Nineteen Minutes Read Online Free PDF Page A

liked him or anything, although he had turned around to hand her back her homework paper and held on to it just a smidgen too long…)? Would they get stuck together like jammed gears and have to be taken to the emergency room at the hospital, and how totally humiliating would that be?
    Zoe ran her tongue along the ragged metal fence posts in her mouth. Maybe she could temporarily join a convent.
    She sighed and peered down the block to see whether she could make out her mom’s green Explorer from the conga line of passing cars. And just about then, something exploded.
    Patrick sat at a red light in his unmarked police car, waiting to turn onto the highway. Beside him, on the passenger seat, was a paper bag with a vial of cocaine inside it. The dealer they’d busted at the high school had admitted it was cocaine, and yet Patrick had to waste half his day taking it to the state lab so that someone in a white coat could tell him what he already knew. He fiddled with the volume button of the dispatch radio just in time to hear the fire department being sent to the high school for an explosion. Probably the boiler; the school was old enough for its internal structure to be falling apart. He tried to remember where the boiler was located in Sterling High, and wondered if they’d be lucky enough to come out of that kind of situation without anyone being hurt.
    Shots fired…
    The light turned green, but Patrick didn’t move. The discharge of a gun in Sterling was rare enough to have him narrow his attention to the voice on the dispatch radio, waiting for an explanation.
    At the high school…Sterling High…
    The dispatcher’s voice was getting faster, more intense. Patrick wheeled the car in a U-turn and started toward the school with his lights flashing. Other voices began to transmit in static bursts: officers stating their positions in town; the on-duty supervisor trying to coordinate manpower and calling for mutual aid from Hanover and Lebanon. Their voices knotted and tangled, blocking one another so that everything and nothing was being said at once.
    Signal 1000, the dispatcher said. Signal 1000.
    In Patrick’s entire career as a detective, he’d only heard that call twice. Once was in Maine, when a deadbeat dad had taken an officer hostage. Once was in Sterling, during a potential bank robbery that turned out to be a false alarm. Signal 1000 meant that everyone, immediately, was to get off the radio and leave it free for dispatch. It meant that what they were dealing with was not routine police business.
    It meant life or death.
    Chaos was a constellation of students, running out of the school and trampling the injured. A boy holding a handmade sign in an upstairs window that read help us. Two girls hugging each other and sobbing. Chaos was blood melting pink on the snow; it was the drip of parents that turned into a stream and then a raging river, screaming out the names of their missing children. Chaos was a TV camera in your face, not enough ambulances, not enough officers, and no plan for how to react when the world as you knew it went to pieces.
    Patrick pulled halfway onto the sidewalk and grabbed his bulletproof vest from the back of the car. Already, adrenaline pulsed through him, making the edges of his vision swim and his senses more acute. He found Chief O’Rourke standing with a megaphone in the middle of the melee. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with yet,” the chief said. “SOU’s on its way.”
    Patrick didn’t give a damn about the Special Operations Unit. By the time the SWAT team got here, a hundred more shots might be fired; a kid might be killed. He drew his gun. “I’m going in.”
    “The hell you are. That’s not protocol.”
    “There is no fucking protocol for this,” Patrick snapped. “You can fire me later.”
    As he raced up the steps to the school, he was vaguely aware of two other patrol officers bucking the chief’s commands and joining him in the fray. Patrick