The Pain Scale

by Tyler Dilts

  “We’re ready to go,” Phillips said. “You guys good?”

  We all nodded. Young had been fully rehearsed. He’d be making one or, more likely, two calls, then leaving his FBI Ford in the driveway and heading out through the alley behind the garage to wait with the rest of the team.

  Young swallowed and took a single deep breath, then used Goodman’s phone to dial Kroll’s number.

  When the call was answered, Young said, “Hello, Mr. Kroll. This is Special Agent Young. Agent Goodman’s partner?”

  Jen and I were huddled around a receiver that Phillips was holding between us so we could all lean in and hear the other end of the conversation.

  “Hello,” Kroll said. “I’m very sorry for your loss. It’s a real shame.”

  “Yes,” Young said, “it is.”

  “It’s a real tragedy when the stresses of the job overwhelm such devoted public servants as Agent Goodman.”

  “You’re right, sir, it is.”

  Kroll paused briefly, to see if Young would continue, and when he didn’t, said, “How can I help you, son?”

  “Well,” Young said, “I have some things here. Some...uh... personal effects of Goodman’s?” A pause. “He didn’t have a chance to deliver them. I was hoping you might know what to do?” He was selling it well. His performance made him sound even more immature and green than he actually was. “Mr. Kroll? What should I do with this stuff?”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. It seemed as if it lasted for hours. Later, the recording of the conversation would clock it at seven seconds.

  Finally, Kroll spoke with an empty and unconvincing certitude. “I’m afraid I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

  “But, sir, I really don’t know what to do with these things.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you with that. If there’s anything else we can do for you or the bureau, please don’t hesitate to contact our office.”

  “Sir, I—”

  “I’m sorry for your loss, Agent Young. Very sorry.” Kroll didn’t give him time to answer before ending the call.

  “Just like you said,” Young said to me.

  “Make the second call,” I told him.

  He dialed Kroll’s number again, and as we’d expected, the call went straight to voice mail.

  Young’s voice had a slight quavering stutter as he spoke. It made me think he had potential. “Mr. Kroll? I know you couldn’t help before. But I really hope you can now. Goodman said I should trust you.” He waited a few seconds, as if he were summoning his courage. “I’m going to take those things of his to Bradley Benton’s house. In Bixby Knolls? I know it’s empty. I’m going to wait there for two hours. I’ll be in the den. Right inside the door off the backyard. If anyone comes, they can have Goodman’s things. If not, well, then”—another practiced pause—“well, then I’ll have to give them to the special agent in charge in LA. Help me out, okay, Mr. Kroll? I’m sure this is what Goodman would have wanted me to do.” He waited a few more seconds, as if he weren’t sure if there was anything else to be said, and ended the call.

  “How was that?” Young’s voice was firm, and all the traces of uncertainty had vanished.

  “Spot on,” Jen said.

  “Let’s go,” Phillips said.

  Young followed him out into the yard, and the two SWAT officers took up their positions upstairs, one watching the front of the house and one the back.

  Jen and I both had radios with wireless earpieces and open mics. “Phillips? You hear us okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said, his voice sounding small and tinny in my right ear. “We got you. We’re just about in place. How about you guys upstairs?”

  “Front’s clear.”

  “Back’s clear, too.”

  “Okay,” Phillips said, “now we just sit and wait.”

  I reminded myself not to forget that everything we said would be going out to the rest of the team and be recorded as well.

  “You have the Taser?” Jen asked me.

  On the way, I’d made a point of getting the stun gun out of the war bag in the trunk of my Camry. I told Jen that, with the way all of our suspects had been winding up dead, I wanted to keep this one alive if we could.

  But my hand was resting on the butt of the Glock on my right hip, not the electroshock weapon in my coat pocket.

  The pictures on the wall were same ones I’d spent so much time studying the day of the murders. I saw all the same images, but read into them completely different interpretations. Context is everything.

  In the photos of Bradley, so many of them in so many places with so many people, where I’d seen arrogance and superiority, now I just saw the pathetic, broken man who couldn’t go for more than ten minutes without the regret and sorrow overtaking him and reducing him to tears. As much as I wanted to take satisfaction in his misery, it was hard to do so. Even if he wasn’t responsible for the death of his wife and children as I had so wanted to believe he was, he had still committed at least three counts of sexual assault, and probably more. Wasn’t that enough for me to revel in his pain? I thought about the life of privilege and entitlement in which he’d been raised, and while it wasn’t enough to absolve him in my mind, it was enough to allow me to take pleasure in his suffering. I had wanted to believe him evil, a monster capable of willful, cold-blooded infanticide, when really he was just one more fucked-up and spoiled child.

  There were a few photos of Bradley and his father. If there were evil here, that’s where it truly found its place. Congressman Benton was the connecting tissue, but I was convinced Margaret Benton was pulling the strings through Kroll and his underlings and using all the strength that Sternow & Byrne had put within their reach. It all came back to the green footprints. Air force Pararescue. The congressman, Kroll, Goodman, even the SUV driver who wanted so badly to fit in that his envy earned him a bullet to the back of his head. I was willing to bet whoever came through the back door would have the tattoo right where it belonged.

  I looked at the shot of Sara and the children that had moved me so much the first night and wondered what, if anything, we had accomplished for them. Had we brought them justice? Was there even such a thing? What could possibly balance the scales for the loss of a mother and her two young children? One of the men who had actually perpetrated the crimes had been dealt with to the full extent of the law; the other had left his brains splashed on an ATM in Seal Beach. Was that justice? How about those truly responsible for the crime? Anton was certainly one of them. His body had been rotting in the harbor when we’d pulled him out. Justice? I don’t know. Would whoever came through the door get us any closer to Kroll and the congressman? And even if it did, what would that mean for Jacob and Bailey and Sara?

  I turned to see Jen leaning casually against the wall with a serene expression on her face. Her left hand was clasped over her right, which held her Glock, her index finger resting on the side of the trigger guard.

  “What are you thinking about?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  I looked at her. “Really?”

  She nodded.

  “Wish I could do that.”

  “You can.”

  “How?”

  “It’s easy.” She let a slight smile play across her face. “Just go study martial arts for twenty years.”

  I smiled, too. “Phillips? We got anything yet?”

  “Nope. Don’t worry. We’ll holler when we do.”

  The clock said it had been fifty minutes since Young had made the call. I was already pacing the room.

  “If you’re going to keep moving,” Jen said, “do it farther away from the windows. He might pick up the motion.”

  She was right.

  I sat down on an arm of the sofa, careful to keep weight on the balls of my feet so I could be up quickly if anyone saw anything. I thought about unholstering my pistol but decided against it. I didn’t have Jen’s Zen-master calm, so I worried I’d get too comfortable and lose the
edge with a gun in my hand.

  Again and again, I wished I were better at waiting.

  “You used to be lot better at this,” she said to me.

  “I know.”

  “What happened?”

  It hadn’t occurred to me until she asked, but I was surprised to realize that I knew the answer to her question. “I spent more than a year waiting for something that never came.”

  “On a scale of one to ten,” she said.

  For just a moment, I was upset that she mentioned the pain. I realized, though, that she knew what she was doing. She could sense the level of my pain more clearly and accurately than I could myself. The ache in my arm and shoulder was distant and dull. My awareness was where it needed to be.

  In the moment.

  In the room.

  I was ready. And for the first time since I’d come back to active duty, I knew I could do what needed to be done.

  “What’s that line in Hamlet?” I asked. “‘If it be now...’” I tried to remember how it went.

  “Seriously? Hamlet?”

  “I can’t remember exactly how it goes, but the last part is ‘the readiness is all.’”

  “You’re ready?” she asked.

  I looked at her and knew she could see it in my face.

  Then we waited for two and half hours for absolutely nothing to happen.

  “How much longer should we keep it up?” Jen asked.

  “As long as we can,” I said. “How long can we go, Phillips?”

  There was no reply. We hadn’t checked in for a while.

  “Phillips?” I said again.

  “The radios are dead.” Jen took the receiver out of her pocket with her left hand and fiddled with the controls. “Nothing except a little bit of static,” she said.

  “Can anyone hear me?” I asked.

  Nothing.

  “Coincidence?”

  She answered with a single shake of her head.

  I pointed up at the ceiling.

  She nodded.

  I held up a finger. My Glock was in my right hand, and I backed into the corner farthest from the outside door. With my left thumb, I managed a clumsy text to Phillips: lost rdio wht shold we doo?

  We didn’t wait for him to reply.

  I took the lead and started across the den to the inside door leading into the great room and the rest of the house. The lights were off and the gray sky outside did little to diffuse the dimness of the light. I took a position on the right side and looked through the door to the left as far as I could without crossing the threshold. Then I repeated the process from the opposite side. I nodded to Jen and then stepped through the door.

  I didn’t see where he’d come from.

  Before I knew what was happening, I was on the floor, my gun was no longer in my hands, and my ears were ringing. When I tried to stand up, dizziness overtook me and I fell back to the floor with a weight that seemed much heavier than my own.

  To my left, I heard the sounds of a struggle and concentrated my vision on the commotion.

  “Shoot him,” I said without being sure if I could even hear myself speaking.

  My focus was returning, and I saw two figures silhouetted against the white curtains of the large front window.

  They were both in fighter’s crouches, and it looked as though he was backed up into a corner.

  Jen was standing in his way.

  He closed in on her, but she stopped him with a kick to his knee.

  He backed up and then feinted left, but Jen didn’t take the bait. He hooked with his right, but Jen blocked it and connected with a hard left jab and then a right open-handed strike to his neck. He stumbled back and got his bearings, then lunged hard at her.

  She moved in toward him, twisted and bent at the waist, and threw him to the floor with a force that reverberated strongly enough for me to feel the vibrations through the hardwood slats all the way across the room.

  She rotated upward, still grasping his wrist in both of her hands, then spun again, turning him facedown on the floor. She yanked and twisted his arm, and I heard a meaty snap.

  I was expecting a scream. It didn’t come. I found my balance and wobbled to my feet.

  By the time I made it across the room, she had stepped over him without ever releasing the wristlock and brought her foot down hard on his other hand, then cuffed him with his face in a puddle of his own blood.

  We heard Phillips and the rest of the tactical team kicking in the front door.

  “Jarman,” I said, looking down at him and recognizing his face from the iPhone image and our facial recognition match, battered and swollen as it was.

  He spit some blood on the floor. A tooth went with it.

  “Is that all you’ve got left?”

  He rolled over looked up at me with anger in his eyes.

  I fired the Taser into his face.

  When he stopped convulsing, I squatted down and grabbed his web belt above the hips, pulled his pants down, and rolled him up onto his hip.

  Half a dozen SWAT officers leaned in and looked at the tattoo on his ass.

  “I’m not sure that’s proper procedure,” Phillips said.

  No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t return his grin.

  PART FIVE: PROGNOSIS

  That’s how it is on this bitch of an earth.

  —Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

  Two

  WHEN JARMAN WOKE up in the security ward of Long Beach Memorial, he had casts on both arms, one for his shattered left wrist, the other for his right elbow, which, when the EMTs had started working on him, had been bent at a ninety-degree angle in the wrong direction. One of his legs was elevated as well. Jen had done a job on one of his knees. His face was a swollen, discolored mass of bruises and inflammation. There were two bandages—one on his cheek and one on his forehead—where the Taser electrodes had hit him.

  On a scale of one to ten, I thought.

  And I wanted nothing more than to hurt him even more. He saw me smile, and although it was really impossible to tell with his face in the condition that it was in, I genuinely wanted to believe that he found it disturbing. I stared at him until he tried to talk.

  His voice was slurred and muffled, but I think he said, “I don’t have anything to say to you.”

  “Really? You’re going to be stand-up after everything that happened? You know Kroll sold you out, right?” I watched his eye. Of course Kroll hadn’t sold him out. I wanted to shake something loose. Get him to give us something we could use to add credence to our best theory. Or even to help us come up with a new one.

  He was buying it. I could see the seeds of doubt in his squint.

  “That’s right. We’ve got you cold on Shevchuk and on Porter.” The coroner had been able to, finally, ID the SUV driver. “And on Anton Tropov, too. Kroll told the DA the whole story. You’re going down hard. Unless...”

  The “unless” got his attention, but he tried not to let me see it. He hardened his expression as much as he could. Tried for a thousand-yard stare. I wondered if his one good eye meant he could only go five hundred.

  I stopped talking again. Made him bring the conversation back to me.

  “Unless what?” he mumbled.

  “You know what. You want to talk to us?”

  He turned his face an inch or two toward the window. It was the closest he could come to storming out of the room.

  “Okay. I get it. Semper Fidelis, and all that.” I let that sit for a few seconds. “No, wait. That’s the marines, right? Does the air force have a thing like that? A motto?”

  He made a vague grunt.

  “Isn’t it Aim High or something like that? Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?”

  He was still quiet.

  “How about Pararescue? PJs, right? You’ve got to have something, right? Something for when you’re all drunk and trying to pick up chicks? To impress the wannabes?”

  It looked like he was clenching his jaw.

 
“Nothing? It seems like you’d have something to say when the SEALs or Green Berets tell you that calling yourselves ‘PJs’ makes you sound like a bunch of pussies.”

  He angled his face back to me, and I could see the rage in his uncovered eye.

  “What, you’re not pussies?” I finished that sentence with a snicker. I could feel him wanting to talk, to fight. But he couldn’t. “You got your ass kicked by a girl you outweigh by seventy-five pounds. You really believe you’re not a pussy?”

  I couldn’t have stopped pushing his buttons at that point even if I had wanted to.

  “I saw your ass tattoo. Green footprints. I get it. I do. Maybe you’re right. Maybe you aren’t a pussy, after all.”

  There was a question in his eye. He thought I was changing my tactic. But he still didn’t have anything to say.

  “I think I get Porter. He was...uh...What was he again?” I made a show of flipping through my notebook. After half a dozen pages, I pretended like I couldn’t find what I was looking for and snapped it shut. “He was in some kind of logistics unit, right? What does that mean? He drove a forklift or something?”

  He exhaled through his nose. Was that indignation?

  “An asswipe like that has no business with that tattoo.”

  He wanted to say something, but I could see him struggling to hold back.

  “The dicktard didn’t even know enough,” I said, “not to put it on his fucking arm.”

  He didn’t say anything, but his expression at least confirmed that theory. Porter was a poser wannabe, and it had gotten him killed.

  “Is that why you did him like that? I know he blew the getaway, but that wasn’t all of it, was it? If he’d been a real PJ, you wouldn’t have dropped him like that, would you?”