Friendly Fire

by John Gilstrap

  On Boxers’ screen, the continuing image from the hovering Roxie showed a Jeep Cherokee in which multiple men had gathered, none of whom seemed in any hurry to get out.

  “What can they be doing in there?” Boxers wondered aloud. He and Jonathan had both pulled black coveralls over their street clothes, and they’d prepared their assault gear in case it needed to be deployed.

  “I have no idea,” Jonathan said. “But let’s assume that they’re planning to assault the station. How would you do it?” He spun his laptop so Big Guy could get a better view of the floor plan Venice had sent. The footprint of the building bore a striking resemblance to a fat pistol, with the vertical part of the grip running north-south and the barrel assembly running east-west. The public entrance and reception areas were in the grip at the westernmost extreme of the building. Jonathan could see the light through those doors straight ahead, though partially concealed by trees.

  In the door (think slide rod on the pistol image) and turn left (toward the front sight), you’d find the chief’s office and other administrative services clustered in the northwest corner. Halfway to that corner, the single main hallway—a long one—split off to the right. Down that hall lay evidence rooms, men’s and women’s locker rooms, the armory, the patrol briefing room, and then a hard stop at a security door that led to the secure prisoner processing areas, which were downstairs. The detention cells lay on the lower floor at the farthest northeast corner of the building.

  Boxers leaned in closer. “How many troops do I have?”

  “Let’s say ten.”

  Boxers gave a low whistle. “What’s my mission? Is it merely to create mayhem, or am I after something?”

  “Let’s say you’re trying to kill a prisoner.” That comment earned him a concerned look. “Just for planning purposes,” Jonathan said.

  Boxers’ face took on a serious concentration as he planned an imaginary attack. “How good is my team?” he asked.

  “Very.”

  Boxers growled as he studied the plans.

  Jonathan decided to take the first shot at his own question. “Going in from the east end is a nonstarter,” he said. “Any walls that are designed to keep killers in will work just as well to keep attackers out.”

  “Agreed,” Boxers said. “The softest point of entry is going to be the front door. With ten guys who are good at what they do stacked up on the door, they’ll be able to spread out pretty quickly to contain any threats.”

  “What about here?” Jonathan pointed to a spot on the south wall, roughly where the trigger would be, carrying on with the pistol metaphor. “That’s their ‘public safety training room,’ whatever that means. It’s got a big window. That might be a great breach point.”

  Boxers scowled, then nodded. “Either way, once they get to that security door in the center of the long hallway, everything’s going to choke. If they can’t get through, they’ll be trapped. It’d be a damned firing squad wall.”

  “And what about when they get to the other side?” Jonathan added. “People on the other side of that wall will have had a lot of unintentional advance notice. They’ll be loaded for bear.”

  “Do they allow firearms on that side of the security door?” Boxers asked. “The smart move for them might be to just boogey out and run.”

  Jonathan thought about that. “Actually, I think I’ve got it,” he said. “Simultaneous entry from both the west and the south. The team from the west can confront and control shooters while the team from the south works its magic on the center security door.”

  “Hey, Boss? Tell me again what you see our role to be in this imaginary firefight between cops and bad guys.”

  Jonathan clapped him on the shoulder. “You’ll be the first to know as soon as I figure that out,” he said.

  * * *

  “Any sign of the Hummer?” Spike asked. Of all the members on his team, the one who called himself Tomlinson was by far the most paranoid. He’d talked himself into believing that they were being followed by a big black Hummer. Tomlinson made it his habit to ride turned backward in the seat, perpetually looking for signs that they were being tailed. Spike had never drilled into the origins of his paranoia—he didn’t care—but there were advantages to having someone on the team who worried all the time. In the world of alpha male shooter teams, that kind of perceived weakness was hard to come by. Spike didn’t doubt the fact that Tomlinson had seen the Hummer both of the two times he reported, but this was a crowded part of the world, and most roads led to thousands of places, of which this was only one.

  “I don’t see him,” Tomlinson said. He had a reedy, squeaky voice that served only to perpetuate the perception of weakness. “But I saw lights behind us as we pulled in, and no vehicle ever passed us. They could be hiding in the shadows back there, and we’d never know.”

  “Could be Apache warriors,” said Watkins, another member of the team. He considered himself the alpha of alphas.

  “Pygmies.” That from Simpson.

  “Har, har,” Tomlinson said. “Judge as you wish. I’m just tellin’ you what I’m seein’.”

  The ball-busting continued among the team as Spike considered his options. Part of him imagined that paranoid people lived longer than non-paranoid people. As the thought passed through his head, he realized he was gently stroking the bandage over his right ear. That guy in the park had skills. And maybe a guy with skills would go to the effort to follow them for their assault on the police station.

  There were a million reasons why that concern was preposterous—start with the fact that this was Braddock-freaking-County, Virginia, not Westchester County, New York. This little burg was nowhere on anyone’s list of probable terrorist targets. Add to that the security they’d built into their operations. But then there were the breaches. The death of Bill Jones. The mugging in the park. The black Hummer.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” Spike announced, effectively cutting off the banter among the team members. He looked at his watch. “In ten seconds, the show starts at the mall. Figure five minutes max for these idiots to get the word, and then we’re off and running. Tomlinson, I want you and Watkins to move backward when the balloon goes up. If your Hummer is there, kill everyone in it, and then join the attack.”

  “Oh, come on,” Watkins protested. “Are you serious?”

  “Those are my orders,” Spike said. “And feel free to scalp any and all Apache warriors you run into.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  “Let me share a secret with you,” Drew said to his new smartass friends. “Listen carefully.”

  One crossed his arms, the other planted his hands on his hips.

  “Three, two, one, zero.” Drew raised his M4 to his shoulder and shot them both in the face, point blank. It was on.

  Automatic weapons fire opened up from every compass point within the mall. At first, predictably, shoppers froze, some in a half crouch, but most stood cluelessly upright. With his right thumb, Drew switched the selector from single shot to full-auto, and he fired a full thirty-round mag down the length of the mall to his left, and as he dropped the empty and replaced it with a full, he pivoted on his own axis and fired down the length of the mall to his right.

  Through the window of the designer shoe store, he saw a teenage clerk standing stock still, frozen in place as she tried to comprehend the incomprehensible. Drew waved at her and motioned for her to get down. His good deed for the day.

  The thunder of gunfire translated to vibrations in the floor as his team members did the jobs they were being paid so handsomely to perform. Drew found it thrilling at a visceral level. It tapped the same corner of his brain where sexual pleasure resided. He felt himself growing erect. The air itself transformed into a smoky haze that smelled of gunpowder and blood and fear.

  He emptied another full magazine in each direction, and then he switched his selector to single fire. From here on out, his shots would be aimed. Fifteen seconds into the attack, those who were able to m
ove to save themselves dove for cover inside the nearest store, oblivious to the fact that those doorless, wide-open spaces offered virtually no cover at all. Soon, he would begin his stroll to prove the futility of their actions in the most vivid way he and they could imagine. Up close and very, very personal.

  But first, they had to make it that far. Only thirty feet away, a young husband enveloped his bride in a protective hug as he tried to hustle her out of sight, but Drew killed them both with the same bullet through two set of lungs.

  Slaughters in real life don’t happen the way they do in the movies. First of all, nothing is in slow motion, and there are rarely eruptions of blood as shown on the screen. In real life, people just fall, and the blood comes later, sometimes bright red, sometimes darker red, but always red.

  People screamed, he supposed, because they believed it to be the thing to do in a stressful situation, but it made no sense to him. Screaming accomplished nothing. Worse, it took up valuable real estate in the brain. Real estate that would be better dedicated to escape and evasion and even retaliation.

  Just for shits and giggles, Drew chose the farthest target he could see, a dark-haired woman in some kind of retail uniform running directly away from him. He settled his red dot sight on a spot between her shoulder blades and pressed the trigger. She fell facedown and slid along the tile floor as she died.

  * * *

  “Holy shit, that’s gunfire!” Pam declared. She jumped to her feet and drew her off-duty weapon, a 9 millimeter Glock 26, spilling her water and sending her mini key lime pie crashing to the floor. Opposite her, Josh was on his feet as well, brandishing his 9 millimeter Glock 19. Diners saw the weapons and panic rippled through the room.

  “We’re police officers!” Josh yelled. “Everybody stay put and get down.”

  Outside in the mall, it sounded like a war. People rushed away from the open front wall of the restaurant and started packing into the back. Moving against the flow, Pam and Josh tried to push their way to the front.

  “Make way, please,” Pam said, trying her best to keep her voice modulated. “Move to the back and stay down. Take cover.” She held her badge in one hand, poised over her head, and her Glock in the other. “I’m a police officer,” she said again and again. “Nobody panic. I know it’s hard, but nobody panic. Go to the back of the restaurant. We’ll protect you.” She cringed as she heard her own words. She’d just made a promise she had no idea that she could keep.

  Among the throngs of pushing humanity, Pam caught sight of Juan-their-server-this-evening. She grabbed a fistful of his vest and pulled him out of the flowing stream. “You remember me, right?” she said. “We were at your—”

  “My table, yeah. What do you want?”

  “I need you to lead these people to the back door. Show them where it is and direct—”

  The kid looked terrified. “What if there’s a guy with a gun back there, too?”

  “Work the odds,” Pam said. “The world is coming apart out there beyond the front door. You know there’s a shooter out there. And it sounds like he’s getting closer. Against that, there might be a bad guy in the back hallway. Which sounds like the smarter move, staying or going?”

  She saw the darkness lift from his eyes. He got it.

  “Okay,” Pam shouted to the gathering crowd of panicking shoppers. “Listen up! I am Detective Pam Hastings with the Braddock County Police Department. I want you all to follow—”

  “You!” a lady yelled. “You’re the police!”

  Pam turned to the voice.

  The lady rushed her, threw a punch that missed by a foot. “God damn you!” the lady yelled. Her face and her blouse—a beige flannel shirt, really—were both spattered with blood.

  Pam recoiled from the attack, feeling unbalanced by the violence of it. The anger of it. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “It’s you!” the lady yelled. “You’re the killer!”

  Josh had joined Pam now. He’d slung his own badge—a silver one while Pam’s was gold—from his shirt pocket, and he seemed ready to tear apart the lady who had accosted his date.

  “We’re the killers?” Pam pressed. “What are you talking—”

  “The police are shooting everybody. They’re shooting everybody they see!”

  A memory rumbled deep in Pam’s brain. Casual talk about stolen uniforms. Her stomach seized.

  Outside, the shooting continued. The screaming, the running. The panic continued. The slaughter continued.

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” Pam said. She dared to grab the woman by both shoulders and gave her a hard shake. “Tell me. Tell me what you saw out there.”

  The woman seemed surprised that Pam wasn’t getting it. Annoyed. “They’re cops,” she said. “Police officers. I saw four of them, but I think there are more. They’re everywhere and they’re just executing people.”

  “No,” Josh said. “That can’t be right.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Pam said. To the blood-spattered woman, she said, “Join these people. Get out of here.” She raised her voice and addressed everyone. “Follow Juan here, and he will lead you to safety. Don’t slow down, don’t turn back.” She looked to Josh. “We’ll take care of this.”

  * * *

  The MIA box on Warren Michaels’s desk squealed at the same instant that his phone buzzed an SOS in his pocket. The MIA system—Major Incident Alert—was an outgrowth of the old Plectron system that told the chief of police that it was time to go to work with extreme prejudice. Triggered by dispatchers in the EOC—Emergency Operations Center—a MIA tone preceded the dispatch of something earth-shattering, and alerted everyone from the county executive down through the newest public safety employee that whatever plans they thought they’d made for the day had been canceled. During the six years that Warren had been chief, this was the first time that the system had been implemented outside of a drill.

  Warren’s head pivoted to the box on his desk and his heart stammered at the sound of stress in the usually implacable dispatcher’s voice. “Attention all units, attention all units. Emergency traffic. All available units respond to multiple active shooters at Mason’s Corner Shopping Mall. We are receiving dozens of calls reporting multiple casualties and multiple shooters. All available units respond.”

  In the space of a heartbeat, the world changed. Warren could almost feel a vacuum being drawn on the headquarters building as more than a dozen officers ejected themselves from whatever corner or cubical they’d been occupying and dashed for the doors.

  Warren rose from his desk and yelled, “Long guns!” He had no idea if anyone had heard him. Being the chief puts you in a corner office beyond the smaller office that held his administrative assistant, who was now at home, enjoying a peaceful evening. Or so he hoped. As long as she wasn’t shopping at Mason’s Corner. He hurried past her desk to confront the flow of exiting officers.

  He was pleased to see that many of them were already ahead of him. They swarmed the armory down the hall, where Cletus Bangstrom’s temporary replacement seemed utterly swamped by the demand for rifles and magazines. In the middle of it all, trying to bring order to the chaos, was Jed Hackner, among whose many talents was an impressive knack for calming people down. This wasn’t the place Warren wanted him to be.

  “Jed!” Warren called.

  The lieutenant turned.

  “I want you on the scene. Now. Take charge and be my eyes until the van gets spun up. I’ll be in the CTC.” Crisis Tactical Center. When the command van was staffed, Warren would move from the CTC in the basement of the police station to the MCTC—the Mobile Crisis Tactical Center. If the incident grew large enough, there’d be a lot of people inside that van—a converted RV, really—and about forty percent of them would want to be in charge. For now, though, and for the next ten minutes or so, no one would challenge Warren’s authority in what was known to his command staff as the bunker.

  Warren left the scene in the hallway to head to the CTC. As
he passed the various cubicles and hallways, he noted that all but a few of the department’s civilian employees were gone for the night. One of the exceptions was a young IT genius named Yolanda Pierce, who Warren wasn’t sure he’d ever seen in the building past 5:30. On a different night, he’d have asked if everything was all right. Tonight, however, he knew for a fact that a lot of things were very wrong.

  When he got to the door to the basement, he passed his ID card over the reader in the wall and the heavy steel door buzzed. He pulled it open and glided down the stairs into the gloom that housed the CTC as well as the prisoner processing and holding areas. While the new building was under construction, Warren had suggested to the Board of Supervisors that there might be dividends in making the basement spaces less dank, but none of them wanted to hear it. Prisoners were criminals, and they deserved to be treated as such. The fact that police officers needed to work in that space too seemed beyond their grasp.

  The CTC looked like a poor man’s version of the White House Situation Room—lots of computer terminals arranged around an eight-foot-long rectangular conference table. The cables from the computer equipment all snaked into holes designed for that purpose into a space below the table that Warren had never cared to look at. He wouldn’t have known what he was seeing even if he had.

  He was the second person to arrive, after Janey Brothers, the night-shift proprietor of all things electronic. The speakers in the walls hummed with radio traffic as various police units marked responding.

  “Are we up and running?” Warren asked.