Dog One

by Jim Riley

  “This is Stinson.”

  “This is Moffat.”

  “Thanks for calling in. You okay?” A man after my own heart. He cared how I was doing.

  “I’m fine. What’s up?” I didn’t exactly know how to start the conversation.

  “I’m putting you on speaker phone, Sergeant Moffat.”

  I hate speaker phones. As soon as he did it I could hear noises in the background, like people talking. Stinson tried to talk to me, but I was having a hard time hearing him. Then I could hear him telling someone to keep it down. He was doing it with authority, but it wasn’t necessarily doing the job. Finally, it got quiet and he repeated his request to me. “Tell us about what you saw and heard, Sergeant Moffat.”

  “This will be my fourth and last briefing, gentlemen. So takes notes or record it.” I was beginning to get a little irritable. When I got to the part about the men speaking Arabic, I heard someone questioning how I would know Arabic if I heard it. As if scripted, I heard Pete and Repeat coming down the hall. I could also hear the squelch break on their packset radio. I was trying to get the idiots in the Command Post to shut up. My intentions were to hold the phone up to the door and let them hear the language for themselves. I was about to give up and hang up the phone when there was a lull in the chatter.

  “Shut up and listen. They’re coming.” I held up the phone to the door and wondered if they could hear what I was hearing. I continued holding the phone up to the door until the patrol left, then I put the phone down under my body. I figured as soon as it got quiet they would start talking to me and the coast may not be clear yet. I don’t know if they started talking immediately after it got quiet, but I do know that they were yelling again when I put the phone back up to my ear. It was still too soon after the patrol for me to feel comfortable talking so I waited for another lull and whispered for Stinson. He heard me.

  “Take me off of that speaker phone.” It was more than just a request, and I heard a clicking sound immediately afterward. “Look, if this isn’t a terrorist event, I’ll kiss your ass. And if you have any sense, you’ll kick that stupid shit Pullman out of the CP before he gets someone hurt.” There was sudden silence, then someone chuckled. “We’re still on speaker phone, aren’t we?” I asked.

  “Uh, yes,” Stinson confirmed.

  I heard some yelling that sounded like it was coming from someone who had just been called a stupid shit in front of other people, followed by a slamming door. “Was that the stupid shit leaving?” I asked.

  “Yes, it was. Astute observation, by the way.” So far, I liked this guy Stinson. Especially for a boss.

  “What’s the plan?”

  Stinson asked me to tell him about every little thing. I filled him in on the small things I had noticed about the men I saw and included the newer information of how they varied their patrols but never got back to me before twenty minutes. I also informed him they had comms because I had heard the squelch break. He replied that they already had that bit of information but didn’t explain how he knew or how they were exploiting it. I didn’t ask.

  “What’s your read on the situation?” he asked me. Now I knew I liked this guy. He probably didn’t need to know or even care what my theories were, but he was smart enough to ask me. It made me feel like he cared about me and it kept me in the game. I knew what he was doing but it still had the effect he wanted it to have. As easy as that, I was working for him.

  I told him about my thoughts. The two unarmed men were being guarded by specially-trained bodyguards that were obviously a step or two above the rest in training. I also opined that if the black case the men carried was simply comm gear or a computer, why not let one of the underlings pack the heavy thing around? It implied more importance. And then the question I had been pondering over while my legs became petrified: Why this building? It seems that if they were going to take over a building, there were better targets. I had allowed for the fact that I didn’t know everything about the target and that there could be a logical explanation for the choice. There could be some government offices in the building. Their first target had been hardened and this was a safer one. Who knows? But it still bugged me. Stinson mumbled his agreement and added it didn’t necessarily make sense.

  I noticed that the screen on my phone had started off with four bars on the bottom, which was indicating the battery was fully charged. I had at least read that far in the instruction manual. I now saw that it was down to two bars. Since our conversation had turned into insignificant chatter, I signed off and told him I would call back in twenty minutes.

  I decided to take that twenty minutes to focus on something besides my situation. I felt more comfortable now with Stinson in charge and Pullman off licking his wounds. My thoughts turned to family and friends. For the first time, I started considering my predicament and at least acknowledging the fact that I may die in the well-carpeted building. I started to go back over my last argument with Tish but decided to put that away for now and switched over to thinking about Anthony, our son. I was very proud of him. He was halfway through his degree at MIT. I dwelled on that for a second. I remember when he told Tish and I he’d gotten accepted. I hugged him and told him how proud I was of him. I thought back on the good times we had when he was little. Playing ball, fishing, teaching him to ride a bike. I could feel myself getting a little melancholy, so I changed gears again.

  I decided to think about FBI Special Agent Cooper Watts. Coop was like the brother I never had. I actually had a brother, but he turned out to be a piece of shit who was now in prison somewhere in upstate New York. Most of the family had written him off. The last time I talked to him, which was fifteen years ago, I told him I wasn’t writing him off, but I had no interest in talking to him again until he was clean. Coop had filled that spot as well as any non-blood-related person could have.

  We had met while working a case. I had caught a case involving a guy who had used a small explosive and incendiary device to burn up his failing business. I had contacted the AFT for some assistance, but they were too busy. Even though I knew the FBI had no interest or jurisdiction in the case, I had called out of frustration since I needed help with financial records on my guy. Somehow, I got routed to Coop’s desk. He didn’t tell me he was over the Terrorism Division and this wasn’t his thing; he just helped me. He didn’t get any points or recognition for it; he just did it to help me. I eventually made my case and wrote a nice thank you letter to the SAC in consideration of Coop. But more importantly, I remembered that I owed him one. About three months later I got a tip on a bank robber. This was one of those “you’ve got to be kidding me” things that had to be true because it was too bizarre to be fiction.

  I was at the bus terminal in Denver picking up a witness in a case that was going to trial. You know your county is poor when they bring witnesses in on Greyhound instead of United. I’m surprised the guy even came. I wouldn’t have. Anyway, I’m waiting for the wit and I see Pooky getting off a different bus. Pooky had been one of my best informants when I worked narcotics in Dallas. He was your usual hype who would sell his soul, or your television, for a fix. I went over to him to say hello and saw something I had never seen before. Pooky’s eyes were clear. He’d stopped using.

  “Pooky, how the hell are you?”

  “Okay, Moffat.” He was as caught off guard as I was, but I had the advantage of knowing why I was there. He seemed a little suspicious. I guess that unspoken hype/cop relationship never changes no matter what else does.

  “You look cleaned up.”

  “I am. Nine months now.”

  “What you doing here?” I asked, finally getting around to the obvious. Hypes and even ex-hypes don’t usually travel to see the world.

  “Had to get out of town.”

  “Someone after you?” I said, looking over his shoulder and not wanting to catch a bullet marked for him.

  “No. I’m trying to stay clean. If I stayed in Dallas, it’d never happen, ya know?”

  �
�I understand that.” My thoughts went to my own journey from the city.

  Pooky and I caught up on some of the players we both knew, most of whom were dead, in jail, or missing. I filled him in on where I was working now, and he told me how his brother who had played pro football helped him clean up. I finally saw that the bus from Topeka had come in and started to wish him well.

  “Where you gonna stay?” I asked him.

  “I dunno. Thought I’d find a mission or something.”

  I handed him a fifty-dollar bill. Pooky and I had a lot of business in the past exchanging information for money. One time, some of that information had even saved my life. I never told him that because it would have upset the balance of our relationship, and he might have started him thinking I owed him. I did, but he’d never know it. He took the fifty without reservation but thanked me sincerely. I turned to walk away, and he grabbed me by the coat sleeve.

  “You know those banks that are getting hit by the man and woman team?”

  “Yeah.” I knew he was about to tell me something. We had been at this place many times before and I could hear it in his voice.

  “Not a woman. It’s two men. One’s a he/she.” He tore off the top of his Marlboro box lid and unfolded it, wrote something on it, and handed it to me. I didn’t look at it, I just nodded my appreciation and we parted ways.

  The next day I drove back to Denver and met SA Coop Watts in person. I took him out to lunch and told him again how much I appreciated how he had taken his time to help me. He blew it off as simple professional courtesy. We shared a few war stories—most of mine were from Dallas since there weren’t a lot of wars in Logan County—and it was time to pay the bill and leave.

  “Here,” I said, handing him an envelope from the soft-sided case I had brought along.

  “What is it?”

  “Payback.”

  He smiled and opened it. The package contained the criminal histories and mug shots of the two bank robbers. I didn’t have any information on the bank robberies themselves beyond what I had seen on television. However, when I ran the criminal histories on the two men Pooky had turned me on to, I found out that they were both from Dallas, had relatives in Denver, and had been contacted on the interstate by the Colorado State Patrol south of Pueblo on the afternoon of the last bank robbery. That put them in the right state. It was all circumstantial, but Pooky had never given me bad information. The two men had never left any fingerprints, but eventually a DNA match put one of the two at the scene of one of the robberies. Ultimately, Coop closed that case and the three others the men were good for. We were even. Since then we had worked cases together unofficially, simply because we liked each other as partners. We thought alike and worked alike.

  It was time for a check-in and I turned the phone on. By now I was getting used to the damn thing singing like a cheap radio. I had also become fairly comfortable with the quiet periods between patrols as being safe. Maybe too comfortable, I reminded myself.

  “This is Stinson.”

  “It’s me.”

  “Call me back in five minutes.”

  I hung up. That was encouraging. Maybe. In five minutes I called him back.

  “I need an honest, no-bullshit answer from you, Dell,” Stinson told me.

  “Okay.”

  “How good of a SWAT guy are you?”

  I thought about that question for a moment. The only reason he was asking me was that he was considering using me for something. Probably to open a door or something from the inside so HRT could breach the building quietly. Or maybe something more, I didn’t know. But I knew I had to put away the bravado and be honest with him and myself. After some thought, I told him, “I’m a short, ugly man with a Napoleon complex and a bad attitude. But I’m one hell of an operator.”

  He must have liked it because the next words out of his mouth were what deep down I had been wanting to hear. “Good. We need your help. You up to it?”

  Chapter Four

  After an appendage has lost circulation for an extended period of time, your body rebels by hating you. It isn’t simply satisfied with the excruciating pain that happens as the blood flows back into veins and arteries that feel like they had completely collapsed. After that initial pain, it lets you relax momentarily, then attacks again with a vengeance. Over and over. Next to the kidney stone I passed without the benefit of any Demerol when I was twenty, this was the worst pain I had ever experienced.

  Getting down from the top shelf had proved a chore, as I had thought it would, but didn’t result in the calamity I was afraid of. I had rolled my body and useless legs off the shelf, after moving the Lysol cans of course, and used my upper body strength to lower myself down to the bottom. When I reached the floor I just laid down and worked the circulation back into my legs by rubbing them. After I got some feeling back, I attempted to do some knee bends and get the stiffness out while helping the circulation. My body still seemed a little pissed but was slowly getting over it. I looked at my watch and saw that my ten minutes were up and Stinson would be expecting my call. Hopefully, this time they’d have their stuff together. I still didn’t know what I was going to be doing, but by now I was pretty psyched about doing it.

  “Hello.” A new voice answered Stinson’s phone. I wasn’t prepared for that.

  “Where’s Stinson?”

  “Stepped out. This Moffat?”

  “Yeah. Who am I talking to?” I wasn’t too happy about being handed off to a new player.

  “Name’s Oberg. Randy Oberg. HRT.”

  I was impressed. I wouldn’t have thought I would have been. But there it is.

  “You up for a mission?” He hadn’t asked it with the same confidence and enthusiasm as Stinson had.

  I responded with as much confidence as I could muster. The FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team is the most elite law enforcement SWAT team in the world. HRT performs at, and some times above, the level of many military and non-military tactical teams anywhere. I was duly impressed, but my ego would not allow me to let him know that. “Of course.”

  I was expecting him to tell me to stand by for a while, or to call him back in twenty minutes like everyone else had. Instead, he asked me where I was. I didn’t want to sound like a smartass, so I simply responded that I was still in the broom closet.

  Undoubtedly, smartass was what he was interested in and he asked me, “Where at in the broom closet?”

  “Standing on the floor, getting my legs working again. They’ve been folded in half for over six hours now.” I gave him that information, hoping both to let him know that I wasn’t in one hundred percent working order yet, and, not incidentally, to let him know how much I could take. Lame, Dell, I thought, scolding myself. Sure enough, he didn’t seem too interested in my pain or my stamina.

  “You good to go?”

  “Good to go.”

  “Okay, climb back up on the shelf, but this time on the other side.”

  I started to respond but held my tongue. Then I decided that I had to say something. My confusion came out in the articulate form of, “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

  “There’s an attic door in the ceiling of the broom closet. It leads to a space between floors on the back side of the south elevator. It’s on the other side of the small closet you’re in.”

  I thought I got the implication of the words “small closet,” meaning, “Why didn’t you see it, Mr. Trained Observer Detective Wannabe SWAT guy?” I was getting pissed off. I wanted to think it was because he was razzing me about not seeing the door, or not being HRT, or being from Podunk, Colorado. I did a reality check and realized it was me who had the problem, not him. He was just doing his job and probably wasn’t trying to send any hidden messages at all.

  “I got it,” I said, looking up in the dark and using the light from my cell phone to illuminate the trap door, so obvious to me now. I checked my watch and saw that I was coming up on twenty minutes since the last patrol. It didn’t mean they would be coming by now, but it
did mean they could. I told that to Oberg.

  “Good eye on the time, but we’ve got you covered. They’re not anywhere near you. You need to go now.”

  I knew not to ask how he knew what he knew. It would either seem like an ill-timed question, or more correctly, like I was second-guessing him. So I simply climbed back to the top of the closet. The trap door had a slide bolt on it, for what reason I couldn’t fathom. After all, it wasn’t like there would be people in the attic trying to break into the broom closet. I slid it back, and the door swung up into the opening. I held on until it rested quietly back on its hinges and went no further. I climbed up the rest of the way and sat on the edge of the opening with my feet hanging down into the closet. If I thought it was dark in the closet, this was ten times worse. There was a sliver of light coming from behind me somewhere, but the darkness was so thick, it seemed to absorb the light before it could make its way to me.

  “Darker than a tax collector’s heart up here.”

  He either didn’t get my joke, or didn’t care, because not only didn’t he laugh, he didn’t even comment. “You see the light filtering in behind you?”

  “Yeah, I see it.”

  “Well, that’s north. You need to go southeast from where you are.”

  “How did you know about the sliver of light?” I asked. I mean, even HRT isn’t that omniscient.

  “Maintenance guy told us about it when we asked him about any lighting up there. You need to get going.”

  I turned back around and looked into the blank space of where I needed to go. I was about to ask him if he had any suggestion about how I was supposed to see to get to where I was going. But then I realized that the answer was simple. I could use the light from my phone. The bigger problem was that I was letting myself get psyched out. I was losing confidence in my ability to adapt and overcome, and his smartass answers to my questions weren’t doing anything to help that. I stood up on the wooden landing and closed the hatch, shutting what very little light was filtering up from under the closet door and up through the trap door. Even though it was darker, I suddenly felt more confident. Fuck HRT, I thought. I’m Logan County SWAT.