The Last King of Texas (Tres Navarre #3)(3)

DeLeon said, "Dr. Navarre told you it was a lai, Gregory. Were there any other questions?"

Gregory kept his mouth closed. He shifted his mail bin around, looked at Professor Mitchell like he was expecting protection, then at me. "Maybe I could check back tomorrow?"

"Good idea," I said. "And the mail?"

Gregory thought about it, checked out DeLeon's Glock one more time, then dipped a beefy hand into the bin. He brought out a rubber-banded stack of letters that probably represented two weeks of withheld mail. He threw it on the desk and knocked over the silver-framed photo of Brandon's family.

"Fine," Gregory said. "Package, too."

The package hit the table with a muffled clunk. It was a manila bubble-wrap mailer, eleven by seventeen, dinged up and glistening at both ends with scotch tape. It had a large red stamp along the side that read INTRACAMPUS DELIVERIES ONLY.

While Professor Mitchell shooed Gregory out the door, DeLeon and I were staring at the same thing — the plain white address label on the mailing envelope, AARON BRANDON, HSS 3,11. No street address or zip. No return. A computer-printed label, Chicago 12-point.

I remember locking eyes with DeLeon for maybe half a second. After that it happened fast.

DeLeon put a hand on Professor Mitchell's shoulder and calmly started to say, "Why don't we go—" when something inside the package made a plasticky crick-crick-crick sound like a soda bottle cap being twisted off.

DeLeon was smaller than Mitchell by maybe a hundred pounds, but she had him wrestled to the floor on the count of two. I should have followed her example.

Instead, I swept the package off the desk and into the metal trash can. Nice plan if I'd been able to get to the floor myself. But the trash can started toppling. First toward my face. Then toward the window. Then it went off like a cannon.

In the first millisecond, even before the sound registered, the force of the blast frosted a huge ragged oval in the glass, then melted it in a cone of metal shards and yellow ribbon and flames, ripping through the wall and the mesquite outside and shredding the new leaves and branches into ticker tape.

I was on my butt in the opposite corner of the office. My ankle was twisted in the walnut armrest of Aaron Brandon's overturned chair and my ribs had slammed against a filing cabinet. There was an upside-down pothos plant in my lap. Someone was pressing a very large A-flat tuning fork to the base of my skull and my left cheek felt wet and cold. I dabbed at the cheek with my fingers, felt nothing, brought my fingers away, and saw that they glistened red.

Except for the tuning fork, the room was silent. Leaves and pigeon feathers and pages from essays were twirling aimlessly in the air, curlicuing in and out of the blasted wall. There was a fine white smoke layering the room and a smell like burning swimming-pool chemicals.

Slowly, DeLeon got to her feet. A single yellow pothos leaf was stuck in her hair. She pulled Mitchell up by the elbow.

Neither of them looked hurt. DeLeon examined the room coolly, then looked at me, focusing on the side of my face.

"You're bleeding," she announced.

It sounded like she was talking through a can and string, but I was relieved to register any sound at all. Then I heard other things — voices in the plaza below, people yelling. A low, hot sizzle from the remnants of the blasted garbage can. I staggered to my feet, brushed the plant and the dirt off my lap, took a step toward the window. No more pigeons on the ledge. The bottom of the garbage can, the only part that wasn't shredded, had propelled itself backward with such force that an inch of the base was embedded in the side of the oak desk. Distressed voices were coming down the hall now. Insistent knocks on neighboring doors.

Mitchell's eyelids stuck together when he blinked. He shook his head and focused on me with great effort. "I don't — I don't..."

DeLeon patted the old professor's shoulder, telling him she thought he was going to be okay. Then she looked at me. "A doctor for that cheek. What do you think?" I looked out the hole somebody had just blasted in a perfect spring day. I said, "I think I'll take the job."

TWO

The bomb-squad guys were a laugh a minute.

After barking orders to the campus uniforms and kicking through the rubble in their storm trooper outfits, sniffing the trash can and measuring lug nuts and screws and other metal fragments that had embedded themselves several inches into the concrete window frame, the squad decided it was safe to stand down. They threw Gregory the mail boy into an office down the hall for questioning by the FBI folks, though it was clear the poor kid knew nothing about the bomb and was already rattled to tears at the thought of his werewolf essay being blown to Valhalla. Then the squad relaxed in the hallway with their Dr Peppers and let lesser individuals take over the investigation.

"Same as that'n last year," one of the storm troopers said. "You remember that kid?"

A blond guy with a sergeant's badge clipped to his belt took a noisy pull on his soda. "Blew off three of his fingers, didn't it?"

"Four, Sarge. Remember? We found one of them later, under the bed."

They all laughed.

Another guy mentioned the lunatic they'd caught last month trying to drop TNT-filled Ping-Pong balls off the Tower of the Americas. He reminisced about how the perp would've blown a hole in the sergeant's crotch except Sarge was such a good catch. Hilarious.