Tom Reed Thriller Series

by Rick Mofina

  In that terrible instant of knowing, August’s thought process accelerated to absorb, comprehend, analyze what had befallen him, for there were now three people nearing the van.

  August’s pulse raced upon seeing a terrified woman handcuffed in the chair under a blanket, which was folded back by a breeze, revealing the canvas bags. He saw how the large woman pushing the chair had locked on to him from behind her dark glasses as the old man in the hat shot out his arm to fire a handgun repeatedly into the van at Mr. Tattoo. August’s brain commanded his body to leap back into his patrol car, call for help. The big woman was now training an automatic assault rifle on him. August heard the handcuffed woman scream, saw the muzzle fire, his windshield blossoming with round after round, felt burning sledgehammers pound his arm, his vest, wrist, shoulder, throat. Christ. The glass popping, gunfire, screams. Warm liquid flowed all over him. What was that? His body numbed. His dispatcher was calling, her voice quivering. August was gripping his open microphone as he lay in the front seat of his patrol car gazing up at his son’s face smiling down on him.

  THREE

  The police scanners sizzled at the San Francisco Star.

  The young reporter assigned to them was doing her best, deciphering codes, making calls, jotting notes as the chatter spilled over the glass walls of the small office tucked in a corner of the newsroom. Experienced listeners kept the volume low but when a story broke things got hot.

  No one knew that better than Tom Reed.

  From far across the metro section he picked up on the emotion in the dispatchers’ voices. It was a skill he’d never lost even though it had been ages since he did a shift at the police radios, the most dreaded job in the newsroom. The noise irritated the burnouts who wanted them silenced, a blasphemy to diehards like Reed. Scanners were sacred. They alerted you to the first cries for help, pulling you into a story that would stop the heart of your city. Or break it.

  Reed sensed something was up. But he forced himself to shrug it off. None of it mattered to him anymore. Today was the day he was going to quit.

  He took stock of the newsroom, the editors, deskers, reporters. At their computers, keyboards clicking, phones ringing, people taking notes, conversations flaring, large TVs locked on to twenty-four-hour news stations on overhead shelves. The smell of news and coffee in the air. Reed loosened his tie, draped his jacket over his chair, settled in.

  You’re going to miss this.

  Milestones stared at him from the half walls around his desk, a faded clipping, with the head FORMER GREAT FALLS NEWSPAPER BOY NOMINATED FOR PULITZER PRIZE. It resurrected boyhood memories of Montana, the Rockies, Big Sky Country. Crisp editions of the Trib, bulging in that bag, gray with newsprint, slung over his shoulder as he trudged the streets of his neighborhood, dreaming of becoming a big-city crime reporter.

  Next to the clipping, a snapshot.

  Reed saw a cockier, younger version of himself grinning in front of the Golden Gate Bridge with the gang from the San Francisco bureau of The Associated Press. It was his first job after college and where he broke the story on crime networks on the West Coast that got him short-listed for the prize. He didn’t win but it boosted his ego and prompted the San Francisco Star to hire him as a senior crime reporter. A dream realized.

  The yellowing tear sheets of his bigger stories layered the walls around his desk. So many. Cases that had led him into the darkest regions. The way Virgil guided Dante’s descent into hell. Headlines above Reed’s byline screamed of earthquakes, fires, executions of unrepentant killers, drug wars, blood-drinking cults, shooting rampages, babies whose corpses were found in the trash. Or worse. It was a world of pain and Reed was one of its chroniclers, on the scene each time a new horror surfaced, ensuring that an accounting of it bled in the black ink of the San Francisco Star.

  Over the years, he felt each story fracture the armor he wore as protection from the tragedies he covered. It became an internal battle to keep his distance, especially from the ones whose acts were so hideous the details never made it into print. Instead, they wormed their way into his dreams.

  When he tried to drown them with Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Sipping Whiskey, his life began disintegrating.

  In the newsroom late one night, after finishing a story about a crack-addicted bodybuilder who threw his ten-month-old daughter against a cement wall, Reed found himself confiding to the Star's religion editor.

  “You know what I cover?” Reed said. “I cover evil.”

  “Maybe you should change beats.”

  “I can’t. I thought about it. I just can’t.”

  “Then be careful. Remember Nietzsche’s caution.”

  “Yeah, what’s that?”

  “Just don’t get too close to your subject, Tom.”

  That was several years ago, when the stories grew darker and his drinking grew heavier, exacting a toll on his wife, Ann, and their son, Zach.

  He picked up the small framed photograph of the three of them, ran a hand over his face. Ann left him during that time. Took Zach and moved to her mother’s in Berkeley for a few months. He never blamed her. It needed to be done, so he could see what he’d become. And it worked. They reconciled, pulled through, re-built their lives piece by piece. Ann’s children’s clothing stores were prospering. Reed promised to leave daily news reporting within a year, to stay home and write books. But with his drinking in check, his marriage strengthened. So did his reporting and writing. He had some dry spells, he also whacked a few major stories out of the park. When he’d taken a few months off to write a book, Ann never spoke of the promise he’d made until the weekend before his leave of absence ended. They went for a Sunday drive along the coast. They walked along a rise overlooking the Pacific, Ann took his hand, entwined her fingers with his, then chose her words carefully.

  “Tom, you haven’t said it, but I feel you’re thinking about not quitting.”

  Gulls cried above them as Zach ran ahead.

  “Things are good for us now. We’re stronger. Happier,” she said. “The stores are doing well. But I’m afraid.”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “That if you don’t get out now, you’ll never leave. And if you don’t leave, you’ll get too close again.”

  “Ann—”

  “Tom, you immerse yourself into the most horrible stories, until they become a terrible obsession. What you achieve for the newspaper comes at a price, and Zach and I pay it.”

  He said nothing.

  “And if that happens again, if it turns bad like the other times, Tom, I just can’t go through it. We won’t survive it.”

  The roar of the surf and salty sea breezes tumbled over them.

  He couldn’t find the words to tell her the truth, that he feared he couldn’t quit. Couldn’t quit something that deep down he believed he was born to do. Something that had chosen him. That despite the bad times, he was convinced there was a greater meaning in it all and he couldn’t stop until he found it.

  “It’s your call, Tom.”

  He searched the horizon for the right answer.

  “This week, Ann. When I get back this week, I’ll tell them I’m finished.”

  Reed set the picture down next to his computer screen.

  Across the newsroom somebody was shouting about a jewelry store. The police radios blared. Reed ignored them. An editorial assistant hurried by. “Hey, Tom, good to see you, man.”

  In the few days since his return, Reed had accepted a stream of “welcome backs” and updates on newsroom gossip, all the while not breathing a word to anyone that he was poised to quit. Three large boxes of unopened mail awaited attention on his desk. He still hadn’t gotten through it all, or his hundreds of e-mails. He hadn’t even had the chance to talk to the Star’s new metro editor, Bob Shepherd. On Reed’s first day back, they’d met for a moment. Shepherd wanted a private meeting, then got tied up.

  Reed fished out an outdated newsroom memo on Shepherd’s appointment. He had joined the Star six
months after leaving the Washington Post. He’d also been a features editor at the Wall Street Journal and a metro news editor at the New York Daily News. He was a respected first-class legend with twenty-four years in the business. He knew how to break a story and how it should be written. A reporter’s dream. Too bad they wouldn’t get a chance to work together, Reed thought. He was wondering whether he should begin drafting his letter of resignation when his line rang.

  “Tom, it’s Bob. Sorry for the delay. Been having a lot of meetings. Got a little time now, if you’re clear.”

  “Sure.”

  Approaching Shepherd’s office, Reed felt his stomach twist with the final story he was about to break. The end of his newspaper career. As he glanced at the controlled chaos of the newsroom, Reed’s years at the Star blurred by. Shepherd’s door was open, he was waving him in while talking into his phone.

  “We’ve got people on it? Have a seat, Tom. Photogs? Good. Keep me posted.” Shepherd hung up, extended his hand to Reed.

  “Tom, I’m afraid I’ve only got a few minutes. My apologies. A lot of meetings, but I didn’t want to put ours off again. Welcome back, belatedly. How’d the book go? Crime fiction, was it?”

  “Yes. It was good, and, well, it’s fantastic you’re here, Bob, but I think, right off, there’s something I have to tell you.”

  “Sure.” The phone rang. “Hang on.” Shepherd took the call.

  Reed noticed the framed awards, certificates, pictures of Shepherd holding the Pulitzer Prizes he’d helped his former papers win.

  Shepherd ended his call.

  “Sorry, Tom. I’m going to have to take off to see the publisher. Look, there are some long-range and immediate ideas I need to kick around with you, now, if I may.”

  “Well, I—”

  “Some of my recent meetings dealt with this paper’s slipping circulation, loss of readership to the Internet, television, lifestyle, habits, everything. Newspapers breathing their death gasps and what we can do about it.”

  “Right.”

  “The numbers don’t lie, but I still believe that for the money, newspapers are the best narrative vehicle for reflecting the daily meaning of contemporary life. I know you believe it, because I saw it in your stuff, and the work of some Star staffers when I was at the Post. I believe there’s untapped potential to produce outstanding work on a regular basis here.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s part of the reason I sought this job. My wife and I have family here, but a few months after I left the Post, I realized I wasn’t ready to walk away from this business. I think people like you are its hope for the future.”

  “You think so?”

  “Tom, it’s in your stories, your digging, your writing. You get under the skin of the most difficult stories to cover, tragedies. You find the details that haunt readers, that make a small anguish seem epic. You find its soul. I don’t know what the Star’s priorities were over the years, but I think they missed out by not taking advantage of the natural storytelling talent in this newsroom. I don’t intend to make that mistake. I need you to help me save this paper from becoming irrelevant, to make it matter to the city it serves.”

  Reed couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “Tom, I’d like you to consider trying your hand at something today. We’ve got a jewelry store heist unfolding.”

  “I heard some commotion on the scanners.”

  “Shots fired. People wounded. Details are still coming. Maybe a standoff. We’ve got people on it already. Depending on how this goes down, we’ll get the hits and siders for tomorrow. I’d like you to go down there now with the aim, we’ll keep it loose if things change, but go with the intention of producing an anatomy of a heist. Say, from the perspective of the suspects, the cops, the victims. Consider a Joycean stream-of-consciousness approach.”

  A James Joyce stream-of-consciousness approach. Reed liked that.

  “What do you say?”

  A literary approach to a heist story by the Star. Shepherd’s predecessors, the clueless idiot Benson, and Brader the manipulative snake, would have laughed at such a concept, if they could even grasp it. It sounded wild. But Reed couldn’t take it. He’d come to resign.

  “What is it, Tom? Do you object?”

  “No, it’s not that.”

  “The point is to take readers into the heart of a heist, to let them experience what is happening on the streets of their city.” Shepherd glanced at his watch. “Sorry, I have to run.”

  Reed glimpsed the wall behind Shepherd, trying to count his Pulitzer Prizes.

  “You were going to say something, Tom?”

  “Welcome to the Star, Bob.”

  Reed hustled back to his desk, still employed as he grabbed his notebook, cell phone, and jacket. Heading for the elevator, glimpsing one of the TV screens with the BREAKING NEWS graphic under a jittery aerial shot of the scene of a van, an SFPD black-and-white, driver’s door open, windshield laced with bullet holes…“We’re taking you live now to KTO’s news chopper and Sky Parker over the scene in the Richmond District—Aaron, sources have just confirmed to KTO a San Francisco police officer has been shot; that is confirmed...”

  The elevator doors opened. Reed stepped in.

  FOUR

  Blood oozed from the suspect holed up in the van near the jewelry store, matting his hair, lacing his face, and drenching his torso. Every few moments he waved a handgun randomly into the evacuated street, ignoring the bull-horned order to surrender.

  Officer August lay across the front seat of his idling patrol car, its lights flashing. No way for paramedics to get to him. No need to. Half of his head was gone. Much of it covered the rear window, filling the rifle scope of the tactical team sniper on the roof of the bakery down the street. He adjusted it to read August’s bloodstained nameplate on his chest, then blinked twice. Stay focused. He inched his scope over to the van’s windshield, catching the sun’s glare. The vehicle rocked. Parts of the suspect jerked in and out of his crosshairs. A hand. A shoulder. A knee.

  “Suspect hyper. No clear kill shot,” the sniper said through the throat band of his LASH headset to his team leader at the command post. It was set up at the end of the block. On the third floor of a Web-based graphics office with bay windows overlooking the hot zone.

  Since the 406 call went out, every available officer from Richmond Station and others across the city had hurried to the scene. They had sealed an outer perimeter, diverting traffic a few blocks back, while evacuating people from homes, stores, and offices. Bay Area radio stations broadcast bulletins. TV news helicopters whooped by overhead. Rubberneckers with binoculars and camcorders gathered at the yellow police tape, straining to see something. Anything.

  Far from public view, the tactical team had set up the inner perimeter. The scouts were the first to go in, ascertaining safety points for team members that followed: the sharpshooters, the gas team, the utility man, and the preacher. They communicated with hand signals. Each TAC member took a covered line on the gunman. Each battled to keep his mind on the job because a few yards away they faced the aftermath of their dead colleague. Early in the ordeal they heard the eerie unanswered calls over his radio as his dispatcher tried to raise him, her voice echoing in the deserted street painted red by the patrol car’s pulsating emergency lights. She kept trying until she was advised to stop. In the quiet, the TAC members heard nothing but their own breathing while waiting for the tactical plan to emerge from the command post.

  Lieutenant George Horn was working on it. He stood over a large table of detailed street maps, floor plans, and notes, while consulting the TAC team leader, the district people, the negotiator, the entry team leader, and the supervisor for EOD, the explosive ordinance disposal team—the bomb squad. High-ranking bodies from the Hall of Justice were said to be on the way. Horn was unfazed. He owned the scene. He knew his job. Keep it simple. Keep it flexible. Peel it down.

  What you know: five victims trapped in the jewelry store becaus
e the suspects trip-wired the doors with grenades. EOD is working on the back door. Got an armed bleeding suspect waving a handgun. You can't get at him. Got a dead cop lying out there like he was trash and officers struggling not to lose it.

  Okay, what you don’t know: The shooter could have explosives, a hostage, or an unseen accomplice in the van.

  Horn made a call to a tactical team technician on the street, crouched between a parked Cherokee and a Beetle, holding a powerful parabolic dish aimed at the truck’s cab. It amplified sound from a distance by some seventy-five times.

  “Anything new?”

  “From what we’re picking up, he’s alone but agitated.”

  “What’s he saying?”

  “A lot of swearing. He doesn’t sound too good.”

  These were Horn’s options: Continue trying to talk to the shooter, which seemed futile. Gas him, and risk further casualties. Make an assault on the van and risk further casualties. Green-light a marksman, and risk casualties. Wait him out. But you don’t know what else is in that van. Could be an injured hostage or accomplice. There’s a casualty risk at every turn.

  That’s when the district lieutenant lost his patience. “Horn, are you going to take the mother down or buy him dinner?”

  “Darnell—”

  “You listen here.” Darnell's eyes shone. “That’s Rod August out there. One of my best. Thirty-two years old. Five years on the job. He wanted to be a detective. I’d be talking to him right now in my office, if—”

  “We know,” Horn said. “Take it easy. We all know.”

  “Sure we do. Make an assault and the shooter goes down. It’s over in two minutes. If he lives, it’s two decades and three million bucks of taxpayer room and board before it’s over. And we all know, it’s never over.”

  “Darnell, come on,” Horn said.

  “Rod’s boy was being dropped off at the station today to meet him after his shift. Billy is six years old. He ain’t never ever gonna forget today.”