The voice is coming from the bag. I go to it, tug back the zipper.
Gun. Another Beretta. Loose bullets, more than a hundred. And a walkie-talkie.
“Jack,” the walkie barks.
How the hell does he know my name?
“Can you hear me, Jacqueline?”
I look around, find some napkins on a table, pick up the radio and hit the talk button.
“Who is this?”
“I'm doing this for you, Jacqueline. This is all for you. Do you remember Washington?”
Thoughts rush at me. Seven dead so far. He knows me. The perp has over a hundred bullets left. I don't know this guy. I've never been to Washington, the state or the capitol. He knows me. Someone I arrested before? Who is he?
I press talk. “If it's me you want, come and get me.”
“I can't right now,” the walkie says. “I'm late for class.”
I race for the front doors. When I step onto the sidewalk, I see the perp darting through traffic and running full sprint down the sidewalk.
Heading for Thomas Jefferson Middle School.
I don't hear any sirens. Too soon. Look left and right, and don't see Herb.
I rush back into the restaurant, drop the radio into the perp's bag, grab the handle and run after him.
Three steps into the street I'm clipped by a bike messenger.
He spins me around, and I land on my knees, watching as he skids down the tarmac on his helmet, a spray of loose bullets from the gunman's bag jingling after him like dropped change. A car honks. There's a screech of tires. I manage to make it to my feet, still holding the bag, still holding my gun, too distracted to sense if I'm hurt or not.
The school.
I cross the rest of the street, realize I've somehow lost a shoe, my bare right foot slapping against the cold concrete, pedestrians jumping out of my path.
An alarm up ahead, so piercing I feel it in my teeth. The metal detector at the school entrance. It's followed by two more gunshots.
“Jack!”
Herb, from across the street.
“Cars in the parking lot!” I yell, hoping he'll understand. Guy in a football helmet and ammo belts didn't walk in off the street. Must have driven.
The school rushes up at me. I push through the glass doors, the metal detector screaming, a hall monitor slumped dead in her chair, blood pooling black on the rubber mat.
I drop the bag, pocket the Beretta and a handful of brass, hit talk on the radio.
“Where are you?”
Static. Then, coming through the speaker, children's screams.
Followed by gunshots.
I run, trying to follow the echo, trying to pinpoint the cries for help, passing door after door, rushing up a staircase, hearing more gunshots, seeing the muzzle flashes coming from a classroom, going in low and fast.
“Drop the gun,” he says.
His Beretta is aimed at the head of a seven-year-old girl.
A sob gets caught in my throat, but I refuse to cry because tears will cloud my vision.
I can't watch anyone else die.
I drop my gun.
The perp begins to twitch, his face wet behind the football helmet.
“Do you have children, Jack?”
I'm not able to talk, so I just shake my head.
“Neither do I,” he says. “Isn't...isn't it a shame?”
He pats the girl on the head, crouches down to whisper.
“You did good, sweetheart. I don't need you anymore.”
I scream my soul raw when he pulls the trigger.
The little girl drops away, her pink dress now a shocking red, and I launch myself at him just as he turns his weapon on the children cowering in the corner of the room and opens fire.
One.
Two.
Three.
He manages four shots before I body-tackle him, both hands locking on his gun arm, pushing it up and away from the innocents, my head filled with frightened cries that might be from the children but might also be mine.
I grip his wrist and tug hard, locking his elbow, dropping down and forcing him to release the gun. It clatters to the ground.
His free hand tangles itself in my hair and pulls so hard my vision ignites like a flashbulb. I lose my grip and fall to my knees, and he jerks me in the other direction, white hot pain lacing across my scalp as a patch of hair rips free.
I drive an uppercut between his legs, my knuckles bouncing off a plastic supporter, then I'm being pushed away and he's leaping for the door.
My jacket is twisted up, and I can't find my pocket even though I feel the weight of the gun, and finally my hand slips in and I tug a Beretta free and bury three shots into his legs as he runs into the hallway.
I chance a quick look at the children, see several have been hit, see blood on the wall covering two dozen construction paper jack-o-lantern pictures, then I crawl after the perp with the gun raised.
He's waiting for me in the hall, sitting against the wall, bleeding from both knees. I hear him sobbing.
“You weren't supposed to drop your gun,” he says.
My breath is coming quick, and I blow it out through my mouth. I'm shaking so bad I can't even keep a bead on him. I blink away tears and repeat over and over, “he's-unarmed-don't-shoot-he's-unarmed-don't shoot-he's-unarmed-don't shoot...”
Movement to my left.
Herb, barreling down the hall. He stops and aims.
“You okay?” Herb asks.
I think I nod.
“Hands in the air!” he screams at the perp.
The perp continues to moan. He doesn't raise his hands.
“Put your hands in the air now!”
The sob becomes a howl, and the perp reaches into his trench coat.
Herb and I empty our guns into him. I aim at his face.
My aim his true.
The perp slumps over, streaking the wall with red. Herb rushes up, pats down the corpse.
“He's clean,” Herb says. “No weapons.”
I can hear the sirens now. I manage to lower my gun as the paramedics storm the stairs. Kids flood out of the classroom, teachers hurrying them down the hall, telling them not to look.
Many of them look anyway.
I feel my vision narrow, my shoulders quake. I'm suddenly very cold.
“Are you hurt?” Herb asks, squatting down next to me. I'm covered with the blood of too many people.
I shake my head.
“I found the car,” Herb says. “Registered to a William Phillip Martingale, Buffalo Grove Illinois. He left a suicide note on the windshield. It said, 'Life no longer matters.'”
“Priors?” I ask, my voice someone else's.
“No.”
And something clicks. Some long ago memory from before I was a cop, before I was even an adult.
“I think I know him,” I say.
William Phillip Martingale. Billy Martingale. In my fifth grade class at George Washington Elementary School.
“When we were kids. He asked me to the Valentine's Day dance.” The words feel like stale bread crust stuck in my throat. “I turned him down. I already had a date.”
“Jesus,” Herb says.
But there was more. No one liked Billy. He had a bad front tooth, dark gray. Talked kind of slow. Everyone teased him. Everyone including me.
I crawl past the paramedics, over to the perp, probing the ruin of his face, finding that bad tooth he'd never bothered to get fixed.
The first body is wheeled out of the classroom, the body bag no larger than a pillow.
I begin to cry, and I don't think I'll ever be able to stop.
Suffer
Another Phin story. Phin comes from a long tradition of anti-heroes, and was influenced by Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer, Max Allan Collins' Quarry, and Richard Stark's Parker. But he's mostly a direct descendant of F. Paul Wilson's Repairman Jack, with decidedly less humanity. I wrote this story at the request of the editor for the anthology Chicago Noir. He rejected it. So I sold it to EQMM and wrote another Phin story for him, Epitaph. He rejected that as well, and I sold that to James Patterson for the ITW Thriller anthology. I'm happy how things worked out.