Please pardon the late posting! Things have been annoyingly hectic on my end lately. But here ya go. Here’s more fucking Trigger Warning!
I honestly cannot even begin to summarise what is happening in this book. I think people are still being held hostage in the university library by the FAR FAR LEFT!
Chapter 29:
As Cal Granderson returns to consciousness, he thinks he hears his grandmother’s voice.
Then he realized that it wasn’t her voice, made raspy and screechy by decades of smoking weed, that he heard. It was some guy shouting, “Get down, get down!”
That sounded like something Grandma might have said, all right, but it wasn’t her.
Johnstone, William W.. Trigger Warning (p. 235). Kensington. Kindle Edition.
I love this for many reasons. Firstly that Cal Granderson’s grandmother smoked a lot of weed (which apparently made her voice raspy??). Secondly that he could confuse her voice with this man’s shouting due to all the weed smoking. And lastly that IT SOUNDS LIKE SOMETHING GRANDMA MIGHT HAVE SAID! I imagine his grandmother was a DJ who just wanted everyone to get down and have a good time at the club.
After a while—he couldn’t tell how long, but the yelling was still going on, for whatever that was worth—his vision cleared some and he could tell what he was looking at, at such close range.
It was a floor tile.
Granderson knew a floor tile when he saw one. He had run a buffer over enough of them, during a stint working as a janitor a few years ago…
Johnstone, William W.. Trigger Warning (pp. 235-236). Kensington. Kindle Edition.
I feel like you don’t need to have worked as a janitor to correctly identify a floor tile, but sure.
Cal finally remembers what’s going on, but realises that he is still too weak to do anything about it. He tries to figure out what’s going on while pretending to still be unconscious. Fear not, the moment is not dire enough for Cal not to check his bias.
Think like a cop, he told himself. Think like a cop. What did the gunmen want? They weren’t here to rob somebody, or they would have done that and gone already. They weren’t spree killers, or surely they would have put some bullets in him. If they had been Middle Eastern, his first hunch would have been that they were terrorists—but then he felt ashamed of himself for allowing that thought to cross his mind now. He didn’t want to be Islam-ophobic.
Johnstone, William W.. Trigger Warning (p. 237). Kensington. Kindle Edition.
He quickly determines that they must be demanding a huge amount of money. He also somehow determines that soon enough he’ll be able to fight again (even though it’s a struggle for him to even determine if he can still move his fingers???)
All those on the outside—Chief McRainey, the Greenleaf cops who had been too good to hire him, the state police, probably even the FBI—they would all be freaking out about now. What they didn’t know was that they had a secret weapon on the inside, a secret weapon named Cal Granderson.
He had to smile a little at the thought, but not so much that anybody would notice.
Johnstone, William W.. Trigger Warning (p. 238). Kensington. Kindle Edition.
Grooooan.
We then switch on over to McRainey’s story. He also has just woken up except he’s in the back of an ambulance on the way to the hospital. He insists that he doesn’t need to go to the hospital. Eventually, he convinces the EMTs to let him go so he can help save the day.
Sadly, these next scenes are just cops talking about securing the buildings and strategizing to save the hostages WITHOUT SO MUCH AS A WHIFF OF IDEOLOGY CLUNKILY WOVEN IN!
McRainey and the other cop he’s speaking to decide that the hostages are going to have to get the upper hand somehow, which seems like absolutely the wrong strategy for them to be planning for. McRainey wonders where Jake Rivers is.
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