The Listener. Kay David

I’ll be fine.” Ryan straightened slowly. “I feel better already.”

      The boy nodded. He’d heard adults lie before, the motion said, and he knew better than to challenge them. Without another word, he edged around Ryan and headed back to the crowd. Ryan turned and strode in the opposite direction, toward the range, the kid already forgotten.

      Damn Maria Worley. What in the hell was she doing to him?

      “I’LL HAVE three dogs, two with chili, one without. And lots of onions. Oh, and we want three lemonades, too. No…make that one lemonade and two iced teas….”

      With a frazzled nod, Maria took the older man’s order and began to prepare it. Business had been nonstop all morning and she was ready to collapse. Lena had promised to help but once the organized activities had begun, she’d disappeared, her presence needed elsewhere. Just as Maria was about to scream, her relief appeared. A teacher from the elementary school, Cindy took one look at Maria and waved her off. “I’ll handle this now,” she said with practiced aplomb. “You go on…”

      With a grateful nod, Maria removed her apron and stepped outside the booth. She wanted to find the nearest picnic table and collapse but she’d only been able to check on Christopher once since they’d arrived. She needed to find him first, then she could relax.

      Wading into the crowd, she searched for him. The task seemed impossible. A lot of people had shown up in the past few hours and there were even more arrivals pouring into the gates as she walked about. Just as she was thinking of giving up, Christopher materialized at her elbow.

      “Hey, Mom…” He seemed in a much better mood, his earlier surliness a distant memory.

      “Hey, yourself,” she answered with a smile and a secret sigh of relief. “Are you having any fun or is this as terminally boring as you thought it would be?”

      “It’s kinda interesting,” he said, surprising her once more. “I’ve seen where the cops work and where they train and stuff….” He turned slightly and pointed over his shoulder. “Back there, they even have a shooting range. In a few minutes they’re gonna show off some of the weapons they use. Wanna go?”

      “Weapons? You mean with guns?”

      Christopher rolled his eyes. “Yesss, Mom, guns! Whaddaya think they use to get the bad guys? Bows and arrows?”

      She’d asked the question to gain some time—she barely heard her son’s smart-aleck reply. There was only one person who would be running that operation, and she wasn’t really sure she wanted to see him in action. Ryan Lukas was scary enough just standing still and saying nothing. What would he look like with a gun in his hand?

      “C’mon, Mom,” Christopher urged. “I wanna see, but they aren’t lettin’ kids in by themselves. Come with me…please?”

      She looked down and into Chris’s excited eyes. It was the first time in weeks she’d actually seen him interested in something other than giving her a hard time. She couldn’t refuse. “Okay,” she said, throwing up her hands. “You lead the way, I’ll follow.”

      He took off so fast she had trouble keeping up with him. In just a few short minutes they were at the rear of the facility. People were being funneled into a cordoned area, passing by a uniformed officer first, a man Maria didn’t recognize. He smiled at them both in a friendly way and waved them through. Christopher pushed into the throng to head for the front, Maria apologizing for him as she dogged his steps. They came to the edge of the roped-in crowd where Ryan Lukas was already speaking.

      His voice was low and steady. Maria might have had to strain to hear him except everyone around her was completely quiet. They were focused on the sniper, she realized at once, and when she followed their stares, she understood why.

      He was mesmerizing. His commanding presence made it impossible to look elsewhere. Tall and muscular, Ryan Lukas appeared as if he were ready for anything. But only part of his magnetism was physical; the rest came from the unspoken sense of purpose that seemed to radiate from an internal source of energy.

      Even Christopher fell under Ryan’s spell. Usually fidgeting, easily bored, her son leaned over the yellow ribbon and stared at the sniper with fascinated concentration.

      “We didn’t always have SWAT teams,” Ryan was explaining as Maria began to listen. “The first one came into existence after an incident in Austin, Texas, in August of 1966. Does anyone here know what I’m talking about?”

      The people around the rope shook their head. Maria had no idea herself. She’d been born that year.

      “A man named Charles Joseph Whitman, an honor student at the University of Texas in Austin, climbed into the elevator of what was known as the Texas Tower. At that time, it was the tallest building in Austin—308 feet high. Whitman was twenty-five and he was wheeling a dolly that contained a foot-locker. Inside the footlocker was a sawed-off shotgun, two handguns and three rifles. He also had hundreds of rounds of ammo, a container of gasoline, a gallon of water and his lunch.”

      Christopher hadn’t moved an inch, and neither had Maria. She felt herself tense as Ryan began to speak once more.

      “No one knew at the time, of course, but Whitman had already murdered three people—his mother, his wife and a receptionist inside the tower. When he reached the thirty-second floor of the building, he shot three more people, a woman and her two children who happened to be looking over the campus. He then set up his equipment. For an hour and a half he fired. He killed more than a dozen people and wounded over thirty.”

      The group of people standing around Maria and Christopher murmured quietly. She felt her stomach roll over at Ryan’s calm description, but underneath his outer shell, she sensed a deep disquiet. He’d obviously told this story more than once, yet the details continued to disturb him.

      “Officers from every law enforcement agency in the area responded—the Texas Highway Patrol, the Austin Police force, the Capitol Grounds Police Force, even the campus police—but they were helpless. They even tried to fire on him from a plane above. Nothing worked. The cops and medical people couldn’t even rescue the wounded or dying. Finally, two officers from the Austin police department gained entry by using a tunnel located underneath the tower. Once inside they climbed up. Whitman spotted them when they came out to the observation deck and shot at them. They returned fire and wounded him. He continued to shoot until they killed him.” He paused and took a breath. “Some people believe this was when the need for a SWAT team—Special Weapons and Tactics—was born.”

      Maria blinked then glanced down at Christopher. He was completely enthralled, and she felt uneasiness brush over her.

      “The tools of the SWAT team are just one of the things that set them apart, allowing them to disable people like Charles Whitman,” Ryan continued. “Today I’m going to show you a few of the guns. We won’t be firing them, of course, but you can see what they look like and how they work….”

      As he brought out a variety of wicked-looking weapons Maria suddenly wanted to pull her son away from the gleaming barrels and turn and run. Just as quickly, though, she realized she was being silly. Guns didn’t create violence on their own. Maybe it was good for Chris to realize how carefully they needed to be handled. Ryan’s large hands wrapped around the grips comfortably, she saw, but still he was treating them with a great deal of respect.

      In the end, she stayed where she was and let Christopher listen to it all. When Ryan finished and the crowd began to disperse, she moved away as well, but Christopher tugged her back.

      “Mom, I saw him earlier, but I didn’t know who he was then.” He tilted his head toward Ryan and spoke in a low, almost confidential voice. “He was on the path out back. He seemed sick, but he looks okay now, doesn’t he?”

      Maria’s attention focused at once. “You saw Lieutenant Lukas? And he looked sick?”

      Christopher nodded importantly. “He was standing on the path all by himself. I thought he wanted to puke or something but when I asked him