He wanted to know why he wasn’t asked to be in the meeting.
Will looked down at his phone again.
Nothing but yam.
He stared out the window. He sensed that he was being watched.
Sara cleared her throat.
Will felt his bad mood lift. He couldn’t stop the stupid grin that came to his face every time he saw her. Her long, auburn hair was down. He loved it when her hair was down. “Is it time for lunch?”
Sara looked at her watch. “It’s one forty-six. We have exactly fourteen minutes of calm before the storm.”
He studied her face, which was beautiful, but there was a streak of something above her eyebrow that looked suspiciously like the smeared entrails of a dead bug.
She gave him a curious look.
“Have you seen the shed?” Will offered her the grand tour, but only as a ruse to get her onto the couch. He was exhausted from the mowing. He was starving. He was worried that Sara was only fine with a poor cop as long as that poor cop had ambitions.
He asked, “It’s great in here, right?”
Sara coughed at the dust that huffed up from the couch. Still, she looped her leg over his. Her arm rested along his shoulders. Her fingers stroked the wet ends of his hair. He always felt a sudden calm when Sara was with him, like the only thing that mattered was the connection that tethered them together.
Will asked, “Can we move in? I’m only halfway kidding.”
Sara’s curious look turned guarded.
Will stopped breathing. The joke had landed wrong. Or maybe it wasn’t a joke, because they had been dancing around this subject of moving in together for a while. He was basically living with Sara now, but she hadn’t asked him to properly move in, and he couldn’t figure out if that was a sign, and if it was a sign, was it a stop sign or a go sign or was it the kind of sign she was beating him over the head with, only he was missing it?
He desperately searched for a change in subject. “Look, a guitar.”
Will fiddled with the strings. His teenage self had had the patience to learn exactly one song in its entirety. He started out slow, humming the tune so that he could remember the chords. And then he stopped, wondering why he’d ever thought “I’m on Fire” was The Song that would persuade a girl to let him touch her breasts. “That’s kind of gross, isn’t it? ‘Hey little girl is your daddy home?’”
“How about ‘Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon’? Or ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’? Or the opening line to ‘Sara Smile’?”
He plucked at the guitar strings, hearing Daryl Hall singing in his head—
Baby hair with a woman’s eyes . . .
“Damn,” Will murmured. Why was every soft rock jam from his teenage years a Class A felony? “Hall and Oates, too?”
“Panic! At the Disco has a better version.”
Will loved that she knew this. He’d initially been alarmed by the number of Dolly Parton CDs in her car. Then he’d seen her iTunes list, which featured everything from Adam Ant to Kraftwerk to Led Zeppelin, and known that they were going to be okay.
She was smiling at him, watching his fingers move along the cords. “When did you learn to play?”
“High school. Self-taught.” He stroked her hair back so he could see her face. “Think of every stupid thing a sixteen-year-old boy would do to impress a sixteen-year-old girl and I know how to do it.”
That, at least, got a laugh out of her. “Did you have a fade?”
“Duh.” He listed all of his pathetic accomplishments, which had worked with exactly zero girls. “You should’ve seen me in my acid-washed jeans and Nember’s Only jacket.”
“Nember?”
“Dollar Store brand. I didn’t say I was a millionaire.” He couldn’t ignore the dead bug anymore. He nodded toward the streak of bug guts above her eyebrow. “What’s going on up there?”
Sara shook her head.
Will returned the guitar to the stand. He used his thumb to wipe away the bug. “That’s better.”
For some reason, she started kissing him. Really kissing him. He let his hands run down her waist. Sara moved closer. Kissed him deeper. She used her fingertips to press down his shoulders. Then she pushed him down with her hands. Will was on his knees thinking he would never get tired of the taste of her when the ground started to shake.
Sara sat up. “What the hell was that?”
Will wiped his mouth. He couldn’t joke about making the earth move for her because the earth had literally moved. He checked under the old couch to see if it was falling apart. He stood up and knocked at the beams, which was probably stupid because the whole shed could fall down on them.
He asked Sara, “Remember that earthquake in Alabama a few years back?” Will had been on a stakeout in north Georgia. The car had shimmied away from the curb. “That felt the same, but stronger.”
Sara was buttoning her shorts. “There was a sound. The country club does fireworks displays. Maybe they’re testing out a new show?”
“In broad daylight?” Will found his phone on the workbench. The screen gave the time.
1:49 p.m.
He told Sara, “There aren’t any alerts.” She worked at the GBI, too. She knew that the state had an emergency contact system that pinged all law enforcement phones in case of a terrorist attack.
Will considered where they were standing, what kind of cataclysmic event could be felt at these coordinates. He recalled attending a seminar given by an FBI agent who’d been at Ground Zero. Even over a decade later, the man could not find the words to describe the awesome kinetic energy dissipated into the ground when a skyscraper fell.
Like an off-the-scale earthquake.
The Atlanta airport was seven miles from downtown. More than a quarter of a million passengers flew in and out every day.
Will returned to his phone. He tried to check his messages and emails, but the wheel just spun on the screen. He called Faith but couldn’t get through. He tried Amanda and got the same. He dialed the main office number at the GBI.
Nothing worked.
He held up the phone so Sara could hear the three tones, then the operator saying all circuits were busy. He dropped the phone onto the bench. It might as well be a brick.
Sara’s expression was filled with anxiety. She said, “Emory has an emergency siren. It goes off when there’s a natural disast—”
Boom.
Will almost lost his footing. He ran into the yard and looked up at the sky. A plume of dark smoke curled up behind the tree line.
Not fireworks.
Two explosions.
“Let’s go.” Will started running toward the driveway.
“Sara!” Cathy called from the back door. “Did you hear that?”
He watched Sara dart into the house. She was probably looking for her keys. He wanted her to stay inside but knew she wouldn’t.
Will darted across the sloping front yard. The police would set up roadblocks. There would be nowhere to park a car and Will could probably run there faster. He thought about his gun locked in the glove box of Sara’s BMW, but if the local cops needed him for anything, it would be crowd control.
Will’s foot hit the road just as the wail of an emergency siren filled the air. Bella’s house was on a straight stretch of Lullwater Road. There was a curve fifty yards ahead that followed the contours of the Druid Hills golf course. Will kept his arms tight to his body, legs pumping hard, as he closed the gap to the curve.
He was almost at the bend when he heard another sound. Not an explosion, but the weird pop that two automobiles make when they smack into each other. There was another pop. He gritted his teeth as he waited through the ensuing silence. A car horn started to whine along with the emergency siren.
It wasn’t until Will had finally rounded the curve that he saw what had happened: two cars had marshmallowed a blue pickup truck between them.
A red Porsche Boxter S was at the front. Older model, naturally aspirated flat-six, a third radiator behind the opening in the lower front fascia. The trunk had popped open. The driver was slumped at the wheel, pressing the horn with his face.
A Ford F-150 truck was behind it. The doors must’ve crumpled on impact. One man was trying to climb out the open window. The other was leaning against the hood, blood dripping down his face.
A four-door, silver Chevy Malibu brought up the rear. Driver in front, two passengers in back, none of them moving.
The cop in Will immediately assigned blame. The Porsche had stopped too quickly. The truck and Malibu were following too closely, probably speeding. Whether or not the Porsche driver had antagonized the guy in the truck by tapping the brakes was a puzzle for the accident investigator to figure out.
Will looked past them to the roundabout at North Decatur Road. Parked vehicles filled the circle. A minivan. A box truck. Mercedes. BMW. Audi. They were all abandoned, doors hanging open. Drivers and passengers stood in the street looking up at the smoke curling into the blue sky.
Will’s hard run downshifted to a jog, then he, too, came to a standstill.
Birds chirped in the trees. The smallest of breezes rustled the leaves. The smoke was coming from the Emory campus. Students, staff, two hospitals, the FBI headquarters, the CDC.