Nineteen Minutes (4 page)

Patrick didn’t give a damn about the Special Operations Unit. By the time the SWAT team got here, a hundred more shots might be fired; a kid might be killed. He drew his gun. “I’m going in.”

“The hell you are. That’s not protocol.”

“There is no fucking protocol for this,” Patrick snapped. “You can fire me later.”

As he raced up the steps to the school, he was vaguely aware of two other patrol officers bucking the chief’s commands and joining him in the fray. Patrick directed them each down a different hallway, and then he himself pushed through the double doors, past students who were shoving each other in an effort to get outside. Fire alarms blared so loudly that Patrick had to strain to hear the gunshots. He grabbed the coat of a boy streaking past him. “Who is it?” he yelled. “Who’s shooting?”

The kid shook his head, speechless, and wrenched away. Patrick watched him run crazily down the hallway, open the door, burst into a rectangle of sunlight.

Students funneled around him, as if he were a stone in a river. Smoke billowed and burned his eyes. Patrick heard another staccato of gunshots, and had to restrain himself from running toward them blindly. “How many of them?” he cried as a girl ran by.

“I…I don’t know…”

The boy beside her turned around and looked at Patrick, torn between offering knowledge and getting the hell out of there. “It’s a kid…he’s shooting everyone…”

That was enough. Patrick pushed against the tide, a salmon swimming upstream. Homework papers were scattered on the floor; shell casings rolled beneath the heels of his shoes. Ceiling tiles had been shot off, and a fine gray dust coated the broken bodies that lay twisted on the floor. Patrick ignored all of this, going against most of his training-running past doors that might hide a perp, disregarding rooms that should have been searched-instead driving forward with his weapon drawn and his heart beating through every inch of his skin. Later, he would remember other sights that he didn’t have time to register right away: the heating duct covers that had been pried loose so that students could hide in the crawl space; the shoes left behind by kids who literally ran out of them; the eerie prescience of crime-scene outlines on the floor outside the biology classrooms, where students had been tracing their own bodies on butcher paper for an assignment.

He ran through hallways that seemed to circle in on each other. “Where?” he would bite out every time he passed a fleeing student-his only tool of navigation. He’d see sprays of blood, and students crumpled on the ground, and he did not let himself look twice. He pounded up the main stairwell, and just as he reached the top, a door cracked open. Patrick whirled, pointing his gun, as a young female teacher fell to her knees with her hands raised. Behind the white oval of her face were twelve others, featureless and frightened. Patrick could smell urine.

He lowered his gun and beckoned her toward the staircase. “Go,” he commanded, but he did not stay long enough to see if they did.

Turning a corner, Patrick slipped on blood and heard another gunshot, this one loud enough to ring his ears. He swept into the open double doors of the gymnasium and scanned the handful of sprawled bodies, the basketball cart overturned and the globes resting against the far wall-but no shooter. He knew, from the overtime detail he’d taken on Friday nights to monitor high school ball games, that he’d reached the far end of Sterling High. Which meant that the shooter was either hiding somewhere here or had doubled back past him when Patrick hadn’t noticed…and could even now have cornered him in this gym.

Patrick spun around to the entrance again to see if that was the case, and then heard another shot. He ran to a door that led out from the gym, one he hadn’t noticed in his first quick visual sweep of the area. It was a locker room, tiled white on the walls and the floor. He glanced down, saw the fanned spray of blood at his feet, and edged his gun around the corner wall.

Two bodies lay unmoving at one end of the locker room. At the other, closer to Patrick, a slight boy crouched beside a bank of lockers. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, crooked on his thin face. He was shivering hard.

“Are you okay?” Patrick whispered. He did not want to speak out loud and give away his position to the shooter.

The boy only blinked at him.

“Where is he?” Patrick mouthed.

The boy pulled a pistol from beneath his thigh and held it up to his own head.

A new rush of heat surged through Patrick. “Don’t fucking move,” he shouted, drawing a bead on the boy. “Drop the gun or I will shoot you.” Sweat broke out down his back and on his forehead, and he could feel his cupped hands shifting on the butt of the gun as he aimed, determined to lace the kid with bullets if he had to.

Patrick let his forefinger brush gently against the trigger just as the boy opened his fingers wide as a starfish. The pistol fell to the floor, skittering across the tile.

Immediately, he pounced. One of the other officers-whom Patrick hadn’t even noticed following him-retrieved the boy’s weapon. Patrick dropped the kid onto his stomach and cuffed him, pressing his knee hard into the boy’s spine. “Are you alone? Who’s with you?”

“Just me,” the boy ground out.

Patrick’s head was spinning and his pulse was a military tattoo, but he could vaguely hear the other officer calling this information in over the radio: “Sterling, we have one in custody; we don’t have knowledge of anyone else.”

Just as seamlessly as it had started, it was over-at least as much as something like this could be considered over. Patrick didn’t know if there were booby traps or bombs in the school; he didn’t know how many casualties there were; he didn’t know how many wounded Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and Alice Peck Day Hospital could take; he didn’t know how to go about processing a crime scene this massive. The target had been taken out, but at what irreplaceable cost? Patrick’s entire body began to shake, knowing that for so many students and parents and citizens today, he had once again been too late.

He took a few steps and sank down to his knees, mostly because his legs simply gave out from underneath them, and pretended that this was intentional, that he wanted to check out the two bodies at the other end of the room. He was vaguely aware of the shooter being pushed out of the locker room by the other officer, to a waiting cruiser downstairs. He didn’t turn to watch the kid go; instead he focused on the body directly in front of him.

A boy, dressed in a hockey jersey. There was a puddle of blood underneath his side, and a gunshot wound through his forehead. Patrick reached out for a baseball cap that had fallen a few feet away, with the words STERLING HOCKEY embroidered across it. He turned the brim around in his hands, an imperfect circle.

The girl lying next to him was facedown, blood spreading from beneath her temple. She was barefoot, and on her toenails was bright pink polish-just like the stuff Tara had put on Patrick. It made his heart catch. This girl, just like his goddaughter and her brother and a million other kids in this country, had gotten up today and gone to school never imagining she would be in danger. She trusted all the grown-ups and teachers and principals to keep her safe. It was why these schools, post-9/11, had teachers wearing ID all the time and doors locked during the day-the enemy was always supposed to be an outsider, not the kid who was sitting right next to you.

Suddenly, the girl shifted. “Help…me…”

Patrick knelt beside her. “I’m here,” he said, his touch gentle as he assessed her condition. “Everything’s all right.” He turned her enough to see that the blood was coming from a cut on her scalp, not a gunshot wound, as he’d assumed. He ran his hands over her limbs. He kept murmuring to her, words that did not always make sense, but that let her know that she wasn’t alone anymore. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

“Josie…” The girl started to thrash, trying to sit up. Patrick put the bulk of his body strategically between her and the boy’s-she’d be in shock already; he didn’t need her to go over the edge. She touched her hand to her forehead, and when it came away oily with blood, she panicked. “What…happened?”

He should have stayed there and waited for the medics to come get her. He should have radioed for help. But should hardly seemed to apply anymore, and so Patrick lifted Josie into his arms. He carried her out of the locker room where she’d nearly been killed, hurried down the stairs, and pushed through the front door of the school, as if he might be able to save them both.

Seventeen Years Before

T here were fourteen people sitting in front of Lacy, if you counted the fact that each of the seven women attending this prenatal class was pregnant. Some of them had come equipped with notebooks and pens, and had spent the past hour and a half writing down recommended dosages of folic acid, the names of teratogens, and suggested diets for a mother-to-be. Two had turned green in the middle of the discussion of a normal birth and had rushed to the bathroom with morning sickness-which, of course, stretched as long as the whole day, and was like saying summertime when you really meant all four seasons of the year.

She was tired. Only a week back into work after her own maternity leave, it seemed patently unfair that if she wasn’t up all night with her own baby, she had to be awake delivering someone else’s. Her breasts ached, an uncomfortable reminder that she had to go pump again, so that she’d have milk to leave the sitter tomorrow for Peter.

And yet, she loved her job too much to give it up entirely. She’d had the grades to get into medical school, and had considered being an OB/GYN, until she realized that she had a profound inability to sit bedside by a patient and not feel her pain. Doctors put a wall up between themselves and their patients; nurses broke it down. She switched into a program that would certify her as a nurse-midwife, that encouraged her to tap into the emotional health of a mother-to-be instead of just her symptomology. Maybe it made some of the doctors at the hospital consider her a flake, but Lacy truly believed that when you asked a patient How do you feel?, what was wrong wasn’t nearly as important as what was right.

She reached past the plastic model of the growing fetus and lifted a best-selling pregnancy guidebook into the air. “How many of you have seen this book before?”

Seven hands lifted.

“Okay. Do not buy this book. Do not read this book. If it’s already at your house, throw it out. This book will convince you that you are going to bleed out, have seizures, drop dead, or any of a hundred other things that do not happen with normal pregnancies. Believe me, the range of normal is much wider than anything these authors will tell you.”

She glanced in the back, where a woman was holding her side. Cramping? Lacy thought. Ectopic pregnancy?

The woman was dressed in a black suit, her hair pulled back into a neat, low ponytail. Lacy watched her pinch her waist once again, this time pulling off a small beeper attached to her skirt. She got to her feet. “I…um, I’m sorry. I have to go.”

“Can it wait a few minutes?” Lacy asked. “We’re just about to go on a tour of the birthing pavilion.”

The woman handed her the paperwork she’d been asked to fill out during this visit. “I have something more pressing to deal with,” she said, and she hurried off.

“Well,” Lacy said. “Maybe this is a good time for a bathroom break.” As the six remaining women filed out of the room, she glanced down at the forms in her hand. Alexandra Cormier, she read. And she thought: I’m going to have to watch this one.

The last time Alex had defended Loomis Bronchetti, he had broken into three homes and stolen electronics equipment, which he then tried to fence on the streets of Enfield, New Hampshire. Although Loomis was enterprising enough to dream up this scheme, he failed to realize that in a town as small as Enfield, hot stereo equipment might raise a red flag.

Apparently, Loomis had escalated his criminal résumé last night when he and two friends decided to go after a drug dealer who didn’t bring them enough pot. They got high, hog-tied the guy, and threw him in the trunk. Loomis whacked the dealer over the head with a baseball bat, cracking his skull and sending him into convulsions. When he started choking on his own blood, Loomis turned him over so that he could breathe.

“I can’t believe they’re charging me with assault,” Loomis told Alex through the bars of the holding cell. “I saved the guy’s life.”

“Well,” Alex said. “We might have been able to use that-if you hadn’t been the one who inflicted the injury in the first place.”

“You gotta plead me out for less than a year. I don’t want to get sent down to the prison in Concord…”

“You could have been charged with attempted murder, you know.”

Loomis scowled. “I was doing the cops a favor, getting a lowlife like that off the streets.”

The same, Alex knew, could be said for Loomis Bronchetti, if he was convicted and sent to the state prison. But her job was not about judging Loomis. It was about working hard, in spite of her personal opinions about a client. It was about showing one face to Loomis, and knowing she had another one masked away. It was about not letting her feelings interfere with her ability to get Loomis Bronchetti acquitted.

“Let me see what I can do,” she said.

Lacy understood that all infants were different-tiny little creatures with their own quirks and habits and peeves and desires. But somehow, she’d expected that this second foray into motherhood would produce a child like her first-Joey, a golden boy who would make passersby turn their heads, stop her as she pushed the stroller to tell her what a beautiful child she had. Peter was just as beautiful, but he was definitely a more challenging baby. He’d cry, colicky, and have to be soothed by putting his car seat on the vibrating clothes dryer. He’d be nursing, and suddenly arch away from her.

It was two in the morning, and Lacy was trying to get Peter to settle back to sleep. Unlike Joey, who fell into slumber like taking a giant step off a cliff, Peter fought it every step of the way. She patted his back and rubbed small circles between his tiny shoulder blades as he hiccuped and wailed. Frankly, she felt like doing that, too. For the past two hours, she’d watched the same infomercial on Ginsu knives. She had counted the ticking stripes on the elephantine arm of the sofa until they blurred. She was so exhausted that everything ached. “What’s the matter, little man,” she sighed. “What can I do to make you happy?”