Time Bomb (4 page)

“You bet,” said Ahlward.

Latch nodded. Ahlward returned to the group.

“Thank God for Bud,” said Latch, loud enough for the group to hear. Someone patted Ahlward on the back. The redheaded man appeared unmoved. Standing with the others but not one of them. A distant look had settled on his face—Zen placid, as if he’d projected himself to another place, another time. Not a hint that he’d spent his lunch hour shooting someone to death.

“Okay, my friends,” said Latch, taking a step backward. “It’s been a long day that shows no sign of ending. Dr. Overstreet, if you need anything, bypass the red tape and come straight to me. I mean it. Let’s get things on an even keel, once and for all. Dr. Delaware, sounds like the kids are in good hands, but you, too, feel free to get in touch if there’s anything I can do.”

He reached into his jacket, removed some business cards from a leather holder, and gave them to us. A two-handed grasp of Linda’s hand, then mine, and he was gone.

Linda crumpled the card. Her face had tightened.

I said, “What’s the matter?”

“Suddenly he’s Mr. Helpful,” she said, “but last spring, when the kids were being put through hell, I tried to get his help. Ocean Heights is part of his district, even though I’m sure he didn’t get too many votes here. I thought because of his reputation, all the civil rights stuff he used to be into, he’d come down, talk to the kids, show them someone with power was on their side. If for no other reason than to use it for public relations. I must have called his office half a dozen times. Not even a return call.”

“He came down today. To square off against Massengil.”

“Some kind of ulterior motive, no doubt. They’re all the same.” She blushed. “Listen to me. You must think I’m a foursquare ballbuster.”

“You might very well be,” I said, “but I’d have to study you under more optimal circumstances in order to be able to come to a conclusion vis-à-vis that issue.”

She opened her mouth, then broke into laughter. The cop down the hall pretended not to hear.

The classroom was large and bright and filled with an unaccustomed silence. Only the rain broke the quiet, sloshing against the windows in an insistent car-wash rhythm. Twenty pairs of eyes stared back at me.

I said, “I’m the kind of doctor who doesn’t give shots. I don’t look in kids’ eyes or ears, either.” Pause. “What I do is
talk
with kids and
play
with them. You guys like to play, don’t you?”

A few blinks.

“What kinds of games do you like to play?”

Silence.

“How about ball? Any of you like to play ball?”

Nods.

“Handball?”

An Asian boy with a soup-bowl haircut said, “Base-ball.”

“Baseball,” I said. “What position do you play?”

“Pitch. Soccer and football and basketball too.”

“Jumpin’ rope” said a girl.

“Pizza Party,” said the Asian boy.

“That’s a board game,” explained the teacher. A stylish black woman in her forties, she’d relinquished her desk to me with eagerness, pulled a chair into a corner, and sat, hands folded, like a punished student. “We have that here in class. We have lots of board games, don’t we, class?”

“I like to be mushrooms,” said the Asian boy.

“Peppers,” said another boy, small-boned, with long, wavy hair. “Hot peppers.
Muy caliente!”

Giggles.

I said, “Okay. What other board games do you like to play?”

“Checkers.”

“Chutes and Ladders!”

“Checkers!”

“I already said that!”

“Chinese
checkers!”

“
You
Chinese”

“No way. I’m
Viet
namese!”

“Memory!”

“I like to play too,” I said. “Sometimes for fun and sometimes to help kids when they’re scared or worried.”

Return of silence. The teacher fidgeted.

“Something very scary happened today,” I said. “Right here in school.”

“Someone got killed,” said a dimpled girl with coffee-colored skin.

“Anna, we don’t
know
that,” said the teacher.

“Yes,” insisted the girl. “There was
shooting.
That means
killing
.”

I said, “You’ve heard shooting before.”

She nodded with vehemence.
“Uh-
huh
.
On my
street.
The gangbangers drive by and shoot into the houses. That means killing.
My
papa said so. One time we had a bullet hole in our garage. Like this.” She measured a space between thumb and forefinger.

“My street too,” said a crew-cut boy with an elfin face and bat ears. “A dude got killed. Dead. Boom boom boom. Inna face.”

The teacher looked ill.

A few of the boys began to pantomime shooting using their fingers for guns and half-rising out of their seats.

“Sounds scary,” I said.

A boy laughed and shot at a girl. She said, “
Stop
it! You’re
stupid
!”

The boy swore at her in Spanish.

“Ramon!”
said the teacher. “Now you just settle down. Let’s all of us settle down, class.” Her glance at me said
Where’d you get your degree?

I said, “It’s fun to play shooting, because it makes us feel strong. In charge—the boss over our lives. But when it really happens, when someone’s really shooting at us, it isn’t too funny, is it?”

Headshakes. The boys who’d laughed hardest suddenly looked the most frightened.

I said, “What do you guys understand about what happened today?”

“Some dude was shootin’ at us,” said the Asian boy.

“Tranh,” said the teacher. “We don’t know that.”

“Yeah, he was shootin’ at us, Miz Williams!”

“Yes, Tranh. He
was
shooting,” she said. “But we don’t know who he was shooting
at.
He could have been shooting into the air.” A look to me for confirmation.

“He was shooting at
us
,” insisted Tranh.

I said, “Do any of you know what happened to him?”

“He got shot?” said the girl named Anna.

“That’s right. He got shot and
he’s
dead. So he can’t hurt you. Can’t do
anything
to you.”

Silence as they appraised that.

The boy named Ramon said, “What about his friends, man?”

“What friends?”

“Like if he’s a homeboy and the other homeboys are gonna come back and shoot us again?”

“No reason to think he’s a homeboy,” I said.

“But what if he’s a stoner, man?” said Ramon. “Or a
cholo
.”

“Who is he?” asked another girl, chubby, with black Shirley Temple ringlets and a quiver in her voice.

Twenty faces, waiting.

I said, “I don’t know yet. No one does. But he’s gone. Forever. You’re safe from him.”

“We should kill him
again
!” said Ramon.

“Yeah!
Kill
him! Shoot him with a twenty-two!”

“With a Uzi!”

“Push his face inna pizza so he don’t breathe no more!”

“Push his face in
ca-ca
!”

The teacher started to say something. I stilled her with a glance. “How else could you hurt him?”

“Kill him!”

“Cut him up and feed him to Pancho—that’s my dog!”

“Shoot him, boom, inna balls!”

“Ay, los cojones!”

Laughter.

“Boom!”

“Cut him up and grind him up and feed him to
my
dog!”

“You don’t got no dog, Martha!”

“Do so! Got a real mean pit bull and he’ll eat
you
!”

I said, “Shoot him, stab him, push his face down. Sounds like you guys are really mad.”

“Yeah, man,” said Ramon. “What you think, man? He try to kill us, we gonna kill him back!”

“We can’t kill him,” said the chubby girl.

“Why’s that?” I said.

“Because he’s big. We’re just kids. We got no guns.”

“That’s dumb,” said Tranh. “We can’t kill him ’cause he’s already dead!”

“Kill him
again
!” shouted someone.

“Find out where he lives,” said Ramon, “and kill his fuckin’
house
!”

The teacher said, “Language!”

The chubby girl didn’t look reassured. I said, “What’s the matter?”

“Actually,” she said, “we can’t do nothing. We’re kids. If people wanna be mean to us all the time, they can.”

“Honey, no one wants to be mean to you,” said the teacher.

The chubby girl looked at her.

“Everyone likes you, Cecelia,” said the teacher. “Every-one likes all of you.”

The chubby girl shook her head and began to cry.

By the time I finished, the rain had abated. I made a stop at Linda Overstreet’s office, but it was locked and no one answered my knock. As I left the building I saw Milo in the yard, near the cordoned storage shed. He was talking to a slim, dark-haired man in a well-cut blue suit. He noticed me and waved me over.

“Alex, this is Lieutenant Frisk, Anti-Terrorist Division. Lieutenant, Dr. Alex Delaware, the clinical psychologist who’ll be working with the kids.”

Frisk checked me over and said, “How’s it going, Doctor?” in a tone that let me know he didn’t much care.

“Fine.”

“Good to hear it.” He flashed a barrel cuff and consulted his Rolex. He was young and tan, the dark hair permed in a neat cap, and wore a mustache that had taken a long time to trim. The blue suit was expensive, the shirt Turnbull & Asser or a knockoff. The tie that bisected it was heavy silk patterned with dancing blue parallelograms on a background of deep burgundy. His eyes matched the parallelograms; they never stopped moving.

He turned to Milo and said, “I’ll let you know. After-noon, Doctor.” He walked away.

“Spiffy dresser,” I said. “Looks like a TV cop.”

“Young man on the way up,” said Milo. “Masters in public administration from S.C., good connections, D-Three by the age of thirty, promoted to loot three years later.”

“Is he taking over the case?”

“You just heard—he’ll let me know.”

We walked across the schoolyard.

“So,” he said, “how’d it really go?”

“Not bad, really. I managed to meet briefly with all the classes. Most of the kids seem to be reacting normally.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning lots of anxiety, some anger. It’s the anger I tried to harness—get them to feel more in control. I told the teachers to contact the parents and prepare them for possible appetite loss, sloop problems, psychosomatic stuff, clinginess, some school phobia. Some of the kids may need individual treatment, but a group approach should work for most of them. The important thing was getting to them quickly—you done good.”

He said, “What’d you think of Ms. Principal?”

“Feisty lady.”

“Texas lady,” he said. “Cop’s kid—daddy was a Ranger, brought his work home. She knows this scene by heart.”

“She didn’t mention any of that to me.”

“Why should she? With you she probably talked
feelings.”

I
said
, “Her
main feeling right now is anger. Plenty of it simmering beneath the surface. It’s been building since she got here—she’s been dealing with lots of crap and getting very little support. She tell you about the vandalism?”

He frowned. “Yeah. First I’d heard of it. The School Board reported it directly to downtown—it never went any further.”

“Bad P.R.?” I said.

“Perish the thought.”

“Sounds like the school’s been embroiled in politics since they brought the kids in. Think the sniping was political?”

“At this point, who knows?”

“Latch or Massengil have any theories? About being targets themselves?”

“I wouldn’t know,” he said. “Kenny Frisk and the ATD boys did all the interrogation. Hush-hush behind closed doors. Afterwards Kenny comes out and informs the rest of us peons that official policy is tight lips. All press re-leases to emanate from ATD.
Informational infractions
will be severely dealt with.”

I searched his face for signs of anger. All I saw was a big, white mask.

A few steps later he said, “Though with politicos, good luck keeping their lips from flapping.”

“So far Latch seems to be complying,” I said. “I ran into him in the hall as he was leaving. Tried to get some information from him and received zip.”

He turned his head and looked at me. “What kind of information?”

“Some sort of basic description of the sniper. Who he was. Anything tangible. The kids need to form an image of their enemy.” I repeated the rationale I’d given Linda and Gordon Latch. “They’re already asking questions, Milo. It would increase my effectiveness to be able to answer some of them.”

He said, “Just basics, huh? Who he
was
.”

I nodded. “Of course, any details you can tell me would be useful. Short of an ‘informational infraction.’”

He didn’t smile. “Details. Well, first thing I can tell you is that you’re operating on a false premise.”

“What’s that?”

“It wasn’t a
he
. It was a
she
.”

4

The restaurant was dim and mock-English: collections of tankards and heraldic shields displayed on rough-textured dun walls, dartboards in “Ye Olde Pub Room,” lots of distressed crossbeams, the tallowy, sweet smell of seared meat. A catacomb jumble of small dining rooms. A re-spectful maitre d’ had seen to it that ours was empty.

Milo looked up from his T-bone, put down his knife, and took something out of his coat pocket that he slid across the table.

A piece of white paper, folded double. In the center was a photocopy of a driver’s license.

The photo was dark and blurred. A young female face, oval, unsmiling. A little weak-chinned. Thin neck. White blouse. Dark straight hair, cropped short. Straight-edge bangs hovering above arched eyebrows.

I searched the features for something—some harbinger of violence. The eyes looked a little dull. Sullen. Heavy-lidded, shallow as rain puddles. But that could have been the poor quality of the copy or weariness at waiting in line at the DMV. Other than that, nothing. Average. A face you’d never notice.