by Jim Riley
He had saved the best for last. Blackman Firearms and Tactics Institute, or BFTI as Roy called it, was the only privately-owned tactical school in the country to have it, and he was very proud. It was a four-story, concrete office building, complete with plywood-covered walls to accommodate live-fire exercises. No one, except the federal government, had invested enough money to put one together. He stopped the truck and walked me to the building. I hadn’t commented on it yet except to say it was impressive. The building inside was like any other office building except there was no carpet, expensive or otherwise, on the floor, and as I said, the walls and ceiling were covered with a double layer of one-inch plywood to absorb bullets used in live-fire exercises. There were the normal things you’d find in a building, though, like water fountains, solid wood doors, waiting rooms with sofas and coffee tables—sans magazines—and sliding glass windows at the reception desks. There was even an elevator set into the wall, but it didn’t function. It was for training on how to open the doors without the electricity and how to climb in and out of the roof panel. We walked up to the second floor, which was similar to the first but laid out slightly different. I could see bullet holes in the one-inch plywood covering on many of the walls. The place was quiet and had a musty smell to it.
I had been in several office buildings since the event in St. Louis and it had never bothered me. But this was the first one I was in that was going to have anything to do with shooting. I was prepared for it to make me feel uncomfortable. Instead, I felt like I was home.
“Let’s do it.”
Sarge was happy, at least that was what I interpreted his emotions to be, for me about getting the job. He even made some sarcastic comment about me not being worth nearly that much money and grumbled about his measly paycheck. We went out to eat that night and had a huge steak dinner. He insisted I buy.
Tish was excited about my new job as well. She had seen me spiraling down and had been concerned, though not enough to come back. She knew it would have only postponed the inevitable. She never would give me an answer when I asked what was going to happen to us and said that we needed time and space. Our problems didn’t happen overnight and the solution wasn’t going to come about overnight either. At least now when we talked, we normally ended the conversation pleasantly. One time she even told me she loved me.
I was enjoying my hero status at Blackman’s and so was Roy. He was using me in his advertising flyers as being a tactical expert in terrorism matters. I didn’t care. I was being paid handsomely and getting to shoot as much as I wanted to. Most importantly, I was doing what I really enjoyed—teaching other men and women how to be SWAT operators. There were a few, mind you, that should not have been allowed to even handle a firearm, much less shoot it when others were present. One student almost shot me in the butt. He was immediately given a partial refund and driven to the airport.
The biggest pain, though, was the questions. Almost everyone that came through my class would ask me the same thing. “Tell me about it.” I finally dropped all pretenses of being nice and told them as viciously as possible I couldn’t talk about it. Usually I would try to do it in public so word would get around. Having a new group every week, the process got old, and within a month and a half, I would begin each class with the disclaimer, “I cannot and will not talk about what happened at the JP Goldstein building in St. Louis. If you ask me, I will have you doing push-ups until your partner pukes.”
Roy didn’t mind my harsh tone. The customers had already paid. Besides, they expected me to be some kind of hard ass. It fit well.
I worked on all different ranges and taught all kinds of tactics and shooting drills at the institute, being that I had ample experience and was good at it, but my main responsibility was the office building. Once again, it had not hurt my feelings that Roy was using my notoriety to make some money. As far as I was concerned, tactics were tactics, and large, multi-story buildings were something every tactical team was going to deal with at some time or another.
I had been instructing for just over a year when St. Louis came back to haunt me. It wasn’t an anniversary of the incident and nothing traumatic happened to me to trigger my brain. It was just a normal day at the range, with a normal group of students. The weather was nice, and I was in an incredibly good mood. I had gotten a raise the month prior and was now making $5,000 short of $100,000 a year, which is more money than I had ever dreamed of. Roy had told me that I was like a money tree and was bringing in customers from across the globe. During that year I had the opportunity to train every kind of operator, from law enforcement all over the world to several from the spec-ops community. My skills had sharpened as well. Doing the same thing over and over every day will do that for you.
As always, I had started my class that day with a classroom briefing before we even went to the building. We had gone over firearm safety and all the rules that BFTI enforced. Firearm safety was near and dear to my heart, especially after almost getting hit in the ass with a 9mm round. I didn’t give the layout of the entire building at once because at the end of the class the team would be expected to execute a hostage rescue on the top floors, and I didn’t want them to have the floor plan this early. We did go over the first two floors and discussed a plan we would execute. Even though this was the last day of their training and they had already been exposed to several live-fire exercises, we still started slow and moved up. It was safety first. That’s what kept me, and them, alive. I briefed the first scenario, which at this point was a simple building-clearing exercise looking for an armed suspect. One of the instructors played the part of the bad guy. The class was issued special weapons that fired a paint bullet called Simunition. It was a regular-sized cartridge of either .38 or 9mm, depending on what weapon we were using. The only powder it used was the primer, which was just enough to send the paint bullet downrange about 45 feet. The bullet was a plastic cap full of semi-gelled paint. The result of a hit was a mark on the target and a nice welt if the shooter was close enough to the shootee.
After we had discussed the plan in the classroom, we were ready to run through it with the Simunition. All real firearms and ammunition had been taken away, and none were allowed in the building when it was a dry fire or Simunition training. The range was either hot or cold, but not both. That’s how accidents happen.
This class of students was above-average, which may have come from the fact that over half of them had previously been exposed to SWAT training of some type. I was having fun with them as normally a lot of my students were beginners. We were doing a few advanced things since there was already a base of knowledge to build on and moved into things like officer-down scenarios and hostage movement while taking fire.
We were on the second floor, and I had just finished showing them a cover-and-move technique. Most of us were standing around near the stairwell talking and joking about one of the students catching a Simunition round in the peanuts. I heard something that caught my attention and looked at the corner, which was about ten feet away. Suddenly, I was back in the JP Goldstein building. I could see the man coming around the corner, and he had the girl by the arm. I drew my handgun, and without any wasted motion, I put a Simunition round in the right eye lens of his safety glasses. There was some shouting, mainly from the guy I had just shot, and no one knew exactly what to say or do. That included me. I’m not sure if I looked as confused as I felt. I started to say something, but only a moan came out. I walked down the stairs, got into my truck, and drove to the office, where I resigned.
“What you gonna do now?” Sarge asked. We were sitting in his living room, if that’s what you wanted to call it, drinking Diet Pepsi.
“I dunno.”
“Nothing stupid?”
I knew what he meant. “No, I’m not going to eat my gun. “
He nodded his acknowledgement. “I got a friend that’s a shrink.”
“What are you doing with a friend that’s a shrink?” It didn’t fit. A friend that owns a firearms t
raining institution fit, a shrink didn’t.
He shrugged. “I went to him for a while.”
I didn’t know exactly what to say. You look at a tough old Master Sergeant and the last thing that goes through your mind is, “Hey, I wonder if he’s crazy and has to get his head shrunk?”
“You want his name or not?”
“Sure.” If it was good enough for the Sarge, who was I to second guess it.
The guy was nice enough and had even counseled a lot of cops and several spec-ops operators, at least if he was to be believed. I had no reason not to believe him, I suppose. After the third session I had decided that he was good, he knew what he was talking about, he had diagnosed me with something just short of PTSD and was probably right, and that I wasn’t going back to see him anymore.
“How many sessions did you go to?” I asked Sarge when I saw him later.
“Two.”
“Why’d you quit?” I was asking him because I really had no idea why I had decided to stop going, only that I had.
“Cured.”
“What the hell do you mean, cured? Cured of what?”
“Bad dreams. PTSD, I guess. I don’t know. After a couple of sessions, I suddenly felt okay. Not so much like nothing bothered me anymore, but that I was okay if it did.”
“And it hasn’t bothered you ever since.”
He shrugged. “You kill people, you take that with you from now on. You’re crazy if you think that’s just going to disappear. It gets better and you live with it. The main thing, don’t let it scare you and don’t start thinking you’re weird when it happens. Man was not created to kill each other. It’s just our job.”
I guess now that he was saying it out loud, it made sense. The thoughts about St. Louis had been creeping around the edges of my thoughts for a long time. And as much as I didn’t want to admit it, doing SWAT scenarios in that office building was nothing more than a breeding ground for them. It would be like an alcoholic tending bar.
“You going to go back and try again at Blackman’s?”
“No, they would never trust me again. Besides, I need to move on.” I didn’t get into my theory of the building and the drunk tending bar.
“What you gonna do?”
“I’m going back to Colorado.”
Chapter Eight
My first stop in Colorado had been to see Coop Watts. Partly because my flight landed in Denver and he was the only person I knew that I felt like seeing down there. I thanked him for his offer to stay with him and his wife, politely declined, and he and I spent a day together catching up. I had talked to him a couple of times on the phone while I was in Tennessee, but neither of us were really phone-talking types. We had lunch, and I sat with him while he was doing some surveillance on a Sunni Muslim who had known ties to an extremist group’s money operation. Coop had patiently waited—well, not patiently—but had waited out his punishment like a man and was now back in charge of the Counter-Terrorism Division of the Denver Field Office.
“What happened to the ASAC dickhead you diss’d that got you busted?”
“He was transferred.”
“What’d he do to get spanked?” I asked with a gleeful smile on my face.
“Nothing. He was promoted. Went to Headquarters.” Coop said it without distaste. I guess he had become used to the ironic behavior of his organization. “What you going to do?”
“Don’t know yet. Find a job, I guess. I’ve got enough saved to last a while. Maybe even a year.”
“Go back to Logan County?”
“I don’t know. Lots of skeletons there.”
He smirked and shrugged his shoulder. “No more than any other place you’ve left.”
“Bite me.” It was true, and I wondered if he just meant it as a sarcastic jab or if he was trying to tell me something.
“Talked to Tish lately?”
“The last time was before I left Tennessee.”
“You going to tell her why you left?” He knew I probably wasn’t planning on it.
“Don’t know.”
“You should, you know.”
“Why?”
“So she doesn’t think you just up and quit for no reason.”
It was wise advice. I had run away or quit most everything my whole life. It would be a logical conclusion for her to jump to.
I didn’t want to wear out my welcome with one of the few friends I had left, so I left Denver the next day. Not that staying in the metro area would have imposed on Coop, but there was nothing else or anyone else I wanted to see there, so I headed west. To Grand Junction, where Tish was living.
I stayed in a hotel on the east side of town. I picked up the phone to call her that night but couldn’t do it. I told myself I didn’t want to push myself on her, but the real reason, I knew, was that I didn’t want to put myself in a position to be rejected by her. It was just like when I was a kid. I had almost decided to leave Grand Junction the next day but found myself driving down Patterson Boulevard, and before I knew it I was at the hospital. I didn’t know if she was working or not. I knew she worked the day shift but didn’t know what her days off were. Before I could change my mind, I went in and found my way to the emergency room, then asked for her. It felt very awkward talking to the nurse behind the desk, knowing that she was a part of Tish’s life now and I didn’t know who she was. The thought passed through my mind that there may be others here in Tish’s life, maybe even in a more personal way. Like in a relationship. I forced the thought away since Tish had assured me she was not seeing anyone and had no plans to. Our separating was not about seeing someone else. I drummed my fingers on the desk and my stomach was in a knot. When I heard her voice, I melted.
“Hi. What are you doing here? Is everything okay?” She looked concerned and confused, but not annoyed. I was relieved.
“Just stopped in to say hello. You don’t happen to have a break coming up, do you?”
She looked at her watch and shook her head. “My next break isn’t for two more hours.”
“I’ll wait.”
“I’ll cover for you, Tish.” It was the nurse I had spoken to when I first found the desk.
Tish thanked her and we went outside, where the weather was beautiful and it was private.
“Is everything okay?”
I told Tish about everything that had happened at Blackman’s and even told her about my sessions with the shrink. She seemed impressed that I had taken that step and told me so.
“I’m growing up.”
She smiled and nodded but didn’t respond.
“I’m doing a lot of soul searching right now, Tish. I need to know. Is there any hope that we will get back together?”
She didn’t have to think about it, and that was a good sign. “Yes. But not yet. Not now.”
My first thought again was that she had met someone else and was seeing if she liked it. I guess it showed on my face.
“There’s no one else, Dell. Hell, after you, how could anyone keep me entertained?”
I smiled, relieved, and took it as a compliment. “What, then?”
“The same reason we split in the first place. You’re high maintenance, and I need some time to pull myself together before I can take the load on again.”
“It’s been over a year. How long’s it going to take?” I tried not to make it sound bitter, but I’m sure it did anyway.
She got up from where she was leaning against the brick planter. “You try and keep a job for more than a year and we’ll talk about it.” She kissed me on the cheek and walked back through the large sliding glass doors that opened automatically for her.
My next stop was at the only place left in Colorado that I had any real ties to. Sheriff Tobias Christman’s house. I was greeted like the prodigal son, which in some ways I guess I was. A forty-eight-year-old prodigal son. Not very impressive. After the normal pleasantries and an outstanding dinner that his wife Peg had prepared, Toby and I retired to his hot tub. I didn’t have any shorts with me,
so Peg provided me a pair that they kept around as loaners. Toby and I sat in the bubbling water, looking up at the clear night sky. We had been dancing around all the serious issues all night. Toby was that way, sometimes. I broke the glass.
“I quit instructing.”
“How come?”
“Time to get back into law enforcement.” I hated lying to one of my best friends in the world, but to tell him about the Simunition episode would necessitate me telling him all the things that came afterward. I wasn’t embarrassed to tell him, just not up to it.
“I wish I had a place for you at the S.O. but we’re full up.” He was sincere, I knew. He wouldn’t have offered if he weren’t. He was also like that.
“Thanks anyway. How’s Barnes doing?” I asked, changing the subject.
“He’s was doing great right up until the time he took a job at the P.D. in Montrose.”
“Who you got in there now?”
“We’re getting by with just one detective. Budget cuts.” He said it with a snarl of his upper lip. “Got a female in there. You’d like her. Young, smart, catches on quick, and a pain in the ass.” He smiled and looked over at me.
“You stopped drinking?” It was out of the blue and unlike him to drop a bomb like that, but it was a good question from a friend.
“Yep. One year and three weeks now.”
“How’s everything else?” I didn’t know exactly what he was talking about except maybe in general terms.
“Tish and I still talk, and I still hold out hope. Other than that, life is okay.”
“Chief Stalone is looking for a patrol sergeant.” He glanced a sideways look at me.
I chuckled. Then I laughed out loud. He laughed with me. I truly was a shit magnet.
Chapter Nine
Police Chief William Stalone even sat with an air of superiority. His mahogany-colored leather chair was plush, and I’m guessing it had cost more than Toby’s entire office full of furniture. The Chief’s office was mahogany-paneled and precisely decorated. There was nothing on his desk but a leather-bound blotter and his gold-nibbed ink pen that lay there looking very important.