Sergeant Heidler gave her the OK sign.

The girl beamed and exited the store in search of fame.

The technophobic Lieutenant Cowell would have recognized the girl's need to seek out Clark Avery and mingle among the throng of gawkers, their handheld devices already poised to capture the human drama. She wanted to be recorded and broadcast and YouTubed and Facebooked. She wanted what had happened to her tonight to be doc.u.mented. She wanted it to be made real.

Sergeant Heidler turned back to the officer.

"Let me see it."

The officer tossed the earring to Heidler. He looked at it, shook his head and tossed it back.

"Give it to Cowell. That's his department."

A few minutes later, Lieutenant Cowell approached the van, opened the back door, climbed inside, and shut it behind him.

The eleven team members were back in position. Cowell moved through them to the front of the van and knocked twice on the window to the driver's compartment.

And the anonymous black van carrying the Cameron County Sheriff's Department Special Weapons and Tactics team rolled through the city streets.

Fast. Insistent.

CHAPTER 3.

The SWAT van pulled into the rear of the station and stopped. Cowell exited the van first, then turned to address his team.

"Debriefing in ten minutes."

Cowell turned and entered the station. The team members exited the van. They pulled gear from the van and removed their black masks. For some reason, they never removed their masks until they got back to the station house, as though they wanted to be ready for any eventuality while out on the streets. Jacob and Kathryn pulled their rifles out and slung them over their shoulders.

Cowell stuck his head back out through the doorway and yelled.

"Denton!"

Jacob looked up from his gear.

"Sir?"

"Inside."

Once Cowell ducked back inside, Kathryn said, "s.h.i.t. Wonder what we did wrong?"

The other team members looked at Kathryn, and she realized that she had made some sort of faux pas. Yet again. The SWAT team was a world unto itself, and she was still struggling to pick up on the ways of this secret society she had somehow managed to breach. She was always conscious of being the FNG. The f.u.c.king new girl.

Jacob patted her on the back.

"Have you tried decaf? It makes you less paranoid."

The rest of the team laughed, and somebody said, "f.u.c.kin'Denton"-run together into one word. Kathryn was grateful to her partner for defusing the social blunder with a joke. Everybody went back to stripping the outer sh.e.l.ls of their BDUs (battle dress uniforms-a leftover military term) and gathering and stowing their gear. The gear was a big part of the life-the ones who worked patrol kept most of their SWAT gear (including BDUs of different colors for day, night, rural, urban) in the trunks of their patrol cars, and if activated while out on patrol, they geared up while driving to the scene or briefing site. The meeting location could be anywhere-a lonely gas station, a crowded mall parking lot, a little league ball field-where patrol cars and private cars could converge, and the men could dress down from street clothes and marked patrol uniforms to SWAT BDUs. Sometimes they did it in the van (or at least they did before Kathryn broke the gender barrier), but it was essential they be hot and ready to deploy when they hit the scene. It was a lot of s.h.i.t to keep up with. All the while maintaining the anonymity they closely guarded.

And since they lived in such a huge county, some team members could be coming from farther away-off duty and not able to drive code three, using lights and sirens-but there were time constraints specific to each situation and the lieutenant might go in without the full team due to the intensity of the action. They were usually a twelve-man team but could deploy with ten or even eight, but that turned a sniper into a doorkicker sometimes.

Inside, the squad room was a large cavernous cube. Plain. With chairs and tables and clipboards hanging along a wall. Cowell stood at a chalkboard behind the desk at the front of the room drawing a diagram of the convenience store. Getting ready for the debriefing. Jacob bypa.s.sed the locker room, pulled out a chair near Cowell, and sat down. Cowell frowned at him.

"Maybe we better take this into my office, Jake."

Denton shrugged and got back up.

Once behind a closed door, Jacob waited for Cowell to speak first. Through the blinds, he could see the team members filtering into the squad room, sharing stories, stretching in their SWAT t-shirts, repacking gear bags, and wiping at the urban camo smeared around their eyes and necks. The black grease paint was needed to fill in any spots that the eyeholes didn't cover, or wouldn't cover if the balaclava shifted with motion.

It made Jacob conscious of the black greasepaint that still ringed his eyes and neck, and of the fact that he was separate from the rest of his team. But the sniper always was. A man apart.

"That was a h.e.l.l of a shot."

"Thanks."

"How many is that now?"

Jacob shrugged. The Denton Shrug. It was practically patented. It conveyed exactly nothing.

"You telling me you don't know?"

To this question, Jacob gave a modified half shrug. Conveying, again, nothing.

"Come on. Don't bulls.h.i.t me. You always try to bulls.h.i.t me. For twenty years you've tried to bulls.h.i.t me and it never works. How many?"

A three-quarters shrug with an almost imperceptible headshake thrown in to balance it out.

"Christ! We're getting too old for this, you know that?"

Although he had a nearly endless supply of shrug variations, Jacob took pity on his old friend and gave him something. "That's what Sesak keeps telling me."

Cowell took the ante and worked with it. "You two working out okay?"

"Well, she's a girl."

"No s.h.i.t?"

"She's far from ready. Oh, she can shoot, but if she actually killed someone-I think it'd f.u.c.k her up." Jake genuinely thought she was a natural. Highly advanced in her accuracy. The kind that comes courtesy of DNA. But killing left a mark, and he didn't know if she could stand it.

Jake's comment made Cowell happy. Not what the words conveyed, but that Denton was talking. That was practically a speech. The Gettysburg f.u.c.king Address.

"She's killed in the line of duty. Doesn't seem like that f.u.c.ked her up."

"This is different. On the street it's reflex. Kill or be killed. This is methodical. Cold blooded. There's not many men or women up to the task."

Jacob stretched and yawned. That did convey something. And it wasn't that he was tired.

"Listen, Jacob-"

Through the yawn he said, "Here we go."

"Now, G.o.dd.a.m.nit, you know this is part of my job. I have to ask you this."

"Shoot."

"Funny. You're a funny guy. Now look, although you claim not to know it, this is your seventeenth kill. Some people consider it quite strange that you've never accepted the free counseling after a call-out. So, for the record, I'm offering it again. Would you like to talk to somebody?"

"I'm saving my sessions up for Sesak. Trust me, she's going to need them."

"What makes you so d.a.m.n sure you don't need them for yourself?"

Jacob leaned forward in his chair.

"You know, Lieutenant, what 'some people' don't understand is that I do talk to somebody after every case."

"I'm talking about professional help. Real help."

"So am I."

"Jill doesn't count."

"She'll be delighted to hear that."

"Don't be a d.i.c.k. You know what I meant."

Jacob shrugged. A Denton cla.s.sic.

The two men sat in an uncomfortable silence, each waiting for the other to speak again.

Cowell finally said, "You cut it a little close tonight, don't you think?"

"Well, let me see. There's a cop killer on his way to the morgue, and a very much alive young lady telling Channel Three what a d.a.m.n fine job the Cameron County Sheriff's Department did of saving her life." Jacob threw in a demi-shrug and said, "My world is measured in thousandths of an inch, so no, I wouldn't say it was close at all."

Cowell pulled an object from his gear bag and dangled it in Jacob's face. The girl's dis...o...b..ll earring with a perfect hole right through the center. It was a cheap glittery hollow plastic thing. If it had been made of a more rigid or brittle material, it would likely have been obliterated by the 7.62mm lead-core, copper-jacketed hollow point bullet. Or simply been pushed aside.

"Christ, Jacob! What if you had missed?"

"I didn't."

Lieutenant Cowell put the earring on his desktop.

"I never would have authorized that shot."

"Once you give me the green, you authorize whatever shot I take."

"That's not exactly the way it works. You work as a two-man unit out there. What the h.e.l.l was Sesak doing? Her nails?"

"Don't blame her. She said I didn't have a shot."

"Then, why the h.e.l.l-"

"From her vantage point it looked like I didn't. But from my vantage point I saw an opportunity and I took it."

Cowell picked the earring back up and dangled it from his fingers, like a lawyer holding up a piece of particularly d.a.m.ning evidence. He shook his head.

"I understand that dehumanizing the targets and the obstacles is part of the job. But that idea can go too far. It can breed callousness. I want you to see somebody. I want it in your file."

Jacob thought he understood what was going on here. In his world, a sniper's world, there was no such thing as too close. But the earring, the physical manifestation of that idea, was disturbing to Cowell. And there was an element of cover-your-a.s.s at play here, too. Liability. If Jacob f.u.c.ked up, or went 5150, Cowell wanted to be able to say that he'd had Jacob checked out.

"It's not an option. It's an order. We have to know how these hits have affected you."

Jacob looked away, through the window, glancing at the men a.s.sembled in the squad room and said, "They haven't affected me." His first slipup. The looking away tipped his hand. It conveyed something.

"That att.i.tude right there worries me more than anything else."

Back on track, Jacob shrugged.

"I just don't want to lose another good man. I'll make the appointment. With a private doc. No departmental politics in play. At least not until we get the results back. You have no choice in this."

Lieutenant Cowell got up from the desk. He walked past Jacob and gave him a pat on the shoulder on his way out of the room.

Jacob picked up the earring and stared at it. Then he shrugged.

CHAPTER 4.

Jill and Jacob Denton lived in Maggie's Valley, just outside Morgan City. Once upon a time, Morgan City was known as Old Hang Town-with good reason, Jill Denton would tell you. There wasn't much to Maggie's Valley, just a mop-and-pop gas station, a bar, and Jill's old fire station. Once you left Morgan City, you could go one mile and be in the mountains. Switchback roads with steep canyons of death off to one side. Long, long stretches of acreage that may or may not be developed. And the road climbed steeply from there to the crest of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and then over into the South Lake Tahoe Basin. North of Morgan City, you went down, down, down a treacherous canyon gorge and then climbed an equally treacherous switchback on the other side-leading to the fabled "six-toe-country" where the more rugged and clannish Northern Californians lived-the kind of folks who would welcome the Timothy McVeighs of this world with safe harbor. And then maybe shoot them for being too liberal.

Maggie's Valley suited Jacob and Jill best. Their house, about ten miles southeast of Morgan City, was on a graveled cul-de-sac far back from the road, on a two-acre lot. It was given to them as a wedding gift by Jill's parents. Her father built the house himself. It was a simple, small house perfect for a newly married couple, and it was understood that Jacob and Jill would add on to it to accommodate the family they planned to have. But so far, there had been no children, so their home was quite modest at just over a thousand square feet: two bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms, with a freestanding workshop out back for Jacob. Rustic-landscaped by Jill with huge old wagon wheels on the exterior walls, weathered lumber saws, old farmers' seed machines-just western s.h.i.t, she called it.

Tonight, the television set in the Denton house was tuned to Channel Three. Jill had muted the volume earlier, once she was certain her husband was safe, but now she turned it back up and listened as the giddy hostage gave a live on-the-scene interview to Clark Avery. The woman had the biggest smile Jill had ever seen, her eyes gla.s.sy like someone with a high fever. Jill knew that was just the remnant of adrenaline working its way out of the body's system. Jill smiled to herself, knowing the woman would almost certainly be h.o.r.n.y later tonight. Another side effect of the hormones her body had released, but also because s.e.x was life affirming, and after having almost lost her life tonight, life-affirming s.e.x is what the woman would crave.

Jill Denton knew these things because she used to be a firefighter and an EMT. And she could still remember that feeling of living life on the edge, the close calls, the hairy rides through neighborhoods that were like combat zones-and when she got home from one of those shifts, she wanted a long hot shower. And then she wanted to screw. Not a pretty way to put it, but that was the word for what she wanted. Not to make love, but a good old-fashioned pounding.