Titus thought that was ironic but didn’t say anything.
“You know, it would be nice if you came to a service once in a while. Don’t nobody at church think you no damn Uncle Tom,” Albert said. “They worked hard for you, Titus. I’m just saying.” The amount and depth of his gratitude to Emmanuel Baptist Church for their support of his surprise campaign was a conversation his father kept trying to have and Titus kept trying to avoid. Not because he wasn’t grateful. He was well aware it was the support of congregations like Emmanuel that propelled him to the sheriff’s office. Along with an influx of liberal-minded latter-day hippies and good ol’ boys and girls who hated Ward Bennings’s son Cooter more than they distrusted the former football hero and FBI agent. A rare coalition that wouldn’t come together again for a generation. But now everyone had their hands out. His father’s church was no different. He knew that the support of his father’s congregation came with conditions that he wasn’t inclined to meet. Never mind the fact that he hadn’t attended an actual church service since he was fifteen. He’d stopped going about the same time his father had started. Two years after his mother had died.
“I’ll let you know, Pop. It’s the week before Fall Fest. You know that’s gonna be busy for me,” Titus lied. Fall Fest was mainly an excuse for the citizens of Charon County to get drunk and dance in the street before slipping off to some dark corner of the courthouse green for a whiskey-soaked kiss from a lover. Either theirs or someone else’s.
Albert was about to press his case further when Titus’s radio crackled to life.
“Titus, come in!”
The voice on the radio was his dispatcher, Cam Trowder. Cam worked the morning shift and the other dispatcher, Kathy Miller, worked at night. Cam was one of the few holdovers from the previous administration.
He was an Iraq War vet who was calm under pressure, who also possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of every road and dirt lane in the county. Despite those impressive credentials, Cam’s most important attribute was proximity. He lived less than a mile from the sheriff’s office. He never missed a day, come rain or shine. His all-terrain electric wheelchair could get up to twenty miles per hour. Cam had souped it up himself with help from a YouTube video and some PDFs he’d downloaded off the internet. The man was nothing if not determined.
That was why the sheer hopelessness that seeped from his voice and came spilling out of the radio set Titus’s nerves on edge.
“Go ahead for Titus,” he said after he depressed the talk button.
“Titus … there’s an active shooter at the high school. Titus, I’m getting a hundred calls a minute here. I think … I … think … Titus, my nephew’s there,” Cam said. He sounded strange. Titus realized he was crying.
“Cam, call all units. Have them converge on the high school!” Titus shouted into his mic.
“My nephew is there,” Cam said.
“Call all units! Do it now!”
Cam groaned, but when his voice came through the speaker this time it was smooth and resolute.
“Got it, Chief. Calling all units. Active shooter at Jefferson Davis High School. Repeat, active shooter at Jefferson Davis High School.”
Titus dropped the greeting card and sprinted for the door.
“What’s going on?” Albert called after him as he barreled out the back door.
But the only answer he got was the sound of the screen door slamming against the jamb as the autumn wind caught it in its chilly grip.
Titus was already gone.
TWO
There is a sense of chaos that can seem to move with its own order. When a chaotic situation becomes rote, there are certain patterns that emerge from the repetition.
As Titus came screaming into the parking lot of Jefferson Davis High on two wheels, he observed these distinct behaviors as they unfolded like an origami sculpture moving in reverse.
Students and teachers were pouring out from every point of egress of the huge brick building. They were running out the front door. They were slipping out the side doors. They were jumping from the windows. Some had slipped out the back through a metal roll-up door that was the exit and entrance for Mr. Herndon’s auto mechanics class. The tide of students and teachers poured past and around his car like a river passing over and around a stone. Their faces were etchings from a Francis Bacon painting, shadowed by a memory that ten years from now would make them burst into tears at a baby shower, in the middle of the grocery store, after watching a commercial for an exercise bike.
This was the first part of the chaos of this particular type of event. The unrelenting atavistic panic that sprang forth from the deep recesses of the animal part of our brains. Fight or flight went from an abstract concept in health class to a necessary component of survival.
Titus hopped out of his SUV with his gun drawn. The screams of the children were like a storm cloud moving east to west. Their cries were thunderclaps that shook him down to his heels. He looked to his left and saw two of his deputies drive over a shallow ditch that ran parallel to the front lawn of the school. Davy Hildebrandt was driving one patrol car and Roger Simmons was in the other. Carla Ortiz was just seconds behind them in the D.A.R.E. van she drove to the middle and elementary schools. Roger hopped out carrying a riot gun. Davy had his sidearm drawn. Carla had hers as well. Roger was running toward the crowd of teenagers. He was holding the gun by the stock with the barrel pointing toward the sea of bodies coming toward him like a rogue wave.
“Roger, gun up! Gun up!” Titus yelled. Roger stopped and stared at him. He blinked hard, then looked down at his hands. Titus saw him tremble like he’d taken a shot of whiskey, then he raised the gun so the shortened barrel was pointing up in the air.
“Davy! Get everyone across the road! Across the road!” Titus screamed. Davy holstered his gun and started waving to the kids and the teachers and began herding them across the road into a pasture that belonged to Oakfield Farms. A few Angus cows grazed haphazardly in the field. They seemed nonplussed despite the screams of terror echoing through the crisp early morning air.
“What do we do, boss?” Carla asked. She’d sliced her way through the crowd and was standing at Titus’s side. Titus saw a red pickup truck with an emergency light attached to the roof come flying into the parking lot. Tom Sadler was in the truck. He was off today but must have heard the call on his scanner. There were only a few more members of the Charon County Sheriff’s Office that weren’t here today.
Titus prayed they wouldn’t need them. He prayed the shooter didn’t have an AR-15 or an AK-47 or some other machine designed to deal out death in bunches like a spreader tossing seeds.
“We move in and clear the building,” Titus said. He grabbed his mic. “Davy, get Tom to watch the crowd. You come on back and help us clear the scene. You got your vest on?”
The radio crackled when Davy responded. “Sure do. I’ll get Tom.”
“Come on with it, Davy,” Titus said. He motioned for Carla to follow him as he began to move through the stragglers and headed for the school.
“He shot Mr. Spearman!” a slight blond girl said. Titus registered she was Daisy Matthews’s daughter. He’d graduated with Daisy. Her name was …
“Lisa, get across the road!” Carla yelled.
“Who shot Mr. Spearman? What does he look like, Lisa?” Titus asked.
Lisa turned her head and gazed at him like she’d just noticed his six-foot-two frame had appeared. “I … I … don’t know. He was wearing a mask. He shot him in the face. Oh my God, he shot Mr. Spearman!” Lisa’s eyes were as wide as tractor wheels. She wasn’t crying, but her face was pulsatingly red. Titus knew the tears would come later. Either tears or screams in the night.
“Was he tall? Taller than me? What about his clothes? What was he wearing?” Titus said.
Lisa closed her eyes and fell against Carla. “I don’t know!” she screamed into Carla’s shoulder.
Titus took a breath. He realized he had been yelling. A deep-voiced police officer yelling in your face never produced pertinent information. He knew this, preached about this to his deputies, and yet he’d done it anyway.
Titus touched his mic.
“Suspect is wearing a mask. That’s all we got. Let’s move in,” Titus said.
“Honey, I’m gonna need you to go across the road, okay?” Carla said as gently as she could. Lisa didn’t respond but took off for the pasture like a startled gazelle.
“Okay. Let’s go,” Titus said.