs… and saw blood that wasn’t his.
A smear, then several drops farther down. He feared that Kerns might be on the other side of the door, waiting for him to come down. Framed in the narrow doorway, Virgil would be almost impossible to miss.