Hard Return

by J. Carson Black

  Everything he did fit the mold. He walked with his hands loose at his sides but you could see that he was ready.

  He looked at his watch. Just past one in the afternoon. He’d been on display long enough.

  He took the Strassenbahn back to the Hotel Sonnenblick, aware of the eyes on him. Aware of the people who sat on the Strassenbahn with him. Most of them looked down—reading. Or looked out the windows. Mostly impassive, involved with their own thoughts and lives.

  He walked from the tram up the short road to the Gasthof.

  His room was in the back. He headed up the outside stone steps and went in through the side door, then up the hall to his room. He checked to see that the thread still ran from the doorknob to the jamb.

  Listened at the door.

  Prepared himself for anything.

  He stood to the side and pushed the door open.

  Nothing. The room was in darkness, except for a lozenge of golden light from the window. He could see the furniture. Everything as he had left it. The coffee cup on the little table. The book next to it. The bed still unmade, the quilt still sculpted in such a way that he could see a full sunflower emblazoned on the cloth.

  As he reached to turn on the light, he felt it: almost like electricity. Displaced air. He had already tensed, was already turning, when the blow obliterated his thoughts.

  CHAPTER 16

  Mike Morales, 17: Mike belonged to the Gordon C. Tuttle HS Chess Club. He loved to work on cars. His pride and joy was a 1999 Ford Mustang he refurbished with his father. His little brother, Robert, was hit especially hard by Mike’s death. Mike used to let Robert tag along with him, whether it was to a concert or Chuck E. Cheese’s. Recently Mike took Robert to his first Comic Con. Mike was also a star athlete, participating in track and field. —“In Memoriam,” Special Section, the Los Angeles Times

  Landry lay on the floor, something crushing hard between his shoulder blades, holding him down. A knee? Or a foot? The lights in his brain blinked out for a moment, then came back to immense pain. The pain throbbed from his ear to the base of his skull and pulsated like a beating heart.

  Someone kicked his legs apart and confiscated both handguns and the knife strapped to his leg.

  A rough voice snarled, “Pussy!”

  Landry strained to see over his shoulder, head hurting like a son of a bitch. “I know you,” he said.

  A light snapped on.

  “Every night in your dreams, Pretty Boy,” Eric Blackburn said.

  Landry didn’t laugh because he knew from experience it would hurt too much. Instead, he said, “That’s why we called you Hard-on, sweet lips.” He wished his head and neck would stop pulsing, but at least he knew he would live. “Can you take your foot off me now?”

  “Sure thing.”

  Landry rose to a seated position and leaned back against the door. “If you knew it was me, why the hell did you hit me?”

  “Because I could?”

  The man looked broad and even heavy, but Landry knew he was all muscle. He had a day-old beard (he always had a day-old beard) and the red hair that wasn’t in a ponytail flopped in his face.

  Landry massaged his neck.

  Eric held out his hand, helping Landry to his feet. “Good to see you, friend,” he said. Then he opened his arms. “Come to Daddy.”

  They hugged and slapped each other in the way friends do when they haven’t seen one another in years.

  The two of them walked to the corner café, catching up on the way. Eric was no longer with SEAL Team 3. He was a consultant for a company in Nicaragua.

  “But you’re here.”

  “Had some unfinished business.” Eric didn’t elaborate, and Landry didn’t ask.

  They took a table far away from the other café patrons, ordered, and waited until they had been served.

  “Glad to see I was noticed,” Landry said.

  “A parade through town would be more discreet.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be discreet.”

  “Good thing.” Eric had his phone out and started throwing it from one hand to another, more to occupy his hands than anything else. Eric’s engine ran hot, and while he could do stillness, he preferred movement. He fiddled with the phone, his tanned face inscrutable behind his dark glasses. “You’re supposed to be dead, is what I hear,” he said.

  “It’s all relative. I heard the same about you.”

  Eric grinned, making him look like a friendly alligator, which was an oxymoron. Eric himself was an oxymoron: family man, devout Christian, SEAL, and hired mercenary. “Your picture was floating through the Toolshed, so I snagged it.”

  “Glad this wasn’t all for naught.”

  “No way it was for naught. Got your contract, too.” He set the phone down, leaned back, and stretched out his legs. He crossed his tennis-shoed feet at the ankles. “Seriously, dude, the people I work with wouldn’t be happy about the way you’re sniffing around.”

  “Oh?”

  “They asked me to find out your prospective intentions.”

  “Who are your people?”

  Eric smiled and shook his head. “You know I can’t tell you that. So. What’s the story?”

  Landry saw no reason not to tell the truth.

  After he was finished, Eric said, “You think the school shooter came from a Toolshed?”

  “He was a pro.”

  “Not that good a pro. He’s dead. So tell me about the guy.”

  Landry repeated what he’d learned from the special agent in California—the fly-fisherman. No ID. The shape he was in. His age. The missing fingerpads.

  “No car?”

  “No car. Unless they’ve found it since then.”

  “Someone dropped him off.”

  “What I think.” An accomplice. An accomplice who got away.

  Eric shook his head. “Man, this is gonna be tough. I heard you died in Florida.”

  “Somebody got that wrong.”

  “So what happened? I heard it was a clusterfuck—Whitbread Associates dissolved its partnership a little bit too rapidly, you know what I’m saying. Heard you ended up in the drink.”

  “I’m still here.”

  Eric grinned, his face thoughtful. “Yeah, you know the saying, right? ‘Never assume a frogman is dead until you find the body.’ No one knows you’re alive?”

  “My brother. He picked me up.”

  “No one else?”

  Landry thought about the cop, Jolie Burke. “No one.”

  “I heard there were helicopters.”

  “Two helos, yeah. One got blown up on the island. The other one was gone by then. The storm.”

  “Could’ve seen you, bro.”

  Landry shrugged. “Could have, but didn’t.”

  But was he sure about that? He’d swum for hours. There were times when he’d drifted, at the brink of unconsciousness. But there was no way the helo would be flying then. In the storm, in the night, especially after everything had ended and the only thing to do was escape.

  No way the helo would fly during a cat-2 storm.

  Eric said, “Damn. Who would hire a guy to shoot up a school? That’s cold.” He tilted his head sideways a little and regarded his old friend. “Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll leave your name and creds up and we’ll see what happens. Who knows? Maybe you’ll get a bite yet.”

  “Thanks, bro.”

  They split up after that. Landry headed back to the Gasthof, and Eric for parts unknown.

  Jolie had a friend of a friend who had access to photos of the scene. They were not crime scene photos—those would be kept under wraps—but a TV news photog with a telephoto lens had shot them from a helicopter a day after the shooting. There were at least two hundred photos, most of them similar to one another, although they were shot from slightly different angles as
the helo circled. All they showed were crime scene tape and tiny police markers on the asphalt—and those were blurry. The markers pointed out the spot where a shooting victim fell. Each marker corresponded to its own bloodstain. By then everything else had been gathered up—the kids’ possessions, the spent ammunition, each round circled by shiny orange paint before removal.

  The markers were distributed from the entrance to the parking lot about halfway through. A grouping of markers had been placed about two-thirds of the way in, and Jolie tried to make sense of the pattern—five grouped within a few yards of one another. She compared the photos to a schematic her friend’s cop friend had drawn for her and sent by iPhone. It was not accurate, just a sketch from what she remembered at the scene, but Jolie had also compared these photos with the sketch in the Los Angeles Times and they were very close. She looked for discrepancies but found nothing major.

  She blew up and pasted together sixteen squares shot from the helicopter and put them up on the wall of her den. She paired the names with the photos and saw that the center of the grouping were two girls and a boy: Danielle Perez, Taylor Brennan, and Hunter Tomey.

  One car space away was a fourth victim, Devin Patel. The Juggalo boy.

  Jolie read and reread the biographies. She grouped the kids by what they had in common. She grouped them by where they were in the parking lot.

  Nothing she saw made goosebumps of recognition walk up her back.

  There was no thrill in her gut.

  She made calls. She got through to a police sergeant in Torrent Valley who spoke briefly, cop to cop. (She’d told him that one of the kids had a father in Tejar.) He gave her nothing. The only thing he let slip was his contempt for the story that the security guard had killed the shooter.

  “Can you elaborate on that?”

  “Nope, sure can’t.”

  Frustrating.

  She was on the outs. She was on leave, and although Jolie had used her full rank as a police officer, it didn’t get her very far.

  Thing was, it looked like a random shooting. Like your typical rampage shooting.

  Except for what Landry had told her. He had seen the guy and he said he was a pro. He should know, because he’d seen the guy through a sniper scope—right before he bit the dust.

  It was impossible to do anything from here. Jolie realized that almost immediately, even though she kept trying.

  I could fly out there. God only knew she had the time now. Try and talk to the families. But she couldn’t act in her official capacity.

  And where would she start?

  All that studying and she came back to the same conclusion Cyril Landry had come to.

  Maybe it was Luke Brodsky and an attempt on Kristal Landry’s life. But maybe it was Danielle Perez, or Taylor Brennan, or Hunter Tomey.

  Or maybe, it was Devin Patel.

  Or none of the above. Maybe it was completely random.

  Just another school shooting.

  Even though Landry had made it known where he was staying, no one contacted him. No one associated with the Toolshed approached him. His alias was excellent, his creds were beyond reproach, but he didn’t get one bite. Landry didn’t know the reason for this, but it seemed he had not made his case.

  Either that, or he was suspect.

  He was careful to watch his back. Every hour, every minute, every second.

  There was no way to get back in touch with Eric. No way to access the Toolshed. The Toolshed was not a mom-and-pop store sitting on the corner of a quiet street. The Toolshed didn’t exist on a physical plane. If no one was interested in Landry’s wares—in his skills—they would pass him up, and he’d never know.

  He wasn’t surprised.

  Anyone who needed access to a Toolshed was naturally suspicious and careful, and would prefer to connect with someone they’d worked with before.

  At least he knew that Eric would keep his mouth shut. He didn’t know much else, but he knew that. It was written in stone.

  He waited one more day, just in case, then made his reservation to fly back to the United States.

  The trip had not been for nothing. Jeffery Peterman was still circulating through the system. If someone did show interest, they would find him. He had set his lines, and now all he could do was wait—and hope—for a catch.

  He would have to wait for them to come to him.

  CHAPTER 17

  Cam had just started to drift off when the truck gunner came into the tent.

  “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Lieutenant, but we drew the short straw and we’re on night patrol.”

  Good news and bad news. The scouting part was good. The flying bullets were not. As his cliché-spouting sister would say, you have to break a few eggs.

  He just didn’t want to be the egg that got broke.

  He slid his vest over his head, pulled on his helmet, and chambered his nine-millimeter handgun. He holstered the weapon, charged his M-16, and was good to go.

  The heat was constant, along with the flies. It was worse tonight, pushing back at him. He felt like he was trudging uphill. Rumors about “field money” were flying. He had no idea how that got started. No one believed it. Some of the guys he was with knew what he knew, and waited for the chance he waited for. Cam’s mind worked overtime as he trudged through the heat and the darkness. His eyes went to his feet—a habit he wished he could break.

  He heard it first: the loud clang of a bolt charging a .50 caliber. Close. Close enough to stir the hairs on his arms, enough to send his internal organs backpedaling into the center of his body.

  He looked up from the desert floor at the Humvee, into the barrel of the .50 caliber.

  “Thought I’d wake you up,” the gunner said. The .50 pointed right at Cam’s head.

  Cam sucked in a breath and held it.

  “Hahahaha! You should see your face!”

  Cam was his superior, but he said nothing. The rules were different out here.

  There was a group of borderline head cases and psychopaths in his unit. To face this shit every day, you almost had to be.

  The guy cackled and another soldier joined him.

  Cam knew that some of these guys called him “the Boy Wonder.” Maybe because he was a commissioned officer, he was younger than them, and they had to take his orders.

  He knew they despised him, but they depended on him, too. He was the brains of this outfit, but even so, he never turned his back on them.

  They drove out in a funnel of dust. Cam and his boys. Jedediah, who came from a religious family, and Martín, whose family came from Mexico. The rest were not worth burying, except to worry they might shoot you in your sleep. Cam, Jedediah, and Martín. The Three Amigos. And guess who would come out of this deployment smelling like a rose? Not the psychopaths.

  Pretty soon they were out in the godforsaken middle of nowhere. They had already gone far beyond the patrol perimeter, which was fine by Cam because he was always, always scouting.

  The moon was full. In the distance Cam saw a small structure. An old farmhouse, out here where the farm fields had dried up and blown away and the few houses in the area were empty and blackened from fire. This place was no different.

  He happened to glance over at Willets, the gunner who had tried to scare him. Who had scared him.

  Willets caught him looking, and even though the man’s face was mostly covered by his headgear, Cam could see the look the gunner gave him. Fear knifed into his entrails.

  Willets pointed at him and nodded.

  Coming up on the right was a slice of the river, and a shot-up palm grove.

  Everyone in the Humvee suddenly clammed up. They seemed to draw into themselves, like snails into their shells.

  The bad feeling spread over them.

  Cam was aware that the gunner’s finger was on the trigger. His M-16 casu
ally pointing Cam’s way. But there was nothing casual about the man’s feelings. They radiated off him like heat from a stove. They came across the distance between them, and Cam knew the man’s hatred was so deep that he meant to kill him.

  “I hear you got something going,” the gunner said.

  Cam said nothing.

  “Hey! Lieut, you hear me? I want to know what it is!”

  The gunner opened his mouth just as a sibilant rush of air told Cam to get down—now! He did. The rifle crack came two seconds behind the sound, two seconds after the gunner’s chest burst from the inside like a rotten pomegranate, juice flying everywhere.

  The driver swung the Humvee around fast and they hightailed it out of there, zigzagging to avoid fire.

  They made it past the doorless, windowless building, and around the back. The shooting had come from a palm grove. The driver pushed the gunner away and took control of the .50.

  He shot into the grove.

  But there was no screaming, no return fire.

  They were fighting phantoms.

  Then he turned the .50 on the Iraqi farmhouse—just in case.

  The concrete block was maybe thirty feet in length, no windows, not even frames. No roof, just a skeleton of a house in the middle of nowhere, and the driver pulled the trigger and blew the thing to smithereens.

  As the smoke and dust drifted away, Cam could see the house had been disintegrated into nothing but the first line of concrete block, only inches above the sand—nowhere for insurgents to hide.

  SOP was to go forward, secure the area, and verify the kills.

  But the driver scrambled back behind the wheel and they peeled away.

  “Where the hell are we going?” Cam said. He was the superior officer, but the driver ignored him. “We’ve got some prodding to do!”

  “Screw that,” the driver said. “There ain’t nothin’ to check out. Hostile parties might be—”

  “Turn around and go back now.”

  For answer, the driver put the pedal to the metal.