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His submachine gun clicked empty. Fallon was twisting to retrieve the sidearm of a dead terrorist when a bearded rail of a man came at him, showcasing a detonator as he blithered away in Arabic.
“Maashallah! Maashallah!”
Fallon palmed Trent’s butterfly knife, locked the blade into place.
“Maashallah! Maashallah!” The man’s wild hair a soaked tangle that swept over his face, seeming to merge it with his beard.
“Maashallah!”
Fallon snapped his hand outward, sending the knife whizzing through the air. It took the final terrorist in the eye, buried to the hilt in his brain. He fell to the floor. The detonator rattled across the floor.
Fourteen down, Fallon thought, realizing his initial estimate had been off as he looked up and let the cascading water wash over his face. And not a single bystander with them.
Fallon emerged from the boys’ locker room, wearing the uniform and visor of a SWAT officer who’d gone in there to secure the site. Confusion was his ally now, confusion and chaos as the police stormed the building to find bodies everywhere and had to sort through the tales of the mysterious teacher who had killed them. They’d never believe it at first and before they did, Fallon would be gone.
In the foyer beyond the gym, he passed his eighth-grade honors Language Arts class being questioned by an expanding bevy of officers. Fallon kept his head turned low and to the side, cocking his gaze back just once when he was almost to the door, to meet Trent’s.
“So if he wasn’t Beechum, any of you have an idea who he was?” an official in plain clothes was asking his students.
“Rainsford,” Trent said as his eyes locked and held with Fallon’s through the SWAT visor. “His name was Rainsford.”
RIDLEY PEARSON
Not only is bestselling author Ridley Pearson a master of forensic detail but he also plays in a rock band with other bestselling writers like Amy Tan, Mitch Albom and Stephen King. “We play music as well as Metallica writes novels,” he said, so it’s good news that Ridley agreed to contribute a story to this collection rather than an original song.
“Boldt’s Broken Angel” opens with one of the most haunting and powerful scenes you’ll ever read. The reader follows detective Lou Boldt on the trail of a serial killer who is as twisted as Ridley’s brilliant plot. Fight the urge to skip ahead, because you won’t want to miss a single word. This is a model thriller by a modern master, the perfect story to complete the collection.
BOLDT’S BROKEN ANGEL
Erastus Malster-they called him Rastus-hooked both feet beneath the large gray cleat on the bow of the fishing trawler Sea Spirits and, holding himself fast, lifted his arms straight out at his sides like Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic. The salt spray peppered his wide-mouthed grin, stung his eyes and seasoned his fourteen-year-old tongue.
It was his uncle’s boat, his uncle’s idea to wave to his mother in the jet as it took off from SEATAC. They had no real way to track the flight, bound for Israel where she was set to join up with a two-star cruise ship tour of Israel ports and Egyptian treasures, so Rastus waved at all the planes, while his uncle drank beer and laughed from the wheelhouse. His uncle loved to laugh.
His uncle had also judged wrong. They were far too distant from the airport to catch any of the planes taking off. In fact, they could barely seen any metal in the sky. A flicker or a flash as the aluminum skin caught the retreating sun.
Rastus saw one blaze in particular as he rode the bow: a brilliant white-and-orange glint that held the intensity of a camera’s flash. He pointed up to it and gasped.
“Uncle! Uncle!” he called out.
His uncle only laughed and hoisted the beer.
At first, he thought they were salmon, or seals or even Orca whales surfacing-an exciting splash a hundred yards to his left. Port, as his uncle called it. Why they couldn’t just call it left Rastus wasn’t sure.
The moment that first splash occurred, his uncle cranked the wheel in that direction, so severely that the cleat was not enough to hold Rastus, and he fell to his right, barely catching hold of the wire rail at the last possible second. He regained his balance, righted himself and looked back at his uncle in the wheelhouse.
The man’s face had contorted into a full flood of surprise and excitement.
Rastus turned to see why: three more giant splashes. Had to be whales, the way the water shot up.
His uncle was ru
His uncle dropped the glasses, let go of the wheel and ran to the railing. He hurled vomit into the water-a man who had never been seasick in his life.
Rastus looked down into the water as a white fish, dead and floating, passed incredibly close. The boat struck the next.
It wasn’t a fish at all: it was a naked woman. Big, and flabby and disgusting. Her skin around her chest and pelvis as white as bone; a patch of wet black hair where her legs met. And there, not twenty yards away, a man. Also naked. Faceup. Arms at his sides.
The sky was raining dead bodies.
A dozen a second now. Two dozen.
Rastus heard a tremendous explosion. He looked to where his uncle had been at the rail. There was nothing but a splash of red there now and a deep dent in the metal decking.
“Uncle!” Rastus screamed. “Uncle?”
Six more bodies streamed by the boat, now ru
All naked. Every face locked-or were they frozen?-in an unforgiving expression of pure terror.
The fifth that passed by was unmistakable.
It was his mother.
As he’d never seen her.
Nine years later
The Joke’s on U was a comedy club in Seattle’s university district, on Friday and Saturday nights, a haunt for college kids, but during the week an escape for aging software wizards, Green-party candidates, some white-haired hippies wearing bifocals and, on this evening, an oversize man at the beat-up piano on stage, a long-in-the-tooth police lieutenant-or former police lieutenant, he wasn’t sure-plugging through a killer rendition of an Oscar Peterson arrangement.
The establishment had moved around town, mostly along 45th Avenue, occasionally changing or at least modifying its name, trying to retain its former clientele while simultaneously skating on some existing debt. It’s owner, Bear Berenson, was a fiftysomething hempie, round in the middle and pallid in the face, a man with a contagious laugh, an agreeable disposition, and a bad left hip. He’d fallen off a bicycle two years earlier, riding at night, without any light, while royally stoned and busy trying to do some math in his head. “The hip has never been right since,” he liked to say, counting how long it took whoever would listen to realize it was a pun. Those who missed the pun altogether were people that didn’t interest Bear. The man at the piano had not only gotten the joke the first time he’d heard it-of many-but had been quick enough to finish the sentence, and therefore the joke, for him. It was just this kind of person that interested Bear-fiercely intelligent, yet humble; nimbly facile, but reserved. Able to leap small buildings-with a ladder and rope.
Lou Boldt kept the song going with his right hand while he sipped some very cold milk, using his left. It was a good happy-hour crowd, all things considered. Some pretty coeds had wandered in, no doubt expecting stand-up, but had stayed the better part of an hour, were presently on the back end of several rounds of margaritas and, without knowing it-or maybe they did-were providing eye candy for the true jazz aficionados who populated the lounge.