Done In One - Part 5
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Part 5

CHAPTER 6.

Kathryn drove the patrol unit, and Jacob rode shotgun.

"How come you never told me?"

"We're scheduled for sniper training later today. Did you bring your gear?"

"Yeah, I brought my f.u.c.king gear. Did you hear what I said?"

"I heard you."

"Well?"

"It wasn't something you needed to know. Take a right at the next light."

"One of your partners goes 5150, out on a psych retirement and you didn't think I needed to know?"

Not even a shrug.

"I don't get you at all. f.u.c.kin'Denton."

"You wouldn't be the first."

When the unit stopped at a traffic light, Jacob turned to look at Kathryn.

"Do you realize that what you've decided to do with your life is kill people?"

"Yeah, bad guys."

"Killing's killing."

"Well, G.o.dd.a.m.n, Captain Sunshine, no wonder your partners flake out."

Jacob cracked a smile at that.

"Green light."

"What do you mean?"

"The light. It's green."

Kathryn looked ahead, then started forward but caught herself and turned right. She could have turned right on the red in California, but she had been focusing on Jake's words.

"If I was driving and you told me the light was green, I wouldn't have checked to be sure. That's the kind of relationship we need to have."

"I get you. And it's not like I want to kill people."

"You don't? That's what we do. You better want to do it. Turn left here."

Morgan City abruptly faded, and the environment shifted from city to country. No buffer. They were heading into Vista Canyon.

"Aren't we supposed to be patrolling Zone Six? We're going the wrong way."

"Extra patrol for Bryant or did you just not listen to briefing? Bad sign. Too much in your head at once?"

Now Kathryn went silent. Busted.

Jacob hated going into Vista Canyon on patrol. A lot of it had to do with Jill's tree. But the tree was just a symbol of what was wrong here. He found Vista Canyon to be a bizarre collection of strip malls and banks and rich-people mansions all in a country setting, but their owners failed to notice that those expensive houses were of generic cookie cutter designs and packed into the canyon merely a few feet apart. Tenements for the wealthy. Tract housing for the upper echelons of management.

This was where Sacramento County yielded to Cameron County, with Folsom a mile back, just over the county line. The canyon was a wedge of prime real estate where Sacramento people moved to feel rugged and rural, and Morgan City people moved to feel suburban and affluent. Folsomites were quite happy where they were.

For police management like Captain Bryant, who called Vista Canyon home, that address on the mailbox came with the knowledge that though they were still county employees, they had reached a new plateau.

Jacob genuinely hated it here. It was the rich people who always gave him the most trouble. They were the ones who complained about stuff that wasn't important and never failed to tell responding officers, "I pay your salary! You work for me! You tell those kids in that cul-de-sac to stop playing basketball!" Jacob would rather have dealt with the Deliverance-people in the high country than face rich-people condescension any day.

Most of the upper echelon moved to this suburb as they were promoted to ranks like detective sergeant, or lieutenant and on up-whether they could afford it or not. Vista Canyon was still technically within their jurisdiction, but it couldn't have been further away from its Gold Country roots.

Still, Captain Bryant lived here and Jacob would never forget a former SWAT team member, no matter what. He would have headed this way without the sergeant's order. They were like the military in that way. A brotherhood of the elite few.

"What I'm saying is I've got a skill that I want to put to good use. We're the good guys, they're the bad guys. You don't need a philosophy degree to figure it out. It's pretty cut and dried."

"Do you have any idea how many guys on the job can plug a dime at one hundred yards? That 'skill' is common as dirt. Except that they're shooting at targets. We're shooting at people. It's what's going on up here that matters. You shoot with your head, not your heart."

"That makes no sense. I shoot with my eye and my finger. What does my heart have to do with anything?"

"It means the second you start thinking about it, you over-think it. The guy in your sights, does he deserve to die? Does he have a family? What led to this? And what about the times the situation changes a split second before you fire? Because that can happen. What if the guy gives up just as you've started to squeeze the trigger? Another second and you would have ended his life. It can be that close. And you might spend your evening thinking about the other times you've put down a target, and you'll wonder, what if I'd waited just a second longer? He might've given up. But what if you'd waited that extra second, and the hostage died? The 'what-if's' will eat at you."

He could see Kathryn was at least considering what he was saying. It wasn't really Jacob's nature to get mystical, Master Po and Gra.s.shopper, but he'd had a variation of this conversation with every spotter he'd ever worked with.

"And thinking about the hostage can paralyze you completely. Once you're in your heart, you're done. Yes, sometimes you've got clear-cut bad guys. The true predators. The wolves. Then you've got the Average Joe just having a really s.h.i.tty day. What about him? Are you okay with taking out somebody's jealous husband who's never been violent before? Are you gonna feel okay running a bullet through somebody's grandpa who's having a bad reaction to his antibiotics?"

"So it's not always cut and dried."

"It's not your job to decide. Some a.s.shole pulls a gun on you, it's kill or be killed. Self-preservation. And still there are some guys who can't handle even that. There are some cops who shoot a suspect in the line of duty. A clean shot. And they never come back from it. This is the deliberate targeting of a human being and keeping him in your crosshairs anywhere from ten seconds to ten days. You never know when that green light is coming. You've got plenty of time to wonder if maybe you should've gotten that philosophy degree after all."

Ahead, at the curb of one of the slightly less pretentious homes, Jacob saw a yellow school bus pulling up to the figure of a man and two children. Captain Bryant seeing his kids off to school. Jacob indicated to Sesak that this was their destination.

The school bus pulled away. Bryant saw the patrol car and waited in his driveway.

Kathryn parked the unit. She approached Bryant first and shook his hand.

"Good morning, sir. I trust your morning has been uneventful."

Bryant took her hand warmly in two of his own.

"How could it be anything but, when I've got G.o.dd.a.m.n suck-up cops stopping at my house every three minutes?"

Bryant let Kathryn squirm for a second then erupted in laughter.

"Sorry, Sesak, I couldn't resist." He winked at Jacob over Kathryn's head. "The first female candidate on the sniper team? You gotta expect a hard time from the old boys like myself. Jacob, it's good to see you."

They shook hands.

"So, this is the greener gra.s.s I've heard so much about," Jacob said, as though he'd never been out to the canyon before. Where they were standing, everything was flat and green and new. A bit off in the distance, some older growth trees and brush fringed the ridges that surrounded the small valley.

"Yeah, and it cost me a hundred bucks a square foot for this f.u.c.king sod. Now I've got Folsom Prison in my backyard and a.s.sholes all around me. I'd go back up country if I could afford it."

Jacob said, "Yeah, Jill is still p.i.s.sed about her tree." He walked a few feet away, pointed, and said, "In fact, I think it was right about there, wasn't it, Sesak?"

"Looks right to me," she said, even though she had no idea what he was talking about.

Bryant just shook his head. "She knows I couldn't control that. Doesn't she?"

Jill never failed to point it out each time they pa.s.sed by. It had been visible from Highway 50. Up on a small rise overlooking Sacramento in a large golden meadow (the "Golden State" really meant dry, dead, combustible gra.s.s each fire season) had been an ancient Valley oak, perfectly shaped, n.o.bly present, and with a stone fence marking a boundary from the distant past. It was a living remnant of an era of fortune hunting and staked claims. What remained from settlers making a go of it, panning for pay dirt, seeking their fortunes and guarding their turf and livestock with stone and lead, not wire and plot eas.e.m.e.nts. It had been a beacon for her. A place she sought out to gather her thoughts and center her mind. To commune with the past.

Then one day she had seen the usual bulldozer-wide "fire line" made in all such areas after the green meadows turned gold each year. As a former firefighter, Jill thought the fire lines were ridiculous, because for the break to work, it needed to be one and a half times the height of the fuel. With dry gra.s.s several feet tall, as in this case, a fire line the width of a single dozer blade would never stop a fire from spreading. It was just a token effort. What had caught Jill's eye was the fact the bulldozer not only remained parked nearby, but it was between two other large, earth-moving machines.

It marked the beginning of the end for her. To her dismay, she watched as the ground was razed and stripped of any and all life-including her beloved Valley oak-in order to build yet another subdivision. Now Jill refused to come here and simply gave the area a double-barreled middle-finger salute whenever they drove by. She would not condone the insanity of ripping up perfectly aged trees only to plant new ones. She was holding a grudge on this one, and rightly so, Jacob reckoned.

But Jill, being Jill, made a joke of it, too. Come to California, she would say in the seductive tone of a tourist board commercial. Come to California. If you see something you like, we'll cut it down, or blow it up.

Come to California.

Sesak was enjoying the captain's discomfort and said, "I heard she's still pretty p.i.s.sed. You're right on her tree!"

Bryant gave Sesak a look that told her she was close to overstepping her position. In fact, he was finished indulging both of them. He said, "Jacob, take a look at this," and pulled something from his pocket. He looked back over his shoulder as he handed it to Jacob.

"Found it in my mailbox. I haven't told Liz."

It was a small plastic bag. An evidence bag. Jacob took it to get a better look, but he had known immediately what the baggie contained. He ought to. It was a single cartridge. It could've been from his personal supply.

"That's a .308 caliber, Federal Match round," Sesak said.

She knew her s.h.i.t, Jacob had to give her that. The Federal Match, right out of the box, was department standard for snipers. Officially, it was what Jacob fired from his Remington 700. It was what most snipers preferred-.308 with Federal Match casings and 168g Sierra Hollow Point Boat Tail bullets in them. A few holdouts still shot .223 caliber, which was great for short-range situations, but Jacob found their lack of stopping power and tendency to splinter on impact too great a liability.

For snipers, ammunition was a fetish, and Jacob was no exception. He studied and kept himself informed. He knew that the recent military engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq had encouraged a compromise between the .50 cal and a .308. The .50 caliber was a heavy and bulky rifle to carry, so the military had gone to a smaller round, a .338 Lapua, that while smaller, outdistanced and outperformed the larger .50 caliber in active combat duty.

He'd fired them all, but Jacob's purest sniper dream would be the .338 Lapua for its long-range performance, but his locale and demographics-his hunting ground-made it impractical for his normal SWAT duties. The department was worried enough about liability without added caliber and the potential for collateral damage.

Jacob handed it back.

"I'll drop it off at Science on my way in," Bryant said. Through the plastic, he held the bra.s.s cartridge upright between thumb and forefinger, studying it, as though he might be able to see any fingerprints with his naked eyes.

As he held the large .308 cartridge up to the lighted blue sky, Bryant's hand exploded in a red mist. At least that's what it looked like.

Any other observer would have thought the live round had simply exploded in Bryant's hand, but Jacob had heard the crack of a rifle report that directly followed it-a bullet moving faster than the speed of sound had struck the cartridge in the captain's grasp. He knew they were being fired upon. Instinct took over, and he dove for cover. The patrol car was closest. Sesak scrambled as well, huddling against the lee of the car.

Bryant remained standing. It was the G.o.dd.a.m.ndest thing Jacob had ever seen in his life. And Jacob Denton had seen some crazy s.h.i.t. Bryant was standing stock-still, holding what was left of his hand out in front of him, staring at the bright red blood pulsing from the stubs of his missing thumb and first two fingers.

"Sir! Take cover!"

Kathryn had climbed into the floorboard of the cruiser and was yelling into the radio, "11-99! Shots fired! Officer down!"

No, he's not quite down, Jacob thought as he drew his .45 automatic and craned his head over and around the patrol car, scanning the wooded ridges, trying to determine the origin of the shot, aware that Bryant was still standing there, dumbfounded, staring at his hand.

"Sir! Captain Bryant, Sir! Take cover! Ben! Take cover!"

Bryant still wasn't responding. Jacob put one foot forward, readying himself to spring out from behind the car and take Bryant down and drag him to safety. But just as soon as he put that foot forward, a bullet tore up the ground at his boot. Jacob recoiled.

Another shot and Bryant's left ear came off as cleanly as a surgeon's slice. Blood poured down the side of his face. But the man still wasn't moving. Against all reason, he remained standing. He was in shock. Jacob scanned the hillside, the pockets of vegetation, estimated the distance, and thought of the calculations that would go into making a shot like that at that distance. The wind today was intermittent. Not easy to prefigure. Jacob knew that. He was always aware of the current wind speeds, the direction. That was part of his life. The temperature. Humidity. They all factored in. The intimacy with your rifle. Knowing it. The difference between a cold barrel shot and a hot barrel shot. All of this went through his mind in less than a second. As he considered his enemy. For there was an enemy out there. They were under attack. By either an amazingly good or amazingly lucky sniper. The shooter wasn't missing his killshot. He was picking Bryant apart. And the groundshot had been a warning to Jacob. Stay back.

He was about to attempt another lunge at Bryant, but another crack of rifle thunder rolled through the canyon. Jacob could not see where it struck the man, but the bullet spun him around and brought him to his knees. Then he saw. The lower half of Bryant's jaw was gone. Jacob could see his upper teeth and his exposed tongue working back and forth. The upper teeth must have been dentures, because they fell out of his ruined mouth and landed softly in the plush carpet of Bermuda gra.s.s that Bryant kept watered and green.

Behind him, Jacob heard Sesak let out a sound that was not quite a scream.

The next bullet grazed Bryant's scalp, splitting it like the skin of a late summer muscadine. A huge flap of scalp-gray hair clinging to it-drooped down like loathsome bunting, obscuring Bryant's horror-show face. The last shot took off the top of the captain's skull, cracking and peeling it back like the sh.e.l.l of a perfectly boiled egg, with most of his brain going with it.

Ending everything.

The man was angry at losing another sheep. But he was more angry at having let his emotion affect his shooting. He had stemmed the anger the way a tourniquet stems the flow of blood. But a little still seeped through. He was getting old. He would teach the boy before he was too old to be any good to anybody.

They trudged forward. Breaking snow.

The animal was losing a lot of blood. The father's shot had not been perfect, it had not been G.o.dly, but it had wounded the Gray Wolf, almost certainly gravely. There was too much red blood on the white snow. The animal could not survive. It was looking for a place to die.

On another day, if he had been alone, the man would have let the animal be. He would have turned back to the warmth of his home and his wife's coffee. The animal was dead. It just didn't know it yet. He could have gone back home without guilt. Only regret for not killing the wolf cleanly.

But the boy could learn.

Ahead, they could see the animal. The wolf had stopped. It was resting. The man moved forward with caution. He knew that no matter how close to death the animal might be, it would use any last vestige of life left in it to turn and attack.

He hunkered down next to the boy and pointed. He watched and nodded his approval at the boy's stance as he raised the weapon, the comb to his cheek, the b.u.t.t snug to his shoulder, so that the telescopic sight fell in line with his eye.

The .22 was just a toy, really. Against a Gray Wolf, it was just a toy. But the animal was wounded, d.a.m.n near dead. The .22 would suffice. The boy had to learn.

"Aim with your head, not with your heart."

"I don't understand that." The boy had learned to always be honest with his father. It was better.

"You will. Remember, when you're ready, half breath out and hold."