Done in One (9781466857841)

by Jerkins, Grant; Thomas, Jan

  But nobody ever really knows until they pull the trigger and end a life. It’s a fucking crapshoot.

  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 crapshoot.

  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 succumbed. 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-God 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 fucking 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 albums, 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 passport 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 pissed 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 mass, Whoopi would swoop in, make some grand all-encompassing moral statement that shut everybody else up, and then they would go to commercial.

  But still, it was entertaining, and then a special news bulletin flashed on the screen and Clark Avery was sitting at the anchor desk saying an unidentified gunman had shot and killed Sheriff’s Captain Benjamin Bryant. They cut to some aerial footage of Vista Canyon and Bryant’s house. Then Avery started using the word sniper and throwing around terms like may not be isolated, city in danger and under attack and threat could come from anywhere. Then he cut to a satellite hookup interview with a former marine sniper. Nathaniel DePoe. Avery introduced him by his unofficial title, “The Deadliest Sniper Alive.” Oswald knew the guy. Deadliest Jackass Alive, maybe. DePoe had served five deployments to Iraq, and totaled 170 certified kills in the course of his career. Wrote a book about it. Oh, and look, he’s got a second book coming out. Wasn’t that a lucky break, to be on TV right when he’s got a new book coming out? The guy was a complete jagoff. A phony. He’d been featured on the covers of several magazines. Oswald was getting mad. He helped himself to another shot of Old Crow and chased it with a sip from a can of flat Dr. Pepper. This was pissing him off. This guy was their expert? Fuck him.

  Oswald listened to DePoe spout off arcane terms like Black Ops, STTU, false flag operations—none of which had even the most remote relevance to what had happened in Vista Canyon; he was jus
t reciting his résumé—and wrap it all up by saying there were perhaps half a dozen men alive who were capable of that kind of shooting, one of them being DePoe himself, and the other five were not in-country.

  Really? Half a dozen? Really? Oswald was fuming. There were many problems with guys like DePoe; the first of those problems was that they couldn’t see past the military world. Secret Service, FBI, Special Forces, Black Ops guys. But that was it. They completely overlooked the Law Enforcement Sharpshooter. During his career, Oswald’s title was Deputy Staley. That was it. Deputy Lee Staley. Other than his closest peers, nobody ever knew he was a sniper (or more accurately, a counter-sniper). He was anonymous. All of the law enforcement sharpshooters were unknown, and they protected their identities for the sake of their families and careers.

  The regular world never knew that the nice sergeant that lived down the street, the deputy who went to their church, or the patrol officer right next door could be a sniper. Most news reports simply said, “The suspect was shot by a SWAT Sharpshooter.” They always protected his identity. Some of that anonymity was naturally controlled by the perimeter that officers established initially, and then SWAT tweaked when they arrived, making it bigger or smaller. And many times, nobody even saw the sniper team come and go—which was the ideal objective. They appeared out of nowhere, handled their business, and faded into the shadows. And they bloody well liked it that way. The rest of the SWAT team understood and respected it and would step in front of a camera to protect a sniper’s identity.

  What guys like DePoe never understood was that they were actually the minority. Snipers were among us every day, everywhere, and no one knew it. They just weren’t angling for photo ops and cover shoots and remote interviews and publishing deals. They were serving in silence.

  Secondly, here you’ve got a guy who’s called The Deadliest Sniper Alive (probably came up with that title himself), which basically meant he’d killed a lot of people. Now you go back to the Vietnam era and the legendary Carlos Hathcock, and he was out there alone, hanging by his ass, swamp-crawling in and out, and Hathcock, arguably the greatest sniper who ever lived, only got credit for a kill if someone else saw it. You had to have independent eyes on to get credit for a kill. Someone else had to see the body. Much of Carlos’s career was in enemy territory when he was alone. And then, he still had to crawl the hell out of Dodge. The man had once shot—at five hundred yards, the length of five football fields—an NVA enemy sniper, with the round going through the enemy sniper’s rifle scope and into his eye. Hathcock ended his amazing career with 93 confirmed kills—far shy of DePoe’s supposed 170.

  Plus, today’s snipers have advanced technology. Determining distance and depth is one of the hardest skills to master. Eye-witnesses are notoriously incorrect when they tell the story from their vantage point. Simply because it’s hard to gauge distance, especially at night.

  So now you’ve got someone like Oswald himself who’d pulled the trigger for thirty years in various capacities and organizations, semper fi, and you’ve got this famous sniper, this Edgar Allen Fucking DePoe or whatever his name was, who did it thirty months. Did that make him a better or truer sniper than Hathcock? Or even someone like Oswald? Because his kill count was so high? Or could those kills be attributed to the fact that DePoe was working in a target-rich environment where he was taking out any and all bad guys as opposed to a single leader? And after he shoots, they just helicopter on over and count the bodies and he gets credit for all of the deaths. Well wasn’t that special?

  Today’s snipers have the technology that gauges distance for them. A rangefinder sends out a beam that says 1250 METERS, the sniper dials his scope in and basically pushes a button. Today’s guys had no clue what it meant to be a true sniper in its purest form. It was a dying art.

  Many current snipers didn’t even carry a dope book on them. That book contained the sniper’s hard-won information gleaned from years of training and documenting what his gun would do under any and all conditions. Distance, weather, wind, population, material, all of that was sweated out from hours and hours inside the reticle. Down the rabbit hole. It was the only way. You recorded every result of how your weapon fired under every condition (not to mention your own condition—tired, sick, hungover, hungry, dehydrated, whatever). You would know your rifle and your physical response to it.

  Few took the time or had the energy to do the work. Oswald was an old-school sniper, and sadly, they were falling by the wayside. So guys like DePoe tended to piss him off.

  * * *

  Oswald had just clicked off the TV, thinking to himself, Fuck Bryant and Fuck DePoe. His rifle was on the coffee table in front of him. It was an imposing instrument. Model 70 Winchester .308. Checkered wood stock—Oswald didn’t go in for that fiberglass shit—and worn leather sling. The Redfield scope was 3 x 9, fixed, with a police special heavy barrel. Imposing. Old school.

  He’d done some shooting early this morning. Fired off more than a few rounds. Hungover and on an empty stomach. You had to know how your body would perform under different conditions the same way you had to know how your rifle would perform under strenuous circumstances. Sometimes you had to go to extremes. It was called hormesis. The booze hadn’t affected his marksmanship. Not yet, anyway. He stayed on top of it. Practiced regularly. Still kept up his dope book. Notated his targets and filed them away. You had to be prepared.

  He grabbed the cleaning kit from an end table. He needed something to calm his nerves. He leaned forward and opened the rifle’s bolt. Then he opened a bottle of Hoppe’s bore cleaner. He picked up a patch, wet it with the Hoppe’s and began cleaning the bolt.

  The loud knock at the door startled him. He stared at the door, willing himself to move, but just couldn’t. Then the knock repeated. And, really, when cops knocked on a door, it somehow carried their authority. This was a cop knock. No doubt about it.

  Oswald glanced at the coffee table and the kitchen counter. He should have started cleaning up the second he saw the news story. He should have known he’d be getting a visit. Stupid. He’d neglected to clean up his mementos and trinkets and doodads from his last little trip down memory lane. Those misty watercolored memories could get you in trouble.

  He yelled, “Just a second” at the door, then took the rifle, cleaning kit, and everything else to the bathroom, where he threw it all in the tub and pulled the vinyl curtain.

  When he opened the front door, he found two detectives and one uniformed deputy on the other side. He knew one of the detectives from the old days. Cortez. Alejandro Cortez. Those watercolored memories just kept popping up.

  “Oh! Hey, guys. What’s up? Do you want to come in?”

  He couldn’t believe how idiotic he sounded. Oh! Hey, guys? What the fuck was that?

  “Sorry, Oz. It’s a business call. We need you to come downtown with us. Answer a few questions.”

  “Yeah, just saw it on the news. I thought you might look me up. Give me a second.”

  He left the door open and disappeared into a bedroom. Palucci, the uniformed deputy, followed him into the room, and Oswald held up his hand.

  “Whoa, hold on there, Romeo. You haven’t even kissed me yet.”

  Cortez said, “Palucci, just wait with us.”

  Once Oswald was in his bedroom, Sayeed Hasan, the second detective, whispered, “I smell Hoppe’s. He’s been cleaning a gun.”

  Cortez said, “Bullshit. How do you know it’s Hoppe’s?”

  “My dick’s getting hard.”

  “You’re a funny guy,” Cortez said, then called out toward the bedroom, “Yo, Oz, I gotta hit the head.”

  Ever since he had turned forty, Cortez was pretty much married to the bathroom. Enlarged prostate. Without waiting for permission, he crossed the living room and pulled the bathroom door shut behind him.

  Hasan, a short man with dark, Indian features, picked up an open poetry book from the coffee table and thumbed through it. It was called There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wol
ves, by James Kavanaugh.

  Oswald reappeared carrying a light nylon jacket which he shrugged into.

  “So, you’re a poetry fan?” Hasan asked.

  “I guess.”

  “‘Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.’ You know that one?”

  “Emily Dickinson.”

  “Sure. You’d do good on Jeopardy!”

  “Sure I would. I can just imagine it: ‘Today on Jeopardy! We welcome Lee ‘Harvey Oswald’ Staley, a retired police sniper from Hangtown, California, currently sought for questioning in the shooting death of his ex-supervisor.’”

  They heard the muffled chug of the toilet flushing. Cortez stepped out and said, “So, Oswald, you’re taking baths with your rifle now? Kinky.”

  Oz shrugged.

  “Hey, Cortez, look. Poetry,” Hasan said, holding up the book.

  “Well, I’ll be damned. A poet?” Cortez said, dropping his voice into the mocking lilt of a British schoolmaster. “The laddie reckons himself a poet?”

  “That’s from Pink Floyd’s The Wall, right?” Oz said, playing along.

  “You’ve totally got Jeopardy! written all over you,” Hasan said.

  “Let’s go,” Cortez said. “We gotta lot to talk about.”

  They all stepped out into the hallway, which smelled vaguely of piss and collard greens. Oswald locked his door, then put his hands behind his back and angled himself toward Deputy Palucci.