Thirty
Sawyer comes back after a few minutes. We show him the stop sign and the structure Trey and I guess to be the building in which the shooting will take place. Sawyer cocks his head and looks at it through narrowed eyes, taking in the turrets and spires. He glances beyond it, and then he turns to peer along the stretch of buildings the other way. “I think it’s this one,” he says, pointing to Cobb Hall, but he doesn’t sound very sure.
“What happened to the shooters?” I ask, making sure nobody else is in earshot.
“They went to the parking lot, got in a car, and took off. I got the car info and license number. Not that it’ll do us any good.”
“Don’t you think we should call the police?” Trey asks. “I think we have to. Isn’t it the law or something?”
“Come on, Trey,” I say. “We went through this last time. They’re going to ask how we know. And then what?”
He’s quiet for a second. “Why can’t we leave an anonymous tip?”
I think about that. “Okay, that’s not a bad idea. Is there a way to do that?”
He shrugs. “Easy enough to find out with Sawyer’s phone.”
Sawyer is already looking it up. “Yeah, there’s an anonymous text line called TXT2TIP. It doesn’t give the cops your number.”
“So . . . we just say we think somebody has plans to shoot down a bunch of students sometime in the near future?” I think about it for a minute. “I suppose it would be better than nothing.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Sawyer looks up. “You think I should do it?”
We look at each other and nod. “We need all the help we can get,” Trey says. “It would make me feel a lot better about everything.”
“Me too,” Sawyer says. “Okay, here goes nothing. I sure hope this isn’t a trick.” His fingers fly over the screen. He stops, reads what he has and shows it to us.
“That looks good,” I say. Trey nods in agreement.
Sawyer takes a breath and lets it out. He presses send. And now the police know there might be a shooting in the near future near Cobb Hall.
There’s not much else we can do. We try to peer into windows on the first floor, but none of the ones we can see into look anything like what Sawyer described. We try the doors to the building all the way around, but they’re locked.
“You know,” I say after we come full circle around the buildings, “we might not want to be seen here. We look kind of suspicious since there aren’t very many students. Especially with the graffiti stuff that was happening, and now that the police have our tip…I mean, they could be on their way over. Maybe we should get out of here.”
Absently, Sawyer touches his puffy eye. “Yeah, that’s cool, but how are we going to monitor things to figure out timing? The buds on the trees are near where they’re supposed to be. The ivy is . . . well, it’s hard to tell if it’s the same as in the vision. I don’t think ivy changes much from day to day. The new stop sign will be up soon, I’m sure. But maybe there are other stop signs. And the vision doesn’t actually show the shooters walking into the building by the stop sign—they’re just walking near it. So I don’t know.” He looks around and we all start heading toward the meatball truck. “How are we supposed to know when it’s going to happen?”
Trey shrugs. “All we know is that it isn’t happening tonight. And that’s the best we can do.”
We stop by the food truck festival grounds to check it out like Dad’s expecting Trey to do. Trey takes care of booking a spot tomorrow for the meatball truck, and finally we’re on our way back home to Melrose Park. We don’t say much, but we’re all wondering. What day? What time? What building? What room? And I remember the way it was with the crash. Everything pointed to Valentine’s Day, but at the last minute I realized it was happening the night before. It was all about observation, noticing the littlest things in the vision, that made the difference. It’s unbelievably frustrating that I can’t see this thing myself.
“How are the visions?” I ask. It’s dark now, and we’re out of the city, heading back to school. Trey’s driving, I’m in the middle seat. Sawyer’s by the window, staring out, tapping out the sound of eleven gunshots on his thigh.
“They come and go.” He winces and closes his eyes, and his fingers stop tapping.
“Were you able to decipher any words from that whiteboard once you did a close-up?”
“No.”
I look at my lap, cringe, and ask another question. “In the vision, when you see the shot of the building, is there any particular part of the building that seems to be, like, the focus of the scene?”
He’s quiet. Trey glances at Sawyer and then at me. I shrug. He frowns and looks back at the road.
“Yeah,” Sawyer says after I’ve already given up on him. He shifts and stares out the window, and I realize he’s looking into the side mirror of the truck. “I mean, not any specific window, but there’s a section of what I think is Cobb Hall that gets a close-up.”
Without a word, Trey slips his phone from his pocket and hands it to me. I look at him, puzzled, but then remember he took pictures of the building. I go through them until I find a shot of Cobb Hall. I touch Sawyer’s arm. “Which part?”
He startles and looks at Trey’s phone for a long moment. And then he looks at me. “I can’t see the photo,” he says.