Done in One (9781466857841) Read online

  In fact, Officer Carpenter decided he was going to get in the guy’s face. Maybe scare him a little bit. He was going to lean right past the register and into his space. And if Carpenter had actually done that—leaned over the counter—he surely would have seen the girl on the floor behind the counter. The girl on the floor was the real cashier. And Carpenter would have seen the tears streaming from her bulging eyes. He would have seen the greaseball’s boot planted square in the girl’s stomach. And he would have seen the Glock 9mm that had been dangling from the greaseball’s right hand the entire time his left hand had been thumbing through the skin magazine.

  But Carpenter didn’t see any of that. Even if he had, it wouldn’t have saved his life. It was too late for that. In any case, he never leaned across the counter and got in the guy’s face. Something caught his eye. Diverted his attention. It was a big glass water tower that set atop the sales counter. Bubbles gurgled up from the bottom, and a sign on the contraption invited customers to drop in quarters for a chance of landing one in the shot glass at the bottom to win a prize. It was all for charity, supposedly, but who knew for sure where the money really ended up?

  Carpenter loved games of chance. Was a sucker for them. He and the missus loved to steal away to Vegas or South Lake Tahoe every now and again. Or hit up one of the half dozen or so Indian casinos in the greater Vista Canyon area and foothills. He considered himself a player. So he just couldn’t resist giving this game a try. He dug into his uniform pocket, pulled out a quarter, and fed it into the slot on top.

  * * *

  Out in the patrol car, rookie Deputy Brinkley wondered just what in the hell was taking his FTO so goddamn long. He’d just about had it with the constant stream of convenience stores. How long did it take to grab a pastry and a cup of java? For Christ’s sake. But for now, Brinkley would keep on keeping it to himself. It was a six-month evaluation period, and then a year’s probation during which he could be terminated without reason. It was best not to make waves. After the evaluation, he would either be assigned a partner and an urban patrol zone, or he would become a single-man unit assigned to one of the vast, sparsely populated areas within the county. Six-toe-country. Camptown.

  Through the plate glass window, Brinkley saw his FTO finally waddle up to the sales counter. What would Carpenter do if he had to chase down a suspect? Surely there were some kind of minimum physical fitness requirements officers had to continue to meet. Surely. Oh well, he didn’t care. The training period was just six months. Then he would either be out on his own or partnered up with somebody long term. Someone of more modern habits he hoped. If he could just get through these six months. And was Carpenter still in there? How long did it take to pay for your shit and get out? Brinkley craned his neck to get a better look. Carpenter was doing something at the counter. It looked like he was putting coins into something. Was that a slot machine? For fuck’s sake.

  * * *

  Carpenter watched his quarter zigzag lazily through the water, buffeted by the rising air bubbles. It missed the shot glass by a wide margin. He considered breaking a dollar to try again, but thought better of it. It was time to go.

  Well, maybe just four more. He pushed a dollar bill down the counter over to the clerk. Before he fed the first one in, he glanced up again at the security monitor mounted above the counter. The clerk couldn’t see it. It was strictly for customers to see. A deterrent. But Carpenter wondered if it was filming him putting quarters into this contraption. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

  He divided his attention between watching his quarter saw through the water, and looking up at the monitor to see if he was being recorded. He saw the area outside the bathrooms, the pumps, the deserted back of the store, the coffee counter. Then he saw the view from directly overhead: It showed the cash register, the clerk, a handgun held at the clerk’s side, and, quite clearly, a girl lying on the floor at the clerk’s feet.

  What he saw registered in Carpenter’s eyes. He knew that. He knew his eyes could have given him away. But what he didn’t know was if the clerk was watching him at the time. If the greaseball saw it register. Maybe, maybe not.

  Carpenter sidled from the water tower back over to the register to indicate that he was ready to pay for his food. He grabbed a bag of Doritos from an impulse-purchase rack and added it to his bounty. Nonchalance personified.

  “Quiet night?” he asked the guy. Easy breezy.

  “Yeah. And I’m not complaining about it,” the guy said, playing his part just fine. And that made Carpenter believe that he would very likely make it out of here without having to draw his service revolver.

  “I don’t blame you,” Carpenter said. “Not one bit.”

  “Six-sixty-six,” said the clerk, but the register said five-eighty-eight. Carpenter didn’t call him on it, just pushed a ten-spot across the counter.

  He gave some change back to Carpenter, who shoved it in his pocket without counting it because it probably wasn’t the right change anyway, and he just wanted out of there so he could call for backup.

  Carpenter didn’t wait to be offered a bag. He took his coffee in one hand, Amy’s Organic Burrito and Doritos in the other, and turned to the door. Easy breezy beautiful.

  Behind him, the clerk leaned forward over the counter and peered up to see what the cop had been looking at. His timing was much better than Carpenter’s. The monitor was displaying the clerk and the girl and the gun.

  “Stop,” he said to the cop. No emotion in his voice. Calm. Easy breezy, some would even say.

  Carpenter pretended not to hear. He pushed at the glass door. He was trying to push the door open with his hands full of food and hot coffee, when the normal thing would have been to turn around and push it open with his ass. But if he turned around, he couldn’t pretend not to hear the clerk.

  “Goddamn it, I said stop.” Nothing easy and/or breezy about his tone now.

  Carpenter stopped. He turned around to face the clerk. The clerk had his pistol pointed straight at the cop. Those synthetic polymer Glocks were all over Cameron County. A plastic plague. They were the Anti-Visa: Everywhere you didn’t want them to be.

  “Christ,” was what the cop said.

  The gunman said, “You should’ve thought about Christ before.” He pulled back and released the slide on the automatic. It was a single fluid yet crisp movement that put a live round in the chamber. It was a loud, attention-getting sound. Maybe not as attention-getting as a shotgun being racked, but it ranked right up there. It was a sound no cop ever wanted to hear.

  “Do you know what it means to feel like God?”

  Carpenter closed his eyes. He didn’t really want to see it coming. And it was coming. He knew that much. The guy was one of the crazies. One of the violent crazies. Do you know what it means to feel like God? What the fuck was that? It was crazy talk. Probably from some rock song. Probably playing on a continuous loop in the guy’s tweaked-out meth-burnt mind. Carpenter opened his eyes to face his fate, and there it was right on the guy’s t-shirt. A dreadlocked zombie, and the words do you know what it means to feel like God?

  It was over. Everything was over. And the last thought that went through FTO Donovan Carpenter’s mind was that Jiffy Kwik didn’t even sell skin mags. They were a Christian organization—beer, wine, cigarettes, condoms, rolling papers, and lottery tickets were all A-okay, but dirty pictures were anathema. So the crazy brought the magazine with him when he came to rob the store. He brought porn to a robbery.

  Below the counter, the real clerk saw that the gunman’s attention was with the cop and took a desperate chance. She lunged under the weight of his leg and managed to sit up enough to sink her teeth firmly into his calf. She bit down hard. Like she meant it. Like she was a cannibal and today was Thanksgiving.

  The gunman screamed and kicked the girl viciously.

  Carpenter saw that God had granted him a reprieve. And yes, it was true, he had let himself go to seed, gotten fat and lazy and stupid. All true. But in the
end, he was a cop. He had a cop’s instincts. A warrior gone to pot, but still a warrior in his heart. One of the good guys.

  This was Carpenter’s chance and he knew it. He didn’t know why the gunman was startled and distracted, he just knew this was his chance to walk out of here a hero. Or at least alive.

  Before his cup of coffee could hit the floor, Carpenter had hit the release on his holster and drawn his revolver while starting the trigger through its double-action cycle like he had done so many times before in training. When he got a sight picture, he completed the trigger pull and the weapon discharged. All of this in less than a second. He is a cop.

  But he wasn’t fast or accurate enough. The gunman fired at the same time as Carpenter. Carpenter’s bullet went wild, as it usually did when he tried to shoot too fast, and the water tower exploded in a geyser of liquid and glass shards.

  The gunman’s bullet went wide, too, and the glass door behind Carpenter shattered.

  * * *

  Brinkley’s head snapped up at the sound of gunfire. His mouth gaped. And all he could think was ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod.

  * * *

  In a very stupid move, Carpenter looked back at the shattered glass behind him. He was stunned. In all his years of police work, he’d managed to avoid being shot at. Until now.

  He turned back to the gunman who was as much in shock as Carpenter. Bits of glass stuck out of the man’s bleeding face, and to Carpenter it looked like porcupine quills or that guy from the horror movie with spikes all in his face. Pinhead.

  The clerk’s gun dangled at his side. His first chance squandered, Carpenter realized he now had another one. He raised his weapon and took a shooter’s stance. Just as he was trained all those years and pounds and cigarettes ago.

  He had the upper hand. Except that his foot slid out from under him in the spilled coffee on the floor. He was going down.

  But before he did, the gunman raised his Glock and fired. The bullet pierced Carpenter’s badge and slammed into his chest. It was like being hit with a sledgehammer. But his vest stopped the bullet from penetrating to his heart. The blow knocked the big man down, and he landed on his ass. Carpenter held on to his weapon and raised it to fire again, but before he could get off another shot, the shooter’s next round found the Achilles’ heel of his Kevlar vest. The bullet hit under Carpenter’s raised right arm, went through his armpit, entered his thoracic cavity, and ripped through both lungs.

  Black coffee and deep red pulmonary blood ran together on the floor.

  * * *

  Brinkley was out of the patrol car. He crouched behind the open door of the cruiser, his weapon drawn. He was screaming into the police radio, his voice cracking like a teenager’s, “11-99! Shots fired! Officer Down! Officer Down! We need assistance!”

  * * *

  Thus did Officer Donovan Carpenter—connoisseur of convenience store coffee, devotee of the cigarette, defender of the doughnut, advocate of the organic food movement, hobby gambler, and tolerator of pornography—known far and wide as The Builder—bleed out on the white tile floor of the Vista Canyon Jiffy Kwik in Cameron County, California.

  Later, it would occur to Maddox Brinkley that he never got the chance to ask his partner why they called him The Builder. And even though he checked around later, he would never find out how Carpenter had earned that nickname, because no one else seemed to know either. Or so they claimed. Code of silence.

  CHAPTER 2

  Out in the humid night, an anonymous black van carrying the Cameron County Sheriff Department’s Special Weapons and Tactics team rolled through the city streets. Fast. Insistent.

  Inside, the eleven team members (ten men and one woman) were dressed in black tactical gear, and wearing balaclavas—black masks with eyeholes. They held on to overhead straps as the vehicle swayed. Fast. Insistent.

  The team faced forward in the van, where a Dry Erase Board was mounted. Standing at the board was Lieutenant Joe Cowell, fifty-one, a tall, lean man who, unlike the fallen Officer Carpenter, hadn’t let age or gravity or bad habits creep up on him. He faced the others, gesturing to the whiteboard.

  The board showed a diagram of the Jiffy Kwik store, surrounding structures, and landscape. Several areas were marked in red, including an exterior spot marked SNIPERS DENTON/SESAK.

  Jacob Denton, whose designation was Primary Sniper, was, at forty-five, the oldest actively serving member of the team. Jake was powerfully built with bowling-ball shoulders, a solid chest, and limbs thick with corded muscle. There was no hint of the athlete about him. Just brawn. As though he were carved from stone. In fact, he was built more like a doorkicker than a traditionally lean and lank sniper. When he saw himself in a mirror, he realized that he looked more and more like his father with each passing year. Solid, but rough hewn—an unfinished statue. His physical presence was, he knew, intimidating. Just like his father.

  His partner was Kathryn Sesak, the only female in the van, a baby at twenty-four. Sesak was his spotter. Shorter than Jake, and certainly smaller, with a physical strength that fell more to the side of agility and grace.

  Jake and Sesak studied the diagram. Jake stared at the red dot on the whiteboard that marked his position. And for a second the red on white blurred. It became fresh red blood spilt on crisp white snow. And he could hear the jagged heavy breathing of a boy struggling to break through the ice-crusted snow to keep up with his father.

  Jake broke his gaze from the Dry Erase board to look at his partner. He and Sesak exchanged a curt nod of acknowledgment. They were ready.

  Fast. Insistent. The SWAT van sliced through the intersection of Powell Inn and Green Valley Road and came to a stop just outside a convergence of cop cars and paramedics, their lights pulsing blue and red in the bruised blackness of the California night.

  The rear doors of the van opened. The SWAT team deployed like parachute jumpers in two-man columns. They entered the madness of the scene, cool and collected, each knowing exactly where to go and what to do.

  Lieutenant Cowell and another man moved toward the command post set up in the parking lot. From this vantage point, Cowell could see the supine body of the dead policeman. With his binoculars, the lieutenant could make out the gunman and the female clerk protected in an aisle of snack food. The hostage-taker held his gun pressed to the girl’s temple.

  Sergeant Ray Heidler, a burly, graying man, leaned over a diagram on the hood of a patrol car. Lieutenant Cowell clapped him on the back. Behind them Maddox Brinkley, the fallen officer’s partner, paced back and forth, high color in his plump cheeks.

  Cowell asked Heidler, “What’ve we got?”

  “He graduated a year behind me, Joe.”

  Cowell glanced again at the body of the slain policeman lying at the front of the store. No time for emotion, reminiscence, or reflection. Not now.

  “I’m sorry, Ray. Let’s concentrate on getting the rest of us out of here alive. Current status?”

  The distorted voice of a police negotiator on a bullhorn provided background noise.

  “He’s got the clerk in there with him. Young white female. He wants safe passage out, but he’s been firing random shots every few minutes. Don’t know how much ammo he’s actually got.”

  “All right, Ray. We’ll take it from here.”

  Cowell spotted the negotiator in the passenger seat of a patrol car with the door open. His voice amplified to distortion by the bullhorn, the negotiator said, “We’re gonna have to have time to locate a vehicle. You don’t want to drive out of here in a cop car, do you? Let the girl go and I personally promise you safe passage out.”

  A gunshot from the store shattered the windshield of the patrol car. The negotiator dropped the bullhorn and ducked under the dashboard. The megaphone tumbled across the pavement.

  Cowell wondered why someone hadn’t found the store’s phone number and established communication that way. The bullhorn and the yelling back and forth just put everybody’s nerves even more on edge. Not to mention the med
ia recording every syllable, and the onlookers with their smart phones capturing every last bit of it. Nothing in this world was real until it was captured digitally. It wasn’t real until you rushed home and uploaded the experience to YouTube. Of course these days, Cowell realized with disdain, they didn’t even have to rush home to get it online. They could upload it on the spot, ricocheted around the globe via satellite. What a world. A cop couldn’t take a breath unless that cop was prepared for that breath to be recorded, broadcast, and analyzed.

  From the floorboard of the patrol car, the negotiator was slamming his fist into the dashboard and yelling, “Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch!”

  “I see you’ve still got the touch, Webster,” Cowell called out to him.

  He walked with deliberation across the parking lot and retrieved the dropped bullhorn, which was emitting a high-pitched whine of feedback. Cowell banged it against the heel of his hand to quiet it. Then he yelled into it.

  “All right, now you listen to me, you fucking asshole. Fire one more shot and I personally promise that you will not leave here alive. Now wait for your fucking car!”

  Cowell tossed the bullhorn to the pavement. Let them record that. Let them put that on their Googles and their Facebooks and their Twitters. Motherfuckers.

  Webster, petulant like a child, said, “Cowell, that was totally and completely—”

  But Cowell was walking away, speaking into his radio.

  “Team Two, copy?”

  * * *

  From the rooftop of a single-story brick building across from the convenience store, Denton and Sesak had taken their positions.

  Denton peered through his rifle scope and locked on target.

  Sesak pulled out a pair of military-grade binoculars. (She had her Night Owls with her as well, but since the store remained well lighted, she had no need of night vision technology.) She adjusted the focus until the scene came into plain view. The suspect. The girl. The gun. The man’s face was barely visible behind the girl’s head. All that could be seen was the hostage’s Christmas-ornament-sized earrings.