Worst Case (Michael Bennett 3)

I noticed that a rail-thin woman in Jackie O shades was already at the opposite corner, standing beside a Range Rover Westminster with a uniformed chauffeur. A diamond-encrusted hand covered her mouth.

“Please,” she said with a Russian accent to the closest officer. “His name is Terrence Osipov. Please, where is he? He’s in the seventh grade.”

“How exclusive is this school again?” Emily said, doing a double-take at the woman’s gems.

“You kidding me?” I said. “Kindergarten at St. Edward’s is thirty K according to the latest New York magazine. Not only is it practically as expensive as Harvard, it’s harder to get into.”

I found a youthful black precinct captain directing cops underneath an apartment house awning on the north side of the street.

“We spoke to the security guard,” the young chief said. “He said the kook came in about half an hour ago to go to the Admissions office. Apparently he’s got a gun, and he’s locked himself inside the gym with the students. There was some kind of pep rally going on. The entire school is in there.”

“First thing we need to do is evacuate the block,” Tim Curtin, the bomb tech, said, arriving behind me. “He sets off that plastic in the right place, the gas lines could go.”

HRT chief Tom Chow looked at the building through binoculars as the thump of a just-arriving NYPD Bell chopper appeared in the slot of sky above the street’s limestone co-ops.

“We need to do this textbook,” he said. “Block off all routes of escape. Take up shooting positions on the surrounding buildings. Approach in a protected vehicle with a barricade phone. Toss it in and start negotiations. We’ll need the building plans.”

“Sounds good,” Emily yelled over the reverberating rotor wash of the helicopter. “Except Mooney’s been flawlessly cold-blooded up to this point. I can’t believe for a second he wants to negotiate a damn thing.”

A female cop came over with an ashen-faced woman in her seventies.

“Cap,” the officer said. “This is the school secretary. She saw the guy who’s holding the kids.”

“He killed Coach Webb,” she blurted between hysterical sobs. “He shot Coach Webb in the face.”

That was it. That sealed it. He’d already started shooting. All-too-familiar gory school-shooting news footage flashed through my mind. No way. No goddamn way.

Without further deliberation, I decided on a course of action.

I started sprinting for the arched entrance of St. Edward’s.

Chapter 83

“MIKE! WAIT! WHAT the hell are you doing?” Emily called behind me.

“I’m going to end this,” I yelled over my shoulder as I cleared my gun. “One way or another. Right now.”

Glock firmly in hand, I burst through the school’s front door in a combat crouch. My overtaxed heart felt like it was about to burst as well when the door rattled shut behind me.

In the glass trophy case beside me were spooky sepia photographs of smiling St. Edward’s students from the turn of the century. I took a deep breath and bit my lip as I peered down the long, even spookier empty corridor in front of me.

“Not so fast, Bennett,” Emily whispered, coming in behind me.

Even better, the eight members of the Hostage Rescue Team were right behind her.

“Stay stacked and watch those corners,” Chow whispered into his tactical mic as they cut ahead. “Off the wall, Jennings bullets tend to ricochet, remember? Guns and eyeballs, people. Make me look bad, and I’ll kick your tail.”

The obsessively trained commandos began making sure the classrooms were empty. Fast crossing thresholds, they kept low so as not to silhouette themselves from inside.

We found the body of Coach Webb in the Admissions office three minutes later. He’d been shot once in the head. A mix of fury and sadness sizzled through me as I stared down at the cross-shaped wound in his skull. Almost like ashes, I thought.

I was looking at Mooney’s twisted version of Ash Wednesday.

We were coming back out into the hall when a loud thundering sound started. The door at the other end of the corridor flew open wide. I swallowed and sucked breath at the same time.

“Hold your fire!” I yelled.

It was the kids. Students in navy blazers, hundreds of them, were running toward us out of the gym, obviously in a panic. Many of them were crying as they rushed down the hall at full speed.