"Gun," Kathryn said.

"I see it."

Kathryn thumbed her mic.

"Suspect has a gun in his right hand. Handgun. In suspect's right hand."

Below them, Wallace Biggsby strolled out onto the front walk. He stopped about halfway and closed his eyes. Clinched. Like he was gathering courage. He brought the weapon out from behind his back and put the barrel in his mouth. He pulled back the hammer. And held that pose, shaking.

Kathryn and Jacob could hear the shouts from below, the clearest being Billy Simon, "Drop the weapon and put your hands in the air!"

Wallace opened his eyes. He unc.o.c.ked the gun and pulled it out of his mouth, trailing stringers of saliva. Tears smearing his cheeks, he gestured with the gun-toward the police on the street, in his front lawn. The blue line ebbed back.

"He's brought the gun out."

"I can see that."

"You've got the green. Men are in danger."

Jacob simply stared through the scope, finger on the trigger.

Biggsby now held the gun down, at his side. He stared at the police presence the way an animal will look at humans that are watching it in a zoo-with mild curiosity.

Now Baker's voice was prominent. "Drop the gun and put your hands in the air. Do it now!"

Jacob had the man in his sights. Caught in his reticle. His finger resting lightly on the trigger. It would be an easy shot. Cold barrel. No wind. No obstructions. No known collateral.

The man wiped his tears with his left hand. He looked around, curiosity morphing into bewilderment. How did it come to this?

Below, Baker repeated, "Drop the gun now! Drop it!"

It was often better to stick to one clear message. In the end, all any of them wanted was for the man to drop the gun. Anything else could wait for later.

Wallace Biggsby's hand began to shake and tremble. He brought the gun up, tilted the barrel, but overall, it was still pointed downward. If it discharged, the bullet would go in the ground.

Kathryn said, "Jesus, Jacob. What the h.e.l.l are you waiting for?"

Now Simon's voice floated up, "I need to see your hands! Now drop the gun, d.a.m.nit! Don't make us do this."

The man raised the gun ever so slightly more.

Baker moved out from behind his squad car door.

Simon, off script, said to Baker, "The f.u.c.k you doing?"

"Relax, it's okay."

Kathryn said, "Jacob..."

"Easy, partner."

Jacob's finger tensed on the trigger. He was prepared to end this in a heartbeat. He knew that Baker putting himself forward like that was a vote of confidence. That he trusted Jacob to protect him. Baker wanted to stay alive as much as the next guy. He wasn't stupid.

Baker, hands open, said, "C'mon man, you don't want to do this. Just drop it now." Baker quieted his voice in the same way he'd physically opened up his body.

Biggsby lifted the gun higher and Jacob's finger began a slow deliberated squeeze.

Baker said, "You agreed to come out and give up the gun. Let's end this. Drop it."

Biggsby's hand steadied for a brief second, then it came up so that it was pointing straight at Baker. In that same motion, Biggsby relaxed his hand, and the gun fell to earth. He sank to his knees and began sobbing into his hands.

Uniformed officers and SWAT members rushed to him, kicked the weapon out of the way and put him facedown on the lawn, then cuffed him.

Jacob relaxed his hand.

"Why the h.e.l.l didn't you take the shot?" Kathryn was genuinely stunned. She would have put the man down. "He could have killed one of us."

"He didn't."

Jacob inspected his rifle, thumbed back the bolt, ejected the unused .308 cartridge, and s.n.a.t.c.hed it out of the air. He studied it a moment and then pocketed it.

"Listen closely, because I will never say this again. When I am in the reticle, I am gone. I'm not here or there. I'm in a kind of middleground. And when I'm in the middleground, you are my eyes and ears. I depend on you for that. But you were badgering me while I was in the middleground. Stick to your job. I will train you. I will tell you why I did A or B, but don't ever tell me when to pull the trigger. Understand?"

Sesak looked wounded. Jacob was putting up a wall, marking boundaries, defining their roles.

"Never tell the primary when to discharge his weapon. I am the primary. Are we clear?"

"Yes, sir."

"Okay. Now ask your questions."

"He was a threat to the officers. I thought we were providing them cover. Keeping them safe."

"We did."

"Why didn't you shoot?"

"Because he wasn't a threat to anyone. He didn't take hostages. He hadn't harmed anyone. He just wanted to die. But he didn't have the guts to take his own life, so he tried the next best thing. Suicide by cop."

Jacob realized that he had become quite talkative of late. Chatty. A shrug would have made a far better answer to Sesak's question.

From below, Simon caught Jacob's eye. Simon pointed his finger like a gun and fired it at Jacob. His smile was filled with contempt.

Jacob said, "Looks like Simon sees it your way."

"Because the man could have fired upon our officers. He held that gun a long f.u.c.king time."

"I could have killed him faster than he could have ever shot Baker. That knowledge gives me leeway, because I know that a precisely placed shot will stop all motor function instantly. There's no way the gunman could have shot and hit any of the officers."

Jacob slung his rifle over his shoulder.

"Besides, he never would have fired it."

"You can't know that."

"I saw it in his eyes." Jacob debated whether or not to say what it was he saw in Wallace Biggsby's eyes. But he realized that he had come to the point in his life that his own father had once come to in his.

He was ready to give instruction. G.o.dly instruction.

"He wasn't a wolf."

And there it was. The truth. He had spoken the truth.

CHAPTER 9.

Cameron County was seven thousand square miles. Ma.s.sive by most standards. It had vast expanses of unspoiled rural beauty that still echoed with the promises of the gold rush. Morgan City was the county seat, a business center with congested streets and tall buildings that gave way to suburban sprawl and cl.u.s.ters of pastel houses on treeless lawns plunked down amongst TAN/NAIL/LIQUOR strip malls. Vista Canyon was the newly developed upscale community for the upwardly mobile.

And there was Hangtown, an urban center similar to Sacramento. It was here that the affluent (who had not yet fled to Vista Canyon) and the abject poor gathered. The middle cla.s.s stuck to the suburbs.

Like most cities, Hangtown had its red brick rows of public housing, the neighborhoods where the gas station convenience stores posted signs that they accept food stamps-CalFresh EBT cards.

This was where Lee Staley lived. Lee "Harvey Oswald" Staley they had called him, once upon a time. "Oswald." Sometimes just "Oz." It was still how he thought of himself. And truly, that was where he was now, the land of Oz. With his retirement pension and disability compensation, he could have set himself up in a pale green split-level in the suburbs, but Hangtown was where he had been drawn.

He had let himself go. He knew that much. The truth was, he wasn't entirely sure how it had all come to this. He lived in Warter Estates, amongst the dopers and the deviants. The disabled and chronically unemployed. The single mothers who turned afternoon tricks to make ends meet. The woman upstairs who performed homegrown plastic surgery on teenage girls-injecting them with silicone purchased from Home Depot. The misfits. The relegated.

The forgotten.

The cops had a name for it when one of their own checked out, turned his back on the regular world and the people who populated it. The ones who couldn't hack it anymore. The ones who grew overwhelmed with seeing just how deep our society had eroded, and had to divorce themselves from it. No cop was ever going to tell you his partner took early retirement due to an overwhelming spiritual angst-your garden variety existential crisis. No, they had a truer name for it. It was a poetic term. Oz liked it. He liked the poetry of it. They would say, That guy? Oh, he burned out. Now he's a blue recluse.

Maybe, in the end, that was all he really wanted. To be a blue recluse. To forget and to be forgotten.

But why? Why go gentle into that good night? Why be forgotten? Why fade away?

The booze was certainly helping him get there, though. He was forgetting himself. Erasing his mind one drink at a time. He'd grown fond of Old Crow. They called it bourbon, but they might as well have labeled it amnesia in a bottle. It made you forget. And when you weren't drunk enough to forget, the paralytic hangovers made you too sick to care.

It was a good balance. Too drunk to remember. Or too sick to care. Life was good that way.

But there was the middleground. That in-between time. The middleground could be a nuisance. The time when your stomach sourly revolted at the thought of the day's first shot of Old Crow. When you had to put food in your belly, but what you really craved was alcohol. It was the time when your existence crept into that shadow world called sobriety. That was a b.i.t.c.h. A real motherf.u.c.ker. The state of sobriety was a motherf.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h. Luckily, it wasn't a state Oswald had to enter very often. He preferred the country of the forgotten. He would go drunk into that good night.

But what was it he wanted to forget? Nothing. There was nothing to forget. The shooting. Of course the shooting. That was what everybody thought had happened to him. (At least those who thought of him at all. Here in the dim nation of the forgotten, where the light had died long ago, invisibility was issued along with your pa.s.sport.) But Oswald knew it wasn't the shooting. He knew that. He had made peace with that long ago. He was good. It's all good.

Sometimes when he found himself in that in-between place, that middleground, and the thoughts were flowing whether he wanted them to or not, Oswald thought about Julius Edenfield.

Julius Edenfield was a good cop. n.o.body ever said otherwise. And he had his head on straight. He was solid. As solid as they come.

Edenfield was involved in a fatal shooting while on patrol. Nothing to do with SWAT or the kind of calculated killing Oswald had saturated himself with.

A guy pulled a gun on his partner, and Edenfield shot him.

He was never the same afterward. And no, he didn't become a stumbling drunk or even a blue recluse. He was just. Never. Quite. The same.

It was a clean shooting. A good shooting. Everyone said so. Even Edenfield himself. But he was different. And the thing is, no cop ever knows how he's going to react after a shooting. After taking another human being's life. Even if it's self-defense. And the risk of change remains whether it's the officer's first suspect killed in the line of duty, or the fifth. No one ever knows just how it affects the guy. Just exactly what thoughts a killing will set loose in someone's head. No cop thinks it will be him or her who gets the bad reaction. They think, I would never feel bad or guilty or uncertain if I took a life in self-defense or to protect the safety of the innocent. That's my calling. That's why I'm here. That's why I'm wearing this uniform. The idea that doing what they were born to do could somehow f.u.c.k them up was an idea of utter lunacy.

But n.o.body ever really knows until they pull the trigger and end a life. It's a f.u.c.king c.r.a.pshoot.

Edenfield never made a decent decision after the shooting. It completely changed him. He tried to act like the same guy, but everyone saw the difference. He'd been married four times since that shooting, moved on to private work, had been employed by three different security agencies, and was now retired after he injured his back wrestling with a stuck floor-to-ceiling steel security gate at a mall jewelry store.

Because his shooting happened while on patrol, the media printed his name, and of course the guy he shot had local family who insisted that their father, though drunk and pointing a shotgun at two cops, "never intended to hurt anyone." So there were letters to the editor and a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking for the whole world to see. That was what changed him. He knew it had been a good shooting, but it was the aftermath that did him in.

Edenfield had learned what Oswald had now learned. Sometimes it is far better to go gentle into that good night.

You just never knew. A c.r.a.pshoot.

And Oswald remembered looking down on Edenfield. As weak. As a man who should never have been a cop in the first place. He disdained Edenfield. Disdain wasn't a cop word, but it was what he felt. Because Edenfield had succ.u.mbed. He had failed to rage against the dying of the light.

And even now, a full-blown alcoholic and the most reclusive of the blue recluses, Oswald did not believe it was the unfortunate event with the hostage that had brought him to this point in his life. No, Oswald simply believed he was a man smart enough to take early retirement when the department offered it to him. He was living the good life. He was retired and he was going to by-G.o.d enjoy it. Maybe he drank too much sometimes, but everybody did after they retired. That was the whole point.

The gunman's hand had jerked when Oswald shot him. It had been a perfectly aimed, perfectly delivered bullet. Oswald had done nothing wrong. In fact, he'd done everything right. No one would ever dispute that. Oswald himself did not dispute it.

The gunman's hand had contracted when Oswald's bullet entered his left eye. It was an involuntary muscle spasm. Not possible to prefigure or foretell. The gunman squeezed the trigger, and the woman ended up with a bullet in her brain, too.

There was no way it could have been avoided. It was an outcome that could not be calculated.

Of course, if Oswald were a pessimist-which he wasn't-he could potentially play with the thought that if he had never fired, the woman might still be alive. He'd had the green light, but he didn't have to take the shot. It was at his discretion. He could have used that discretion to give the negotiator more time to reach the guy. If he was being very pessimistic-down on himself even-Oswald might play with the thought that he'd taken the shot prematurely. That he wanted to walk away the hero, yet again. Because that felt good. Putting the bad guy down and walking away the hero felt pretty f.u.c.king good. So was it within the realm of possibility that he took the shot sooner than he really absolutely had to?

But Oswald didn't have thoughts like that. He was no Julius Edenfield. He was not weak. He was just retired. Living the good life.

But on the few occasions he actually had indulged in such thoughts-and it was seldom, so seldom it was hardly worth mentioning-on those few occasions, the times he reflected on the past and came close to feeling sorry for himself, sometimes the self-pity gave way to resentment. Because, in the end, Oswald had been given the green light. Fire at will. He had been told that the situation warranted mortal measures. His was not to wonder why, his was to jump down the rabbit hole, to deliver the bullet to the intended target. And he had held up his end of that bargain. So, if a mistake had been made, it was made by the person who authorized the shot. The rabbit hole is like a black hole. Light can't escape. Thoughts can't escape. Morality doesn't enter it. You trust those outside the hole to make those calls. To decide if the negotiations were moving forward or not. The negotiator's job was to talk the bad guys out of it, and to stay as long as it took if the suspect hadn't hurt anyone yet or fired on law enforcement. And even if he had fired on them, they may still hold the perimeter, hunker down and keep trying. Shooting is the last resort.

But that day, had Bryant given the green light prematurely? Had he? And by the time Oswald got to the point of asking himself that particular question, resentment had given way to anger. To rage. Because, when you got right down to it, the green light should never have been given.

Rage, rage against the giving of the green light. Ha-ha.

So, sure, sometimes he indulged in self-pity. And that occasionally morphed into resentment. Anger even. Happened to everybody, though. That was normal. A guy gets a few drinks in him, he gets sentimental. Pulls out his photo alb.u.ms, maybe. Or his mementos. His souvenirs collected over the course of a career. That was normal. Souvenirs and mementos. Trinkets and the like. That was normal. Taking a stroll down memory lane. That's what they called it. Memories. Of the way we were.

And so thoughts of the past played through Oswald's mind as he ate the Maple & Brown Sugar Quaker Instant Oatmeal that morning. What little he had eaten had settled his stomach. Taken the edge off his hangover. He felt much better now. No need to think about these things. In fact, Oswald glanced at his watch and reckoned it might not be too early to have a little shot of the Crow. Take wing, so to speak. Just to get his motor running. Get afloat. Airborne. Maybe watch some Judge Judy and catch a light buzz. He was retired and deserved to take it easy. Plus he wanted to celebrate-for once again having successfully navigated the treacherous waters of In-Between. The Middleground. He'd started in the Land of the Sick, and now he was ready to get his pa.s.sport punched in the Country of the Forgotten.

He might just stay awhile.

Judge Judy was a rerun, so Oswald did a little channel surfing. He had his sea legs now, so a little surfing suited him just fine. He settled on The View on the local ABC affiliate. He thought that Rosie O'Donnell was funny, but Whoopi Goldberg pretty much p.i.s.sed him off. There was just something about her. Was she a lesbian now? That girl from the Roseanne Barr show was gay now. She was on some talk show, too. It was kinda like The View, but The View was better. A better dynamic between the women. They were always arguing about something. Whoopi would usually say something, some little throwaway line about nothing at all, and the rest of the women would just start fighting over it. Then Whoopi would just kind of sit back and watch the women tear each other's throats out, then when it just about reached critical ma.s.s, Whoopi would swoop in, make some grand all-encompa.s.sing moral statement that shut everybody else up, and then they would go to commercial.