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Page 22.
 The assailant was as splattered with sauce as Jack was. His momentum carried him forward, and now it was his turn to slip on the water and the sauce. He landed facing Jack, on his knees and forearms.
His gun landed rough, letting off one more pop. This showered the room with fine glass, pungent spices, and shredded olives.
Jack pushed over on him an entire shelf of empty glass canning jars.
The man exploded right through that glass and shelving. He'd lost the gun, but clawed at Jack with hands of steely strength. As the man lunged, Jack connected with a lightning left jab that stunned the fake docent on the right temple. As the man started to fall over forward, Jack pulled out an empty steel shelf on wheels.
Jack grabbed a firehose off the wall nearby, unfolded the first few feet, and smacked his assailant across the head with the heavy brass nozzle.
The man's head bobbed about as if he were seeing stars.
The man landed across the wheeled shelf, chest and belly down. He seemed to be body surfing, with his arms raised outward and upward behind him like wings to steady himself. Jack glanced over his shoulder, and saw their images in a dirty window overlooking a small service ramp outside, at the back entrance to the kitchen. The assailant was just coming to and shaking his head. His face was contorted in a wide-eyed, open-mouthed look of sheer terror.
Jack looked again to his left for a flight path. He saw the reflections of two tomato-smeared figures in a dirty window at the end of the room.
"Here's food for reflection." Grabbing the cart with the man on it, he shoved the cart as hard as he could.
The cart, and its semi-conscious passenger, rolled across the wet tile floor. Jack gave it another hard shove, and it smacked against the end-wall of the long, narrow room. The cart stopped dead, but the man traveled on—through the window with a loud crash, and into the night beyond. Little curtains blew in surprise.
Jack fumbled amid debris and sauce, and came up with the man's gun.
Thus armed, he staggered the twenty feet to the end of the room—near the broken window with the cart now on its side and its wheels spinning—and out through a small wooden door.
On the concrete apron of the loading dock, Jack welcomed the bite of fresh night air, after the stuffy pantry.
Having rolled upon landing, and now recovering, the assassin was back in action. He knelt as he fumbled with his own ankle-holster and backup gun.
Jack aimed the tomato-smeared gun at him. "It doesn't have to end this way." The man might be worth more alive than dead, if he had any information Sigma or the FBI could chew on.
The man swung around and aimed a small black gun at Jack, with the shooting end resting across his other, upraised arm.
Jack fired, but the clogged barrel exploded in his hand. The ruined gun flew from his hand. Jack involuntarily cried out in pain and grabbed his injured hand in his good hand.
In front of him, the man was momentarily frozen in the act of aiming across his free arm. His expression grew blank, and his eyes vacant, as a round hole in his forehead darkened, and blood trickled down his nose. He pitched over and lay face-down. His gun clattered nearby.
Jack doubled over. He waved his hand in the air to drive the jangled nerve feeling away. He felt as if he'd been jolted with a line of electricity. He hoped nothing was broken. His hand just felt numb, like a slab of cold bacon. A few days in a thickly padded bandage, he estimated, and a few gin and tonics plus some attention from Minica should do the trick.
He extracted his cell phone from his inside left pocket, and called 9-1-1. As he spoke with the emergency dispatcher, he leaned over to feel the man's pulse. There was none.
Jack lived by a number of rules, none of which contradicted each other. He had just now killed a man. He had killed before, and he would probably kill again. He never messed with another man's wife, and he never killed unless it was self-defense. Sometimes you just wanted to throw up. At other times, you were too pissed off to care. This was one of those pissed off moments. When he thought of Catherine, and Tony, Claire, and Minica, he almost wished he could kill this piece of work one more time, just for the sheer damnedness of it all. He wasn't going to puke over this bum or lose any sleep about it. He thought better of giving the corpse a kick in the head, and instead kicked the bent ankle gun out of reach.
Jack left instructions for the police not to use lights or sirens. Their dispatcher would notify campus police, and together they would arrive without noise or fuss—cordon off the area, secure the body, look for signs of accomplices, and so on. No sense getting those eighty people all riled up and scared. With any luck, this shooter would be the Dragon Lady's last hurrah, unless she wanted to come for him herself. Maybe another day.
Jack dusted himself off, and headed into the kitchen to clean up, before returning to the lecture hall.
Jack washed up as best he could at the kitchen sink. His jacket was stained and torn—a total loss. So was the necktie. He managed to wash the shirt and wring it out. He still wore a clean T-shirt under it, but he wouldn't be seen, not even at a semi-formal affair like this, wearing a T-shirt. So he put the wet shirt back on, hoping it would dry quickly. The trousers were ruined at the knees, with a total rip from the knee down on one side where the shoe had raked him, but otherwise he was still standing and functional.
His strongest urge now was to check on Minica, Claire, and Tony. As he quietly opened the small side door, a row of applause rang out. The other man, a professor of aeronautical engineering, had just told the most interesting details about a new Air Force jet that could fly backwards in a pinch. What would they think of next?
Jack walked toward the podium. He joined the innocent clapping as he walked. The English professor cocked an eyebrow. The aeronautics expert pouted in his white beard, with huge angry eyes. He looked as if he felt upstaged. Or he would start sobbing any second. To hell with him also. Jack was in no mood to hold any man’s hand or indulge petty rivalry.
In their seats, Minica and Claire looked shocked. Knowing Jack, they had a good idea he had just saved everyone’s lives, including his own. Minica held fingers up to stifle her gasp, and Claire had that look, which said, "Whom do we need to pay off to clean up after you?" Tony's expression was more one of "I hope the other guy looks twice as bad as you do."
Jack clapped with the audience, who were on their feet now.
Jack stood dripping before the microphone. "There was a little circus, I'm afraid."
Minutes later, Jack and his companions ducked out as quickly as they could. Claire called her office in Washington, catching an assistant undersecretary of something at a dinner party, who in turn called a local Congresswoman who knew the mayor, who was in a bar getting sloshed, but his press secretary called the police chief and explained everything. As a result, the eighty people were released immediately after giving names and other identification, in case they needed to be called. The audience separated to go to their various homes, restaurants, or watering holes.
Jack conferred briefly with a police deputy commissioner on the scene, along with the campus security chief. Jack decided not to mention his broken car windows, which the assassin had trashed more than likely to get Jack’s attention and draw him out into the darkness for a quick kill, made to look like a mugging. Much simpler to let the Porsche be towed to a garage on Rector's Compass News tab, and take a taxi to the airport tomorrow. Jack got his luggage and gun out of the trunk.
Tony and Claire were driving a large, boxy government car, so Minica and Jack rode in the back with ample room. Jack cleaned up some more as best he could, and sat on an old towel. Minica was solicitous as could be, but avoided hugging Jack as she desperately wanted to do. It would have stained her white dress with reddish solanum lycopersicum residue.
Jack's fondest wish was to get to a hotel with Minica, soak in a hot bath, and have her fuss over his hand. He longed to snuggle with her, while watching one of those scary movies that would make her crawl deep under the sheets to get as close to him as possible, while shivering uncontrollably and seeking his sexual attentions.
Claire seemed to read Jack's mind. That was obvious from the way she regarded Jack and his beautiful, dark-haired companion.
Some time later—as he and Minica stepped from the Lightfield hay wagon on a remote city street of Colonial pedigree and elegant period houses—Claire said mock-sternly: "Your plans will have to wait a while longer. You won't want to miss this."
Minica, always a good scout under trying conditions, held Jack as if rendering bodily assistance, and to hell with her dress.
"That okay with you?" Jack murmured in Minica's ear.
She kissed Jack's cheek, and whispered in his ear: "I'm so proud of you."
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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