The big V8 roared to life, and arcing jets of slushy snow blasted from beneath all four wheels. Mercer balanced the heavy pistol into his partially unzipped bomber jacket.
“Do you have a plan?” Jordan asked, finally turning to look at him as the Yukon plowed through part of a snowbank in pursuit of the little Honda.
“Run this guy down and find out why he killed Abe and the others,” Mercer said.
“Are you sure he’s one of them?”
“I never got a good look at them all, but the way he just reacted tells me everything I need to know. He’s one of the shooters.”
The SUV had an automatic transmission, but Mercer worked the column shifter like a NASCAR driver, eking out the engine’s maximum torque and using the motor to assist the brakes through the neighborhood’s tight turns.
The light green Honda juked around a sharp corner a second after Mercer spotted the nimble little four-door. He cursed. It was like chasing a jackrabbit. The Honda Fit was more agile, had better acceleration, and the driver had the advantage of knowing where he was going. Mercer felt like he was guiding a hippopotamus, the Yukon lumbered so. It rolled into the corners like a sailing ship heeling in a gale wind.
The fleeing Honda took yet another sharp right turn, and Mercer suddenly understood what the gunman was after. He had flushed the SUV away from the target house, and now he was doubling back.
Mercer cranked the Yukon’s wheel hard over and slotted the big SUV between a couple of pine trees and the corner of a mid-block house. The Yukon turned the front fence into so much wooden kindling as it blew through. They had no problem with the snow, bulling over drifts like a tank. They passed the house, and a nice glassed-in back atrium where the startled owner had been enjoying the morning paper and a coffee before an SUV barreled through his backyard. The truck tore apart a more substantial back fence and sped across some other poor suburbanite’s lawn. This one abutted a raised ranch with a back deck draped in snow like white bunting. Mercer guided the truck through a high-speed slalom, avoiding copses of trees and an aboveground swimming pool. He didn’t see a large plastic sandbox buried in the snow and tore across it in an unexpected explosion of sand particles as fine as diamond chips.
They careened past the ranch house and raced across the owner’s front lawn. There were no more fences to crash through, but Mercer managed to accidentally clip the trailer hitch of a boat sitting in the driveway. In their wake the trailer’s front jack collapsed, and a nice eighteen-foot bass boat tumbled to the frozen ground and capsized.
In a four-wheel drift that taxed the Yukon’s suspension, Mercer threw the truck back onto Abe Jacobs’s street. He’d managed to cut deeply into the Honda’s lead but not nearly enough. The car was stopped in front of the Tudor house, driver door open, and the man was running from the house back toward the car. He saw the Yukon’s sudden appearance, only a half dozen houses away, and dove back into the idling car.
The driver didn’t wait to see his handiwork. The street was too wet with snow melted by the municipal salt trucks to peel out the tires, but he managed to get the car twitchy as he rocketed up through the gears.
For a breathless second, Mercer glanced at the house, and noticed the front window was broken. Then came a shattering explosion that blew the remains of the living room window across the lawn like a cannon blast from a ship of the line discharging grapeshot. The front door resisted the overpressure for only seconds before it, too, blew off its hinges and flew like a playing card into the street. Mercer stopped the SUV. Flames quickly engulfed the front of the house, licking at the stucco and igniting the decorative oak beams.
The explosive device the Honda driver had thrown through the window must have contained an accelerant. Gasoline would be easy enough, thought Mercer. Abe Jacobs’s quaint Tudor home was about to become a charred pile of cinders and ash. The conflagration grew before their eyes. Smoke and then flame started pouring from the upstairs window above the front room. The house, and whatever clues Abe might have left behind, were moments away from being a total loss.
6
Mercer pulled his cell from his back pocket and slammed down on the accelerator once again. He tossed the phone to Jordan. “Call 911.”
“About the fire?” Jordan asked, her fingers poised.
He knew the consequences would be dire if he was wrong, but he couldn’t take the chance. “No. Tell them they need to lock down Hardt College. There are armed men on campus.”
With so many school shooting tragedies in recent years, it was a threat law enforcement would not take lightly.
She hadn’t yet spoken to a police operator when Mercer drove through the campus gates. There were few students out, thankfully most were in class, but a few people were walking the paths between the stately buildings. The structures were an odd assortment of clapboard and brick, Federal style and classical, built not so much to blend with each other but to showcase architectural taste at the time they were erected. One dorm had the glaze of blued glass and orange-dyed anodized aluminum popular in the late 1960s, while another was simple unadorned brick that had likely gone up during the austere war years.
Mercer saw a sign for the Lauder Science Center with an arrow pointing off around the imposing plantation-style mansion that had once been the entirety of the college. The roads were plowed enough so that Mercer couldn’t tell if the green Honda was already here, but he felt certain it was. The road curved past some neglected gardens and around several more academic and administrative buildings, the largest of which was labeled Nichols Gymnasium — Home of the Brown Boars.
Mercer couldn’t imagine a more uninspired name for a sports team. To add insult to injury the mascot on the sign looked more like a South American tapir than a European boar.
They rounded a hill and continued following the signs for the science building. It had to be one of the school’s newest construction projects. It stood four stories and was sheathed in dark glass with modernist touches including a grand atrium held up with struts like a giant Erector set. Inside they could see a large mobile in the shape of the solar system. Rather than traditional internal stairs, enclosed glass ramps looped along the outside of the building like the handles of an Etruscan vase. Jordan and Mercer watched students inside the ramps bustling along, and it reminded them both of gerbils in those elaborate plastic Habitrail cages.
Without warning, the students near the entry started running in panic. An instant later, Mercer saw beyond the large windows that the green Honda was racing into the building. It slipped right through the main doors and was careening across the tiled atrium, headed for the main ramp up to the second floor. The tube was more than large enough to accommodate it, but students either had to flatten themselves to the curved glass walls or try to race ahead of the car.
Mercer watched it speed up the ramp. Two students, a male and female, were struck and hurled against one of the tube’s large curved windows. The coed left a smear of blood on the glass as she slid to the floor. Two more alert students who had pressed themselves flat to avoid the hurtling car quickly crossed the tunnel to help.
Mercer didn’t yet know the driver’s intention. But now that the other man knew he was being pursued, he would have no choice but to change his original plans. If Mercer had to guess, and he’d been thinking about little else during his long drive, the gunmen were here to steal anything pertaining to what they had already taken back in the mine. If that failed, their next priority would be to destroy any remaining evidence. The car might have been used to haul away material like notebooks or geological samples, but the eight or ten gallons of gasoline in the fuel tank could also ensure a fire of epic proportions.