Ask Me If I Care (SWAT Generation 2.0 4)

Normally I would’ve laughed.

But not today.

***

Calloway

The moment the door closed, I looked around the deserted hallway.

Just as I was about to move, the janitor came out of the gym pushing a trash can.

I hurried to him.

“Terrence,” I called out to the man. “Have you seen Ms. Downy?”

“The hot redhead?” Terrence, the new janitor, asked.

My lips twitched. “That one.”

“I just saw her walking out of the gym with the principal. I was at the top of the bleachers fixing the painting. That graffiti is killing me,” he muttered. “Today I painted over a pair of really realistic tits, and….”

I interrupted him. “Terrence, did you see which way they headed as they walked out of the gym?”

He frowned. “They headed to the field house. I was going to go follow them to ask the Bailey dick a question, but when I got to the door, they’d already made it inside the field house and I wasn’t really interested in walking through the rain to ask about a dick that couldn’t be painted over.”

My stomach churned as I pulled out my phone and called the first person that I could think of that would know what to do.

***

Louis

“House is empty,” I grumbled as I looked around at the overly-clean house that we’d just walked into with our warrant. “Not even a dish in the sink to let us know that he was once here.”

“Doubt he even stays here at all,” Booth muttered. “No one is this clean.”

I agreed.

The house looked like it was staged to sell. There was furniture, but no random sweater on the back of a chair. There were knick-knacks, but a very fine layer of dust showing that those knick-knacks hadn’t been touched or moved in a while.

There were cans in the cabinets, but nothing perishable in the fridge.

It was eerie.

Eerie as fuck.

My phone rang, and I looked at the caller ID.

I answered the phone without thought.

Calloway didn’t call out of the goodness of her heart. Not anymore, at least.

“Yeah?” I said, heart rate picking up speed as I thought about who was calling.

“Louis.”

That should’ve been my first indication that something was wrong.

“Calloway,” I said. “Everything okay? I’m in the middle of serving a warrant.”

“If that warrant has anything to do with Bailey Patman, you’re gonna want to come to the school right the hell now,” she said. “Because Bailey and Ares were just seen walking into the field house by a janitor.”

“Son of a bitch.”Chapter 19Carpe that fucking diem.

-Coffee Cup

Ares

“Go in there and lock the back door,” Bailey ordered. “And don’t think about doing anything stupid like leaving out of it. I can’t afford to be distracted right now. I’ve never done one of these before.”

I looked at him in confusion, and he wiggled a wire and a battery at me.

“It’s a homemade bomb,” he said. “I learned how to make it at the library.”

At the library.

He learned how to make a bomb at the library.

Holy. Shit.

He was making a bomb!

“Not to mention, if you try to run, I’ll make it back inside the school before you can, and I’ll do some damage before anyone can stop me.”

He wasn’t lying.

I saw the truth in his eyes.

I closed mine very briefly, then went to do what he asked of me.

Walking to the door, I twisted the lock and then checked the door handle just to be sure.

Locked.

I was locked in the field house with a fucking serial killer.

And he was making a bomb.

I raised my hand and pressed it against the glass, saddened that I couldn’t see out due to all of the shoe polish that the cheerleaders used to decorate for the football team.

My finger scratched it slightly, knocking the shoe polish off of the glass where my finger brushed it.

My heart started to race, and I did it again, this time on purpose.

Very slowly as not to draw Bailey’s attention, I scratched a few words into the shoe polish, hoping that it was big enough that someone could read it when they came in, but small enough that Bailey wouldn’t be able to see what I’d written.

Then I turned my back on the door and prayed that nobody accidentally walked in and got caught in the crossfire.

***

Hayes

“You’re not going.”

I wasn’t going.

I knew it.

Luke knew it.

Downy knew it.

My fucking father, who was for some reason there as well, knew it.

Everybody knew it.

That didn’t make it any easier to swallow.

“I won’t go in,” I promised.

Unless I was needed.

Then I would go in and fuck the consequences.

“Good,” Foster grumbled and walked over to where Saint was standing. Saint had taken over Downy’s job, which was a good thing in this case. There was no way Downy would be able to negotiate with Bailey right now since his daughter was the one being held hostage.

“I got a sign on the door,” Louis murmured through the microphone that I wore in my right ear. “At first I wasn’t quite sure what it meant, but now that I’ve been staring at it long enough through my scope, I’m seeing that something is scratched out in the chalk covering the door. It says ‘Bomb. Inside.’”