Page 46 of The Grave Artist

The late entry, standing in the aisle just behind their pew, was a young White man in jeans, a dark-green windbreaker and a baseball cap with no logo.

That he was White was not unusual. The Ezekiel Brethren congregation was only about 80 percent people of color. Williamson knew most of the parishioners well, but he didn’t recognize the newcomer.

There were plenty of seats, but the man continued to stand in the middle of the single aisle, gazing about, searching for congregants he was supposed to meet, Williamson assumed. He concentrated on his own singing. Reverend DeKalb encouraged everyone to join in.

A full two minutes passed and still the young man did not sit, and Williamson noted something—hebelievedhe noted something. As theman scanned the church, he was not looking at the clusters of White congregants but only those of color—Black and a few Latino families.

The beautiful, the beautiful river ...

And then it happened.

The man crouched, and Williamson recognized the way his hand disappeared into his jacket in a way that meant only one thing—he was cross-drawing a weapon.

Williamson was instantly on his feet, covering his wife and the boys beside her and flinging his son Marcus, closest to the threat, behind him. The boy actually caught air before Camille fielded him.

“Shooter!” he yelled in a booming baritone.

Williamson carried a .40 Glock—a powerful round—but there were parishioners behind the gunman. At this range, his bullet might tear through his target and strike innocents.

As the shooter’s weapon swept out—a Glock 9mm—Williamson launched himself forward. While some of the muscle from his college football days had pastured into fat, most remained rock solid. He slammed headlong into the perp. They both crashed into the pew on the other side of the aisle and sprawled to the floor.

The attacker was scrawny, but he twisted and slugged and kicked like someone possessed—no doubt trying to injure Williamson and get some distance so he could start shooting the other congregants.

Williamson shouted at Camille: “Get the boys out of here! Call it in!”

And he was infinitely grateful she didn’t hesitate but quickly shepherded their children to safety.

As the two men grappled, Williamson began to twist the gunman’s wrist, grunting with the effort as he issued a guttural command through clenched teeth. “Drop it.”

Rather than comply, the shooter used his left hand to pull the gun from his right and swung the muzzle back and forth as he looked for targets.

Some fled the church, but many remained, hiding behind the pews. Williamson had no way to warn them that a 9mm round could penetrate the wooden benches.

And more troubling, Mrs. Abbott, a grandmother who took six-year-old Mary to church when her mother worked, was panicking. She had simply dropped to the middle of the aisle not twenty feet from the gunman, using her body as a human shield to cover her screaming granddaughter.

The shooter noticed and smiled as he shifted to aim his weapon at them.

Williamson cried, “Get out! Run!”

But Mrs. Abbott was paralyzed with fear.

The big agent released his grip on the gunman’s right wrist and caught the left an instant before he pulled the trigger.

Williamson had been in plenty of fights. The familiar mix of sweat and body odor assailed his nostrils as he kept trying to wrestle the gun away. “You don’t ... want to ... do this,” he muttered, between grunts. “It’s not too late.”

The shooter spat in Williamson’s face, then blurted the familiar slur—the last resort of the ignorant and the desperate—after which he redoubled his efforts to point the muzzle toward the Abbotts.

A jerk of the trigger.

The explosion of sound and the muzzle blast so close to Williamson’s face forced his eyes shut and snapped his head back.

The bullet ended up somewhere in the ceiling.

Then a searing wave of pain, breathtaking, as the attacker’s teeth sank into the flesh just below Williamson’s thumb.

He howled in agony, but didn’t let go, and he felt the recoil in his throbbing hand as the man fired another two shots. They too missed their target, one slamming into the altar, the other shattering a stained glass window depicting Jesus on the cross.

Williamson’s left hand was free, and he drew it back to plow the heel of his palm into the man’s nose in an attempt to break the excruciating grip with his teeth. A scream—a satisfying scream—resulted.