On the other hand, he was sure that the shooter had heard the phony call to the sheriff’s office, and didn’t everybody carry a cell phone at all times? The sheriff’s cars should be arriving any minute.…
He listened, and listened, and imagined things, and finally, with his heart in his mouth, eased down the last few steps to the door and peeked around the doorjamb. The outer door stood open. He listened for another minute, his patience reinforced by the fact that his life depended on it.
Then moving slowly, he again peeked at the outer door. As far as he could tell, the hallway was empty.
He was wearing boots. He stepped back, listening, sat down, his gun right by his hand, and pulled the boots off. On his feet again, he peeked: nobody. He took a chance and ran, nearly soundless in his stocking feet, boots in one hand, gun in the other, around to the front of the building and down the same stairs he’d come up. At the bottom he listened again, heard nothing — but the shooter could be planning an ambush — and took the chance and dashed to the side door where he’d come in.
He forgot about the glass on the floor until the last second. He hadn’t been shot at, so he skidded to a stop, walked carefully around it, looked out at the parking lot. His was the only truck.
One final break: he ran across the lot to the truck, a distance of perhaps twenty yards, then dropped to the ground next to a tire, aiming his pistol at the side door. Nothing.
He gave it a full thirty seconds, then popped the door on his truck, climbed inside.
Jenkins answered on the first ring: “We can be there in ten minutes.”
“Forget it, man, there’s been a shoot-out at the school, I’m bleeding like a water hose, I need you guys down here now.”
Jenkins’s voice went calm and cold, as it tended to when he was tense and angry: “That’s on the main drag, right? Two minutes. We’re in town, you’ll hear us coming.”
And he did. Virgil had a good first aid kit in the back of the truck, got it open, pulled out the thickest bandage he had, pressed it to the wound, not too hard, because with the splinter in his scalp, the harder he pressed, the more it hurt.
Then he called the sheriff. The duty officer answered. Virgil filled him in, and the duty officer said he’d call the sheriff himself and send the patrol car around as fast as it could get there.
Jenkins and Shrake arrived in the next moment, in a dazzling display of LED emergency lights from the front of the Crown Vic, and they both hopped out as the car rolled to a stop and jogged over to the truck.
Shrake took one look and snapped at Jenkins, “Roll an ambulance.”
Virgiclass="underline" “Nah, nah, nah. It’s all blood, I got a cut in my scalp. I’m afraid there’s a dead man inside, but maybe he’s not dead. We need to get inside—”
“You need to get to the hospital,” Shrake said, adding to Jenkins, “Fuck him. Roll an ambulance.” And to Virgil, “Sit right there or I’ll coldcock you, I swear to God. Then you will need the bus.”
The sheriff’s patrol car rolled in a few seconds later, as Jenkins was shouting on his phone at the EMS service. A deputy got out, and Virgil, still holding the now-blood-soaked pad to his head, and with blood running down his face, pushed his way past Shrake, and when Jenkins got off the phone, told the two agents and the deputy what had happened.
“The big thing is this: it was our killer, he’s firing bursts of three, I’m afraid he might have done something to the janitor who was helping me, so we’ve got to go through the school and look at every possible hiding spot. I don’t think the shooter is in there, but I’m sure, one way or another, that Bacon is. I just hope he’s locked up.…”
He told them about the attic room, but added that there was nobody up there. “Stay out of there. There’s blood there that’s not mine — it’s the killer’s. I don’t think I hit him bad, because there’s not much, but there’s enough to get DNA. Wait till I get back to identify it.”
They said they would, and they’d start pulling the school apart. The deputy said he’d roust the rest of the force and have them all there in twenty minutes or so, and that the sheriff was on the way.
“We need to find Randall Kerns — it’s ninety percent that he’s the killer,” Virgil said. “That he’s the shooter. But you gotta be careful.…”
Virgil was still talking when an EMT pushed him to the ambulance, and they started down the main drag.
There was only one doc on duty at the clinic, and he was trying to remove a fishbone from the throat of a young girl. He stopped doing that for a moment to look at Virgil’s wound, and said, “It’s either not bad at all, or it’s terrible, but either way, it won’t make any difference if I take the bone out of this kid’s throat first.”
Virgil said, “Yeah, go ahead,” and the doc spent two minutes extracting the bone. The girl’s worried father walked back and forth in front of the bay where the work was going on, and every time he passed Virgil, he said, “I’m sorry about this, I’m sorry about this.”
When the bone was out, the doc gave it to the kid as a trophy, and a nurse took them away to get the insurance information, and the doc put Virgil in another bay, said, “Shoot, I thought I might get to do some brain surgery. I guess not.”
“I love medical humor,” Virgil said.
The doc got a needle and some anesthetic, killed the nerves around the wound, made a couple minor skin snips with a pair of surgical scissors, and picked the splinter out, all the time questioning Virgil about the shoot-out. When the wound was clean, the doc killed three bleeders with a cautery, which smelled like wet burning chicken feathers, and sewed him up. “Fourteen stitches, and very skillfully done for a small-town hospital,” he said. “Who’s gonna pay?”
Virgil called Shrake for a ride back to the school, and was told Bacon hadn’t shown up, either dead or alive, but the school was a nightmare of nooks and crannies. “This could take all night.”
“Then we take all night,” Virgil said.
“Uh, by the way, somebody might have mentioned this to Frankie.”
“Goddamnit, Shrake—”
“Hey, it wasn’t me who called her, but if Jenkins hadn’t, I would have — a guy gets shot, the old lady gets to know about it. I told her it didn’t look too bad, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she showed up—”
“Goddamnit, Shrake—”
“He told her you’d been hit in the head. She said, ‘Thank God, if it’d been in his dick, it would have killed both of us.’”
Virgiclass="underline" “She did not.”
“No, but it’s a good story and I plan to tell people she did,” Shrake said. “I’ll see you in five minutes, if I actually know where the clinic is. I think I do.”
“Yeah, it has a big brightly lit sign on the front, and it says ‘Clinic.’ You can’t miss it.”
18
The criminal conspiracy — the school board — called an emergency rump session at Jennifer 1’s house, attended by Randy Kerns, the three Jennifers, Vike Laughton, and Henry Hetfield, the school superintendent.
They immediately fell into a screaming brawl.
Kerns started it: “… so I know that fucking Bacon was up to something. He came into the meeting, which he never does, and he did something with his hand, which I didn’t know what it was, but I thought he might have took a picture or a remote control or something, I couldn’t tell what. Anyway, I hung around afterward, when everybody was gone, and he brings this ladder over and he climbs up into the lights and takes down a movie camera — I think he filmed the whole thing, the whole meeting after the meeting.”