Done in One (9781466857841) Read online

  Sesak said, “Right rear of the store. Between the Twinkies and the potato chips.”

  “I’ve got him.”

  Jake peered through the scope. Kathryn cupped her hand to her ear, then keyed her mic.

  “Team Two copies. Green light.”

  Then to Denton, “We’ve got the green.”

  Jacob heard the word green. His finger tensed around the trigger. Then the outside world faded as he focused every bit of his conscious self into his scope. He was down the rabbit hole. He was in what he thought of as the perfect peace of the reticle. All of his other senses seemed to fall away. Like snow mutes the sounds of nature. This was common in most snipers. It was why they worked in teams. It was why he had a spotter with him. Once he jumped down the rabbit hole, and the perfect peace of the reticle had made the outside world fade away, Kathryn Sesak was his eyes and ears. He had to trust her.

  Through her binoculars, Sesak saw the gunman move.

  “No shot. Target obscured.”

  Jacob’s finger eased.

  Although he and Sesak were working as a team, they were not equals. She was a spotter only. For now, she was a sniper-in-training, and she could never rise above that position without Jake’s endorsement. Over the years, he’d had dozens of spotters, few of them lasting more than six months. The truth of it was that it was a brutal, regimented, and disciplined way of life. Not a career move, but a way of life. Those past partners had thought they wanted to be snipers, but they all seemed to wash out.

  The gunman shifted his head from one side of the girl’s head, then back to the other side again. With those huge dime-store earrings, it was just a guessing game. They were huge and spangled. Like mirror balls. Like something out of Saturday Night Fever. Who wore stuff like that anymore?

  From the street, Cowell was looking through his own binoculars and speaking into his radio.

  “We’ve got ten minutes. Confirming. You’ve got a green light.”

  Flat on her belly, from the rooftop, Kathryn watched.

  “Still no shot. No shot.”

  There was simply no way to shoot. Only a sliver of the gunman’s head was visible behind the girl. And those damnable earrings. What was this, 1979?

  “He’s not moving. No—”

  A sharp crack erupted in the night.

  Kathryn rolled away from Jacob, out of instinct. Fear. She stared at her partner.

  Jacob, still locked in position, peered through the scope.

  “Target down.”

  Kathryn rolled back to position, raised the binoculars again.

  The suspect was slumped over the food rack. The girl stood over his body, screaming. Screaming her head off. A disco queen at a filming of Soul Train gone horribly, horribly wrong.

  Kathryn keyed her mic.

  “Target down.”

  She once again distanced herself from her partner. Rolled away. She watched him. Denton was still frozen, locked into position.

  She waited.

  Below she heard the rush of activity as SWAT team members burst into the Jiffy Kwik.

  Jacob stood up and gathered his equipment. Kathryn had hoped he would speak first. But she couldn’t keep waiting.

  “But you didn’t have a shot.”

  Jacob nodded toward the store. “Tell him that.”

  Kathryn stared below, mouth agape.

  “And don’t ever roll like that again. It draws attention. Get your gear. Let’s move out.”

  Jacob left. Kathryn scrambled for her gear and hurried after him.

  * * *

  Uniformed deputies and EMTs streamed through the store like insects following chemical trails, each knowing their purpose. They stepped around the bodies, which would be there for many hours to come.

  The female hostage stood with Sergeant Heidler. They’d already gotten her initial, adrenaline-fueled statement, and would get a more formal account once she’d calmed herself down.

  “Ohmygod I’ve never been so scared in my entire life. Do you think this’ll get me on a talk show or Inside Edition or anything?”

  Behind her, a uniformed deputy raised his eyebrows at Sergeant Heidler. They had both seen this type of euphoria, this manic gushing, from victims who’d had close calls.

  “This was un-fucking-believable! Did I tell you I bit the guy? I bit him. Bit him right on the leg. He kicked me in the stomach. What happened? How’d you shoot him? I don’t know what happened but I almost peed my pants when he got shot! I had a gun to my head! I can’t believe it!”

  She raised her hands to the sides of her face. One of her earrings was missing.

  “Oh shit. I lost an earring.” She looked around, amid the blood and broken glass.

  The uniformed officer ducked down the snack aisle. He spotted the earring wedged between two packages of Lays barbecue potato chips and plucked it out. He looked at it, then hid it behind his back as he emerged back up front.

  “Did you see it? It was vintage.”

  He shook his head no.

  She peered out the front window and squealed in excitement.

  “Ohmygod! Is that Clark Avery from Channel Three? Oh my God. It is! Do you think he’ll want to talk to me?”

  Sergeant Heidler put a light hand to her elbow and steered her toward the door.

  “I’m sure of it. Why don’t you go on out while we finish up in here.”

  She ran her hands through her hair, down her clothes, straightening, fluffing and stuffing.

  “How do I look?”

  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 documented. 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, “Shit. 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 fucking 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, “Fuckin’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 shells 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 shit 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 bypassed 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 hell 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 bullshit me. You always try to bullshit me. For twenty years you’ve tried to bullshit 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 shit?”

  “She’s far from ready. Oh, she can shoot, but if she actually killed someone—I think it’d fuck 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 fucking Address.

  “She’s killed in the line of duty. Doesn’t seem like that fucked 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, goddamnit, 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 damn 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 dick. You know what I meant.”

  Jacob shrugged. A Denton classic.

  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 damn 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 disco ball 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 hell was Sesak doing? Her nails?”

  “Don’t blame her. She said I didn’t have a shot.”

  “Then, why the hell—”

  “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 damning 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-ass at play here, too. Liability. If Jacob fucked up, or went 51–50, 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 assembled in the squad room and said, “They haven’t affected me.” His first slipup. The looking away tipped his hand. It conveyed something.

  “That attitude 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 shit, she called it.