Blue moon - By Lori Handeland Page 0,8

to throw stones?

I drew my service revolver and headed down the deserted hallway.

The lack of gunfire and the sudden absence of screaming made it difficult for me to locate the source of the problem. I wouldn't have, except for a slight, nearly undetectable whimper that drifted from a room ahead and to my left.

A sign on the wall outside the door read, Miss Larson. Third Grade.

"Shit," I muttered. "I haft being right."

Having my school shooting scenario go up in smoke should have made me happy. Instead, what I found when I opened the classroom door made me sick.

Karen Larson wasn't well. The fairy princess aura had vanished, the air of fragility, too. Her hair hung across her face in sweaty hanks, only partially obscuring her eyes.

Too bad. Because her eyes reminded me of a man I'd testified against once in an insanity trial. He'd gone to Happy Hill for the rest of his days. But what bothered me more than her appearance was the little boy in her grasp.

He was probably eight years old and not small by any means. Yet she held him aloft with one hand; his Nikes dangled a foot above the floor. His body was limp, though I could see his chest rise and fall with a steady breath.

Unconscious. Good. From the appearance of Miss Larson, life was going to get unpleasant.

"Put him down." I didn't shout, but I didn't whisper, either. Calm but firm worked best in almost any situation.

Miss Larson glanced up. Her mouth was flecked with pink foam. It wasn't a good look for her.

Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed another body nearby. Larger. Not a child, but a man. Maybe the janitor, or the principal. He wasn't moving, even to breathe, and there was blood spattered all around. I understood why Miss Larson's foam was pink. Uck.

I cocked my gun. My window for playing nice had closed.

"Put him down!" My voice was louder and less calm than before. "Do it, Karen."

She cocked her head like a dog who had recognized its name somewhere in the jumble of human words.

I shivered. This was just too weird.

Things got weirder when she growled at me. Seriously. She did. Flecks of foam flew from her mouth, and there were bloodstains on her teeth.

I inched forward and she snarled, tugged the limp boy closer, nuzzled his hair, licked his neck. What happened next I'm not certain.

I would swear to this day that she smiled at me with perfect clarity. As if she were fine, this had all been a mistake. I would also vow, though never out loud, that in the next instant a feral mask descended over her face; the spirit of an animal lived in her eyes.

She lifted her head, reared back as if to tear out the throat of the child in her arms, and a gunshot thundered through the room.

I'll never be able to prove if I imagined the change in Karen Larson or if it was real, because her head snapped back as a bullet took out her brain.

Thank God the kid was unconscious. Considering the mess, I wish I had been.
Chapter 4
Before you get the wrong impression, I didn't shoot her.

I spun around, coming face-to-face with my boss, Sheriff Clyde Johnston.

"Were you gonna shoot that pistol or whistle Dixie?" he grumbled.

If Clyde wasn't three-quarters Indian, he'd be a good old boy to rival them all. As it was, his belly stretched his sheriff's shirt to bursting, the chew in his mouth garbled his speech, and the size of his gun made me remember old jokes about large weapons and small male equipment. His habit of parroting lines from Clint Eastwood movies in normal conversation frayed the patience of better men than me.

His Clint fixation also explained why we carried .44 Magnums in Miniwa when a lot of other departments had moved into the world of semiautomatic weapons. But I agreed with Clyde that revolvers were more reliable than the newfangled automatics, which required a higher quality of ammunition and had a habit of misfiring. When dealing with guns, I vote for reliability over speed any day.

My ears ringing from the volume of the blast, I ran across the room and picked up the little boy. He was still unconscious. A quick glance at the other body, principal from the cut of the suit, revealed he was as dead as Karen Larson, though not from the same cause. Her head sported a large hole. The principal's neck did.

"Guess .44