The first blow hit him on the right side of the head, just above his ear. He felt the rounded metal end of the hammer smash the bone of his skull and embed itself within the flesh and shattered fragments. The pain was overwhelming, a searing white-hot agony that so dwarfed anything he had ever experienced there was no basis for comparison. Blood gushed out of his head, over his ear and down his body. Were he able to reason, he might have thought he’d feel nothing after that, so overloaded were his senses, but when the hammer pulled out and Evangeline swung it at his shoulder, crushing the clavicle beneath, pain flashed anew, and his body sagged beneath the weight of the trauma, held up only by the strong hands of First People’s goons.

And the blows kept coming, one to his chest, cracking his sternum, one to his crotch, mashing his testicles. He felt nothing but pain, thought no thoughts except acknowledgment of that pain, and then another strike in the center of his face made even those thoughts disappear.

The last sounds he heard, though he was unable to recognize them as words, were spoken by the loan officer.

“Good job,” the banker told Evangeline. “But you still have to make your payments.”

Seventeen

SEVENTEEN

1

“All units. Active shooter at Montgomery High School.”

They were the last words Brad had ever thought he would hear, ones he’d hoped never to hear. The call came over their radios as he and Hank sat in the diner—

The First People’s Diner

—waiting for their food. He practically knocked over the table getting up, and had his radio out, responding as the two of them sprinted out the door. “Heard! We’re on our way!”

There were already sirens wailing, and theirs joined the chorus as they skidded over the gravel of the small parking lot, bottoming out as they bumped onto the street. His heart was pounding, and his overactive imagination was already visualizing a bloody massacre, but a small secret part of him was relieved that the high school was the target and not his girls’ elementary school.

It was one of those situations where kids must have called or texted their parents the moment the assault started, because in addition to the three deputies who had arrived before them, a growing group of civilians was in the parking lot, on the sidewalk and grass, teary faces pleading with Issac, the lone deputy handling crowd control. Brad and Hank quickly exited the cruiser, and Brad waved at Issac to thank him for keeping people back before rushing over to where Vern and Mitch were arming up and preparing to go in. Both had already strapped on vests.

“What do we know?” Brad demanded.