Hard Return

by J. Carson Black

  An elderly man at the next table said, “They auctioned the whole shebang off. Everything. Even Trigger.”

  “They did?”

  “Yup. Made a mint, too.”

  Landry was surprised at the sadness he felt. Roy Rogers was part of Americana. But now Americana wasn’t quaint and striving and earnest. It was all over the map. It was just a string of disconnected places held together by freeways and overpriced diners like the HomeTown Buffet. America was both amorphous and disjointed at the same time. But then, things weren’t so great even back then. Landry recalled reading somewhere that unbeknownst to Roy Rogers, an assistant to the taxidermist who mounted Trigger parceled out the famous stallion’s meat to local restaurants.

  Landry realized he had been feeling melancholy most of the day. It was tied to the massacre at Gordon C. Tuttle High, but it was more than that. He felt alone.

  Actually, he felt lonely.

  Landry was never lonely. He had what was called an introverted personality. That did not mean he was shy, because he wasn’t. He just needed a lot of downtime from people. A little bit of people went a long way, even if he enjoyed their company. Even if he liked them, he often needed to get away and recharge his batteries. There were times in his life when he was part of a team—in fact that had been his entire career as a Navy SEAL—but left to his own devices, he preferred to be by himself.

  The only exceptions to this rule were Cindi and Kristal. Cindi and Kristal were family, and their proximity didn’t take energy away from him. Their presence added to his feeling of well-being. All three of them were independent by nature, so their relationship worked like a well-oiled machine. They each had their own rituals, private jokes, annoyances—a whole history of being together in every conceivable circumstance.

  Family.

  He loved them and they had loved him . . .

  But was that true now? Did love fade as time went by?

  Did love fade if you thought your loved one was dead?

  He got back into the Explorer and drove back onto the freeway. As his headlights pierced the dusk and the night closed around him, Landry felt something stutter in his heart. He found himself asking the eternal question people ask themselves in the quiet and the dark of their loneliness. How the hell did I get here?

  The answer was clear, now that he was looking straight at it. He had turned his back on the people who meant the most to him.

  His wife was engaged to be married to some pale bald guy who worked for a finance company. His daughter barely avoided being shot to death. Her boyfriend was shot dead before her eyes.

  Luke had tried to save her. He had sacrificed his life for her.

  Luke, not Landry. Landry himself had been too late. He made it a rule never to second-guess an action—it was a zero-sum game in his line of work—but this time . . .

  He couldn’t help but think: If he’d been able to act a hair faster, would Luke still be alive?

  Driving through the moonscape of the desert in the dark, the headlights like pinpoints that grew and grew and then flashed by in the other lanes, Landry felt he might as well be on the moon.

  Because he was all alone.

  The traffic picked up heading into LA—a stream of red and white. Like blood cells teeming through an artery. Every car a self-contained pod, rushing in the same direction.

  It wasn’t as if Cindi didn’t know that Landry could disappear. They had talked about it in the abstract: “I may have to go off the grid. When it’s safe, I’ll come back.” But they both knew that if he went off the grid, it would be impossible to come back. Cindi had friends whose husbands were SEALs. They knew it was unlikely their husbands would just disappear, but they also knew that the men they loved were trained to do one thing better than any other thing.

  And that skill set would be hard to translate to civilian life.

  A lot of men he knew had suffered, once their usefulness came into question. A guy you could depend on in a firefight was suddenly trying to sell shoes in a strip mall sporting-goods store—if he could get the job. Or a fast food place.

  His superior officer called it “repurposing,” but it didn’t make it any better.

  Landry had taken the easiest route. He’d worked for Whitbread Associates during the Iraq War, and he stayed on with them afterward.

  He was paid well and he’d socked a retirement away. Two retirements. He did well in the stock market. Money seemed to come to him.

  But he didn’t quit. He didn’t enjoy retirement, because he couldn’t enjoy retirement. He was skilled. He was one of the best at what he did. And Whitbread worked for the United States government, so Landry could even tell himself he was still working for his country.

  Until Florida.

  He skirted LA and took an off-ramp into Fullerton. He had a friend, a former Navy SEAL, who lived there. Dan was out of town most of the year, but Landry and Dan had an agreement. Landry kept a mono vault in the backyard of his condo in Lake View Terrace for Dan, and Dan did the same for him in Fullerton. It was just another option they both had.

  The neighborhood was quiet. Landry parked under a tree along the sidewalk and climbed the wall. The house was dark, but there were security lights everywhere. A dog barked three houses down. Landry waited, expecting to hear a door open or close or someone rebuking the dog, but the dog just kept barking halfheartedly, and finally stopped. Landry headed for the back terrace. Standing at the edge of the terrace was a large Mexican Talavera flowerpot.

  He hauled the pot sideways. Instead of the brick that covered the rest of the terrace, the place where the flowerpot had been was a round patch of dirt. Landry brushed away the dirt and unscrewed the polyurethane lid, setting it to the side, and aimed his flashlight down into the vault. There was the packet, wrapped in oilskin: a passport and a driver’s license under the name Jeffery Peterman.

  Landry was out in five and back on the freeway in nine.

  He went south to I-8, and found a hotel just off the freeway in El Cajon, east of San Diego. He checked in using Jeffery Peterman’s driver’s license.

  Thinking about the kids.

  Inside the room, Landry fired up the laptop and searched for articles on the shooting. Right at the top on Google was a new story from the Los Angeles Times, perfect for his purposes. Profiles of the kids who were shot and killed, one paragraph each.

  He lay against the headboard fully clothed, propped up against the pillows, and read the story.

  Luke first.

  Luke was seventeen. The photo they had of him was a selfie. To his right Landry saw a bare shoulder and a swatch of longish dark blond hair that might have belonged to his daughter. Luke’s expression was goofy. With his free hand he flashed some kind of gang sign. Your average high school kid, not old enough or smart enough to look into his future.

  And in Luke’s case, there was no point.

  He wore a long-sleeved shirt with the word “Quiksilver” on the front. His black hair on the long side. Landry knew from looking up his clothing, his skateboard, and his attitude that he was a “skater,” and this wasn’t just a style but a lifestyle. The memorial named Luke’s favorite music—Daft Punk, some musical group Landry had never heard of. They wrote a song called “Get Lucky.”

  This was not so different from Landry’s day. Kids were kids. They identified with a group and dressed that way. It was protective coloring. They tried to fit in with their tribe.

  If he saw a kid like that on the street, he wouldn’t give him a second look, but Landry was possessive of his daughter. He had disliked Luke from the beginning, even though they’d never met face-to-face. It was enough that he knew Luke had either had sex with his daughter or was about to. The thought of that alone had simmered and threatened to boil over if he ever came face-to-face with the kid.

  But instead, Landry had remained on the sidelines, helpless. It was hard for hi
m to reconcile this with who he was. He knew it was for the safety of his wife and daughter, but it still rankled. But now Landry felt some pride that his daughter had chosen right. The boy had turned out to be a hero.

  Now the kid was dead and Landry pictured his mother folding the Quiksilver shirt and putting it away.

  Landry scanned down the photos of the dead and read their stories. Nothing popped out. They were typical high school kids. Maybe one of them had a father or mother who was an FBI agent. Maybe one of them was involved in the occult. But from the short bios, he couldn’t read between the lines. Most of them he could identify now by their clothing—which group they belonged to. Landry needed to pare down the number.

  He had to start somewhere. He’d already picked out two besides Luke and Kristal. His choices were purely based on instinct and on the memory of what he’d seen. The first kid who was killed, and the boy opposite Kristal’s car.

  The first boy could have been shot just to let the shooter get his head into the game.

  So Landry homed in on the boy across the parking lot from Luke and Kristal:

  Hunter Tomey.

  Hunter was a nice-looking kid. Blond hair and blue eyes. Startling eyes. He could have been a model, like you’d see in a catalog. All-American kid, uncomplicated smile. Not preppy, exactly—preppy was an old word—but clean-cut.

  So, two ways to go. Hunter Tomey, and Landry’s own enemies.

  He read the bio again.

  The kid sounded like he was comfortably middle class. Typical American family fare, down to the football team, college, the girlfriend. He could have been living in the 1990s, the 1980s, the 1970s, or even earlier. Which in itself was unusual in 2014. But the school catered to upper-middle-class and even wealthy residents, so he fit in. Handsome and blond—a standout, but not that much of a standout. White bread. Maybe he’d gotten into a scrape or two, but as he was a juvenile it would be hard to find out if he did. So Landry took him at face value for now.

  The shooting seemed random, but it was not. It was clear the shooter wasn’t a disaffected youth, but a hired killer. He was good at his job. If Landry hadn’t been there, he might have killed twenty or even thirty more.

  But Landry knew this about the military, and he knew this about cops. You take out the biggest threat first. In this case you would take out your target first. You’d make sure you’d get the one you’re after before adding window dressing.

  This was truer of cops than the military. Landry’s uncle was a cop. Cops looked for trouble, and their plan was to cut that trouble off at the knees before it got out of control. You could say cops were proactive. They had the upper hand and they wanted to keep it that way, so they always saw trouble and ran to meet it, to shut it down so that they were in charge and out of danger.

  The cops’ motto was “To protect and serve.” First and foremost, though, protect and serve yourself.

  This man couldn’t be ignorant of tactics.

  Tactically, if possible, the shooter would kill the kid he was hired to kill early on. Maybe in the first three or four, maybe the first seven, but it was doubtful he’d go beyond that. Time had a way of moving forward, dynamics changed, the window of opportunity slammed shut, and you didn’t want to come away empty-handed.

  This was borne out in the man’s actions. He had gone into the lot and walked one way along the rows of cars, then turned and walked back.

  Another memory: the shooter only went halfway through the parking lot before turning around.

  Which meant his target was closer to the exit gate than to the school building when the shooter started. He aimed at the kids who came out first and were making their way through the parking lot—and his target was in the vanguard of that group.

  His target had been one of the first of the kids to come outside.

  Landry had drawn a diagram of the parking lot, including his own position across the street. He had drawn it from a diagram put out by the Los Angeles Times that was everywhere on the Internet.

  Landry’s trued up pretty well with their diagram. There were black circles where each of the kids had fallen—the dead and the injured.

  Tomey was the only other student who, to Landry, appeared exceptional—except for Kristal and Luke.

  Kristal was the obvious choice, because of who her dad was.

  As much as he would look at the other victims, Landry had a feeling that the shooter had been aiming for Kristal and Luke. And the only reason he would do that would be to draw Landry out.

  Then his cell rang. It was Special Agent Andrew Keller.

  CHAPTER 12

  Taylor Brennan, 17: Taylor wanted to be a singer. Her friends and family said that was all she thought about. She had big ambitions, and even made it to America’s Got Talent. Her idols were Ke$ha, Ciara, and Beyoncé. She loved her cat, Timmy. She was fun to be around, and was the life of every party. —“In Memoriam,” Special Section, the Los Angeles Times

  Landry was surprised by Keller’s call. He would have thought that by now the FBI agent would have copped to the fact that Landry was a fake.

  Must be busy over there.

  “Jim Branch, Zephyr PD,” Landry said.

  “Jim—Special Agent Andrew Keller.”

  “Andrew. Hello.”

  “I need to ask you something.”

  “Shoot.”

  There was a slight hesitation. Then: “Look, I’m taking a risk with you and I hope it’s justified.”

  Landry waited.

  “This can’t go any further.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  A pause. “Was there anything about your guy that was unusual?”

  “Unusual?”

  Silence. Keller was conflicted about talking to him. Landry’s guess was that Keller was on to something, and thought his new friend at Podunk PD in Montana might just have some corroborating evidence.

  Think fast. What could it be? Something to do with the body, was his best guess.

  “Anything unusual at all?” Keller said.

  “Well, yeah.” There were only so many things it could be, so Landry made an educated guess. “There was. We found traces of wax on the steering wheel. Is that what you’re talking about?”

  Silence.

  Bingo.

  Professionals removed their fingerprints a certain way. They spread laminated latex over a soft gelatin pad, wrapped the pad around their fingers down to halfway, and let the mixture warm under an ultraviolet lamp for approximately sixty seconds. The wax coating would eliminate fingerprints.

  Landry decided to give him a nudge. “Latex? That was my thinking.”

  “Your guy—you think he was just some backwoods asshole with a grievance?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “So there were traces of latex on the steering wheel?”

  “Roger that.”

  “You sound like you were in the military.”

  “I was.”

  “Elite?”

  “What kind of question is that?” Landry said.

  “Elite. I thought so.”

  Landry waited.

  “You ever hear of a company named Sabrecor?”

  “Sabrecor?”

  Landry wished the guy would stop playing coy. He decided to rise to the bait. “I’ve heard of them. Works with the military, or is it the government? Top-secret stuff, right? You think they have something to do with this?”

  “We think there might be a connection. One of their products.”

  “One of their products?” That would mean an institution of some sort. A company specializing in special ops, or another type of institution—for instance, a government.

  Keller said, “Another thing. Whoever shot the shooter placed the shot perfectly.”

  “I thought the shooter was killed by a security guard.”


  “That was what we put out to the press, yeah.”

  Landry said nothing. He’d hunted at many a waterhole, and he knew not to spook the target.

  Then Keller said, “Thing I want to know is, why would someone shoot the shooter?”

  Landry pretended to think about it. He decided it was time to state the obvious, since that was where Keller was headed. “Maybe that was the plan all along? Hire somebody to shoot up the school and then shoot the shooter? If it was me, I would be worried the first guy would get caught.”

  “Yeah. What I was thinking. Dead men tell no tales.”

  Landry said nothing.

  The silence stretched. Then: “I was just thinking out loud,” Keller said. “You sure that was wax on that steering wheel?”

  “Yeah. I’ll go look for the pics, although I can’t guarantee—”

  “Okay. Look. Not a—”

  “—word. I know.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Iraq. Afghanistan.” He rattled off a battalion he didn’t belong to.

  “Might’ve run into you. Well, you take care now, and tell your brother I’ll be coming out there soon.”

  “Come in June. The cutties will be rising by then.”

  “You know it!” Keller disconnected.

  Landry removed the SIM card from his burner phone and stomped it to pieces. He dumped the LA Times into his duffle and hit the road back in the direction of San Diego—putting as much distance between himself and the phone as possible. He guessed Agent Keller had triangulated the call.

  A minute later, he saw a cop car, lights off, moving fast in the opposite lane. In his rearview he watched the car take the El Centro exit.

  Inconclusive. But better safe than sorry.

  He drove back the way he’d come, landed in Mission Bay, and found a backwater motel from the fifties. He suspected that the clerk looked the other way, and often, judging from the cars parked out front. It was a place where no one would ask questions.

  It was stultifying in the room, so he grabbed his laptop and went out onto the walkway outside his door. It was now almost three in the morning and no one was around. Down at the end of the walkway, the ice machine ruminated. He looked out at the sliver of bay he could see from here. The smell of seaweed and fish was stronger. He sat down on the resin chair beside the door. The wind was picking up. A paper cup scuttled through the parking lot and the dwarf palm fronds heaved in the sea-scented air. Landry found the “In Memoriam” page and stared at it in the yellow of the porch light. The neon sign sizzled nearby, making him think of a busy hive of bees.