Back Blast

61

By the time dawn broke over the tiny town of Glen St. Mary, Florida, the roosters on the farm just north of Claude Harvey Road had already been crowing for hours.

Court had known they would be. The ancestors of those roosters had been screwing with his sleep for as far back as he could remember.

To call this a farm at all was putting it charitably. It was fifty acres of mostly hard-packed sandy dirt, covered in trees and shrubs on the edges and flat as a pancake. There was a pond and a double-wide and a detached garage made of corrugated tin, and there were a few chickens in a coop and a few goats in a pen, but that looked like the full measure of the place if you were driving by on Claude Harvey, the only paved road in sight.

But a passing motorist wouldn’t be able to see the largest structure on the farm from the road. It was back behind the trees, two hundred yards off Claude Harvey, just this side of a fat man-made earthen berm that had long since become overgrown with thatchy privet and wild oak.

The structure was a two-story shoot house, a firearms training center, constructed like a fort out of railroad ties, old tires, plywood, Conex boxes, and other rusted metal. At over nine thousand square feet, it was massive, although it had never been fancy and had fallen into disrepair in the past fifteen years. Next to the old wooden structure, several firing ranges could still be detected in the underbrush, and old rusted steel man-shaped targets leaned haphazardly against the berm.

The owner of the farm and the shoot house was a sixty-eight-year-old native Floridian named James Ray Gentry. Gentry had served as a marine in Vietnam, a small-town cop, a large-city SWAT officer, and his department’s lead firearms instructor, and then, when he was still in his early thirties, he quit the force and opened his own private tactical training center for state and local law enforcement agencies. This was the early 1980s, when Florida’s cocaine wars put armed bad guys with automatic weapons on the streets, in the bars, and in the boats offshore. Cops and deputy sheriffs all over the state needed to learn how to transition from the days of six-shooters and minimal chance for danger to fighting protracted street battles with heavily armed men with little reluctance to kill or die to protect their millions in product.

And James Gentry taught most of the state’s SWAT teams right here on Claude Harvey Road. By the nineties he was training federal law enforcement and even some CIA units, as well, all of whom knew he had the abilities to show them how to clean and clear houses without subjecting large portions of their units to near-certain death.

James’s wife died back in the eighties, but not before she gave him two healthy boys. Courtland, and then two years later, Chancellor. Chance seemed destined to follow in his father’s footsteps from birth. He always wanted to wear his father’s police gear, or dress up like the Lone Ranger.

Court was night and day different from his little brother; he was obsessed with Indians as a child, he was more interested in horses than in police cars, and Court became the Indian outlaw to Chance’s U.S. Marshal. They chased each other all over the farm in character. Chance versus Court. Cowboy versus Indian. The good guy versus the bad guy.

The father’s son, and the rebel.

Both boys assisted their dad in his business, first by helping to pick up spent brass around the ranges and shoot house, then by cleaning the training weapons each night while the SWAT teams sat in meeting rooms, going over the day’s actions.

Even as a small boy Court had been a mascot of the school. Though he didn’t have his brother’s obsession with guns, he’d been a natural with firearms, even better than his brother, and students from all over the country training at the school would bet handfuls of ammunition they could outshoot the ten-year-old son of the legendary James Gentry.

The older Gentry took all their bets, and invariably he’d end up with more loaded ammo to throw into his oil drum full of Court’s winnings.

By the time Court was fourteen, he and his brother had found themselves at the center of the family business. Their dad would let them play hooky from school so they could serve as opposition forces pitted against visiting SWAT teams, waiting in the dark for cops to come into the shoot house with guns loaded with paintballs.

Often the Gentry boys would take down full eight- or twelve-man units without so much as a single splatter on their own bodies.

And more often than not furious police captains screamed red-faced at James Gentry, insisting the training was rigged against his men, because no one could believe a couple of teenaged brothers, one short-haired and personable, the other long-haired and reserved, could wipe out well-trained tactical units of veteran cops.

James Gentry sometimes allowed the captains to make the rules in the next drill, to stack the deck in favor of their own men, and often the result was the same.

But Court’s rebellious nature grew exponentially in his late teens and he ran afoul of his taciturn father. Though Chance did his best to keep the peace between them, Court and James were two stubborn personalities, and conflict between them became the norm.

Court drifted away from Glen St. Mary as soon as he turned eighteen, and he ended up in Miami. There, looking for work, he took a job in security for a shady businessman and, with no clear understanding of what he was involved with, he slowly realized he had managed to become a henchman for a drug dealer. This career lasted exactly two months, and it ended abruptly when an attempt on his boss’s life at Opa-locka Airport caused Court to pull out his Micro Uzi and open fire.

In five seconds three men were dead, and in thirty seconds more, Court was on his knees with his hands in the air, complying with the orders of the undercover DEA officer who stared him down over the barrel of his shotgun.

The fact that the dead men were all Cuban assassins did not get Court off the hook and, by age nineteen, it looked like he’d spend the rest of his life behind bars.

But a CIA officer who’d once taken a weeklong course at the tactical training center in Glen St. Mary found out about the older Gentry brother’s misfortune, and he sent recruiters to the penitentiary where Gentry was serving time.

Accommodations were made, his record was expunged, and soon Court Gentry was in training at the CIA’s facility in Harvey Point, North Carolina, to become a singleton operator for the CIA.

He never looked back, and he never returned to north Florida.

Until now.

Court lay prone under a pine tree, eighty yards from his father’s driveway. Through the scope of Zack Hightower’s rifle he had line of sight on the front door of the double-wide, and he could see all the lights were off in the windows inside. He’d detected no sign of surveillance, and an F-250 pickup truck was parked in the drive just exactly at the angle his dad had always parked his car, so he thought the odds were good his dad was home.

As the sun came up a little more and the light grew, he took in more of the property.

Court saw his old beloved Bronco sitting up on blocks next to the garage. It was half-hidden by the weeds and covered in grime from twenty years of accumulation from the crab apple tree above it.

He’d come to rescue his dad, but for a moment he thought about saying “Screw it,” leaving his father to the enemy, and just rescuing his old truck instead.

But not for too long. By eight a.m. he saw the first movement of something larger than a rooster on the property — a new gray Chrysler 300 rolling up the dirt road towards his father’s farm. It looked like it was probably a rental car, but after it stopped and two men climbed out, Court knew in a heartbeat these guys were either FBI or state investigators, or perhaps CIA officers posing as law enforcement.

Court lowered his eye back into the rifle scope and tracked the men carefully as they parked by the F-250 and headed up to the front door of his father’s old trailer.

The door opened after a few knocks, and Court put his eyes in his binoculars. His father answered, and he stood there in worn boxers and an old gray T-shirt with the logo for the NRA on the front.

Court zoomed his binos in on his father’s face.

“Jesus, Dad. You got old.”

Court chastised himself immediately. The last time he’d seen his father’s face, James would have been in his late forties. Court himself had been a teenager, and since then his life had been hard lived, to say the least.

He figured if anyone looked twenty years older than the last time the two had spoken, it would be Court.

The three men on the little wooden porch talked for over a minute, and Court couldn’t hear a bit of it. The Walker’s Game Ear was in place, and he could clearly hear their voices, but with the ambient sounds of a steady breeze and the clucking chickens it was hard to make out much of the conversation.

Finally Court heard one word, spoken by his father, in a surprised, questioning tone.

“Breakfast?”

These goons were asking to take Court’s dad to breakfast on this fine Saturday morning.

And this told Court exactly where they were heading.

He wanted to back away right now, but instead he waited, and he was glad he did, because James Gentry invited the men inside, presumably so he could change clothes. As soon as the door closed, Court began a quick but careful egress across a small field till he got to the higher brush near the pond, and then he stood in a crouch and began hurrying back to his Bronco.

As soon as he made it to his vehicle, he pulled out all the clothes in his backpack and began digging through them. He wanted to pick just the right attire to wear for the surveillance he had planned.

Five minutes later Court had already changed clothes, and he was pulling out of the trees and onto a dirt road.

There wasn’t just one diner that served breakfast in Glen St. Mary. There were two. But as long as Court could remember, his father had only gone to one of them.

Court pulled into Ronnie’s dressed in jeans, work boots, a canvas jacket, and a baseball cap. With these clothes and the three-day growth on his face he looked like every trucker, every farmhand, every male for ten miles in any direction.

He was the Gray Man — he knew he could remain invisible, even to the government types palling around with his father.

Court was already sitting at the counter, a cup of black coffee in front of him and a plate of toast and eggs on order, when his father entered with two men in suits. The elder Gentry wore jeans and a Carhartt pullover, a Caterpillar baseball cap, and Roper boots, and he nodded to the young waitress behind the counter. She greeted him by name and gave a quick but curious glance to the two men, as did another table of old-timers, but no one looked Court’s way, not even his dad when he passed within feet of him on his way to his favorite table, a booth in the back corner.

Court had his Walker’s Game Ear in his right ear and he had turned it up before the trio arrived, so when his eggs came he was able to position the hearing enhancer perfectly in line with the booth on his right while he ate.

In this way he could hear every word the men said.

“Again, Mr. Gentry. The two of you haven’t had any contact in how long?”

Court listened to his dad sigh. He thought the old man sounded much older than he remembered him sounding, and his voice was slow, slurred a little.

Court had the impression his dad was drunk.

“I told you this morning, and I told your coworkers the other day when they came by.”

“Sorry, Mr. Gentry, but we need you to tell us again.”

“You fellers want to write it down this time? Might help you remember.”

“Please, sir. How long?”

A sigh. “It’s been nineteen years, give or take.”

Court bit into his toast, and he heard the pages on a notepad flipping over at the corner booth.

“What do you do for a living, sir?”

“Social Security. I had a stroke a few years back. Can’t work.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Shit happens,” James said.

Court wanted to look to his father, but he fought the urge. He ate his bacon and looked at his plate, finding himself relieved the man was not, in fact, drunk.

One of the men said, “You had another son. Chance. He was a police officer for the City of Tallahassee.”

A pause before the elder Gentry responded. “That’s correct.”

“He was killed in the line of duty.”

“Are you asking me, or telling me? Because I already know.”

Court knew about his brother, but it still hurt to hear his dad talk about it. He chanced a half glance to his right, but still kept his ear turned towards the booth. He saw his father looking out the window now.

He looks so damn rough, Court thought.

“So… you are saying Courtland missed his own brother’s funeral?”

Gentry looked back to his breakfast. He waited to hear what his old man had to say about that.

“It’s crazy,” James replied. “The whole time that funeral was going on, I kept expecting Court to pop his head out from behind a tree, like he and Chance always did when they played cowboys and Indians as kids.”

“How did that make you feel? Losing your son like that?”

“Chance died serving his community. You go into police work knowing that’s on the table.”

Court heard his father trying to be stoic, but Court wasn’t buying it. Chance’s funeral had probably just about killed him. It easily could have led to his stroke. Court felt like shit for not being there, but his access to the United States had been limited at the time, to say the least.

Court knew that if he had come to his brother’s funeral, he probably would have been shot through the head by a Delta Force sniper and dropped into the hole meant for his brother.

Killed while in the service of his community.

The other goon took over now. “One thing is troubling me, Mr. Gentry. I’ve got to admit I think it’s pretty interesting that you haven’t asked us anything about your son. Aren’t you curious as to why we are here? Don’t you want to know if he’s in some kind of trouble?”

James Gentry laughed boisterously, causing Court to flinch in his seat because the sound was so loud in his earpiece. Court caught himself in mid-flinch, then he looked into his coffee, hoping like hell no one had noticed his action.

His father did not reply to this for several seconds. So long to where Court almost gave in and looked over to his right to see if something was wrong. But he fought the urge and concentrated on his coffee.

Finally his father spoke again, but he sounded different. More slow, more measured. “I didn’t ask if he was in trouble, because I know he’s in trouble.” He lightened a little. “C’mon, gents. I was a cop for a long time. Sharp-dressed assholes like you don’t show up at my door to tell me my son has just won the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes.”

Court fought a smile.

“You boys haven’t asked me what I’d tell my son if he did show up down here in Glen St. Mary.”

Court glanced at the booth quickly, pretending he was just looking out the window at the little parking lot. He saw the two strangers looking to each other — clearly the question wasn’t important to them.

But James Gentry answered anyway. “Well, I’ll tell you what I’d say. I’d tell him to turn his ass around and go back to wherever he came from. There ain’t nothing for him down here at home but problems.”

“Problems?”

“Yeah. I don’t know what the hell he’s gotten himself into this time, but this isn’t the place to come looking to get away from whatever’s after him.”

Court slowly turned his head in the direction of his father now, and he saw that his father was looking right at him, all the way across the room.

The older Gentry continued, still looking directly at his son. “All over this place there is trouble. Everywhere. I’d tell him this town is virtually crawling with it.”

His dad was making himself clear. He’d recognized his son and he was tipping him off. The area was under surveillance. Not just these two guys. The fact that Court hadn’t identified anyone else just yet made him wonder if there were cameras, drones, or other measures out there he couldn’t possibly see, or if his dad had noticed the arrival of other new faces to town, faces Court would not realize did not belong.

One of the men asked, “Why is it you think he might come back?”

“Oh, I’m not sayin’ he would. But if he did come here, the only reason in the world would be because he thought maybe something he did might put me at risk. He’d feel responsible, I guess, and he’d come here to try to help. But if that should happen, I would just tell him that I was fine, as long as he wasn’t here, because I’d be worried about him here more than anywhere else.”

“Why would he come here to help you out? You said you two have been estranged for nearly twenty years. What makes you think he gives a damn?”

The senior Gentry seemed to think about this a long time. He’d turned away from looking towards Court, and now he looked at the two men in front of him. “I always figured he didn’t care. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he grew up between the old days and now, and just maybe he understands that both of us said and did things we regret, so it’s better we both forgive each other, because we’re all the family we have left.”

The two men looked at James Gentry, and then at each other, confused by the softening change in their interviewee.

Gentry continued, “Who knows? I guess if he did show up here, I would know all that was true. I’d like that, to tell you the truth, but then, like I said, I’d tell him to turn his ass around and get the hell out of here.”

Court caught himself staring right at his dad, and his dad stared back at him while he said the last part. It was a terrible piece of tradecraft from the younger Gentry, but he’d been that focused on his father’s words.

Court reached for his wallet, paid his bill with a twenty, then stood up from the counter.

The waitress picked up his check and the cash. “Let me grab your change, hon.”

“You keep it.”

“Well, you have yourself a good day, y’hear?”

“You, too.”

He fought the urge to chance one more look towards the booth in the corner as he walked out the front door of the café and climbed back behind the wheel of his old Bronco, because he thought it highly unlikely he would ever see his father again.