Page 99 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

Josh’s phone rang first. Then mine. Then every phone in the building, one after another, like a chain reaction, and the sound of all those phones going off at once created a discordance that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up before I even looked at the screen.

The number was the school.

I answered.

“Mr. Cole, this is the Pinewood Ridge police department. There has been an incident at Pinewood Elementary. Armed individuals have entered the building. We need you to stay where you are while we…”

I was already running.

The phone was still talking when I hit the truck. Josh was behind me, saying something I could not hear because the blood pounding in my ears had drowned out everything except the three words that were echoing through my skull like gunfire. Armed. Individuals. School.

Emma. Chloe. School.

I drove faster than I had ever driven. The road between the mill and the school was seven minutes on a normal day. I made it in four. The tires screamed through turns and the truck fishtailed on gravel and I did not care because my daughter was in that building and the woman I loved was in that building and every second I was not there was a second too long.

The school was surrounded. Police cruisers angled across the parking lot, lights flashing, officers crouched behind their vehicles with weapons drawn. An ambulance was parked on the far side. Parents were clustered behind the barricade, some of them crying, some of them shouting, all of them wearing the same expression, the one that said their child was behind those walls and they could not reach them.

I got out of the truck and headed for the building.

An officer stepped in front of me. Young. Nervous. His hand on my chest, pushing me back.

“Sir, you cannot go in there. The building is not cleared. We have a tactical team…”

“My family is their target,” I said.

He blinked. “Sir?”

“The men in that building are here for my daughter and her mother. This is not a random incident. This is Jonathan Marshall. He is after my family. I am going in.”

“Sir, I cannot allow…”

I moved past him. He grabbed my arm and I turned and the look on my face must have communicated something that words could not, because his hand dropped and his mouth opened and he did not follow me.

The front entrance was propped open. I moved through it the way I had been trained to move through doorways in places far worse than this, low and fast, shoulders close to the wall, eyes scanning. The hallway was empty. Fluorescent lights buzzing. The floor scattered with papers and backpacks that had been dropped in a panic, the debris of a normal school day interrupted by something that was the opposite of normal.

A sound. To my right. A classroom door opening.

The man came out fast. He was armed, a pistol in his right hand, but he was not expecting someone to be in the hallway. He saw me and his eyes went wide and he swung the weapon toward me but he was a second too slow.

I closed the distance in two strides. My left hand caught his wrist and redirected the gun away from my body while my right hand drove into his throat. He gagged, his grip loosening on the weapon, and I wrenched the pistol free with a twist that snapped his index finger. He dropped to his knees, both hands going to his throat, and I brought my knee up into his jaw. The impact was clean. Precise. His head snapped back and he hit the floor and did not get up.

I checked the gun. Loaded. Safety off. I tucked it into my waistband and kept moving.

The school was not large. One main hallway with classrooms branching off on either side. The gymnasium at the back. The cafeteria on the left. The administrative offices near the front, which I had already passed. Chloe’s classroom was halfway down the hall. Emma’s was at the end.

Another man came around the corner. This one was bigger. Smarter. He saw me and did not hesitate. He fired.

The shot went wide, punching into the wall beside my head, and the sound of it in the enclosed hallway was deafening, a concussive blast that rang in my ears and filled the air with plaster dust. I dove behind a row of lockers, pulled the pistol, and returned fire. Two shots. Controlled. The way I had been taught in a desert ten thousand miles from here, where the targets were not in school hallways but the principle was the same. Center mass. Breathe. Squeeze.

The first shot caught him in the shoulder. The second in the thigh. He went down hard, his gun skidding across the floor, and I was on him before he could reach for it. My boot on his weapon. My pistol pointed at his face.

“How many more?” I said.

He looked up at me with pain-glazed eyes and something in his expression shifted. Recognition. He knew who I was. He knew why I was here.

“Two,” he said through gritted teeth. “The boss and one more. Gymnasium.”

The gymnasium. At the back of the school. I left him where he lay and moved down the hallway, faster now, the gun in my hand and the training running through my body like a current. Every door I passed was closed. Locked from the inside. Teachers following protocol. Keeping their students safe behind desks and under tables, doing the thing they had been trained to do and praying it would be enough.