“Yeah. Then I went Marine option.”
“That was my plan,” Booth said, cupping the barrel of the big. 45 into the palm of his left hand. “Dell? Little shit got on my nerves. He was passive. No balls at all. He was just so fucking weak. Other plebes, you’d run ’em until they finally show a little defiance. But not Dell. I ordered him to wear girls’ panties to his late-night come-arounds, and damned if he didn’t do it. Said he got ’em out of the girls’ locker rooms. Piece a shit faggot plebe. Didn’t belong here.”
“So, tell me: How’d he end up going off that roof? This roof, I guess,” Jim said, gesturing at the window behind him. The moment he moved his hand, the. 45 was pointing straight back across the hall. Booth had the reflexes of a rattlesnake.
“I think he got embarrassed, Hall-Man-Chu. Guy in panties on his knees in your room late at night? You figure it out.”
“Can’t feature you as a gay blade, Mr. Booth. Big strong guy like you. Going Marine option and everything.”
Booth let a triumphant look spread across his face. “You ask Hot Wheels if I’m gay, man. She’ll tell you, and I have the video to prove it. But Dell? Shit. Mouth’s a mouth, man. What the hell did I care?”
“So you’re saying he offed himself? Out of embarrassment?”
“Well, he-”
An imperious and familiar voice from out in the corridor interrupted, demanding to know what the goddamned hell was going on. Jim cringed. The dant had arrived. Booth’s face lost all expression. He got up, came around the desk, pointing the. 45 right at Jim’s chest, and stopped just inside his doorway. Jim half-expected Branner to take him out from across the hall, but then he realized that Branner might be on the roof.
“What is the meaning of this, mister?” Robbins yelled. The big midshipman looked down at him with an expression of such contempt, Jim thought he was going to shoot the commandant right then and there. Robbins was so angry, he was starting the Dant Dance, probably not even realizing he was doing it. His fists were clenched and his face was turning purple.
“You!” Booth shouted at Jim. “Hands on top of your head. Twitch and you’ll have three eyes, understood?”
“Okay, okay,” Jim said hurriedly, clasping his hands on top of his head. “Let’s not get all excited here. Nobody’s going to do anything. Not the captain, not me.” He said that to alert the TAC squad that there was a new complication. He could just see Robbins frozen in place beyond the right side of his door. Booth filled his own doorway. The kid was really big. And pissed off. He leveled the gun, trained it on the commandant, and ordered him to get on his knees. Robbins tried some more bluster, but then Booth thumbed back the hammer and Robbins gulped audibly.
“Get on your fucking knees, dickwad,” Booth spat out.
Robbins, ashen now as he began to appreciate the danger he was in, sank to his knees, his hands held out in front of him as if he didn’t know what to do with them. Jim tried to think of something to say so that the listening cops would know what was going on, but he couldn’t come up with anything there, either.
“Got word you wanted to see me, your highness. So now you can see me, right? Got something to say?”
Robbins swallowed hard, cleared his throat, but nothing came out. Jim could just barely see the commandant’s trembling hands. The captain was clearly terrified now.
“C’mon, Short Round,” Booth taunted. “You’re the big fucking deal in this building. You always have something to say. Spit it out, motherfucker!”
Robbins’s mouth was working, but no words came out. Then Booth fired twice, blasting a pair of those huge slugs on either side of Robbins’s knees. The bullets ricocheted off the floor, one shattering a glass door pane, the other exploding a fluorescent fixture in the ceiling. Booth stepped farther out into the corridor and fired three more rounds at the floor next to the terrified commandant. The rounds went howling down the corridor, smashing windows at the far end. The noise was deafening, and Jim felt his fingers unclasping, but he commanded them not to move, which was a good thing, because now the. 45 was aimed back at him. There was a haze of gun smoke in the hallway. Robbins was prostrate on the floor. Booth was already back inside his doorway.
“Awfully quiet down there, Superman,” Booth said. “Or are you too busy pissing your pants? Goddamn, man, look at that. It’s a fucking lake. You really needed to water your snake, didn’t you? Look at that! Get all those medals and ribbons wet, did you, Dee?”
Robbins, whose eyes were still closed, was making whimpering sounds down on the floor. “C’mon, Booth,” Jim said. “You’ve had your fun. He’s not part of this, is he?”
“He’s probably the biggest part of this there is, Jim. All those ethics and morality sermons he made us sit through? That look like a stand-up guy to you, Hall?”
“Like I said, he’s not part of this, ” Jim said. “This scene right here. This is about you, Mr. Booth. You’re here to pay back Julie Markham, and then you’re going to show us all what you’re made of, right? I mean, shit, it’s not like you’re going anywhere, except maybe out to Leavenworth. You beat up a federal officer so bad, he died. You probably disappeared that Goth freak, Hermione whatever, the one you left behind in the tunnel that night. You personally wrecked the entire underground engineering facilities for this end of the Yard. You’ve cheated your way through school, made a mockery of everything this place stands for. Now you’ve made the dant piss his pants. You surely don’t think they’re gonna let you throw your hat with the rest of your class, do you?”
Jim stopped, because he saw the look spreading across Booth’s face. The kid’s hand was trembling ever so slightly. Jim tried to remember how many rounds that gun carried. Not that many, not like the nines everybody carried today. He also remembered that the thing was impossibly heavy, even for someone of Booth’s heft. Seven rounds, that was it.
“C’mon, Mr. Booth. Send that pissant back down the hall before he craps and makes the place smell really bad.”
Booth grinned at that and nodded. There was a gleam in the kid’s eyes now that hadn’t been there before. Drugs? Meth? Where was the SWAT team? How would he know when they had Julie? Then he realized something: They might manage to get a line on Julie, but they couldn’t move her until Booth opened that window. Based on what he could see of the extended shade, she was hanging by her knees, literally.
“Get out of here, you fucking worm,” Booth said, waving the gun at Robbins. “Slide on back down the passageway, the way you came. Only now you’ll slide better, all wet like that. Move it, asswipe!”
Robbins didn’t hesitate. He started to get up, but Booth aimed the gun right at his head, and the dant subsided with a squeak. He began to inch his way backward, literally leaving a trail on the polished linoleum. When he’d gone fifty feet back, he turned around, still crawling, and went on hands and knees like a frantic turtle until he disappeared around the corner.
Booth backed into his room, checking to see that the shade was still in place on the window. Then he sat down again, facing Jim.
“So you figured this deal out, huh?” he said. “That why you’re here? You wanna watch?”
“I figured this has been coming for some time, Booth. That you knew you’d probably never make it out of here. I mean, after Dell, there’s been too much heat. And all that shit down in the tunnels? But you nearly succeeded, you know.”
“Yeah. They were gonna sweep it, weren’t they? Until that NCIS bitch got in the way.”
“She’s pushy, I’ll say that,” Jim said, trying to keep it going. Then he saw a shadow flick past the tan shade behind Booth. All right. They were on the roof and they were doing something to retrieve Markham. “So why the hell did you even come here? You don’t believe in any of this honor stuff. You hold the whole program in contempt. You came from nothing. What were you thinking?”