Shots were fired rapidly, one right after another. Crawford tried to count them, but lost track in the chaos that erupted inside the courtroom.
Judge Spencer surged to her feet, shouting Chet’s name in alarm.
Joe shoved Grace out of her chair and onto the floor, then ducked down beside her.
The attorneys scurried for cover beneath the tables at which they sat. The court reporter did the same.
Impervious to the scurrying and ear-piercing screams, the shooter, clad in stark white, his facial features distorted by a clear plastic mask, stepped over Chet’s still form as though it weren’t there, and kept coming, shooting, aiming toward the front of the courtroom.
All this registered with Crawford instantly, and he reacted instinctually by vaulting over the railing that separated the witness box from the judge’s podium, forcing her to the floor, then landing on top of her.
Four shots? Five? Six? Crawford had recognized the pistol as a nine-millimeter. Depending on the size of the clip—
Sensing when the shooter rounded the witness box and stepped onto the platform, Crawford whipped his head around. The shooter had a bead on him. Crawford kicked backward. His boot heel caught the guy in the kneecap, hard enough to throw the attacker off balance. His arm went up, and the shot went into the ceiling. Still off balance, he stumbled backward off the platform, then turned and ran for the side exit of the courtroom.
Crawford came up onto one knee and bent over the judge. After confirming that she was alive, he launched himself off the platform like a sprinter off the chocks. He knelt down beside Chet, determined instantly that he was dead and, without allowing himself to think about the waste of a good man, unsnapped the bailiff’s holster and yanked his service revolver from it.
A bailiff from another court barreled in through the rear door, skidding to a halt when he saw Crawford checking to make certain Chet’s revolver was loaded. The bailiff went for his own weapon.
Crawford shouted, “Texas Ranger Hunt! Chet’s down.”
“Oh, Crawford, jeez. What happened?”
Civilians were beginning to crowd in behind the nervous bailiff. “Get those people to take cover. Notify officers downstairs that we have a shooter. He’s masked, dressed in white from head to toe. Tell them not to mistake me for him.”
By now he’d made it to the side exit through which the gunman had disappeared. He opened the door a crack and when nothing happened, banged it open and lunged through, sweeping the pistol from side to side. The long, narrow corridor was empty save for a woman standing in the open doorway of an office, her mouth agape, a hand to her throat.
“Go back into your office.”
“What’s happening? Who was that painter?”
“Which way did he go?”
She pointed toward the door to the fire stairs. When Crawford came even with her, he pushed her inside the office and pulled the door closed. “Lock it,” he said through the door. “Get under your desk and don’t come out. Call 911. Tell them what you saw.”
He jogged down the hall toward the fire stairs.
A man from another office poked his head out into the hallway, saw Crawford, and his eyes went wide with fear. “Please, I—”
“Listen.” Wasting no time on an explanation, Crawford gave him terse instructions about taking cover and staying there until given the all-clear. The man ducked back into his office and slammed the door.
Crawford slowed down as he approached the door to the fire stairs, closing the remainder of the distance with caution. He took a quick peek through the square, wired window in the top third of the door. Seeing nothing through the glass, he cautiously pulled the door open and, with his gun hand extended, made a wide sweep of the stairs above and below him. Nothing happened.
He entered the stairwell, where he paused, waiting for a sound or a motion that would give away which direction the shooter had gone. Then, from behind him—
He spun around as a deputy sheriff stepped through the corridor door. They recognized each other, which was fortunate because their weapons were aimed at each other’s heads. The deputy was about to speak when Crawford placed his index finger against his lips.
The deputy, nodding understanding, motioned that he would go down, Crawford up. Careful, Crawford mouthed.
Keeping close to the wall, Crawford crept up the stairs to the next landing. He opened the door onto a corridor exactly matching the one on the floor below. Aggregate flooring, walls painted government-building beige. Here and there hung a framed portrait of a dour, bygone official. Doors to various offices lined both sides of the hall.
About midway down, two men and a woman were conferring quietly, their aspects fearful. One of the men, seeing that Crawford was armed, raised his hands in surrender.
“I’m a Texas Ranger,” Crawford whispered. “Did you see a person dressed all in white?” Remembering how the first woman had described the shooter, he added, “A painter?”
They shook their heads.
“Lock yourselves in an office. Stay clear of the door and don’t open it to anyone except police.”
Crawford slipped back into the stairwell. He heard footsteps coming up from below and figured the deputy sheriff had picked up a few reinforcements on their climb up from the first floor of the building where the Prentiss County Sheriff’s Office was located. Obviously they hadn’t encountered the shooter going down the stairs. If they had, there would have been considerably more noise, likely gunshots, echoing in the stairwell.
Crawford continued up. When he reached the sixth-floor landing, he stepped to the door and looked both ways through the window into the corridor. Another group of courthouse personnel was huddled together, looking frightened, but not hysterical, which they would have been had the masked gunman just raced past them.
He cracked the door and, staving off their questions about the gunshots they’d heard, identified himself and whispered instructions about taking cover, which they were quick to act on. He eased back into the stairwell and proceeded up to the next landing, which was only half a flight. It ended at the door that opened onto the roof.
In the corner adjacent to the door lay a pair of white coveralls, white cap, a pair of latex gloves, and shoe covers. Probably beneath the heap he’d find the mask, but he didn’t touch anything.
Noticeably missing from the pile of castoff items was the gunman’s pistol.
Leaning over the railing and looking below, he saw the deputy and several other uniformed officers stealthily making their way up. Crawford hitched his head toward the door to the roof. One of the officers backed down to the next landing and spoke quietly into the mike clipped to his epaulette, then gave Crawford and the others a thumbs-up.
Crawford knew that by now the rehearsed emergency response would have been implemented. The courthouse would be surrounded by policemen. Exits would be sealed off, anyone trying to leave or enter would be stopped. A SWAT team would have been deployed. Sharpshooters were no doubt already taking up positions on the roofs of neighboring buildings.
The gunman hadn’t thought this out very well. The only way it could end for him was badly. Unless he could fly, he wasn’t going to leave this building a free man. And as soon as he realized that, he might decide that he might just as well take out a couple more people before his inevitable capture. He’d already killed Chet in front of witnesses. Why not go for broke and make a name for himself as a mass murderer?
Crawford shrugged off his sport jacket and dropped it to the floor, then pushed open the exit door a crack. “Hey, buddy,” he called through it. “Let’s talk.”
He half expected bullets to pepper the metal door, but nothing happened. He opened the door another inch or two. “I’m a Texas Ranger, but I’m not in uniform. I can show you my badge. I’m coming out, okay? I’m unarmed. I just want to talk to you. You cool with that?”
By now the other officers had joined him. One whispered, “Crawford, you sure about this?”
He gave the guy a wry grin to acknowledge the danger he faced, then stuck Chet’s pistol into his waistband at the small of his back, opened the door wide enough to squeeze through, and stepped out onto the gravel roof, arms raised.
It took several seconds for his eyes to adjust to the blazing sunlight, then he immediately saw the guy. He wasn’t even trying to hide. He was standing near the low wall at the edge of the roof. He was Hispanic, late twenties or early thirties, average height, pudgy in the middle.
He didn’t look like anybody to be afraid of except for the pistol that he was aiming at Crawford with a shaky hand. In the other hand he held a smoldering cigarette.
Crawford kept his hands raised. “I’m gonna show you my badge, okay?” He eased his right hand down toward the leather holder clipped to his belt, but when the man dropped his cigarette and ordered, “No!” Crawford put his hand back in the air. “This is a bad idea, pal.”
The man jabbed the pistol forward several times.
“You don’t want to shoot me,” Crawford said. “Put down the weapon, why don’t you? Then nobody else will get hurt, including you.”
In spite of Crawford’s calming tone, the man was becoming increasingly agitated. He rapidly blinked trickles of sweat from his eyes, which darted from side to side. When they came back to Crawford, he motioned again with the pistol for him to back away.
It occurred to Crawford that he might not speak English. “Habla inglés?”
“Sí.” Then more forcibly, “Sí.”
The reply had sounded angrily defensive, leaving Crawford to doubt the man’s command of the language. He took a step forward and made a patting motion toward the ground. “La pistola. Down.”
“No.” He brought his other hand up to cradle the pistol and thrust it at arm’s length toward Crawford.
Shit! “Come on, buddy. There’s no good way out of this if you don’t— No!”
One of the officers must have come out another door accessing the roof because he had suddenly appeared in Crawford’s peripheral vision. The gunman saw him at the same time. He whipped the firearm toward the deputy and pulled the trigger twice. He missed.
But the sharpshooters in place on the neighboring roof didn’t.
The gunman’s body jerked with the impact of each bullet, then crumpled and went entirely still.
Crawford, deflating, backed up to the wall and slid down it until he was crouching on his heels. He watched as officers in various uniforms swarmed through the stairwell door and surrounded the body leaking blood onto the gravel.
Feeling a hand on his shoulder, Crawford looked up into the face of the deputy who’d expressed concern about his going out onto the roof. “You hit?”
He shook his head.
“You got lucky.” He pressed Crawford’s shoulder, then left him to join the other officers grouped around the fallen man.
Crawford’s head dropped forward until his chin touched his chest. “You dumb son of a bitch.”
Anyone overhearing his castigating mutter would have assumed he was addressing the dead man. They would be mistaken.
“Hunt?”
Crawford, who’d been staring sightlessly at the floor, looked toward the homicide detective holding open the interrogation room door and motioning with his head for Crawford to go in.
Crawford had to forcibly exert enough energy to stand up. He dreaded this like hell, but was eager to get it over with.
Inside the room, another man in plainclothes whom Crawford didn’t know was standing with his back to the wall, noisily cracking his knuckles and giving a wad of chewing gum a workout. Crawford wondered what he had to be nervous about.
Sergeant Neal Lester, the senior detective who’d laconically summoned Crawford into the room, motioned him into one of the chairs at the small table and took a seat opposite him. Between them on the table were a legal tablet and a video recording setup.
Neal Lester withdrew a pen from his shirt pocket and clicked the retractor at the end of it several times as he fixed an unfriendly gaze on Crawford. Classmates from primary school, they’d never liked each other, and the mutual dislike had intensified when, in high school, Crawford had dated Neal’s younger sister. The attraction had been short-lived and had never amounted to anything, but apparently Neal still had a burr up his butt about it.
“Want something to drink?” He made the question sound obligatory.
“No thanks.”
“You know Matt Nugent? Recently made detective.” He nodded toward the younger man who was still fidgeting.
Crawford acknowledged the quasi-introduction by hitching his chin in the detective’s direction.
He grinned, showing crooked teeth. “How’s it goin’?” A ridiculous greeting under the circumstances. Crawford didn’t reply and returned his attention to Neal Lester, who had continued the infernal pen-clicking.
“You know the drill,” he said.
Crawford nodded.
“This interview will be recorded.”
Crawford nodded.
“You ready then?”
“When you are, Neal.”
“Let’s keep it official. No first names.”
Crawford barely kept himself from rolling his eyes. One reason he’d never liked Neal Lester was because he was such a tight-ass. Even as a kid, he’d obeyed all the rules and tattled on kids who didn’t.
What galled Crawford now, Neal Lester was eating this up. He was enjoying having Crawford in the hot seat.
However, personal feelings aside, the bottom line was that two men were dead, and Crawford had been within feet of both when they died. As a law enforcement officer, Neal and his nervous sidekick had a duty to perform, and that included questioning him.
He shifted in his chair, trying but failing to better fit his tall frame into the preformed plastic. “Fair enough, Sergeant Lester, where do we begin?”
“Inside the courtroom.” With a decisive punch of his index finger, Neal started the recorder, stated the date, time, and who was present. “Why were you in Family Court today?”
“You know damn well why.”
The detective’s eyes narrowed. “Just answer the question, please.”
Crawford drew a deep breath, then released it as he stated, “I was there for a custody hearing.” Neither detective responded to that, only continued to look at him. He folded his arms across his chest. “My little girl’s custody hearing. Judge Spencer was just about to hand down her decision when the shooter busted in.”
“We have a transcript of the court proceedings up to that point.”
“Then you don’t need me to recount who said what.”
“I’m curious, though,” Neal said. “How do you think Judge Spencer would have ruled?”
Crawford was about to say that what he thought regarding that had no relevance to the matter at hand, but he withheld that, shrugged, and answered. “I was hoping for the best.”
“Fearing the worst?”
Fine, Crawford thought. If Neal was going to be a prick, he could be one back. “Well, I sure as hell didn’t expect the worst, which was seeing Chet Barker gunned down right in front of me.”
The statement had the squelching effect Crawford had intended. To cover the awkward silence that followed, Neal repositioned the camera a quarter inch closer to Crawford. Matt Nugent cleared his throat behind his fist.
“Talk us through it,” Neal said. “Be as detailed as possible.”
Crawford covered his face with his hands and slowly dragged them down until only his fingertips were touching his jaw. Then he dropped his hands and leaned forward, propping his forearms on the edge of the table.
“I was in the witness box. The guy came through the door at the back of the room, shooting. All hell broke loose.”
Nugent asked him to describe the gunman and he did, even though the painter’s garb and mask had been collected as evidence, so they already had a basic description. “The cap covered all but a rim of his hair. He was wearing the gloves and they extended up under his sleeves. That mask was scary as shit. Barely had slits for his eyes. Two small holes for his nostrils. It mashed all his features flat. Total distortion.”
He thought about it for a moment, recapturing his initial impression of the figure coming up the center aisle of the courtroom with such obvious intent. “But even without the disguise I think I would have picked up a bad mojo from this guy. He was focused on what he was doing. Determined.”
Neal nodded. “You said he was shooting when he came through the door.”
“Soon as he cleared it, he fired the first shot.”
“Wild shot? Or did he aim?”
“The pistol was pointed toward the front of the court. He was holding it shoulder high, arm straight out.” He demonstrated. “Pulling the trigger as fast as he could. Bam-bam-bam. Chet…” He paused and made a remorseful sound. “Chet rushed forward and raised his arms like this.” He thrust his hands in front of him at arm’s length, palms out. “He shouted at him. Stop! Something like that. Maybe he just made an exclamation. Then he went down.”
“He died with valor, doing his job,” Neal remarked.
“Yeah,” Crawford sighed. “He’ll be honored for doing so. But I doubt he’d ever drawn his service weapon. Not in the whole of his career. Then to get shot dead by some whack job in a freak show mask. It sucks.”
Chet hadn’t gotten up this morning foreseeing his death. Nor could Crawford have anticipated the wicked curve ball Fate had hurled at him. Pinching the bridge of his nose, he sat back in his chair.
After a moment, Nugent asked if he’d changed his mind about something to drink.
“I’m fine. Carry on.”
Neal clicked his pen and made a notation on the legal tablet. “So…Chet’s down. What happened next?”
Crawford focused his thoughts on the scene in the courtroom. “Chaos. Noise. Screams. Joe moved like lightning, got him and Grace under cover. Everyone was scrambling, panicky.”
“Not you,” Nugent said. “People in the courtroom at the time have told us that you hurdled the railing of the witness box. Do you remember doing that?”
He shook his head. “Not really. I just…reacted. I pushed the judge to the floor and sorta…” He hunched forward, posing to demonstrate how he’d used his body to shield hers. “I heard bullets striking. I didn’t feel anything, but I was so jacked up on adrenalin that, for all I knew, I’d been hit. What with the robe, I couldn’t tell if the judge had been struck or not.
“When he rounded the witness box and stepped up onto the platform,” he continued, “I turned to look at him. He had the pistol pointed straight at us. I remember holding my breath, thinking, ‘This is it.’ I guess my survival instinct kicked in. I let him have it in the knee with my foot.”
He described the gunman’s backward topple off the platform. “Maybe that panicked him. I don’t know. In any case, he ran like hell and disappeared through the side exit.”
Neal nodded as though that jibed with what others had recounted. “Then?”
“I went after him.”
Neal glanced at Nugent, then came back to Crawford and repeated, “You went after him.”
“That’s right.”
“Just like that.”
“I didn’t think about it, if that’s what you mean. I just did it.”
“Like you hurdled the witness box railing.”
He shrugged. “I guess.”
“You acted without thinking or weighing the consequences of your actions.”
“Like you would,” Crawford fired back, “if you were any kind of lawman.”
“Well, we know what kind you are.”
Crawford lunged to his feet, sending his chair over backward. He glared down at Neal, but instantly realized that a show of temper would only confirm what the bastard had implied. He turned and righted the chair, then sat back down. He looked at Nugent, who was swallowing convulsively, as though his chewing gum had slipped down his gullet and gotten stuck.
When he came back around to Neal, Neal said, “You left out a step.”
Realizing what Neal was getting at, he said, “I stopped long enough to take Chet’s revolver.”
“Even jacked up on adrenalin, you had the presence of mind to identify yourself to the first officer into the courtroom.”
“His hand was on his holster. I didn’t want to get shot.”
“You gave him a description of the gunman.”
“A very basic one.”
“You asked for backup. But without waiting for it, you took Chet’s revolver and charged after the shooter. Why?”
“Why?”
“Well, considering your history, you might have exercised more discretion.”
“Discretion could have got people killed.”
“So could indiscretion. Like in Halcon.”