So I swing my foot back and kick his head like it’s a soccer ball.
His lights go out, and the feedback ends. Small favors. There’s still enough pain and panic here to fry my brain if I don’t end this fast.
I step over the second shooter just as the third and final gunman turns.
His gun is off the crowd and pointed right at my face. Point-blank range. No way he can miss.
He pulls the trigger. And nothing happens.
He’d been dry-firing for a while now. So excited that he didn’t realize he needed to reload. From inside his mind, I could feel the difference in the weight of the gun in his hands. I knew what it meant, but he didn’t.
I grab his wrist and yank him toward me, pulling him into an armlock. I twist and he screams.
I have him. All it will take is a little more pressure, and the arm will break, and this will be over.
Then something soft and heavy hits me in the back.
I lose my grip on the gunman as someone rides me down to the deck. I look over my shoulder, and see an overweight guy in a suit on my back.
The bodyguard. Finally trying to earn his pay.
He slugs me twice in the head, his body covering mine like a beanbag chair.
The gunman takes the opportunity to spring to his feet and start running. From my vantage spot on the ground, I see him grab his gun and jump over the railing, heading for the beach.
“Wrong guy, you fucking moron!” I shout at the bodyguard, but he’s not hearing me. His brain is full of triumph.
He’s already envisioning the reward ceremony, the medal from a grateful mayor, maybe even a TV show. He cocks back his fist to land another one on me, and I decide I’ve had enough. I don’t want to waste any mental energy on him. Instead, I twist under his sweaty weight, then bend at the waist and snap my head into his nose. I hear the crunch and he falls back, shrieking and bleeding.
I stagger to my feet and take a quick look around. The other two gunmen are on the ground, barely visible under the weight of a crowd of people who are beating the living shit out of them. One is completely unconscious. The other guy’s mind is a song of pain and fear. He can’t breathe. A dozen different hands are on him, all of them grabbing and hitting. He’s afraid he’s going to die.
Good.
I start running after the last shooter.
The fake waiter runs along the beach path as fast as he can, shoving people out of his way and generally making a spectacle of himself. His wig flew off somewhere behind him, and his real hair, damp with sweat, trails out in a long ponytail. He’s still got the fake mustache glued on tight, though.
People do not try to stop him. Just part of the ongoing reality show called life in Los Angeles. Everyone assumes it must be TV, even if they don’t see the cameras.
But he’s not making any friends. He keeps running into people because he keeps looking back, checking over his shoulder.
I’m gaining on him steadily. He’s got on high-gloss loafers as part of his disguise, and he’s really regretting it right now. His soles nearly slide out from under him with every step he takes. My Eccos grip like racing tires. Even at a wedding, I’m never going to wear shoes that will slow me down.
I’m almost on top of him when he trips over a little girl on a pink tricycle and sends her sprawling on the pavement. The girl’s father grabs him before he can get back on his feet.
“What the hell, man?” he shouts.
The gunman doesn’t even look at him. Instead he sees me, just a dozen feet away now.
So he pulls the gun.
“Back off!” he screams. The father jumps back, his hands held high. The mother shrieks and hauls their crying daughter away as fast as she can.
I almost want to tell them it’s not loaded when I check the feeling from inside the gunman’s head.
Shit. The weight in his hand has changed now. My tussle with the security guard must have given him the time to slap another clip inside.
So when he turns to me, I don’t stop or slow down. I lower my head and find the perfect nightmare for him.
Part of my job in the War on Terror was to sit inside torture chambers and wait for the prisoners’ secrets to come spilling out. It’s one of the reasons I went into business for myself.
But I have plenty of memories stored away from those times.
I share one with him.
Before he can pull the trigger, he suddenly knows what it’s like to be strapped to the steel bars of a cell, a hood over his head, while someone touches electric wires to his bare skin. Every nerve in his body sings with pain and fear. It works better than a Taser. He freezes in place, suddenly paralyzed.
This is drastic. I rarely order this one from the menu because the bill that comes later is horrific.
But I think of Kira falling, and it seems worth the cost.
He stands there, stupid as a rock, and I crash into him and take him to the ground.
We land hard on the path, me on top of him, adding my weight to his own. I feel something pop in his knee. I get part of the pain.
I can identify it. That was part of my training too. Dislocation of the knee and a torn ACL. That’s a bad one. We’re talking surgery, traction, and six to nine months of recovery.
Not that I care much right now.
“Why?” I scream at him.
Because there is an answer. This is not just some crazy people with guns. I can feel it. There is intent behind this. There is a motive.
And I am going to know what it is, goddammit.
I get a jumble of images, mostly mixed up with his pain. I stand above him. His leg is bent at an unnatural angle at the knee. He’s high on adrenaline and rage.
That makes no sense. I step on his bad leg and pull his foot toward me, to help him concentrate. The pain is like a zipper opening up in his knee, spilling out broken glass.
“Why?” I say again. “Why did you do this?”
He finally looks at me, and he has the strangest expression on his face. Even through the tears and the pain, he seems to smirk.
The people around us are saying things. Maybe they’re asking questions. They might be telling me to back off.
“Tell me,” I say. I want the name. I want the reason.
I twist his leg again. Harder this time. It bends in a way it was never meant to bend. The smirk vanishes and he screams.
But I get one word, before he passes out.
Then I realize one of the voices I’m hearing is not inside my head. It’s stronger and louder than all the others. I get that telltale prickle on the back of my neck that comes when someone has a weapon trained on me.
“I said, ‘Put your hands up!’ Now!”
I look up and see a Santa Monica bike cop, his sidearm aimed at me.
He is ordering me to put my hands in the air, behind my head.
I obey. Unlike me, he’s got no way of telling the good guys from the bad here, and I don’t want to get shot again today. I kneel on the path, next to the gunman’s unconscious form, and wait for the cuffs. The adrenaline fades, and my side begins to hurt like hell. I look down and see the blood seeping through my shirt.
And I wonder:
What the hell is Downvote?
5
The Reid Technique
The cops take me to St. John’s in Santa Monica. It’s already swamped with the tightly controlled chaos that hits an emergency room after any tragedy. Doctors and nurses move past one another the same way waiters do at a
restaurant during the dinner rush. No wasted motions or words. The noise and pain come from the victims and their families. They scream and they cry. Some try to be stoic. Others demand answers at the top of their lungs. But their minds are all the same storm of panic and anxiety; for me, it’s like walking through a sheet of cold water and getting drenched to the bone.
There are reporters crowding into the waiting area. The police shove them back, not at all gently. I get whisked past the line with a cop on either side of me.
A moment later, I’m in a small room behind the double doors. A nurse cuts away my ruined shirt, and then a doctor takes a quick look at the wound. A stray round nicked my side and tore a short, bloody gutter in my latissimus dorsi. No visible bullet fragments, no arteries hit. She stabs me with a local anesthetic in a syringe, waits the minimum amount of time for it to work, and then staples the wound shut in a quick, staccato sequence. She places a pad over the weeping staples and tells me to keep pressure on it, and then disappears to deal with the real casualties.
After that, I’m left alone for forty-five minutes. I’m not under arrest. Nobody reads me my rights or asks if I want a lawyer.
But a cop stays right outside the door, and I know that he’ll put me down hard if I step outside my tiny room.
So I wait.
The panic subsides slowly, the cold tide receding as people are channeled off into operating rooms or the ICU or waiting areas deeper inside the hospital. The nurse returns and jams an IV into my arm, and I begin to get some fluids back. I only realize I’ve been shaking when I stop.
I scrape what I can from the minds of the people who race past, dealing with the chaos. But there’s not a lot of solid information. Even small crime scenes are messy in the first few hours; something as simple as a liquor-store robbery generates five or six different narratives. The guy had a gun. No, it was two guys. No, it was just one. He was black, he was Mexican, maybe he was Asian. I saw the whole thing. Well, I saw most of it.
Now imagine that multiplied by three hundred guests, with the glare of celebrity and the TV lights and a couple hundred quick-spreading rumors. Basic facts get twisted up pretty fast.
I’ve snagged a few theories already:
None of it matches up with what I saw, but everyone has their favorite story already fixed in their minds.
Even inside the hospital, I can hear the news choppers hovering in the sky outside. It’s got to be like Christmas for the media. This will be bigger than San Bernardino or Orlando. The news channels have to be doing wall-to-wall coverage by now. It’s more than just another mass shooting. There’s fame and sex and TV involved.
And someone has to be blamed for it.
I made the mistake of putting my head up. Even if the other guests say I’m on the side of the angels—which is unlikely, because nobody sees anything clearly when bullets start flying—I still broke any number of laws. Not least of which was crippling a man in front of witnesses.
If I’m not careful, I could finish the day in a cell.
So I wait, doing my best to look patient, helpful, and most of all, innocent.
Another hour passes. The door opens, and a guy about my age in a suit enters. He wears his credentials on a lanyard so nobody will mistake him for a mere civilian. He looks me up and down, and I scan him at the same time.
I can feel him size me up, and I get a quick read on him from the self-image that we all carry with us, at all times, as a way of reminding ourselves who we are.
Agent Gregory Vincent, from the Los Angeles branch. When I look inside his head, I get a picture of his desk. It’s immaculately clean. He doesn’t let it pile up with papers or coffee cups. The computer lines up with the monitor, which lines up with the edges of the desk, all at right angles. More than anyplace else, that’s his home. He needs to have one space where everything is perfect and orderly, because he deals with chaos every day.
Already I’m a little worried. He’s smarter than your average fed, promoted faster than other people with more seniority. More arrogant too. And I’m not sure why he’s here. This should be LAPD’s case all the way.
Vincent stands next to me. He does not apologize for keeping me waiting. He hands back my ID and wallet and phone, which is a nice gesture, but basically meaningless. I could still be arrested at any moment, and then he’d just take them back.
“Greg Vincent. FBI,” he tells me. “I’m told we have you to thank for the capture of a couple of the gunmen. That was admirable.”
I don’t get admiration from him. I get a wave of suspicion. And dislike. He’s run my name and read whatever he could find before he came in here.
But I play along. “I was just doing what anyone else would have done. Got caught in the middle. That’s all.”
“I think you’re being modest,” he says. “We’ve got just a few more questions, and then we’ll get you out of here.”
He’s all smiles. That’s when my alarm bells start ringing. I’d say my chances of leaving this room in cuffs just doubled.
“What do you do for a living, Mr. Smith?” he asks.
“I’m a security consultant,” I reply. That’s what it says on my taxes. Which I pay early and in full, because I do not want to give guys like Vincent an excuse to look deeply into my life.
“Explains why you’re still walking upright and the other guys are in the hospital,” he says. “Impressive.”
“How are they?”
That surprises him. “Do you really care?”
It’s the difference between assault and homicide, so yeah, I care. Out loud, all I say is “I’m curious.”
“Critical but stable condition,” he says. “One guy has a concussion. One guy is breathing through a tube now. And the one you ran down is going to have a limp when he gets out of the hospital. But isn’t there something else you’d like to know?”
“What?” For a moment, I’m baffled.
“You haven’t asked me how the bride is doing.”
Shit. I’ve been thinking so hard about blocking the inevitable backlash that I forgot to act normal. I already know how Kira is doing. I took that from the mind of the nurse. But Vincent’s right—that should have been the first thing I asked.
Now he’s looking at me with even more suspicion. I make an admittedly lame attempt to cover.
“She’s in surgery, is what I heard. Nobody knows how it’s going to come out.”
“Who told you that?”
“One of the other officers. I didn’t get his name.”
He frowns, but he lets it go.
“Well. About fifteen other people got hit too. Six dead so far. Another in critical condition, aside from Ms. Sadeghi. One of the groom’s relatives—his grandfather, I think—had a heart attack. But it could have been much worse. It was very lucky you were there. Where did you learn to handle yourself like that?”
“Army,” I say, and leave it at that. He knows there’s more to it. But I want to see if he’ll push me on it.
He doesn’t. He moves on, smoothly. “Where were you stationed?”
“All over.”
He nods as if that’s satisfactory. “Why were you at the wedding today, Mr. Smith?”
“I was invited.”
He waits. I don’t add anything else. His face doesn’t change, but I can feel his patience ticking down, like the timer on a bomb. He tries again: “By whom were you invited?”
Proper grammar. Very nice. “The father of the bride.”
“You a friend of the family?”
“No. I did some work for him a while back.”
“What kind of work?”
“Consulting on security issues. Does it really matter?”
“No, I suppose not. It just seems a bit odd that Mr. Sadeghi would ask you to his daughter’s wedding. I had a guy install a burglar alarm on my hou
se. I don’t invite him to family events.”
“Maybe you should talk to Armin about that.”
“Oh, I have,” he says.
He’s lying. Armin is, as far as I can tell from Vincent’s short-term memory, planted like an oak outside the operating room, waiting for news about Kira and surrounded by a wall of lawyers. Vincent hasn’t been able to get within ten feet of him.
But that doesn’t stop him from spinning out his theory.
“Mr. Sadeghi said you were not invited to the wedding. He says you crashed. The security guard says you interfered with his efforts to stop the intruders.”
That last bit is true, at least. The security guard did say that. Maybe he even believes it. Guy has to salvage his ego somehow.
“That’s not true,” I say, mainly for the audio recording. Silence can be taken as agreement.
“Yeah, well, here’s what I think, Mr. Smith. I think you are deeply involved in what happened here today. I think you’re pulling some kind of shakedown scam. You arranged for your partners to hit this wedding so you could be the hero. And then you got a little rougher than they anticipated because you wanted to keep them from ever talking. Now, I’m not sure what your endgame is, but I know this: you were behind what happened here today. And that means you are looking at attempted murder and conspiracy charges.”
Standard law enforcement interrogation is almost all based on something called the Reid Technique. You’ve seen it done badly on cop shows, which is the way a lot of cops learn it too. The quick-and-dirty version goes like this: Act like you already know everything. Tell the story the way you believe it. Say it with real conviction, as if you’ve got Gus Grissom and the whole CSI lab and DNA evidence backing you up, right outside the door. Say it with such confidence that you make the suspect believe you’ve got him completely nailed. And then get him to confirm your theory. Then you’ve got a confession, and you don’t need any of that other evidence.
It’s so effective that it leads to completely innocent people confessing to crimes they never committed. But it’s a much harder trick to pull when the suspect—in this case, me—can read your mind.
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