Twenty Read online

  Dedication

  For Tiffany.

  Remember that trip to Australia?

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by James Grippando

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  “Everything I learned, I’ve forgotten since kindergarten,” said Jack. He was behind the wheel of the family SUV with his wife, Andie, beside him. Their daughter was behind Andie, strapped into her car seat, her curious expression lighting up Jack’s rearview mirror.

  “What does that mean, Daddy?”

  “Oh, there was this book some time ago. It was called—”

  “Actually,” said Andie, “it was called Everything I Need to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten. So I think what your daddy is saying is that he needs to go back to kindergarten.”

  “You mean he wants a do-over?” asked Righley.

  Jack smiled. “Yes, honey. Daddy wants a do-over.”

  “No do-overs! That’s our rule.”

  Jack was the assistant coach of Righley’s peewee soccer team. “You’re right, honey. That is the rule.”

  Had a do-over been possible, Jack would have chosen Riverside Day School for his own education. Seated on ten picturesque acres of green space in one of the oldest neighborhoods along the Miami River, Riverside was South Florida’s premier K-through-12 private academy. Ninety percent of the faculty had a postgraduate degree, no teacher had more than eighteen students, and every classroom had the latest SMART Board technology. The parent directory read like a Who’s Who of Florida business leaders, which left Jack and Andie in the proverbial no-man’s-land on the financial spectrum, too rich for financial aid and not nearly rich enough to afford the tuition. So they stretched, remaining conspicuously silent when other parents waxed on about their ski trips over winter break or summers in the South of France.

  “Park right there,” said Andie, pointing to an open space on the street.

  They were still more than two blocks from the campus entrance, just outside the blinking amber lights of the designated school zone. The school had a parking lot, but Jack understood the issue. Andie was an FBI agent, and although she was dressed for a day of field work, she was not yet on duty, and Florida law prohibited law enforcement officers from carrying weapons into school zones if they were off duty. Jack parked the car and unloaded Righley from the back seat while Andie discreetly locked her sidearm and holster in the glove compartment.

  It was mid-September, a Wednesday morning, the final week during which kindergarten parents were allowed to walk their children to the classroom. Hand in hand, they entered the campus and went to the flagpole on the quad, where the elementary-level students assembled every morning in a circle, placed their hands over their hearts, and recited the pledge of allegiance. Or some reasonable facsimile thereof.

  And to the Republic, for Richard Stanz.

  One day Jack wanted to meet this Richard Stanz.

  Jack’s law office was within walking distance, a historic coral-stone house that, like most residences in this gentrified circa-1920s neighborhood, had been refurbished and converted to commercial use. He gave Andie the car keys and a kiss, hugged Righley, and headed off beneath the sprawling limbs of century-old live oaks. It was a perfect morning, still hours away from the heat and humidity that would return every afternoon until about Halloween, a wet blanket of a reminder that there really was no such thing as autumn in the subtropics. It made Jack think of the walks he would have liked to have taken with his father when he was in kindergarten, when a young Representative Harry Swyteck was away in Tallahassee for legislative sessions and Jack’s stepmother was too hung over to get out of bed.

  Jack enjoyed his walk along the river, thanking his lucky stars for the life he and Andie had made for themselves and their only child.

  The mother-daughter good-bye at the classroom door was without tears, at least not from Righley. Andie’s commute to the FBI’s field office in North Miami was by way of the dreaded Palmetto Expressway, a miles-long, bumper-to-bumper nightmare of blinking red taillights, the thought of which made her downright envious of Jack’s lovely walk from the school to his office. Deciding to let rush-hour traffic subside before getting on the road, Andie joined the other parents in the recreation center for the regular second-Wednesday-of-the-month coffee with the head of school. It was Andie’s first, but it wasn’t limited to new parents, so it was mostly “the usual suspects.” Working mothers dressed for the office in one cluster. Stay-at-home mothers in workout spandex or tennis skirts in another. Off to the side, alone, stood a tech-world multimillionaire who had sold his company and retired way too young, not really sure how he fit into this overwhelmingly female group. Andie felt almost as out of place, dressed in law-enforcement khaki pants and black tactical boots, which made her look more like the head janitor than a Riverside parent. She was relieved to find her friend Molly near the basket of bagels.

  “Glad to see you here,” said Andie.

  Molly had two boys and a girl at Riverside, a senior, a sophomore, and her “happy accident,” a daughter in the second grade. After the third, she’d stopped teaching Lamaze, but it was in Molly’s course that Andie had first met her. They’d lost touch after Righley’s birth, but she was once again Andie’s rock, her only familiar face at Riverside.

  “There’s a fresh patch of vomit on the gym floor,” said Molly. “Could you please fetch a bag of sawdust?”

  “Right away, ma’am.”

  The “janitor look” was a running joke between them. The first few weeks of school were filled with countless orientations and meetings for Riverside parents: meet the math department, meet the coaches, meet the science teachers, meet the alumni parents who are so glad they spent a fortune on private school because their kids are rockin’ it at Harvard. At the first gathering of the year, a tenth-g
rade mother had asked Andie to look into the condensation dripping from the AC vent. Andie had since made a habit of latching on to Molly.

  “Have you decided what committee you’re going to volunteer for?” asked Molly.

  “Committee? I wasn’t planning on volunteering.”

  “Oh, no, no, no, dear. You can attend all the welcome meetings you want. But if you’re going to come to the monthly morning coffees with the head of school, you can either volunteer or write a check big enough to have a classroom named after you.”

  “Jack volunteers. He helps with the soccer team. Doesn’t that count?”

  “Technically, yes. But that doesn’t give you much to talk about with this group of women.”

  “What committee are you on?”

  “Me? Volunteer? I don’t think so.”

  “So you write a check?”

  She stepped closer, as if letting Andie in on a secret. “Of course I write a check. But I still come to the coffees.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I like coffee.”

  Andie laughed, though not everyone at Riverside was as quiet about the checks they wrote, as if they weren’t already saying enough with their Cartier bracelets stacked seven or eight high à la Kylie Jenner, engagement rings of at least three karats (extra points for a marquis-cut canary diamond), and sparkling stud earrings that resembled something out of the Milky Way. Andie’s entire net worth paled in comparison to the “everyday” bauble collection of the average mother at Riverside.

  “Come on,” said Molly, still playing the poor-mouth game. “It’s time for us commoners to pay our respects to the head of school.”

  They started across the room, but the sudden blare of a fire alarm stopped them in their tracks. All conversation ceased. The head of school moved to the center of the room and addressed the parents in a calm and even tone. “Everyone, please stay where you are.” She quickly made a call on her cell. Despite the pulsing alarm, Andie heard her say into her phone, “Judy, is this a drill?”

  The response was heard only by the head of school, but in a moment, every woman in the room had an answer. An unmistakable noise—pop, pop, pop!—sounded in the hallway.

  “That’s gunfire!” shouted Andie.

  The screams inside the room weren’t nearly loud enough to drown out the blaring alarm or the continued pop, pop, pop of semiautomatic gunfire outside the rec center. As an FBI agent, Andie knew that activating a fire alarm to create chaos was a tried-and-true modus operandi in school shootings. The screams of children in the hallway confirmed they were caught in the middle of one. Andie hurried to the door, but before she could open it, the next three pops resulted in three bullet-sized dimples in the bullet-resistant steel.

  “This way!” the head shouted. “Follow me!”

  She led them to the door on the opposite side of the room, pushed it open, and stepped aside to let parents exit first. It was anything but orderly, elbows flying and parents pushing other parents to the floor in a mad scramble to safety.

  “Let’s go!” shouted Molly.

  Andie switched off the lights. “You go! I got the rear.”

  The gunfire in the hallway was nonstop.

  “Are you crazy?

  “Just go, Molly! Run!”

  Molly did. Andie was alone in the rec center. As an agent, she was familiar with the active-shooter response protocol. Option one: run. Option two: hide. Last resort: fight. As a mother, the protocol went right out the window. The sound of the semiautomatic gunfire—loud, very loud, then more distant—told her that the shooter was headed south. The kindergarten classrooms were at the south end of campus. Righley was in danger. Andie had no choice.

  And no weapon.

  Andie spotted a fire extinguisher on the wall. With a tap of the metal hammer, the glass case shattered, and she grabbed the extinguisher. Fire-retardant foam was no match for a semiautomatic firearm, but a sudden burst in an ambush might confuse or blind the shooter long enough for her to overtake him. There was no time to lose. Andie pushed open the door, stepped out of the rec center, and came face-to-face with a stampede of screaming children running for their lives. They were running from a masked shooter at the end of the hallway, a man walking with purpose as he squeezed off round after round from a semiautomatic pistol with an extended magazine. A long extended magazine.

  To Andie, it looked as long as a child’s arm.

  “Righley!” she shouted instinctively, and she started down the hallway, braving the noise and the chaos, armed with only a fire extinguisher.

  Chapter 2

  Jack was at his desk preparing for a deposition when an emergency text from Riverside popped up on his cell phone: ACTIVE SHOOTER ON CAMPUS.

  “Clear my morning calendar!” he said to his assistant as he rushed out the door, cell phone in hand.

  The race back to Riverside was like a high-speed rewind of Jack’s lovely walk on a perfect morning, a panic-driven sprint through a parent’s worst nightmare. He speed-dialed Andie, never breaking stride, but the call didn’t go through. Cell-phone service was already overloaded around the school. Traffic was backed up for blocks, horns blaring. Frightened and frustrated parents abandoned their vehicles in the street and joined Jack on foot. Inside of a block from campus the crowd was so large that people could barely move. Obviously, Jack had not been the first to receive the “Active Shooter” alert by text message. Helicopters whirred overhead, some from law enforcement, others bearing the colorful logos of local television news stations. Jack pushed forward, wending his way toward the police perimeter outside the campus gate.

  “You can’t go any farther,” said an officer in uniform.

  “But my daughter’s in there!” he said, and it sounded as if a dozen other parents behind him had said the same thing in unison.

  “No one goes in,” the officer said firmly. “We’ve locked down the premises.”

  Locked down the premises. Police jargon seemed only to underscore the insanity of the fact that Righley had skipped through these gates holding hands with her parents, and two hours later Jack was at the gates to hell—parents searching for their children, teachers trying to account for their students, children crying and clinging to one another, ambulances and police cars with beacons flashing.

  “Out of the way!” a paramedic shouted.

  Jack turned to see first responders whisking a victim from school grounds on a gurney. They nearly had to run over a camera crew to get past the scores of television journalists who had descended on the scene. A sickening feeling came over Jack as the paramedics loaded the unconscious student into the back of an ambulance. The boy wasn’t even old enough to shave.

  Jack tried dialing Andie again, but the call failed. Righley’s teacher had given all parents her cell number on the first day of classes, and Jack kicked himself for not having entered it into his contacts. Not that her cell-phone service would have performed any better. He needed information, and he needed to gather it the old-fashioned way. Down the sidewalk, Jack spotted a field reporter speaking into the camera with a live Action News update. He moved closer to hear her report in real time.

  “The active shooting from inside the building seems to have stopped,” she said in an urgent voice. “A scattering of students have fled to safety, but most are still in their classrooms. The entire campus is on lockdown. Information is spotty. Rumors abound. Some say the shooter is dead. Others say he got away. As best we can piece it together, most of the shooting occurred at or near the rec center.”

  Jack froze. The rec center.

  The reporter wrapped up her live update, her crewman lowered his camera, and Jack pushed his way forward to get the reporter’s attention.

  “Excuse me, but did you say there was shooting at the rec center?”

  “You can get instant updates if you follow me on Twitter,” she said, but Jack wasn’t listening as she shared her handle. His gaze drifted toward the chaos on the campus grounds. More gurneys, flanked by first responders,
were speeding toward the waiting ambulances. He was certain that he’d heard the reporter right the first time, and Jack’s words came like a reflex.

  “My wife was in the rec center.”

  On a dead run, Andie put herself into a base-stealing slide across the tile floor and hunkered down outside Righley’s classroom, still armed with the fire extinguisher. Her shoulder was against the steel door, and the entranceway was a recessed alcove, so she couldn’t see left or right down the hallway. It was like peering out from inside a tunnel. She knocked on the door so hard it hurt her hand. The teacher didn’t open it, and Andie didn’t blame her. No matter: if the shooter was going to get to her daughter, he’d have to get past the mother bear.

  Ninety. Ninety-one. Ninety-two.

  Andie’s estimate of rounds fired was certainly low. She hadn’t even started counting until she’d bolted from the rec center, and she’d surely missed a few in the noisy sprint down the hallway. Her singular objective had been to reach the kindergarten classroom before the shooter did. Adrenaline had propelled her. Instinct and training had probably kept her alive. Or luck. The blaring alarm, punctuated by screams and gunshots, made it impossible to think straight, let alone hear. It was the classic fog of war. In a school.

  Thirty feet. Andie had switched to counting the 12x12 floor tiles. She was trying to gauge the width of the hallway, trying to guess how far the foam might spray—the range of her makeshift weapon. The sight of a spent ammunition round on the floor made her heart skip a beat.

  She checked her cell phone. She’d texted her location to every law enforcement officer on her list of contacts, but reception was spotty, and not one had gone through immediately. She was checking the send status when her cop instincts kicked in, and she detected a change in the air—something afoot. She put her phone on silent mode and listened more intently. The fire alarm continued to whine, but the shooting seemed to have stopped. It had been at least a minute since anyone had passed in the hallway from either direction.

  Then she heard it—even over the piercing alarm. Footfalls in the hallway. Heavy footfalls, like marching boots on the move.

  Is he coming back this way?