“I’m really sorry to do this to your wife and child. Noelle played beautifully.”

Smith looked puzzled — then he knew. He dropped the vial of coke, and his hand dove under his jacket. Too late.

The man in the blue suit lifted his bag-covered gun, pulled the trigger, and shot Chaz Smith twice between the eyes.

Two

A LONG SECOND bloomed like a white flower in the blue-tiled room.

Smith stared at his killer, his blue eyes wide open, two bullet holes in his forehead weeping blood, a look of disbelief frozen on his face. He was still on his feet, but his heart had stopped.

Chaz Smith was dead and he knew it.

The shooter stared back at Smith, then reached out a hand and pushed him off his feet. The dead man fell into the stall, collapsing onto the seat, his head knocking once against the wall.

It was a perfect setting for the late Chaz Smith. Dead on the toilet, a fitting last pose for this crud.

“You deserved this. You deserved worse, you son of a bitch.”

It had been a good kill, and now he had to get out.

He put the plastic bag containing the shell casings, the GSR, and the gun back into his jacket pocket and closed the stall door.

Then he carried the trash can out of the men’s room and put it down so that it blocked the door from the outside. That would hold people off for a while, make them think that the men’s room was temporarily closed.

The man in the blue suit heard a rush of sound. The auditorium doors had opened for the crowd. He headed back by way of the main hallway, turning left just as people poured into the lobby, chattering and laughing. None of them noticed him, but even if they had, they would never have connected him to the dead man.

There was a fire alarm box on the wall next to a door marked TEACHERS’ LOUNGE.

Using his handkerchief to glove his hand, he opened the door to the box, lifted the hammer, broke the glass, and pulled the lever; the alarm bell shrilled.

Then he walked directly into the thick of the crowd.

Children were already starting to scream and run in circles in the lobby. Parents called out to their kids, took their hands or lifted them into their arms, and moved quickly toward the front doors.

The man went with the crowd, through the glass doors and out onto California Street. He kept going, turned onto a side street, passed Chaz Smith’s Ferrari, and unlocked his scarred SUV parked right behind it.

A moment later, he cruised slowly past the school. All the good people — the kids and their parents — were facing the building, staring up at the roof, watching for smoke and flames.

They didn’t know it, but they were all safer now.

Chaz Smith was only one of his targets. The media had started tracking this shooter’s kills — drug dealers, all of them. One of the papers had given him a nickname and it had stuck.