Cortez intervened and said, “Jesus, Oz. We’re not going to cuff you.”
“Two detectives and one deputy to escort little old me? You were clearly expecting trouble.”
“We just want to interview you.”
“You mean like for a job? I need a job.”
“No, we’re talent scouts for Alex Trebek.”
“Funny.”
CHAPTER 10
Jill had been dreading having coffee with Susan. It felt more like a chore than a treat. But why? This morning she’d had an insight. She now realized where those misgivings about the girl came from. It wasn’t that Susan was clingy, it wasn’t that she was buying Jill’s friendship, and it wasn’t that she looked like a possum.
It was, simply put, that Susan was a better writer than Jill. And that stung. That stung like a bitch. The terrible truth was that this manuscript about the little girl Rose with the criminal father was far more complex and far more evocative than anything Jill had ever written. It would be published. Make no mistake, it would be snapped up, published, and maybe even be a bestseller. Hell, it deserved to be a bestseller. It was that good. Literary and compelling, and heartbreaking.
She would pull off what Jill had tried to do and failed.
But, still, Jill had to be honest. It was her nature.
Without preamble, she said, “I love it. I absolutely love it.”
Susan smiled as big as a jack-o-lantern. “I’ve been so worried what you would think. You know I love your books. Your opinion means everything to me.”
“Well, it’s good. Brilliant, even. If I’m being totally honest, it’s probably better than my stuff. I can see this being a crossover hit. I mean, the violence is so over the top, but the way you pull it off, it feels more like poetry. It feels like something out of Cormac McCarthy or James Dickey. The literary community will love your use of language, the art you employ to get across the desolation of Rose’s girlhood, the love she and her father share. Never cloying, never sentimental. In fact, their love and need for one another comes through in the things you don’t say.”
“I loved my own father like that. So it was easy. Not much art involved in it.”
“You underestimate yourself. And I can tell you this much, he would be proud.”
Susan smiled into her coffee, but didn’t say anything else. It was too personal. All the really good writing is, Jill thought.
Keeping with her policy of complete honesty, Jill had to share her one lingering criticism of Susan’s novel.
“There’s one thing that bothered me, though. And I’m probably the only person in the world who is gonna feel this way, but I have to say it.”
“I want you to say it. This is valuable to me.”
But Jill wondered if that was true.
“It’s the end. The climax. The bank heist at the end. To me, that made the father the bad guy. I didn’t care what life circumstances brought him to that point. I was fine with the robberies to feed his family. I was fine believing that he had gotten so off track that he was willing to do that to get a better life for his family. It was wrong, but understandable. He was in a cycle he couldn’t break. But when he took the hostages in the bank. And an innocent person lost their life. At that point, I wasn’t rooting for him anymore. I wanted the police to take him. He deserved it. And I don’t think that’s what you were going for.”
The disappointment in Susan’s face was unmistakable.
“I’m just being honest. And like I say, I’m absolutely certain that I’m in the minority. Very few people would feel the way I do. We live in a culture where Hannibal Lecter has evolved into a hero of sorts.”
“Well, he makes those choices because he’s forced to. I hardly think Rose’s father is on par with Hannibal the Cannibal.”
“No, of course not. You’re right. It’s an amazing novel. It really is. Hell, I’m jealous of what you’ve accomplished here. And I’m telling you that from the heart. But I’m the wrong audience for this book. You’ve got to remember who I’m married to. My husband is the guy they call in to eliminate people like the father. For me, Jacob is always going to be the hero. He doesn’t get a chance to ask these people if life has been hard on them. If they were abused as children. If their Pop-Tart was stale that morning. He just saves lives.”
Susan’s phone beeped at her, she glanced at it and started stuffing her things into her marsupial handbag.
“I’ve gotta go. Sorry.”
Every other time they had been together, Susan ignored her phone the few times it rang. Jill understood the woman was hurt. She understood, as a writer, that authors fell in love with their characters. It was part of the process. The hallmark of the really good ones.
Susan flopped two limp twenties on the table and scurried away with a mumbled “bye.”
The tab would be less than half that. Jill wondered if the extra twenty was for the waitress or for her. It felt a little demeaning.
And then she wondered if in actuality she was the one who had demeaned Susan. Just how jealous was she of what Susan had accomplished with her fiction? She wondered how much it bothered her that the student had bested the teacher. Did it bother her enough that maybe she took some small degree of pleasure in delivering that last bit of criticism? And could it be that Susan picked up on that pleasure? Had Susan picked up on that schadenfreude? Had she felt demeaned? Was Jill just being a jealous bitch?
No.
No, Jill had just been honest. Maybe she could have been more tactful. But tact didn’t make people better writers, did it? And if she had hurt the woman’s feelings, well that was just too fucking bad, wasn’t it? People like Jacob were the heroes, not the bad guys.
She stared at the two twenties for a long time, then she opened her purse and added another twenty.
At least it would be a good day for the waitress.
CHAPTER 11
But she couldn’t let it go. Not like this. It felt wrong. In several different ways, it felt wrong.
After she added her twenty to the pile, Jill gathered her stuff and hurried out the door of the Morgan City Café. She saw Susan on the sidewalk up ahead. She called after her, but Susan turned into the shadows of the parking deck. Jill ran. She wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight if she didn’t at least make her part in this right.
She saw Susan making her way down a curving concrete ramp, and that image of a burrowing rodent returned to her. And that wasn’t fair either. Why did she insist on thinking of the girl in those terms? Demeaning. It was demeaning. She would do better.
Susan heard her name called, turned and waited.
“I’m sorry,” Jill said. “I was too rough.”
“Did you ever stop and think that you’re actually married to a professional killer? Kinda makes the father in my book seem pretty harmless when you think about it.”
So she’d been right. Susan was hurt and angry. Jill decided she wouldn’t return those emotions. Besides, she’d heard this line of reasoning before. From her mother. Sister. Concerned friends. And other idiots.
“Maybe,” Jill said. It was all she could think to say. But she refused to spit the venom back. There had to be a way to resolve this.
“How can you live with someone like that?”
“Like what?”
“You heard me. A killer. Not make believe. Not a story. A cold-blooded killer.”
As much as she wanted to resolve this on good terms, Jill felt her blood rising. Don’t fuck with my husband. My hero.
And then inspiration hit. She put her hands on Susan’s shoulders, a gesture of friendship, and said, “Close your eyes.”
“What?” Suspicious.
“Just do this for me. Close your eyes.”
“I’m not going—”
“Please. Author to author. Friend to friend. Close your eyes.”
It was the friend to friend that did it. Susan was hungry for friends. Real ones, not the imaginary kind. She closed her eyes.
With her hands still on Sus
an’s shoulders, Jill took a deep breath. With cars rolling past them, and warm tangy exhaust fumes tickling their throats, Jill began to speak.
“Okay, you’re in the bank one day. You need to make a withdrawal because you left your ATM card at home, so you stand in line to see a teller. It’s almost your turn when the guy in front of you starts rummaging around in his jacket. Only it’s summer and why would he be wearing a jacket? He keeps fidgeting. You see a flash of metal. And you’re a smart girl. You know what it means. This is a robbery.”
“A bank was robbed in Sacramento last month.”
“It happens all the time, Susan. All the time. Keep your eyes closed. Imagine, suddenly there’s a gun in the guy’s hand. Looks like a freaking howitzer. He pops off a few rounds, the first one takes out the security guard. Then the cameras. You’re in shock. You can’t take your eyes off the security guard twitching in a pool of his own blood on the marble tile floor. You had noticed the guard when you first walked in, because he’s about your age. Handsome. Strong, athletic type. He probably won’t survive the gunshot, but if he does his days of being strong and athletic are behind him now. It’s wheelchair city from here on out. Pressure sores and a catheter bag strapped to his ankle.
“You’ve never seen a person shot before. In the movies maybe. Described in books. But this is different. This is real. The blood is real. You can smell it. It smells like dirty pennies soaked in saliva. You’re going to pass out. How can this be real?
“But you don’t pass out. This is not a movie. This is not the news. This is you. This is your life.”
Jill had her eyes closed too. Living this right along with Susan.
“This is your bank and you’re in there with the gunman. He’s just killed someone in front of thirty witnesses. He’s already been captured on the security system whether he shot the cameras or not. The data is stored off-site. He has nothing left to lose. And now you’re all side by side, facedown on the floor. This is real. This is happening. You are fucked.
“And then you hear it. Sirens. In the distance. Growing louder. A silent alarm was tripped maybe, or someone heard the shots and called it in. All that matters is that help is on the way. You allow yourself a glimmer of hope. Maybe you’ll live through this. The police arrive, but your gunman friend grabs the woman next to you, hoists her to her feet and drags her to the door. A police negotiator tries to initiate conversation, but your friend isn’t listening. Instead, he shoots the woman in the head and pitches her out into the street.”
Susan’s breathing had gotten quicker. Jill could hear it. Felt warm little puffs of it on her face.
“He returns, only this time he pulls you up, holds you in front of him and presses the gun to your temple. The bore is still hot. It burns your skin.”
Jill opened her eyes and saw that Susan’s were open as well. She seemed to be holding her breath now. Jill kept talking, staring directly into Susan’s brown eyes.
“You won’t be seeing it played out on the news this time around because this time, you are the news. You are a human shield for an inhuman sociopathic animal. And both of you are completely unaware that somewhere, out in the quiet and the shadows, in a place you’ll never see, doing things you’d never dream of, a man waits. All he does is handle situations like this. In all this hell you’ve been through, only he can make it right. Only he can remove this maniac from your life. And he does it. With one shot. One perfectly placed shot and you’re free.”
Susan let out a deep breath.
“Now you tell me … do you still think he’s a professional killer?”
Susan broke her gaze and stared at the oil-stained surface of the ramp they were standing on.
“Jill. I am so sorry. I didn’t mean … I never meant to imply…”
“Don’t worry about it. Most people have no idea what the job is about. To some, maybe he is a killer. But to others, he’s a hero. I choose to love the hero.”
“What a job.”
The tension between them was gone now. Peace had been made.
Jill smiled and said, “In fact, it really is just a job. Just like any other. You get a short in your wiring, you call an electrician. Leaky pipes? You call a plumber. A cranked-up psychopath takes you hostage? You call a police sharpshooter. You call a sniper.”
Susan returned the smile and said, “Maybe I should be taking notes. Maybe there’s room for another hero in my book.”
CHAPTER 12
The Cameron County Range, the proving ground, was where Jacob and his partner were required to qualify on a monthly basis. The shooting range was a large rectangle, about the size and shape of a football field with markers at 7, 15, 20, 25, 50, and 100 yards. Targets were up at the far end of the range. Jacob was examining his used targets, making notations about environmental conditions directly on them and making notes in his dope book as well. He turned when he heard his partner approaching behind him.
Sesak had changed out of her training gear and into a ghillie suit. A large camouflage outfit with strange little tendrils sprouting from it, a ghillie suit blended with the environment and broke up a sniper’s outline so it wasn’t quite as man-shaped. These were not off-the-rack uniforms, or even special order gear. Snipers made their own. Typically, the sniper would start with an olive drab poncho and canvas field hat, add jute and burlap and even hunks of grandma’s Christmas wreath if appropriate. The suit was usually finished off with scraps and cuttings of foliage from the immediate vegetation so that the blending effect was perfected not only in shape and color, but so that the suit would respond to the wind or the rain or the snow exactly as the surrounding environment. It was the ultimate expression of trompe l’oeil—deceive the eye.
Kathryn even had similar colors painted on her face. She could have been a tree if she had more arms. She peered out at Jacob.
“What are we doing again?”
Jacob indicated the grassy meadow that sprawled out from the maintained shooting range. It was several hundred yards long and about a hundred yards wide. The meadow was an undisturbed expanse of trees and tall golden grass—a plot of the past that seemed to have arrived on this spot as though delivered by a time machine. Jacob was pretty sure one of the trees, a beautifully gnarled live oak, was an Indian trail tree that predated the first white settlers to this end of the country. The Indians purposely bent and deformed certain trees to permanently point the way to water or food or safety. The massive trunk of the live oak in this meadow came straight out of the earth, then bent at a near ninety degree angle about five feet up so that the trunk was actually parallel to the ground, then bent again and continued straight up. The horizontal plane it created pointed to the freshwater stream at the bottom of the meadow. (Jacob was ashamed to realize that he didn’t even know what tribes were aboriginal to Northern California, but he recognized the oak for what it was the instant he first saw it. His father had taught him about Indian trail trees.) Now the oak seemed to point in accusation. That so many other trees had been bulldozed so that the land could be developed. Maybe he and Jill were both haunted by trees.
For Jacob, it was a stark reminder of the substance of the past that always surrounded him, pulling at him. The settlers, pioneers, forty-niners, and the cowboys migrated across the country in search of good land, homes, gold, wide open space—a place where they would be free to live by their own codes. They found all those things when they got here. Only problem was that there was nothing past California. The dream came to fruition and then ended here. Jacob and his kind were the last vestiges of that western spirit. The Sheriff’s posse now rode in patrol units and SWAT vans. But they were still trying to bring order and justice to the Wild West. They still believed the American dream was worth protecting. For a while anyway. Until the bad guys and the system that seemed to support those bad guys wore them down. Wore their resistance to nothing. Everything simultaneously culminated and ended in California. And now even the good guys were fleeing this apogee of America.
The Land of Milk
and Honey, where the homesteaders came to be free of oppressive government and live by their own personal code, now had more legislation per capita than anyone, anywhere. Yes, they had codes to live by. Thousands of them. Cops and firefighters put in their twenty, then fled the state at the earliest opportunity. Maybe that was what the Indian trail tree was pointing to. The way out.
* * *
“We’ll be stalking each other through this meadow. I’ll start at the other end. We’ll have radio contact.” Jacob began putting on his ghillie suit too, smearing his hands and brow with a handful of dirt, snapping off strands of grass and vine and attaching them to his suit. “The objective is to spot me before I get close enough for a hand-to-hand kill. You, of course, will be trying to stalk me as well. When you think you’ve seen me, indicate the location on the radio, and I’ll let you know if you’re right. I’ll do the same.”
Sesak smiled and said, “And you won’t be pissed if I win?”
Jacob shrugged. “I hope you do. Remember, patience is the key. You have to move in tiny, minute increments to avoid detection. Be conscious of everything you’re wearing and everything around you. What could cause a glare or reflection. A sound not consistent with the environment. Things like that. Okay?”
“Fine. Let’s get started. I’m burning up in here.”
“You’d be in one of these things for days if you were waiting to take out a strategic military target. Not only that, an enemy sniper would be hunting you. That’s the point of the exercise.”
“We’re not military snipers.”
“No shit. But we can still learn from them.” Jacob paused, then said, “Make your weapon safe.”
Kathryn opened the bolt to reveal an empty chamber and showed it to Jacob.
Jacob nodded, satisfied. “I’ll signal you when I’m in position at the other side.”
“Got it.”
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