Chapter 43

The meeting with the headmaster was on a Wednesday.

Quinn had known it was coming. He’d done the accounting in the holding cell and again in the mornings running his familiar route. He had worked through the probable sequence of events with the attention he brought to things he needed to understand before they happened.

He’d been at the school for three and a half years on a scholarship constructed around a fiction the school had participated in—one that the school would now need to manage. He’d discharged a firearm in public. He’d been arrested. Even though he’d been released, he was featured on fifty-odd videos that had been viewed several million times.

The school had a problem. It had its reputation, its donors, and its parents. Those parents were paying a lot of money to buy safety and order for the controlled excellence that St. Crispin’s Preparatory Academy had been selling for sixty years. A kid who shot up a mall just before Christmas was a problem.

Quinn was not angry about this. He understood it. But that didn’t mean he was going to let them throw him under a bus.

The headmaster’s office was like he remembered it. The degrees on the wall were arranged alongside photographs of the headmaster shaking the hands of San Francisco’s movers and shakers.

Dr. Harmon was fifty-eight, a former academic who had moved into administration because he found the management of institutional reputation more interesting than the disbursing of ideas.

Quinn and the Colonel sat across from the desk and waited.

Harmon began.

He began in the way that people in his position began difficult conversations — the windup, the approach, the clearing of the institutional throat, the organization of language designed to move toward an outcome while maintaining the posture of deliberation.