Innocent Blood Read online

  Danny skidded to a stop, hesitated, and then began to run back. As he did so, Frank saw a white van drive through the school gates and stop by Mr Lomax’s little glass booth.

  Wednesday, September 22, 9:32 A.M.

  Kathy had changed into her field hockey kit and joined the shuffling, giggling line at the changing-room door. Eventually Ms Bushmeyer appeared, wearing her cerise and white tracksuit, with her whistle around her neck on a lanyard.

  ‘All right, girls, an orderly line, please! No pushing and shoving!’

  ‘Amanda pulled my braids.’

  ‘I did not! I was nowhere near you!’

  They left the church building by the side entrance, still arguing. Kathy and Terra walked on either side of Lilian Bushmeyer. They liked talking to Ms Bushmeyer because she was always telling them that she dreamed about a handsome man with thick black hair and shining white teeth, who would come striding through the school gates one morning, walk straight into assembly, and lift her clean off her feet in front of everybody. Then he would fly her off to a Caribbean island where they would lie on the dazzling white sands all day and drink cocktails out of half coconuts.

  ‘Did you ever have a boyfriend, Ms Bushmeyer?’

  ‘Of course I did. His name was Clark.’

  ‘You mean like Superman?’

  Lilian Bushmeyer pushed her frizzy hair into her sweatband. ‘Not exactly, Kathy. He sold carpets.’

  They were nearly halfway across the parking lot on their way to the playing fields when they saw the white van, too.

  Wednesday, September 22, 9:34 A.M.

  It was an ordinary white panel van. It had to stop because the school gates were always locked after nine A.M., for the sake of security. There were too many students at The Cedars whose parents may not have been Hollywood A-list, but who were certainly wealthy and well known and who could have been potential targets for kidnap.

  The van driver tooted his horn and Mr Lomax came out of his booth. Mr Lomax was very tall and loopy, like a basketball player, and he wore a beige uniform with a peaked cap. Lilian Bushmeyer couldn’t stop herself from thinking about the ‘Mr Lomax’ prediction in Jade Peller’s fortune-teller, and – to her own embarrassment – found herself blushing. She turned to the chattering crocodile behind her and called out, ‘Come along, girls, we don’t have all day!’

  Mr Lomax opened the gates and the van drove into the parking lot toward them. Lilian Bushmeyer noticed how slowly it was being driven, as if she were watching it in a dream.

  ‘Keep well out of the way, girls!’

  The van was almost alongside them now. Lilian Bushmeyer looked at the driver and for some reason he was smiling at her, really smiling, as if today was the happiest day of his whole life. He was unshaven and he was wearing a black woolly hat. There was a woman sitting next to him, wearing dark glasses, but she wasn’t smiling at all.

  Wednesday, September 22, 9:35 A.M.

  Lilian Bushmeyer felt a strange compression in her ears, but she didn’t hear anything. The van exploded only ten feet away, blowing off her legs and arms and sending her torso flying through the high stained-glass window of the Zeigler Memorial Library, where nine students were just beginning a class in creative writing. Six of them were killed instantly.

  The field hockey team were strewn across the parking lot, so violently torn apart that it looked as if they had been attacked by wild animals.

  The van itself was blown into a wild sculptural question mark of twisted paneling. An orange fireball rolled out of it, up into the blue morning sky, and the bang echoed around the canyons like a frightening shout.

  Wednesday, September 22, 9:35 A.M.

  Even though the van had blown up nearly two hundred feet away, the force of the blast was so powerful that Frank had been hurled against the passenger door of a parked Toyota, denting it into the shape of his body. Danny was thrown face-first on to the sidewalk. The Cedars had completely disappeared behind a huge cloud of black smoke and dust. Leaves had been stripped from the yucca trees all the way along the street and sent whirling up into the air.

  Now, through the fog, fragments of metal – nuts, bolts, a windshield wiper, a length of exhaust pipe – began to rain down all around them, clanging and tinkling like a chorus of badly tuned bells. Frank was hit on the shoulder by a tire iron, and then by a stinging shower of ball bearings. He tossed aside Danny’s sandwich box, grabbed hold of his arm and hoisted him to his feet. Danny’s nose and knees were scratched, but apart from that he seemed to be unhurt.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Frank shouted, still deafened.

  ‘My back hurts.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My back hurts!’

  Frank turned him around and around but he couldn’t see any sign of injury. No blood, no rips in his jacket. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s get out of here.’ He took hold of Danny’s hand and pulled him along the street as fast as he could run until they reached their car. He wrenched open the door, bundled Danny into the back seat, and then seized his cellphone.

  ‘Emergency? You’re going to have to send everything you’ve got – fire, police, ambulance, everything. A bomb’s gone off at The Cedars school on Franklin Avenue . . . That’s right . . . No, no. It’s a bomb for sure. People have been killed, I’ve seen them. Children. I don’t know how many.’

  ‘Can you give me your name, sir?’

  ‘Frank. Frank Bell. I was just taking my son to school and bang! There were children killed. They’re lying all over the parking lot. It’s just terrible.’

  ‘OK, sir, please try to stay calm. Are you at a safe distance from the school now?’

  ‘Yes, yes I am, I think. Me and my son.’

  ‘Stay well away until the emergency services arrive. There could be a secondary device. Warn others to stay away, too.’

  ‘A secondary device? You mean another bomb?’

  ‘Just stay well away, sir, but make yourself known to the police when they reach you.’

  ‘Got you, yes.’

  Danny was white. ‘Was that a bomb? Was that really a bomb?’

  Frank nodded. He was shaking so much that he could hardly speak. ‘How do you feel now? Does your back still hurt?’

  Danny grimaced and nodded. ‘My knees are bleeding.’

  Frank reached into the glovebox and found him a Kleenex. He looked back toward The Cedars and saw a thick cloud of gray dust rolling out of the school parking lot and across the street. People were staggering out of it with their hands held out in front of them, like zombies.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I have to go back to help. You stay here and call Mommy. Tell her what’s happened; tell her we’re both OK.’

  Danny said, ‘You have blood on your face.’

  ‘What?’ He touched his forehead and it felt wet. He pulled down his sun visor to look at himself in the mirror. There was a small cut just below his hairline and the blood was sliding down toward his nose. He tugged out another Kleenex and dabbed at it, staring at himself as he did so. Apart from that single minor injury, he looked completely normal. Thin-faced, pale, bespectacled. How could he look so normal when he had just witnessed a bomb going off, and all those children killed?

  ‘Call Mommy, OK?’ he said, handing Danny his cellphone. ‘She’s going to see this on TV and I want her to know that we’re safe.’

  Wednesday, September 22, 9:41 A.M.

  Frank jogged back toward the school. The dust was settling now and gradually the outline of the church building was reappearing. It looked from the street as if the entire front of the library had been demolished, as well as half of the front portico, and every single window was broken. Teachers and children were emerging from the side entrance, most of them bloodied and smothered in dust, all of them walking in a strange hypnotized shuffle, like hermits let out of a cave. Some of them were screaming a high, monotonous scream.

  Several people were already sitting on the sidewalk, their faces scorched, their clothing ripped, their eyes staring in shoc
k. A middle-aged woman came limping toward him, holding up her left arm. She wore a brown floral dress and her ginger hair was sticking up in the air as if she had been electrocuted. She had no left hand, only a stump with a white bone sticking out.

  ‘I’m all right,’ she reassured him as she approached. ‘Don’t worry about me. See to the children.’

  ‘Here, sit down,’ he told her, and eased her on to the grass with her back against the wheel of a parked car. He yanked off his red and yellow necktie and twisted it around her forearm, knotting it tight. ‘Just stay here, ma’am; you’re going to be OK. The paramedics will be here in a couple of minutes.’

  ‘It doesn’t hurt, you know,’ she said, looking at her wrist and turning it this way and that, as if it were quite a novelty. ‘It doesn’t hurt in the slightest.’

  The wrought-iron school gates were still standing but they had been strangely twisted, as if he was looking at them through rippling water. Beside the gates, Mr Lomax’s security booth was leaning at an angle, and all the glass had been blown out of the windows. Mr Lomax himself was sitting on his revolving chair, his beige uniform in black tatters, like crow’s feathers. There was a large black lump by his left eye, and as Frank moved cautiously closer he realized that it was the head of a claw hammer. The shaft of the hammer had penetrated Mr Lomax’s eye socket and it was only the hammer head that had prevented it from going clean through his skull and out the other side.

  Frank stood by the security booth, breathless, swimmy-headed, feeling completely helpless. Teachers and children were still milling around outside the side entrance, and he desperately wanted to do something to help them, but he couldn’t think what. As for the children lying in the parking lot, they were beyond anything but burial – and prayers.

  ‘Oh shit,’ he said. ‘Oh shit.’ He turned away and his eyes suddenly became crowded with tears.

  A girl appeared, close beside him. Her cropped brown hair was ashen with dust, and her jeans and her buttermilk-colored blouse were finely spattered with blood. She was wearing only one sandal.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asked him. She reached out and gently touched his shoulder as if she were trying to make sure that he was real.

  ‘What?’ he said, frowning at her. He was still half deaf.

  She leaned closer, holding his shoulder more firmly. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked him. ‘You’re not hurt, are you?’ She had a husky voice, like a heavy smoker.

  ‘I have this ringing in my ears. But otherwise, no, I’m fine.’

  ‘It was a bomb,’ she said.

  ‘I know. But I don’t know what to do. I called 911 but they said I had to keep away.’ He cleared his throat and wiped his eyes with his fingers, leaving wet gray smears down his cheeks. ‘Something about a . . . secondary something. Device, bomb.’

  ‘You didn’t have a child here, did you?’ she asked him.

  ‘My son, he goes here. But we were held up in traffic. Otherwise . . . Jesus. But all those other kids. Oh, God. All those other kids . . .’

  ‘I’ve lost somebody,’ the girl told him. She said it in such a flat tone of voice that he blinked and focused on her more closely. Her irises were rinsed-out blue, almost colorless, and he had the strangest feeling that he had seen her before. More than that – that he actually knew her.

  ‘I’m so sorry. Not your child, I hope?’

  ‘No, not a child. Somebody closer than that.’

  He looked around. He could hear sirens whooping and racing toward them in the warm morning air. ‘Listen, why don’t you sit down?’ he suggested.

  ‘I’m OK. I just wanted to make sure that you were OK.’

  ‘Sure, I’m OK.’

  Around the devastated school an unnatural quiet had descended. The yucca leaves were rustling down; the dust was settling. The children had stopped screaming and, although some of them were still sobbing, they were very muted, as if they were afraid to make too much noise.

  Wednesday, September 22, 9:44 A.M.

  A police car slewed to a halt in front of the school, quickly followed by another, and another. Then two fire trucks came up the street, their lights flashing and their horns blaring like enraged elephants. Next came an ambulance, and two more squad cars, and another ambulance, and another fire truck, and three TV vans. In the space of a few minutes, Franklin Avenue was crowded with emergency vehicles and police and firemen running out hoses.

  A police officer with a gingery sweeping-brush moustache came up to Frank and said, ‘Did you witness this, sir?’

  ‘I was taking my boy to school . . . We were late.’

  ‘But you saw what happened?’

  ‘There was a white panel van . . . it just exploded. I came back to help but I didn’t know what to do.’

  ‘OK, listen. Right now we have to get this situation under control, but we’ll need to speak to you later. Give me your name and address and telephone number and somebody will be in touch with you later today.’

  Frank reached into his billfold and took out his business card. ‘This young lady saw what happened, too.’

  The police officer looked around him, left, then right, and then he shrugged in bafflement. Frank turned, and was just in time to see the girl disappearing around the corner of Gardner Street.

  ‘She . . . er . . . she left. She’s probably even more shocked than I am.’

  ‘That’s OK, sir. Now, if you can leave the area and let the emergency people get on with what they have to do.’

  ‘Of course, yes. Absolutely.’

  Frank took one more look across at the school. Paramedics were already stepping through the litter of the fallen children, kneeling down now and again to check if any of them were still alive. The clock in the church steeple chimed the three-quarter hour. Usually this provoked a flutter of California quail, but this time there were none. They had all been frightened far away by the bomb blast.

  Frank walked back to his car and climbed in. Danny was still sitting in the back seat, although he looked very pale. Delayed shock, thought Frank. He was suffering from shock, too, to the point where he found it difficult to make his lips speak any sense.

  ‘Danny? Did you manage to talk to Mom?’

  Danny didn’t answer but simply stared at him. He had the strangest expression on his face, as if he were smiling at a private joke.

  ‘Danny? Are you feeling OK?’

  Still Danny didn’t answer. Frank twisted round in his seat and said, ‘Come on, champ. I’ll take you home and you can go to bed for the rest of the day.’ Danny continued to stare at him. ‘Danny? Quit fooling around, Danny, this is too damn serious.’

  He climbed out of the car again and opened Danny’s door. He reached out for Danny’s shoulder and as he did so the boy fell sideways on to the seat. The back of his blazer was soaked dark with blood.

  Oh, God, no. Oh, God, not Danny. Frank lifted Danny up and cupped his face in both hands. He was still warm. But his eyes were unfocused and his mouth was hanging open and he wasn’t breathing.

  Frank felt as if his heart had dropped ten thousand feet. He scooped his hands under Danny’s legs and lifted him awkwardly out of the car. There was blood everywhere, all over his shorts, all over his thighs, even on his sneakers.

  ‘Paramedic!’ he screamed, running back along the sidewalk with Danny lolling in his arms. ‘For Christ’s sake, get me a paramedic!’

  Wednesday, September 22, 6:47 P.M.

  At the hospital, the young medical examiner came out to the waiting area where Frank and Margot were sitting beside a parched yucca and a black youth with an interminable sniff. The medical examiner was soft-spoken, evasive, with hairy hands that crawled around his knees like two tame tarantulas.

  ‘I’ve examined Danny and I’ve discovered what happened. An ordinary woodworking nail penetrated his middle back between his fifth and sixth ribs. It was traveling at considerable velocity, almost as fast as a bullet. If it had gone right through him, back to front, his chances of survival would have been very
much higher. But, unfortunately, it struck his sternum – his breastbone – and was deflected back into his abdomen. It entered his liver at an oblique angle, causing considerable trauma.’

  Margot covered her mouth with her hand and her eyes filled up with tears.

  Frank said, ‘I want you to be honest with me, doctor.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘If I had realized that Danny was so badly injured . . . I mean, if I had taken him to the hospital immediately he was injured . . . do you think they could have saved him?’

  The medical examiner glanced uneasily at Margot, and then turned back to Frank.

  ‘In my opinion, yes. But that’s only my opinion.’

  One

  He sat on the couch in front of the television and watched the bombing on the news, again and again. Margot had taken a wicker chair to the conservatory window and sat staring out at the red and yellow swing set in the yard. He didn’t know whether she was listening to the television or not, or whether she was even aware that he was still sitting there. She was smoking for the first time in four and a half years. Very occasionally, she coughed.

  ‘Hollywood and the world were devastated this morning when a terrorist bomb exploded in the grounds of one of the city’s most exclusive elementary schools, killing at least seventeen students and three faculty members and seriously injuring very many more.

  ‘A suicide bomber drove the device into the school’s front yard in a white panel van, detonating it only ten feet away from a line of children who were on their way to play sports in a nearby field. Some of the children have yet to be formally identified.

  ‘Among the dead and injured were the sons and daughters of some of Hollywood’s best-known celebrities, including the ten-year-old daughter of Lynn Ashbee, who plays Megan White in May to September; the nine-year-old daughter of Billy Kretchmer, who plays Jed Summers in The Fairchild Family, and the eight-year-old son of scriptwriter Frank Bell, who has penned more than nineteen episodes of the hit comedy series If Pigs Could Sing.

  ‘Eye witnesses described the scene as “carnage,” with children’s bodies strewn all over the schoolyard. The bomb blast was heard seven miles away in Sherman Oaks, and initial estimates suggest that the van contained more than three hundred and fifty pounds of high explosive. It was also packed with scrap metal, including tools, ball bearings, razor-wire and auto parts, in order to make its effect doubly devastating.