20

In my car, I texted Vanessa that I’d found out it was Detective Quinn behind the last week of horror, and then I drove straight to campus to tell Stefan the astonishing story Quinn’s estranged wife had revealed to me.

But could I believe Pat Silver? Hadn’t Stefan told me Casey said both his parents were harsh?

Upstairs, when I exited the elevator on the third floor, I could see Stefan standing in the doorway of Celine’s office, off to the left across that small sea of low-walled cubicle partitions. There were only a few bent heads among the warren of desks, and once again, it struck me as a remarkable and bizarre reversal in my departmental fortunes that I wasn’t among them. But I knew from Shakespeare that Fortune’s Wheel could turn sharply, and hadn’t it done just that only days ago?

Estella was dressed in clinging pink and black Lycra today like an aerobics instructor. She smiled absently as I passed, though whether at me or her smart phone where she was texting, I couldn’t say. Stefan waved, and as I skirted the cubicles and got closer, I could see he was talking to Celine who stood just inside the doorway of her office. I greeted them both. She was wearing a lime green cottony outfit almost like loose pajamas. She looked cool, but she said with an unusual hint of shyness, “A nephew of mine is in the Iowa writing program and a really big fan of memoirs, so he wanted me to get him a signed copy of Stefan’s book.”

Stefan grinned as he always did (and probably always would) at any mention of his only best-selling book. He pulled a copy out of his black leather Ferragamo messenger bag. This was also the only book of his with an author photo plastered across the back cover, a sign of how well the publisher had thought the book would do.

“Are you sure I can’t pay you for it?” Celine asked him.

He nodded.

“Listen,” I said, voice low, since the echo on this newly redesigned floor was unpredictable, “you are not going to believe what I just found out.” I ushered them both into Celine’s office, and shut the heavy oak door behind me. It closed with a thud.

Celine sat down behind her desk, Stefan on the deep, cushioned windowsill, setting his bag on the floor at his feet.

I paced back and forth as I recounted everything Quinn’s wife had told me: their contempt for all of us at SUM, his abuse, her suspecting him of killing Casey, her conviction that he was our tormentor. Stefan was still, back straight, brawny arms folded, but his eyes got wider and wider. When I was done, Celine nodded almost as if she had suspected this revelation.

“Nothing the po-po does surprises me,” she said. I knew that was African American slang for the police, like “5-0.” “I can’t begin to count how many times my eldest son has gotten stopped around here because his Daddy splurged and gave him an Audi A3 for his eighteenth birthday.”

“Driving While Black,” Stefan muttered.

Celine nodded. “And you two, no matter what somebody thinks you did or didn’t do, you’re gay and that puts you way down the totem pole no matter what happens. You can’t tell me that isn’t part of all this shit that’s been going down. It’s not just that you’re professors.”

I’d never heard Celine use even mild profanity before, or slang. I was about to ask her more about her son when I noticed Stefan had turned and was staring out the window.

“There are people running down there,” he said, frowning. “Something must be happening. A car accident?”

We hadn’t heard any crash, so I doubted that.

Celine and I moved to the window, and I realized that the people were running out of Parker Hall and scattering in all directions. But there hadn’t been any fire alarm, so what was going on? Some of them had stopped across the street and were on their smart phones, making calls and gesticulating wildly with their free hands. Others were pointing, taking pictures with their phones. But pictures of what?

That’s when we heard muffled shouting from somewhere in the building and another sound I couldn’t identify. We all stood there, frozen, holding our breath, as if somehow being utterly still could magically protect us. Then I heard that weird clanging echo of the stairs, and from the office below us, there was a terrifically loud, bizarre grinding and shaking that rattled the framed Hitchcock posters on Celine’s walls.

“The copy room is right below us,” Celine said. “I think someone’s trying to move one of the copy machines.” Celine’s forehead creased in puzzlement.

Stefan and I asked “Why?” at the same time.

“To blockade the door.”

“From what?” Stefan asked.

That’s when we heard what I was sure was a gun shot, and a scream. Both of them traveled up through the floor the way dark spirits swoop into and out of people in horror films. I felt just as shaken and hollowed out. I waited for something to fill the emptiness: memories, visions, anything.

“It’s Quinn,” Stefan said dully. “It’s got to be Quinn. He probably followed you to his wife’s house, or maybe she even told him you were there after you left. How do you know she’s not as crazy as he is?”

“This is not possible,” I said. “This is not happening.”

Celine was on her cell. As she dialed 911, she said, “I don’t think we can get out of here. We’re too high up to jump and we could get caught on the stairs or in the elevator.”

I listened to her efficiently and calmly report who and where we were, what we had heard and what we thought was going on. After she finished, she told me and Stefan, “They’re getting other calls about a gunman and that at least one person’s been shot. Campus is being evacuated. They told us to hide and protect ourselves as best we can if we can’t escape.”

I felt as if I had silently shrunk into myself, and all I could picture was the first of the Twin Towers imploding and collapsing, sending up a mountain of dust and ash. We were going to die as surely as everyone who couldn’t get out of those buildings had died. Quinn would find us and he was going to kill us. It was over.

I could suddenly hear my breathing: short and fast. My chest felt tight and there was a strange tension at the back of my throat as if I were about to start choking. Despite what Celine had said, I wanted to try jumping from one of the windows, but then I pictured myself breaking one or both legs and lying there unable to move, helpless, an easier target than I was already.

Celine grabbed my arm and shook me hard. “Nick! Stay focused.” I looked at her as if I were at the bottom of a pool and she was dragging me to the surface. Then I saw that Stefan’s lips were moving and I could just make out that he was praying the “Hail Mary.” And that’s when it hit me: Maybe I was going to die, but I wouldn’t die alone. We were together. And perhaps that could save us somehow, but my thinking had slowed down as if I were drugged.

I nodded at Celine anyway, to show that I wasn’t giving up.

She stalked through the connecting doorway into my office, closed and locked my outer door to the rest of the department, then passed back through the connecting doorway to rejoin me and Stefan, closing that door behind her.

“Your office is closest to the elevator,” she said. “And if he breaks in that way, he’ll probably come through there.” She pointed at the door between our offices. She whirled around and started scrabbling in her desk. “Damn. I never lock that door, I don’t know where the key is.” Then she smacked her forehead, reached into her skirt pocket and pulled out her keychain, found the large brass key, locked the connecting door and sighed as deeply as if she’d just finished a marathon.

She locked her other door, then glanced around the room, clearly trying to figure out what we could move in front of the connecting door to slow Quinn down or even stop him. But he’d find us eventually.

“Help me with that book case!” she said to us, pointing at the four-foot-tall metal book case behind her desk. Stefan and I got on one side and slid it across in front of the door between our offices. Some of the binders and books toppled out of it onto the floor, lying splayed open like corpses in a morgue. Stefan grabbed her desk chair and stacked it on top of the bookcase, then added the only other chair in the room and a small three-legged table that had stood under the window and held a philodendron. It wasn’t much, but the door was also one of the old, heavy, recycled doors from before the building renovation and maybe would gain us some time till the police came.

The Michiganapolis police. They’d ruined my life, ruined Stefan’s life just a week ago, and now we were waiting for them to save us. It was terrifying. One of their own had started this whole nightmare and was in the building determined to kill us and who knew how many other people. It had to be Quinn, who else would be going berserk like this?

All three of us were staring at Celine’s office door out to the department now, and then we circled the room for anything big enough to make a barricade for this one, too. We tried moving the file cabinet standing to its left, but it was too heavy to slide and if we just tipped it over on its side, it wouldn’t do much to keep anyone out. Her old oak desk didn’t budge. Even if we’d pulled out the desk drawers I didn’t think we could maneuver the desk onto one end and ram it against the door.

Celine shook her head. “Okay, stay away from the door, anyway. The bullets penetrate much easier than through a wall, even these old walls.”

“How do you know that?” I asked, making sure I did what she said.

“They train us for emergencies like this. We just have to hold out somehow till the cops get here. But we need weapons. If he gets in, we have to try to disarm or disable him.”

Her assurance calmed me down, but I cursed myself for not having moved faster after that terrible first night to apply for a gun license and buy a gun. If only I had a gun, any kind of gun, we’d truly be able to defend ourselves.

Celine surveyed the office again, and yanked the fire extinguisher from its wall mount behind her desk. It wasn’t much, but it was something. I lifted the Psycho poster from its spot near the door, turned it glass side out and figured that if she and I and Stefan hit Quinn at the same time, maybe we’d have a chance. It was heavier than I’d expected, and could possibly do enough damage to buy us the time we needed.

But just as I was wondering what Stefan could use to try to disarm Quinn, I saw him bending over his messenger bag, and then he pulled out a handgun. I thought I recognized it from one of the brochures I had been reading: it looked like a Walther PPK .380, but different from the ones I’d seen in catalogues, and it had what I guessed was a custom wrap-around grip of some fancy wood. I watched Stefan check to see that it was unloaded, grab ammo from a small cardboard box, take out the magazine, carefully but quickly load it and slide it in, then click off the safety as smoothly as if he’d handled it many times. He was ready.

I no longer recognized this man, and I didn’t know what to say. Celine was silent, too. Time seemed to stop. No, that wasn’t it. We had stopped. We stood at the dead center of a ravenous storm whirling around us.

He met my eyes, unabashed. “Those times this past week I haven’t been around? Father Ryan took me out to a friend’s farm to try out a bunch of different handguns. He knew how scared I was. This was the one that I got off the best shots with.” Stefan was holding the PPK safely, pointing it down to the floor, but the image of him with any kind of gun was surreal. “Nick,” he said, “I’m not going to die without fighting back.” And before I could say anything, he added, “No, I don’t have a license to carry it. I don’t have any kind of license and I don’t give a fuck.”

I didn’t either. “But why didn’t you want me to have a gun?”

He shrugged. “You’re too combustible.”

I would have laughed if we weren’t in so much danger. It didn’t matter that he had berated me when we had talked about gun permits after Vanessa Liberati had urged us to protect ourselves. I was grateful that at least one of us had a real weapon, and adjectives from the Walther website I had once taken a look at drifted through my mind as if I were hallucinating: “classic,” “timeless,” “elegant.” They seemed obscenely frivolous now that we were about to face a maniac, words that were better suited to a fashion show. The PPK was small as semiautomatics went (six inches long, about four inches high), and I’d read somewhere that it was worthless for self-defense. I hoped to God that wasn’t true.

I nodded at Stefan, still speechless, but I think we had lived together long enough for him to know that I was commending him.

Stefan nodded back, grimly, then waved me and Celine with our makeshift weapons to the right side of the massive door. To the left was the gray metal file cabinet like millions of others across the country, one that we had tried to move but couldn’t, not that it would have made much difference since it was much narrower than the door. Stefan crouched down next to it. If the door gave way, it might block Quinn’s view—for a moment.

“How many rounds?” I asked Stefan, unable for some reason to recall the PPK’s capacity.

“Seven.”

Seven chances. But not with a better gun like a Glock or Sig Sauer….

“Can he get through the door?” Celine wondered. And then she answered her own question in a murmur: “All he has to do is shoot out the lock.”

We weren’t hiding inside a bank vault. As heavy and thick as it was, the door was just an office door.

It was very cool in Celine’s office but my forehead and neck were sweaty and the room seemed filled with whatever floral perfume Celine was wearing.

I heard the distinctive ding of the elevator and then someone bellowed “Where are those faggots?”

It was followed by a scream, the boom of a gunshot, then a shout of “Get back here you bitch!” and a second shot. The echoes in that high-ceilinged space were tremendous and the blasts were as loud as anything I’d ever heard in a movie—and far more terrifying. I closed my eyes and almost dropped the framed poster whose sides I was gripping, but Celine hissed at me, “Get ready!”

On the far side of the door, I heard Stefan breathing even harder than I was. And then the far-off ululating sirens of police cars came blasting up around us with the force of a gale, and I was sure I could hear the distinctive rumble of a fire truck. Was I imagining it, or had all those vehicle engines made the building shake a little?

Maybe we’d survive. Maybe they’d storm the building before he could get to us.

Stefan moved quickly to the window, wisely keeping his gun out of sight. “There are five cop cars down there and they’re already setting up barricades to keep people back. The crowd’s enormous. Some of the cops are crouching down behind the cars.”

It had sounded like more than five cars to me, and must have been, because from what seemed like the other side of the building, a distorted voice crackled over a megaphone: “Drop your weapon and come out with your hands up before anyone else gets hurt.”

They didn’t know exactly where he was, I thought.

Stefan stepped back to his spot by the filing cabinet. Celine murmured to me, “Get ready, I think they’re going into hostage mode. It’s on us now.”

“Does he have hostages?”

She shrugged and turned her head back toward the door. We heard more screams out there, partitions crashing, chairs falling over. I was briefly glad that the main directory with all our names and office numbers we had before the renovations hadn’t been replaced, but that wouldn’t buy us much time. There were only six offices with nameplates on this floor, and I knew he had found us when Stefan’s door crashed open. Posters rattled on the wall between Celine’s office and Stefan’s, and everything else in the office we’d locked ourselves into shuddered.

Celine flinched and Stefan ducked down as if he were actually in his office just a few feet away.

Cursing and smashing followed on the other side of the wall. Quinn was probably enraged that the office was empty. There was another crash and I saw a laptop hurtle past our window and down to shatter below. Police outside fired up at the building. We all dropped to the floor and I almost rolled onto the framed poster as we heard shots burying themselves in the soft sandstone walls before someone shouted from outside “Cease fire! Cease fire, you morons!”

Quinn didn’t fire back and we could hear his heavy tread heading toward us, to where we were waiting for the final confrontation. It had to be final. Either he died, or we did.

I felt very stiff, as if I’d been locked inside a cold storage unit. I stood up, grabbing the poster, and planted myself firmly right next to Celine who held the fire extinguisher like an axe. She suddenly changed her position, lowering it to her chest. She pulled out the pin that locked the operating handled, telling me, “I’ll spray him in the face and try to blind him. Then you hit him with Hitchcock.”

I peered out from behind the poster and saw that Stefan had just resumed his crouching position, the gun firmly in both hands, his knees slightly bent, his arms extended.

The door thumped as if a furious beast had rammed into it. The pounding came again. And again.

“He’s kicking the door in,” I whispered, unable to imagine the kind of fury that would make someone do that.

The door shuddered again and again. Then the brass door plate and knob flew off as the battered door burst open in a shower of wood splinters, smashing against the file cabinet where Stefan was waiting but now invisible to me. I was frozen and expected to die in that very instant.

Breathing loudly through his mouth, a colossus in black stepped into the room, filling my vision. The man’s sharp profile told me it was definitely Quinn. He was easily six feet two and well over two hundred pounds of muscle and rage armored in black boots, pants, t-shirt, wool hat. He held a big black gun that looked like a Glock 20. How many rounds did he have left?

Quinn was standing only a few feet from us, but before Celine or I could make any kind of move to try to stop him, we heard a gunshot from off beyond the door. Quinn grunted and stumbled forward one step. As if part of me were an architect studying blueprints, I realized that Stefan must have shot Quinn in the back and the bullet had probably hit one of his ribs, driving him forward from the waist and knocking him off balance. But why wasn’t he wearing a protective vest?

Before Quinn could straighten up and turn, Stefan stepped forward and shot him in the back of the head. The black-clad figure toppled to the floor, knees first. Then his head crashed down and hit the uncarpeted tile flooring with a grotesque cracking sound that made me gag.

The Glock had slipped from Quinn’s hands as he fell, sliding across the floor and under Celine’s desk. I waited for it to go off like a bomb, even though I knew it wouldn’t. My face and hands were wet with sweat or tears, my ears filled with the roar of my own pulse—or was it the two rounds Stefan had fired?

The framed poster started to slide from my hands and I grabbed it tightly before the glass could shatter, leaned it carefully against the wall behind me, wiping my hands on my jeans, afraid now to look at our persecutor, even though he had to be dead. In my mind, the door seemed to be crashing open over and over.

Another shot followed, making me jump.

I looked up to see Stefan standing close to the prone body, his face cold and implacable. Holding the Walther in both hands, he fired into Quinn’s back four more times, emptying his gun. Quinn hadn’t shown any signs of life after his head smashed onto the floor, but I didn’t think of telling Stefan to stop. I was too stunned to say anything, and each spent cartridge flipping out of his gun and clattering on the floor was like the lash of a whip.

Quinn’s body seemed to jerk a bit with the impact of each shot—unless I was imagining it, wishing for it—and I felt a sour taste in my mouth. Blood had seeped onto the floor from Quinn’s nose or mouth. I wasn’t sure which.

My ears were ringing, and the very faint haze left by Stefan’s gun irritated my eyes.

I had never before seen anyone killed right in front of me, and Quinn’s lifeless body looked as massive as the toppled statue of a dictator. The room stank, filled with the acrid tang of gunpowder and what I realized was the metallic reek of my sweat-soaked clothes. I felt trapped inside a new nightmare.

“Sweet Jesus,” Celine murmured.

I heard moaning outside of the office, out amid the cubicles, but I couldn’t move to help anyone at the moment. The supine corpse loomed in front of me like a cliff wall, enormous, forbidding. I didn’t see how I could ever get around it.

Stefan’s lips were moving, but this time he wasn’t praying. Voice breaking, he said, “Father Ryan—He told me—”

“Told you what?” I asked.

As if speaking from a distance, Stefan murmured, “‘Don’t hesitate. Keep shooting.’”

Celine shook herself, set aside the fire extinguisher, headed around Quinn’s corpse to the window, yanked it up and yelled to the cops below, “He’s dead.”

Celine turned to Stefan, who was trembling now, eyes shut. She walked over, touched his shoulder with one hand and his arm with the other, and said quietly, as if comforting an anxious child in a thunderstorm, “You can put the gun down now, honey.”