After the Sunrise (Maximum Security)

  AFTER THE SUNRISE

  By

  Kat Martin

  Kindle Edition

  Copyright 2018 by Kat Martin

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Wolfpack Productions

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Author’s Note

  EXCERPT: THE CONSPIRACY

  BUY LINKS: THE CONSPIRACY

  Chapter One

  Three gunshots and an eruption of screams. After five years in Afghanistan, Kurt Layton recognized the sounds. Sitting in an empty pew at the back of St. Andrew’s church, he dropped to the floor out of sight and crawled toward the far end of the pew, then along the outside aisle toward the shooter, who strode down the center aisle pulling off rounds.

  Every second meant death. People crying and shouting raced for the exit while Kurt ran toward the gunman, his Beretta solidly in hand. He caught a glimpse of the shooter, full camo, armored vest, assault rifle, ducked and kept moving.

  The gunman pulled off a round and Kurt heard the sound of a body hitting the floor. He was as close as he was going to get. He popped up forty feet away, saw the shooter’s weapon pointed at a young woman with auburn hair crouched at the end of a pew, read death in the gunman’s face as he pointed his weapon at the woman.

  One chance to save her. No room for error. With the guy in body armor, Kurt took the only shot he had, aimed at the shooter’s head, and fired. A single bullet and the man went down hard, his head a mass of blood and brains, the woman in the aisle screaming, folded in on herself as if she tried to disappear.

  She was covered in blood, streaks of crimson in her shoulder-length auburn hair. She was shaking head to foot, but she was safe. Kurt checked the area in all directions, looking for a single shooter, but had seen no sign of one. Rounding the gunman’s body, he caught the woman’s wrist and drew her gently to her feet.

  “You’re safe. It’s over. He’s dead. He can’t hurt you now.”

  She looked up at him with big blue, terrified eyes and seemed to pull herself together. “Okay.”

  Kurt gave her a quick nod and turned to help the victims. Four down, three of them near the aisle, one at the far end of a pew three rows back. The good news was, three of them were conscious and moving. He headed for the fourth victim, a young man in his early twenties.

  Kurt knelt next to him and checked for a pulse, felt a heartbeat softly throbbing beneath his fingers. Thank the good Lord, the kid was breathing, but he’d taken a round in the upper left chest. Kurt grabbed a hymnal out of the back of the pew and pressed it over the hole to slow the bleeding.

  In the distance, he could hear the blare of sirens, figured it was time to lose his semi-auto before one of the responding officers shot him, thinking he was the perp.

  The sirens grew louder, then abruptly fell silent. More sirens wailed on their way to the scene.

  “Shooter’s dead!” Kurt shouted to the blue-uniformed officers streaming into the church. “Man down over here!”

  “Raise your hands and slowly come to your feet!” one of the cops called out, his weapon aimed dead center at Kurt’s chest.

  “I need some help here,” he said, then, spotting a couple of EMTs hovering near the entrance, rose to his feet, hands in the air. The EMTs rushed down the outer aisle then along the pew till they reached the victim. Kurt moved toward the cop with the gun.

  “Kurt Layton,” he said. “I’m with Maximum Security. I’m licensed to carry. I was here to provide protection. My weapon is on the floor. It’s been fired two times.”

  “This way,” the officer said. As Kurt made his way to the middle aisle, he spotted the girl he had rescued, the pretty young woman in the yellow dress. She was attending to a man who had been shot in the leg. He gave her kudos for grit.

  The church was swarming with personnel, EMTs, police officers, and churchgoers trying to help. Above the altar, red, green, yellow, and blue light poured in through the big stained glass windows, making the scene look oddly surreal.

  An officer moved toward him, spun him around and cuffed his hands behind his back. He was big and broad-shouldered, with short dark hair streaked with gray. He made a quick weapons search while another officer bagged Kurt’s pistol.

  “Sorry,” the officer said. “Standard procedure. I’m Lieutenant Radcliff, Dallas PD.”

  “I’ve got ID in my pocket.”

  Radcliff checked, found his badge wallet, checked his credentials, and nodded for a patrolman to uncuff him. Radcliff glanced around at the carnage, the people crying, the bloody body on the floor. “Damn glad you were here.”

  Kurt absently rubbed his wrists. “So am I.”

  “Tough shot you made. Saved a lot of lives. You former military?”

  Kurt nodded. “Rangers. I been out a while.”

  “Like I said, damn glad you were here.” He handed back the badge wallet and Kurt tucked it into the inside pocket of the brown tweed blazer he was wearing with his jeans and boots.

  “We’ll need a statement before you can leave,” Radcliff said. “You can talk to one of the detectives. And we’ll need to keep your weapon as evidence.”

  He owned backup pieces. Security was his job. “No problem. Any idea who the shooter was?”

  “Not yet, but we will. Good news it looks like only one man.”

  “Far as I could tell,” Kurt said.

  Radcliff glanced toward the foyer. “There’s an army of reporters out there. You’re a hero, Kurt.”

  He shook his head. He had heard those words in Afghanistan. “I was just doing my job.” Same thing he had said back then.

  Radcliff glanced toward the body. “Maybe. Doesn’t change the fact.” A patrolman walked up just then and requested the lieutenant’s presence. “I’ll be right there.”

  He stuck out a meaty hand to Kurt. “Thank you. For your service and for what you did here today.” The men shook and the lieutenant walked away.

  A detective approached, tall and lean, in a tailored brown suit and polished brown shoes, better dressed than the usual gumshoe. “Let’s go into the vestibule where we can talk.” They made their way into a small room off the foyer where there was a desk and two chairs.

  Kurt sat down and gave his statement, relaying events as they unfolded. The interview lasted less than an hour. It was fairly clear what had occurred.

  The only question was the same one that haunted every bloody shooting like this. Why had the gunman done it?

  Kurt wondered if they would ever find out.

  Chapter Two

  In the shade of a sycamore tree behind the church, Erin McCallum sat in a lawn chair that one of the neighbors had brought over, her hands trapped between her knees as she fought to keep herself from trembling.

  Her pretty yellow dress was spotted with blood, along with the high-heeled sandals she had given herself a few months back as a gift for her twenty-eighth birthday.

  The EMTs had checked her out and helped her clean the blood off her face and out of her hair, but she had refused to go with them to the hospital. It was her nerves and her heart that were wounded. She had been one of the lucky ones.

  A sob caught in her throat as her mind flashed back to the shooting, to the screaming and the echo of gunfire. No one is dead, she reminded herself. She ha
d seen the bullet plow into Bobby Allen’s chest, seen him hit the floor the instant before she dropped to her knees and tried to hide, praying the gunman wouldn’t shoot her.

  She didn’t know Bobby’s condition, but he’d been alive when they wheeled him out of the church.

  “Ms. McCallum? I’m Detective Keith Holmes, Dallas PD. I’m here to take your statement.” The detective was tall and lean, with sandy hair slightly mussed. She noticed he was wearing nice-looking shoes.

  Holmes gave her a reassuring smile. “I know it’s difficult after what you’ve been through, but the sooner we know what happened, the safer for everyone.”

  Her gaze shot to his face. He was late thirties, better than average-looking. “You don’t...you don’t think there are more of them out there?”

  “Doesn’t look that way, but we can’t say for sure. Like I said, the more information we have, the better.”

  She nodded. She could handle this. She was still alive—thanks to the man who had rescued her.

  The detective flipped open his note pad. “Just start at the beginning.”

  The beginning. The reason she happened to be in church that Sunday? Because she had only started attending again in the last few months. She’d been in a dark place ever since her mother, a devout Catholic, had died of rapidly spreading ovarian cancer.

  Then Erin’s job at Jefferson Middle School had suffered budget cuts and she had been laid off. She’d tried to convince herself it was for the best, since the principal, Ron Stoddard, was such an ass, but teaching jobs were tough to find. So far she’d had no luck, and she was getting more and more discouraged.

  Today had been a particularly bad day. Feeling lonely, missing her mother, wondering how her life had gotten so out of control, she’d decided to attend the service.

  And then the shooting had started. She’d be dead if it hadn’t been for the tall man who had appeared out of nowhere to save her. Save all of them.

  The hero of St. Andrew's they were already calling him.

  If she closed her eyes, she could still see the way his jaw was set, his legs splayed, arms out, aim steady. She remembered having the insane thought that he must spend a lot of time outdoors because his brown hair had golden highlights from the sun.

  Erin still didn’t know his name.

  She looked up at the detective, who waited patiently for her to begin. But not at the real beginning. The detective didn’t want to know any of her personal thoughts. He wanted to know what she had seen, wanted her to describe events as they had happened.

  She took a deep breath. “I was listening to Father Murphy. He has a slight Irish lilt I find comforting. I was trying to concentrate but my mind was wandering when I heard a commotion and glanced toward the foyer and there was this soldier. Or I thought he was a soldier because he was wearing camouflage and a vest and carrying an assault rifle.”

  She trembled, swallowed.

  “Take your time.”

  She released a shaky breath. She didn’t want to see the shooting in her mind’s eye again, but she had no choice. “I wouldn’t have known what the gun was called except for seeing them on TV, seeing this happen to other people but never believing for an instant that it could happen to me.”

  She went on to describe what she had heard and seen, the blood and the chaos, looking up into the gunman’s eyes and seeing her own death. Hearing two quick pistol shots, seeing the gunman’s head explode.

  Then her savior had appeared as if by magic and gently drew her to her feet. He’d told her it was over and that she was safe.

  She fell silent for a while, her throat clogged with tears, and the detective didn’t push her. She was grateful for that. Eventually, he started asking questions and she answered each one, going over the same information again and again. She was exhausted by the time they’d finished, and teetering once more on the edge of tears.

  “That’s all we need for now,” Detective Holmes said gently, closing his notebook. “Do you have a car here or someone who can drive you home?”

  “I can walk. I don’t live very far away.”

  The detective motioned to one of the uniformed patrolmen. “Officer Sanchez, give Ms. McCallum a ride to her house. Make sure she gets inside safely.”

  The officer turned to her. “My name is Ben. I’ll take you home.” He was at least part Hispanic, no more than five-foot-seven, with dark eyes and black hair. He led her around the side of the church, out to the front, over to a black and white patrol car parked at the curb.

  The media was everywhere, dozens of cameras and reporters, even a helicopter buzzing around overhead. At the top of the church steps stood the man she recognized as her savior, the hero who had saved her from certain death and given her back her life. Dozens of reporters surrounded him, video cameras rolled.

  He was good-looking, she noticed for the first time, clean-shaven, his sun-lightened brown hair neatly trimmed. But even from a distance, she could tell he was frowning. He didn’t want to be there. He didn’t like the attention.

  He was the hero of St. Andrew's. The man who had saved her life.

  And she hadn’t even bothered to thank him.

  Chapter Three

  Kurt had never been one to sit idly by when there was work to be done. The mid-September afternoon was sliding into evening, the Texas heat easing a little this week as the year drifted toward fall.

  Sitting behind the laptop on the desk in his home office, he scanned the Internet for facts about the shooter, Mason Doan.

  By the time Kurt had escaped the media frenzy in front of the church and made his way back to his townhouse, the name of the shooter had been released. Kurt had immediately gone on the Web and found a photo of Doan’s Facebook page.

  After the shooting, the page had immediately been removed by the FBI, but there was always a backdoor in, someone who’d discovered the shooter’s identity, taken a screen shot of the page, and posted it on the Net.

  He recognized Mason Doan’s face, good-looking, with blond hair and brown eyes, a weak chin. Or at least it seemed that way to Kurt.

  From what he could tell from the page, Doan was a radical, an anti-religion fanatic who preferred Satan to Christ or anything to do with Christianity. He wasn’t any fonder of Jews. In fact, he hated pretty much all religion, believing it would be the downfall of humanity.

  In his warped mind, the devil held higher status than God. Doan had posted pentagrams and skulls, drawings of Beelzebub, and satanic goat heads. There were slurs against Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus. But mostly, he hated the Catholic church. Looked like Mason Doan was a lunatic, pure and simple.

  Which was good. It meant he had probably been acting on his own, an attack on Christians, a bloodbath in the name of the devil himself.

  Since Kurt’s phone had been ringing non-stop, he turned it off, which led to his best friend, Jonah Wolfe, and his boss, Chase Garrett, the owner of Maximum Security, stopping by to be sure he was okay.

  “I’m fine,” he told his friends over a Lone Star out of the six-pack they brought and insisted he share with them. “That wasn’t my first rodeo.”

  “I guess not,” Wolfe said, but “killing’s never easy.”

  Kurt thought it was a helluva lot easier than doing nothing while innocent people were being murdered.

  “Damn good thing you were there,” Chase said. He had dark blond hair and a short-cropped beard along his jaw. He’d been an MP in the Army, but it was a while ago. Jonah was black-haired and dark-eyed, a former police detective. Neither of them had trouble attracting women.

  “You realize,” Chase said, “if three other churches hadn’t gotten death threats, St. Andrew's wouldn’t have hired you.”

  Kurt felt a chill. An image of the pretty young woman in the yellow dress flashed in his head. He didn’t want to think about what would have happened if he hadn’t been there. “I’m just glad they did.”

  Jonah took a swallow of beer, set it down on the coffee table, and walked over to loo
k out the window. The townhouse wasn’t fancy, but the brown leather sofa and chairs, oak tables and big screen TV, suited Kurt just fine.

  “They’re still out there,” Jonah said. “Pack of bloodhounds. Looks like even more of them than before. I can’t believe they aren’t beating down your door.”

  “I talked to them. Asked if they’d give me a little privacy, at least for the rest of the day.”

  “The hero of St. Andrew's.” Jonah turned toward him. “That might be good for a few hours of peace and quiet, but don’t expect it to last.”

  Unfortunately, it probably wouldn’t.

  They finished their beers and the guys rose to leave. Jonah squeezed his shoulder. “Listen, bro, if there’s anything you need...”

  Kurt just nodded. He could count on the guys at The Max. Especially Jonah and Chase, who’d become close friends.

  “Might be smarter to take a few days off and get out of town till this blows over,” Chase said.

  “I’ll think about it. Might be a good idea.”

  By the time the men were gone, Kurt was yawning. He went to bed early, and though it had been a long, exhausting day, he didn’t really expect to sleep.

  As he’d figured, bloody nightmares plagued him. Bodies in the aisle beneath the glow of a stained glass window. At least the victims were all still alive. He wondered if God had been watching over them in His house of worship.

  He finally drifted off around four a.m. but it was an uneasy, restless sleep.

  He was still asleep at eight, when the first knock sounded at the door. Cursing, Kurt rolled over and grabbed his jeans, resigned to another long day.

  ***

  Wearing sunglasses and a paisley scarf tied over her wavy auburn hair, Erin wove her way through the crowd of reporters beginning to collect on the sidewalk in front of Kurt Layton’s townhouse. It was still early, but it looked as if some of them had been there all night.

  She rapped lightly and waited. Her second knock, a little louder, alerted them that something was going on and they began to cluster around her, hopeful that whoever she was, Kurt would open his door to let her in and they would get a glimpse of him. She didn’t expect him to come to the door wearing only a pair of jeans, zipped but not buttoned, his chest bare and his hair mussed.