by Jim Riley
Copyright © 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. Trademarked names appear throughout this book. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, names are used in an editorial fashion, with no intention of infringement of the respective owner’s trademark. The information in this book is distributed on an “as is” basis, without warranty. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this work, neither the author nor the publisher shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
PART I
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
PART II
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
PART III
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Epilogue
Dedicated to Tess
(my Tish)
“DOG ONE”
Prologue
Colorado nights are never warm in the mountains, even in the summertime. Especially when you have been lying motionless for any length of time and you’ve worked hard enough to build up a nice sweat. The perspiration that had built up under my load-bearing vest, or LBV as we called them, had long since turned to uncomfortable clamminess on my chest and back. But worse, my knees were reminding me of their fiftieth birthday that was just around the corner. Thirteen more days, to be exact. Friggin’ old age. I glanced back and saw that my assistant SWAT team leader, Brett Haston, was staring off into the night sky as though he didn’t have a care in the world. I knew him well enough, though, to know that wasn’t the case and he was probably wound so tight at the moment you couldn’t have driven a needle up his ass with a hammer.
The cool mountain air was crisp and brought with it the smells of pine, sage, and cleanliness. It also brought with it sounds. I could hear sporadic traffic on the highway far below, the subtle movement of the pine needles as some of the members of my SWAT team shuffled around, and most disturbingly, the sound of a small plane approaching from the distance.
Logan County, Colorado is rural, but we’re not exactly unaccustomed to airplanes. However, it was a little unusual to have a small, fixed-wing flying low over the county at night. And it’s not like there was anything to see at night or we were situated in any normal flight paths. I assumed the FBI had taken that into consideration during their planning, and I prayed our target wouldn’t notice. The first assumption was stupid on my part, since, well … it’s the FBI, and the second one turned out to not be the case either. Before the plane was even out of hearing a light came on in the upstairs, quickly followed by the voice of my sniper, Danny Baker, over the small, fitted earpiece in my left ear.
“Leader, this Sierra One. I have movement.”
PART I
Chapter One
My name is Dell Moffat and I am a cop. At least that’s what I consider myself. Over the course of the last few years I have been called lots of things, including terrorism expert, bad-ass killer of all things extremist, SWAT tactics trainer, PTSD poster child, and a drunk. I guess some of them were accurate—mainly the last few—but in the end I’m just a cop.
I had been working in Logan County, Colorado as a cop for ten years on and off before that fateful night in June, and it was preceded by an even more fateful day three years and three months earlier. That first event would be the one that earned me the titles of terrorist killer and hero and changed my life forever. I used to say that was the day my marriage started downhill as well, but in all honesty, that’s the one thing I couldn’t blame on terrorists.
My wife and I had come to Colorado for a couple of reasons. One was to escape the city; I had been working as a cop in Dallas. We had vacationed in the mountains pretty regularly for a few years and thought it would be a good change. The other reason was Tish, my wife, thought the slower pace of a small mountain department would be good for me. That was her polite way of saying maybe I could become less of an anal bastard. I had made it clear that I would try, but I was a very accomplished at being an anal bastard and wasn’t completely sure I could transform. We packed up our twelve-year-old son Tony, the dog, and the furnishings, and moved to the mountains.
I had applied for a job with a police department on the front range in the Denver Metro area. It was smaller-sized department of one hundred and fifty sworn officers at the time. Well, at least that was my idea of a smaller department. Tish wasn’t as thrilled. It was still in the city and it still was too busy for her. She had dreams of being up in the mountains like you see on TV. I wasn’t too sure at the time they even had law enforcement agencies up there. It hadn’t disappointed her too much when the job in the metro area fell through at the last minute due to budget cuts, and I found myself without a job opportunity and in need of income. Contrary to my original thoughts, there were law enforcement agencies west of the Continental Divide, and before I knew it I was one of twenty-five sworn officers on the Logan County Sheriff’s Department. It was destiny. I just didn’t realize it at the time. Some of my buddies back home made fun of me with witty comments about kicking horse turds or herding cows on the night shift, but some of the other ones, ones like me who were getting close to the ragged edge, were secretly envious.
In that first year working at the Sheriff’s Department, I quickly learned rural things, like there was never any more than one degree of separation between any two people living in Logan County. At least the ones that had lived there for over three years. That was the second thing I learned. Until you had lived there for three years, or more importantly three winters, you were just visiting. After three years you were considered a transplanted local. To truly be a local you had to practically be a second-generation landowner. Or have married and divorced at least three locals. That was the third thing I found out. Everyone had been married to someone in everyone else’s family at one time or another. Not incest, mind you; that was frowned upon. It would be something like Joe was presently married to Jane, who had been married to Jim, who was now married to Joe’s cousin, Mary. Unlike in some parts of the South where the family tree sometimes doesn’t have many limbs, family trees in Logan County were more like a vine twisting in and out of a bush. Family reunions were more akin to town gatherings since everyone had some kind of connection. Once when my sheriff, Tobias Sebastian, was telling me about one such relationship, I looked at him in amazement. When he finished, I told him that the relationships he had just described would have resulted in at least two killings had they occurred anywhere below the Mason-Dixon line.
He smiled and said, “What can I say? Free love. 1970s. We never got over it.”
Tish and I made fun of it at first, but for me it quickly became a problem at work. Law enforcement only works well when there is a large and continuous supply of good in
telligence off the streets. And the only place to consistently gather that intel is either from an undercover officer or, in most cases, informants. Family members refusing to rat on other family wasn’t a new concept for me, but I just wasn’t used to it being the entire population of my jurisdiction. Not only that, if you could get someone to narc to get out of some trouble, word of their arrest was out on the street before you could get the handcuffs off, and everyone knew not to talk to them or sell them dope for a few weeks. In Dallas a snitch would last about two minutes if it were discovered he was working with the cops. In Logan County everyone just chalked it up to bad form and the person was excommunicated from the fold for a few months.
I worked patrol for the first three years on duty with the LCSO. Sometimes at night in the winter, it would be so slow that the only tire tracks in the snow were mine. I was just about to reach the end of my anal-retentive rope when an opening came up in investigations. I had been a narc in Dallas for a while and decided to give it a shot. Tish was relieved as well since she could tell I was getting fed up, and unlike me, she was really enjoying her job at the local clinic/trauma center/hospital/dentist office. It had been a dramatic job transition for her from the busy Parkland Hospital in Dallas to the local clinic, but she had made the adjustment much better than I had.
I found out I fit in well in the two-man detective bureau of the LCSO. The senior detective, Bart Simpson—no shit, that was his name—was fifty-five years old and going on 90. He had burnt out years ago, but no one had noticed because he had always been so lazy. Bart’s motto was “start off slow, then taper off,” and his idea of working a case was putting his name on it, then quietly closing it out two weeks later. Sometimes he would actually make a phone call or two to inquire further about the facts or to ask a suspect if they did it and would like to come in and confess. His closure rate was somewhere in the mid-to-low single digits.
When I came into the Investigations Division, I made up for all that down time I had spent flattening the seat of my Jeep Cherokee. When I got through with any felony cases I could get my hands on, I would investigate misdemeanors. Hell, one time I took a suspicious incident report, figured a way to get a crime out of it, then made an arrest. Before I knew it, I was actually having fun. I was like the only kid on a playground.
The hardest part for me early on, besides not being able to cultivate a decent informant, was being nice to people. For whatever reason, people expect officers in uniform to be curt, but detectives are supposed to be their friend. And in a small county, every person is a vote. And where there are only about ten thousand votes in the entire county, and your boss the sheriff is an elected official, each one counts.
My standard Dallas P.D. answer of “because I fucking said so, now shut your pie hole” didn’t do much for me in the complaint department. I had been beefed more than any other cop in that department since its inception. It was the only place that Fat Bart outshined me. Unfortunately, that counted for more than felony arrests, and before I knew it I was on the carpet in the Sheriff’s office again.
“You know I had some concerns about this very problem when we hired you, Dell,” Sheriff Christman said to me as I stared him in the eye. He spoke firmly but without any hint of deep-seated anger or malice like I was used to hearing from superior officers, especially the ones at or near the top.
“Yes, sir,” I said without further comment or apology.
“You do understand that you can’t be abusing the public, don’t you?”
I nodded my head, but with a slight sideways motion. It wasn’t really up and down in acknowledgment, but that kind of nod you give when you’re saying, “I hear you, but I would disagree.” When I didn’t respond, he leaned back slowly in his red-speckled-clothed chair until it bottomed out its springs. I noticed it squeaked noticeably and wondered how many times a day he did that, then wondered why he didn’t get a new chair.
“How long you worked here, Dell?”
“Just over three years. Sir.”
“You like it here?”
I started to give him the smartass sideways nod again, but my better judgement saved me before I could sabotage the situation. “Yes, sir.”
He was waiting for an apology, but I just couldn’t bring myself to give it. I wasn’t sure why. Well, besides the fact that I didn’t feel I was wrong and the beef was surely unfounded, whatever it was. There was just something else, but I couldn’t put it into words. Finally, I decided to respond with an answer that could satisfy both my rebellious side and my responsible side. “I feel that sometimes we care more about offending a voting citizen than we do putting bad guys in jail.”
This time he implemented the same telling sideways nod and didn’t say anything. I could hear Tish’s voice in the back of my head scolding me for being stupid, so I tried to recover. “I’m sorry for causing any problems. I began my career in a place that just did things different and sometimes the old habits just slip out. I’ll try and watch my mouth and not let it happen again.” There, I’d done it.
He still didn’t answer but rocked slowly in his red-speckled chair. Finally, he spoke. “Do you know why I called you in?”
“I assumed it was over what I said to that piece of shit burglar I arrested yesterday. I mean, that man I arrested for burglary yesterday.”
He smiled. “No, it’s not about that, or the twenty or so other complaints that you’ve gotten about using foul language throughout your time here,” he said with a half smirk, half smile. “When you were unloading that guy from your Jeep, you hit him in the back of the head. You can’t be hitting handcuffed people.”
I was completely caught off guard. I hadn’t remembered smacking the guy in the back of the head until just now. Why should I have? It was just a love tap, and he deserved it. “He spit on the detention officer. He had it coming,” I said in my defense.
“How would I know that since there wasn’t anything mentioned in a report anywhere?” he asked.
“In Dallas … ”
He put up his hand to stop me. “This isn’t Dallas, Dell. All I’m saying is if the prisoner was resisting and you were simply using the necessary amount of force to get him to stop, you need to articulate that in your report. That way when the piece of shit’s family or lawyer complains, I’ll have an answer.”
I smiled at his description of the perp. I knew he had only said that to let me know he was not trying to be an advocate for the jerk. I also appreciated the way he had reprimanded me. It was almost painless, but more importantly, he did it in a way that I got the point without him treating me like something he’d stepped in. That was a turning point for me at that department. It was also the beginning of long, lasting friendship.
About a year after I transferred to Investigations, I started Logan County’s first SWAT team. It started out as a few of us training on our own time. Some of the guys had friends in SWAT with other departments and had picked up a few tricks, but I was the only one with any real training. And I was definitely the only one with tactical experience.
In Dallas I had put all my energy into moving forward. While others got involved with departmental politics, or brown-nosed their way up the ladder, I focused on being the best cop I could be. After a few years I set my sights on SWAT and finally made it. SWAT on Dallas P.D. was all I had hoped it would be, and I experienced every kind of tactical situation an operator could hope for. Our bread and butter were drug raids, but in the two-and-a-half years I was there I went on hostage rescues, barricaded gunman, you name it. I hadn’t realized how much I missed the action until I started working with those few guys at the S.O. Tish met my enthusiasm with some reservation when I told her I was preparing a proposal to the Sheriff to start a team. I guess she tempered her fear of me going anal again with the thought of, “What kind of trouble can he get into in a county of ten thousand people?”
Sheriff Christman had studied my proposal for about a week when he called me into his office. I was optimistic since I had crammed the th
ing full of statistical reasons why tactical teams were proven safer to have than not. However, I also knew that there might be some concerns from the community about the department having a bunch of “jackbooted thugs.”
Especially since the local mantra was, “Those kinds of things don’t happen up here.”
“I read your proposal,” he said.
“And?”
“And I like it. Just one thing,” he added.
Oh great, here it comes. First, he’ll offer to allow us to carry a carbine or something in the trunk. Maybe get a t-shirt with SWAT on it, but we’ll have to wear it under our uniforms so no one can see it. I was torquing off already and he hadn’t even finished his sentence.
“I think we should open it up to other departments in the county and make it a multi-jurisdictional team.”
After I got my breath back I agreed with him.
“You’ve got a lot of experience with this stuff, don’t you?” he asked me.
“It’s what I do best.”
“Even better than pissing people off?”
“Even better than that,” I told him.
“God help the bad guys, then.”
Most of the other department heads had warmed up to the idea of a SWAT team. Even the Eaglenest Chief of Police, William Stalone. His only suggestion was that his senior sergeant, Bill Baxter, be the team leader.
In my best politically-sensitive tone, I had let the Sheriff know that his response needed to be not “no,” but “hell, no.” He assured me that had already been done, and then faster than I had ever thought imaginable, the Memorandum of Understanding had been signed off on by all four departments in the county.
Chief Stalone continued to be a thorn in my ass, but not a very powerful one. I have to admit that the biggest reason I didn’t like him was not because of anything he had done or not done, but because he was in charge of the largest law enforcement agency in the jurisdiction and had never even been a cop. He had a Master’s degree in Criminal Justice, but his specialty was in the Security field. A wannabe cop. He had won out over the competition for the job four years prior, and one of the men up for the job had been Sheriff Christman. Christman was by far the best choice, but he didn’t look as good on paper. Or in person, for that matter. Not that he was ugly but compared to Chief “look at my smile” Stalone, Brad Pitt would have had to clean up and get a fresh haircut to compete. Stalone had knocked the town council over with his charm, education, and looks, but his real hook had been that he and the General Manager of the ski area were buddies. The Eaglenest Ski Area was in the town. Hell, it was the town as far as money goes. Consequently, it wielded great power, and the fix was in from the get-go. Sheriff Christman continued in his $55,000 a year job of faithfully serving the community, and Stalone slid right on in to his $95,000 a year position of skiing, golfing, and schmoozing. Oh well, the town’s loss was the county’s gain, I had told my boss.