Friendly Fire

by John Gilstrap

  “I got to ride a lightning bolt,” he said with a forced chuckle. “That Taser is a pretty special experience.”

  “Tell me about what led up to that.”

  “Did you know that you can actually see electricity when it’s slamming through your body? It sets off blue lights behind your eyes. And it tastes like blood.”

  She waited.

  Ethan sighed and looked back at the ceiling. “I know you like eye contact, but honest to God, my neck is sore. It’s hard to look to the right. Come to my left and maybe we can do the eye contact thing.”

  Wendy didn’t know if the request was in reality a passive-aggressive power play, but she bought that it was not unreasonable. So she moved to the other side of the bed. The whole room wasn’t eight by ten feet, so the distance separating them remained the same.

  Ethan followed her with his eyes until he could rock his head to his left. “Yes, that’s better,” he said.

  “Good,” Wendy said with a smile. “Now tell me what happened.”

  He took an enormous breath and held it as his jaw muscles worked hard and his face turned red. He was fighting a losing battle over a wave of emotion. “I think I went a little crazy,” he said.

  * * *

  Warren Michaels looked up as Jed Hackner knocked on his open door. “It’s going on nine o’clock, Warren. It’s Friday. Why aren’t you at home?”

  “Asks the man who’s at my door at nine o’clock on a Friday.”

  “You have a life,” Jed said. “I don’t.”

  Warren knew that to be more true than false. Jed had always been drawn to troubled relationships. “I just want to clear the decks for the mountain of crap that’s going to arrive over the weekend when I’m not here. I won’t be a lot longer. What about you?”

  “Another half hour, max.” Jed turned to leave.

  Warren said, “Hey.”

  Jed stopped and turned.

  “What’s the rumble in the jungle over housing the Falk kid here?”

  Jed shrugged. “I haven’t heard anything, but I haven’t asked, either. Want me to put out feelers?”

  “No, that’s okay. No sense kicking a nest. Have a good weekend if I don’t see you before one of us leaves. You’re still planning to come over Sunday for the ’Skins game?”

  “What, are you kidding? Life wouldn’t be the same without my weekly dose of perpetual yet futile hope.”

  * * *

  “They’re splitting up,” Boxers said, pointing through the windshield. “Who do you want to follow?”

  “Let’s stick with the Cherokee,” Jonathan said. When faced with a binary choice, pick one and make it sound authoritative.

  “It looks like two vehicles are going left,” Boxers said. “No, three. The Cherokee has only one companion.”

  “I’m making this up as I go along, Big Guy. For all we know, they’re going home to sleep.”

  “You don’t believe that for a second, do you?”

  “Of course not. But if something is going down, I figure one vehicle will lead us to the others.” Saying it out loud made it sound even more correct.

  “The good ol’ whiskey indigo plan,” Boxers said with a rumble of a laugh. Whiskey indigo equaled “wing it.”

  They followed the Cherokee at a distance, working hard to keep at least two vehicles between them. The route took them back into the deep center of Brookville, past the Old Town city center, and then through a low-rise industrial section until finally they were in the middle of what appeared to be the county government complex.

  “Open up a little more distance,” Jonathan said. At this hour, traffic in and around the government center was practically nonexistent and the Batmobile was not what one would call inconspicuous. It helped that it was black and that the area was dark, but it never hurt to be careful.

  “I don’t get it,” Boxers said. “Are they paying parking tickets or what?”

  As soon as Big Guy asked the question, Jonathan knew exactly what they were about to do. “That’s the police station up there,” he said. “I think they’re going to hit it.”

  Boxers laughed. “Oh, now that should be a hoot to watch. That’s like picking a gunfight at a gun show. Can you say circular firing squad?”

  Jonathan reached for his radio and keyed the mike. “Mother Hen, Scorpion,” he said over the air. To Boxers, he said, “Do you forget how many people we saw pouring out of that Moose lodge?”

  “They’re not here,” Big Guy said.

  “Go ahead, Scorpion,” Venice said.

  “Hey, Box, I want you to launch Roxie again. Put her in a hover over the police station. Just park her there so we can see what’s what.” He keyed the microphone. “Mother Hen, I think we may have stumbled into something hot here. We’re at the Braddock County Police station. See what you can pull up from their video feeds, and if you can, get me a floor plan.”

  “Please tell me you’re not breaking that boy out of jail,” Venice said.

  Boxers and Jonathan exchanged glances. Jonathan said into the radio, “Ethan Falk is inside the police station?”

  “Affirmative,” Venice said. “I thought I told you that.”

  Maybe she did, but sometimes he got distracted during long discussions with Venice.

  “And don’t forget about the property officer who was found dead,” Venice said. “I don’t know if that’s significant, but it would be a heck of a coincidence if it wasn’t.”

  “Copy that,” Jonathan said. “Let me know what you can get on the police station and get back to me ASAP, okay?”

  “Will do.”

  In the back of the Hummer, while Boxers got busy bringing Roxie back online, Jonathan opened the storage locker in the vehicle’s floor.

  “What are you doing, Boss?” Boxers asked.

  “Once you get Roxie up and running, I want us to kit up and be ready to go hot.”

  “To do what?” Boxers looked at him as if he’d grown a new nose. “You know that police stations are full of cops, right?”

  “I think that explains the p word on the door,” Jonathan quipped.

  “And you know we break a lot of laws,” Boxers said. “The police station is pretty much number one on my list of places I don’t want to go.”

  “I’m not all that keen on it, either, but if these guys launch an assault, I can’t imagine just sitting here and watching.”

  “Then let’s leave,” Boxers said. “That way we won’t know.”

  The lightness of Big Guy’s tone sold the suggestion as a joke, but Jonathan had to admit that it made some sense.

  “Hey, Dig, listen to me,” Boxers said. “There’s already a million cops in there as it is. Those two cars hold, what, maybe four, five guys apiece? We can’t bring anything to that fight that won’t already be there. Not to mention the fact that we’re going to be on the round end of the cops’ weapons if we come in behind the bad guys. If the bad guys go in at all.”

  “I can’t argue with any of that,” Jonathan said. “Maybe we won’t have to do anything. But let’s kit up anyway, just to be on the safe side. You can make fun of me later.”

  “Something to look forward to,” Boxers said. He unlatched the back door and stepped out into the night with Roxie. “No, you stay in where it’s warm,” he said. “I got this.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Drew and the rest of the mall team parked in various corners of the three enormous parking structures that served Mason’s Corner. They left the vehicles one at a time, at an interval that shouldn’t draw any attention. And if it did, they were just cops on a routine patrol. In a perfect world, they would have been able to get their hands on a police vehicle, but that most assuredly would have attracted attention.

  When this one was over, the whole game was over for Drew. Over the course of the past few weeks, so many things had gone wrong with virtually nothing going right that he was going to take his share of the sheik’s money and retire. He’d been a shooter in one form or another for nearly t
wenty years now, and while he was damn good at it, the time had come for him to realize the obvious: that this was a young man’s game.

  He had also realized that killing on home turf was a lot harder than killing overseas. He’d never personally invested in the politics that underlay what he did, and he had no compunction against taking lives for money, but after today he and his team would be vilified by the entire free world. The plan was so simple in its design that Drew couldn’t understand why it hadn’t already been thought of by others.

  The uniforms were the key to it all. People expected to see police officers mingling about in crowds. While the M4s that each of them wore slung across their body armor would surely draw attention, the worst that might happen was that people would bitch about the militarization of American law enforcement.

  Boy howdy, wait till tomorrow.

  Drew was last to leave his vehicle, a Honda CR-V. He left it unlocked, with the key fob in the center console. Whoever got to it first—if, in fact, it made sense to get back to it at all—would be able to drive it to the rally point, and from there, the focus would shift to escape and evasion.

  The teams had trained for this for weeks. They’d toured the mall, they’d identified shooting lanes and areas of responsibility. For the entire plan to work, they needed to keep the attack hot for at least ten minutes. Fifteen would be better. Each member of the team carried a minimum of four hundred rounds of ammunition for their long gun, and then whatever they opted to carry for a sidearm.

  The first seconds of the attack would by far cause the most damage. The first gunshots would startle mingling shoppers, but then within ten seconds or so, the reality would kick in, and they would head for cover. From there, the initial round of spray-and-slay would transition to aimed shots. Sniping. And that’s when the panic would fold in on itself. As the real police arrived, each member of the team would decide when it was time to blend in and leave. That wouldn’t be possible for everyone, of course, but each loss of a team member meant an expanded share of money for the survivors.

  Drew entered the mall through the airlock leading to Parker’s Department Store, a chain of high-end clothing and knickknacks headquartered in Seattle, but with anchor stores in countless malls in the Mid-Atlantic that catered to customers who perceived themselves to be richer than their neighbors. It was an egocentric marketing strategy that Drew imagined sold tons of stuff to people who flat-out couldn’t afford what they bought. And for those, there was always the store credit card account, through which already-bilked customers could finance their purchases and wind up spending two or three times the already-inflated prices for the things they didn’t need to begin with.

  Drew held no animus for those who participated in the Northern Virginia nouveau riche competitions that fueled BMW and Mercedes dealerships, but he understood why the rest of the world so hated Americans. When starving kids in Africa were drinking out of shit-contaminated mud puddles, the “poor” people of America suffered through clean tap water instead of bottled designer water and they complained. Drew lamented that his lazy countrymen who had never wandered more than fifty miles from their birthplace moaned about inner-city poverty which looked to the rest of the world like a thriving middle class.

  And then there was Mason’s Corner, a monument built at the feet of money. Five–and-dime stores were not welcome, thank you very much. No barber shops, no trinket stores. Nothing that might attract the hoi polloi that was truly the American middle class. Absolutely not. If you couldn’t afford a fifteen-dollar burger, you had no business being here. Yet it was the place of places to be. Kids were here, teenagers spending their parents’ money, pretending that it was theirs. Young parents were here, too, pushing their kids in strollers through a mall easily an hour after said kids should have been tucked into their own beds.

  If ever there was a group that needed an introduction to reality, it was this one. And he was the vector for it.

  As he walked past the jewelry counter, toward the cosmetics counter and the mall that lay beyond, Drew was keenly aware of the looks he attracted, especially from children, especially from boys. Something about the universal attraction to rifles, he assumed.

  While he was in the space that separated jewelry from cosmetics, a thirty-something man who had clearly never seen a gym yet warranted a “department manager” name tag from Parker’s, approached him from the left. “Excuse me, officer?” he said.

  Drew stopped and addressed the man. He placed his right hand casually over the grip of the Glock 17 that rode in his holster. If he did it right, the posture would look natural. “Yes, sir?”

  “Is there something going on in the mall?” the manager said. His name tag identified him as Darrell Kent.

  “I’m not sure I understand your question,” Drew said. As he spoke, he plotted out firing lanes inside the store, in case it came to that.

  “I’m just coming off my break,” Darrell said, “and you’re the third cop I’ve seen in here carrying a rifle and all kinds of ammunition. We don’t see that very often. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before. Is there some kind of elevated threat level or something?” Darrell’s tone betrayed fear. Drew wondered what the department manager would do if he shared the reality of what was coming in the next few minutes. In the next six minutes and fifty-three seconds, if the truth be known.

  “We call it a show of force,” Drew said, parroting the line they had rehearsed. “You never know when trouble might strike, so periodically we like to step out with a little extra firepower. If bad guys are casing the joint, as they used to say in the old movies, we hope we’ll give them reason to second-think their desire to hit Braddock County.”

  “So there’s no immediate cause for concern?”

  Drew took his time on this answer, savoring his smile. “No, sir,” he said. “It’s all just routine.”

  “Good,” Darrell said. He held out his hand. “And thank you for your service.”

  Drew shook the man’s hand. “You’re welcome,” he said.

  Past the cosmetics counter, a wide doorway opened into the rest of the mall, where hundreds of sales people in hundreds of stores would be more than happy to separate you from your money. Want a cigar? There was a store for that. How about a pretzel double fried in a vat of artery-clogging fat? There was both a store and a kiosk for that. Across the way, pictures of mostly naked teenage boys beckoned customers into a store where boys and girls alike could spend a hundred dollars for pre-torn jeans and fifty dollars for a T-shirt that Drew’s mother would not have let him wear in public. He passed by the kiosk that offered three-dollar cups of coffee, and another where you could spend thirty dollars for a purse for your six-hundred-dollar smart phone.

  As far as Drew was concerned, this was a turning point in the history of the world. And he was the tip of the spear. There was a better than average chance that he would not survive the next thirty minutes, but if it came to that, then by God his final hour on the planet would have been well spent.

  Mason’s Corner Shopping Mall lived on two levels, around a towering atrium that featured glass artwork across the ceiling that reminded Drew of the famed lobby of the Bellagio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Travel between the two levels was made possible not just by the elevators inside the anchor stores, but also via five sets of escalators, multiple ornate stairways, and two sets of glass elevators in the body of the mall.

  Drew took his station on the second level, outside a designer shoe retailer, at the corner where the mall angled out at about forty-five degrees. From here, he had clear lanes of fire down nearly the entire length of the mall, plus an unobstructed view of the shoppers below. The rest of his team members were similarly installed in other strategic locations. He checked his watch.

  Fifty-five seconds till H-hour.

  Drew steeled himself for what was coming. He watched the old couple who held hands while the husband held on to the atrium’s guard rail for support. The young moms and dads with their strollers an
d with their toddlers who clearly wanted to be anywhere else but here. The teenage couples young and in love. The teenage marauders who saw the mall as an amusement park without an admission fee.

  He smiled at those who made eye contact, but mostly he watched how they handled themselves. The law of averages dictated that there would be a few off-duty law enforcement officers, and maybe even a few on-duty ones. This being Virginia, where all God’s children were born with a right to carry firearms, there were likely to be a few civilians who would try to shoot back. This being autumn, where more people wore jackets than didn’t, it would be harder to identify the concealed carriers than it would be if it were summer. But he knew they were out there.

  Thirty seconds.

  Two teenaged boys made eye contact, and Drew knew right away that they were going to be a problem. They approached with anger etched into their faces. Both white and skinny with hair that could have used both a pair of scissors and a pint of shampoo, the one on the right wore a Che Guevara T-shirt, and the other wore a polo that came from the designer store that featured kiddie porn in its windows.

  “Hey, Officer,” said Che-boy as he approached. “Really? You’ve got to have a goddamn machine gun in a shopping mall? Seriously?”

  “Shouldn’t you be chasing real terrorists instead of playing tough killer here?” said the other kid. “Don’t you guys kill enough people as it is?”

  Drew didn’t respond. He looked past them, so as not to get distracted.

  “What?” Che-boy said. “Did your masters forget to program your robot brain to answer questions?”

  Drew felt his lips draw back into an unintentional smile.

  Ten seconds.

  * * *

  Venice had been able to pull up a floor plan for the Braddock County Police station, and had successfully hacked into the building’s video surveillance feed—apparently one of her easiest hacks ever. Jonathan didn’t understand the technical ins and outs of such things, but he figured it made sense not to have multiple layers of security over footage that was readily accessible to the media. The feed showed a building that was more occupied than Jonathan would have imagined, given the time of night on a Friday. Venice had been watching the feed for more time and with more intensity than Jonathan had, and she’d been able to cross-reference some of the faces she’d seen with various other records. Most important, she’d been able to identify the chief of police, and to confirm that he was still in the building. Jonathan wasn’t sure why that was an important detail, but it felt like it was.