Silent Night - By Tom Barber Page 0,90

help. The timer kept counting down over his shoulder.

00:35.

00:34.

At the glass, Jorgensen looked back at the timer.

Pause. He bowed his head, as Shepherd and Marquez looked on desperately from the other side of the glass.

'You need to go,’ he said.

‘No!’ Marquez said, hitting the glass with the butt of her pistol.

‘Go!’

‘No!’

She couldn’t stop tears filling her eyes, standing there looking at her partner. To the left, Shepherd was hammering the glass with the butt of his pistol but it wasn’t giving way.

00:24.

00:23.

And for the first time in a very long time, Dave Jorgensen smiled. He put his hand up to the glass. Tears rolling down her cheeks, Marquez matched it with hers. They stayed that way, palm to palm, for a long moment. He smiled again.

‘Go. And be good, Marquez.’

Openly sobbing, she stared through the glass at her partner. She nodded.

Then she turned and ran for the stairwell with Shepherd.

Alone, everyone out of the building, Jorgensen felt strangely at peace. It was just him. The rest of the team were outside.

Safe.

He sat down with his back against the glass, watching the countdown on the timer across the room. The room around him was quiet and still. There was no movement anywhere he could see save for the constant silent ticking down of the numbers on the explosives.

The timer reached 00:10.

He knew he was about to die. But he wasn’t scared or sad. He thought about his life. Everything he’d done. The best times, and the worst. He thought of his brother, Tommy, and the memories he had of their time together before he died. His time in the Department. His lack of friends.

And Marquez.

He thought back to what he’d said to Archer in the car. He didn’t like the guy but he knew deep down what happened to Tommy wasn’t his fault.

I’ve been an asshole for way too long, he thought.

The timer hit 00:05.

Sitting against the glass, he looked across the lab at the bomb and smiled, knowing all the others had escaped.

Finally, you did something right.

Then he thought of Tommy.

He pictured his big brother waiting for him. In a place without bombs, or anger, or pain.

I’ll be right there, bro.

Up ahead the countdown approached its end. He closed his eyes.

00:03.

00:02.

00:01.

I’ll be right there.

FORTY THREE

Bobby Rourke wasn’t a racist.

Growing up with no prospects in a small southern town, his future had been bleak. Life in Roller was just about as boring and uneventful as you could get without being six feet under. There was a saying in the area that a lot of residents hated, but most of them agreed with. The only good thing about Roller is the road leading out of it. His father had left when Bobby was a kid. He met some other woman and just took off. Bobby couldn’t remember much about him, save that he had hard fists and had a hatred of anyone not white Caucasian. Watching him as a boy Bobby had adopted those beliefs, wanting to please and impress him. But once he was gone and as Bobby grew up, he realised just how wrong his father had been. Society had changed. Equality and human rights now meant people of all colours, races and religions were able to live together, work together, have families together. And despite being the leader of a neo-Nazi hate group, Bobby had a secret.

He didn’t have an issue with any of that.

Before his grandfather had died, he’d asked Bobby to come out to see him on his farm on the outskirts of town. He told him that he was going to leave the farm and the house to him in his will. Rourke wasn’t under any illusions. He knew the only reason it was being passed to him was that he was the only Rourke still around. He’d asked the old man if the will had already been signed. It had. So Bobby had grabbed a cushion from the couch and suffocated him on the spot. A minute later, the old man was dead and the farm belonged to him.

However, he’d completely underestimated the amount of work it took to maintain a place like that. He quickly discovered the sheer weight of tasks he needed to perform in order to keep the place going was far greater than anything he’d ever encountered before. Lazy by nature, Rourke had hated it. True to form, he’d quickly started neglecting the place when he realised money wasn’t just going to fall into his lap and the crops had begun