Killer Heat

FIFTEEN

The hundreds of gunshots that erupted continuously in the still, muggy air of that August morning sounded more like a war zone than an old park grounds in the Bronx. I waited with Mike at the entrance to the pistol range at Rodman's Neck, the training base run by the NYPD Firearms and Tactics Section, just over the drawbridge that led to the little village of City Island.

Large signs that said RESTRICTED were posted along the roadway that separated this isolated area from Pelham Bay Park, of which it was once a part

There's a first time for everything, Coop," Mike said, leading me up to a table in front of a low wooden building that looked like an old stable. We both put on padded ear protectors, although they did little to muffle the constant sound of gunfire. "Settle down. He knew me as well as I knew myself. I didn't like it here. That was evident from the expression on my face and the stiffness of my body.

I was scoping the vast property as we walked through the stall to the place where we would stand for my first lesson firing guns, which I had promised Mike and Mercer I would take after a confrontation with an armed killer.

We were both in jeans and polo shirts already coated with a fine layer of dust from our walk from the parking lot to the area where dozens of cops were lined up side by side, shooting hundreds of rounds of real ammunition as cartridges discharged around us.

"I'd rather be talking to Herb Ackerman. Or checking out Bowery bars."

"Later for that. You do well in school and I'll take you bar-hopping. Okay, we're starting with a revolver."

One of the instructors came up behind me and Mike introduced us. He was dressed in the standard uniform of the firearms squad-all khaki, instead of the dark blue that street cops wore, with crossed pistol insignias on the collar. His name was Pete Acosta, and he had a revolver for each of us.

"But you don't even use one of these anymore."

"I started with this because my old man swore by his. Once upon a time, everybody on the force used a.38. Cops love them 'cause they always fire," Mike said. "And for beginners like you, they're usually easier to handle. Now there's too much fancy hardware on the street and these just can't keep up."

The day after rookie police officers were sworn in, there was a weapons selection event at the academy. It had become increasingly rare for young cops to choose to work with these guns, once thought to be more reliable, though much slower, than semiautomatics.

"Don't look so frightened," Mike said, prodding me in the back. "Step out there. No one's going to shoot you."

He loaded his revolver with six rounds while Pete loaded mine.

To both sides of me, only eight feet apart, were officers firing their guns, maybe a dozen men and women in all. In front of each position was a target, set in the ground about thirty feet away.

The human form, a drawing of a life-sized figure in sharp black outline, was pointing his gun at us. Every cop was blasting away at his chest or head. Most of the rounds were smacking into their paper targets, killing the gun-wielding menace again and again. Some missed high or wide, and you could see the dust kick up on the dry mounds of dirt that formed a perimeter to the rear of the range.

"Go ahead, Alex," Pete said, smiling at my hesitation. "Eight million rounds are fired here every year and nobody's ever been hit."

I looked from side to side at the men practicing around me and raised my arm, lining up the notch on the tip of the revolver through the sight.

"Get the thug," Pete said.

"What?"

"We call him the thug."

I pulled back on the trigger and the gun discharged.

"Sweet Jesus," Mike said. "Check with the Montauk police, Pete. Somebody might be sitting on his deck, gunshot wound in the middle of his forehead. She sailed that one right out of the ballpark. You check your vision lately, Coop?"

The sound of the constant gunfire unnerved me. I had never heard anything like it. I picked up the revolver and aimed again, or so I thought. The bullet lodged somewhere in the dirt beyond the thug's shoulder. He wouldn't even have needed to duck.

Mike stepped in closer behind me and put his arms over each of mine. "You see that guy on the target? He's aiming to blow your brains out. Think of it that way."

He was trying to keep my arms in place after I sighted the chest of the paper figure. "Pull back."

I fired once more, into the mound off in the distance, and now the cops on either side of me stopped to watch. Then I tried the last three rounds, but none of them came close.

"You do it."

Mike stood beside me and pointed the revolver. He let off six rounds, before refilling the gun with a speed loader that Pete handed to him with another six. Every one of them made its mark somewhere on the threatening thug.

"Maybe you'll like the semiautomatic better," Pete said. "What do you use, Mike?"

"A Glock 19," he said, unholstering his gun from his ankle.

Pete walked inside the stable with the revolvers and returned with a different gun for me. "Try this. It's a Sig-Sauer. A nine millimeter semiautomatic."

"Too many moving parts for her. This is a broad who can't operate a DVD player, Pete. She may never get it, but Mercer and I are determined to try."

More men were turning to watch me now-mocking me-as Pete explained the differences between the guns.

"There's one bullet in the chamber," Pete said, "and fifteen in the magazine. It requires good isometric tension to use one of these, Alex. There's a lot of jump in the recoil."

I could guess from firing the revolver what recoil was, but I didn't have a clue about isometric tension.

"Put your right index finger on the trigger," Pete said.

Mike moved in again to position me. He had put his own gun back in his ankle holster. "Stand with your legs apart, arms straight out."

"Why don't you just let Pete do this with me, okay?"

"Put your right index finger on the trigger," Mike said, ignoring me as he was not unused to doing. "Both thumbs on the left side of the grip. No, no, no. You can't cross them like that."

The guy to my right stepped back, with good reason. I pressed hard on the trigger, and when the gun discharged, my arms flew up with the kick and pulled to the side. It seemed like I had grazed the thug's kneecap, although I had been aiming for his chest.

"Look, I can't do this with everyone staring at me."

"You? I'm thinking your dream gig is to try a four-perp murder case that's televised on Court TV. What's with the shy shooter thing? You giving up?"

"Not yet. Is there any other way to do this without an audience?" I asked Pete.

"FATS. That's an indoor facility. Let's go over there. It's the Firearms and Tactics Simulators," he said, pointing to another area of the vast operation.

I returned the Sig and ear protectors and started to walk with Mike.

"You two head over," Pete said, stepping into an office as we passed through the stable to the far side of C-range, the designated pistol target area at which we'd been firing. "I'll put these away and be right there."

"It's amazing no one's been killed here."

"Shot, no. Killed, yes," Mike said. "Thirty years ago, one of my father's friends was blown up."

"What do you mean?"

He walked backwards and squinted to look off to the south, beyond the pistol range. "There's a huge crater they call the Pit. It's on the southernmost tip of the peninsula here, that juts into Eastchester Bay. The bomb squad detonates all the devices that are recovered in the city. They've done it since the days of the Weathermen. One of the earliest bombs they brought here detonated prematurely, and Brian's friend didn't make it away in time."

"How horrible," I said. "Is that why the range is restricted? The bomb danger?"

"This whole enclave is the NYPD's practice territory for urban warfare," Mike said, to the background noise of gunshots. "You've got all the special weapons that the antiterrorist squads use-MP5 submachine guns and Colt rifles and Ithaca shotguns. There's a helipad for the department's choppers. You got Aviation and police boat docks, the Bomb Squad, Special Ops, Highway Patrol, all hidden in this out-ofthe-way place that nobody seems to know about. It was even an emergency base after 9/11."

The range was a beehive of police activity. We passed a mess hall and a gun shop and the entrance to an underground bunker that Mike said held at least one of every kind of firearm ever manufactured, including rare World War II weapons.

There was a series of prefab shacks lined up in a row, and the fourth one of those had the FATS logo hanging over its railing.

I scooped up a handful of empty cartridges from the ground as Pete jogged toward us. "Don't get too attached to those," he said. "I've got my lead poisoning test next week."

I opened my fingers and watched them drop.

"Takes a lot more than that. But we were losing police dogs at a terrifying rate. Turns out they were absorbing the lead through their paws."

I winced as he opened the door to the small cabin. The overhead lights were on when we entered. Pete turned them off so that the three of us stood in complete darkness.

"Private enough for the princess?" Mike asked.

"It might not make any difference in my shooting skills that I can't see, but I think some light would be helpful."

Pete stepped over to a computer monitor and played with the controls. The entire far wall became an enormous screen, and the first frame of a movie was frozen against it.

"Move over behind here, Alex." He guided me to a large, empty oil barrel standing on its end in front of the screen. "This is all you've got in case you need to take cover. Mike, take the one next to her."

On top of each was a semiautomatic. "They're real guns," he said, "but they've got soap cartridges inside. They're connected to the computer. You seen these yet, Mike?"

"Nope."

"I'm going to run these films. Each one is three or four minutes long. You and Mike have answered a call to come to this apartment. Shots fired. Reports of a drug deal gone bad. Try aiming your gun, Alex. It should be a lot lighter than the one you just used."

I lifted the gun and pointed it at the screen, lining it up with the sight. Not only was it dark, but I thought the quiet should make it easier to concentrate.

"Ready?"

"Yes."

The clip began with the closing of the door of the patrol car behind me. I was viewing everything from the vantage point of the first officer on the scene. Voices in the tenement building I virtually entered were shouting that the cops had arrived. A man in a bright-colored shirt was racing up steps-several flights-as I tried to overtake him, and from behind me, Pete was barking out commands.

"Police! Drop your weapons! Stop! Police!" he shouted as though he were actually at the scene. "C'mon, Alex, you're chasing the guy up the stairs. He's taking them two at a time. He's got you beat." The camera lens bounced up and down as I was turning corners after the fleeing suspect. An apartment door slammed shut somewhere above me and the camera lurched upward, toward the high-pitched sound of a child screaming for help.

"It's that one, Alex," Pete yelled. "You're going to kick on that door. You'd better tell them you're a cop."

My virtual foot shoved the door and it opened onto a frenetic scene. A man whose Hawaiian print shirt resembled the clothing of the guy who had run up the stairs leaped over the back of a sofa. He was holding something but he moved so quickly I couldn't tell if the object in his hand was a gun or not.

"Is that your man in there? Are you sure? You better tell them to freeze, Alex. Let me hear you shout at him, okay? Where's your partner? Has he got you covered?"

It was all happening too fast. The slender woman seated on the edge of her chair had drug paraphernalia in front of her. I could make out the white powder and pipe, and as I looked to my right to see whether Mike had his gun poised to back me up, I caught a handlettered sign over the picture of a uniformed cop that said "Kill the pigs."

The man behind the sofa stuck his head up above the top of the cushion and called something out to his companion. I couldn't understand what he said. A baby started crying on the left side of the screen. As my eyes darted in that direction, the woman lifted the lid on the shoebox next to the cocaine and pulled a gun from it.

Before I could aim, she had fired at me. Mike squeezed off a round that nailed her in the throat, although in real time I couldn't have seen him do it. I would have been dead.

"Saved your skinny ass again, Coop."

"I give up. I don't know how you guys do it, day in and day out."

"Ready for another one, Alex?" Pete asked.

"I'm telling you this should be mandatory training for every prosecutor your office hires. Most of them have no idea what we're up against till they're chauffeured to a crime scene in an RMP at three o'clock in the morning," Mike said, referring to the department's blue and white radio motor patrol cars, "and they get an up close and personal sense of what the job is like."

"I don't think I can do it, Pete. I need a nice still target like the thug-nobody shooting back at me-in a quiet room like this. Nothing interactive."

The second tape started to play. It appeared to be a routine traffic accident. A dark green Toyota truck smashed into a silver Honda and spun the car around. The driver of the Honda was slumped against the steering wheel and the wailing siren announced the approach of a police car.

Mike moved into place behind one of the barrels. He didn't need instructions from Pete. I watched as the driver of the truck stepped out of its cab. A passenger in the Honda got out and opened the rear door, coming up with a tire iron.

"Stop right there! Put it down," Mike said.

Instead of obeying Mike's command, the passenger continued walking toward the Toyota, cursing at the other driver, who was reaching into his rear pocket to remove his wallet. The second man returned the expletives with some ethnic slurs, as Mike yelled at them both to back off.

The Honda's passenger began to charge the truck, banging on the hood with the tire iron. As the camera sped in-representing Mike's dash toward the Toyota-the driver turned around and pulled a gun from his waistband, shooting at Mike before pivoting to kill the civilian.

Mike had been quick enough to duck behind the barrel but the shot he fired off was neither timely nor accurate.

"That's why you need a partner you can trust, Coop. There's barely time to think when things heat up on the street. It's like a combat zone."

"I guess what you need, Alex, is the old-fashioned, basic indoor range. It's much calmer, and you'll be able to concentrate," Pete said. "Want to give that a try?"

"One more chance. Then it's back to the law library for me."

Pete shut off the equipment and we walked out of the building, down the steps, in the direction of the huge visitors' parking lot. "We've got to go past the gatehouse," he said, "beyond all the shooting ranges and bomb squad."

The heat was escalating as the late-morning sun climbed higher. The three of us were sweating as we crossed behind the equipment trailers on the edge of the property to get to the new indoor range. There was no shade on the path, just ten feet from the border of scrubby brush that separated the facility from its nearest neighbors. And ever present was the sound of dozens of automatic weapons being fired by cop after cop, eager to plug the thug on the target.

Pete squared the corner at the entry checkpoint, just past the last RESTRICTED sign. Mike stopped short behind him and leaned over to massage a kink in the calf of his left leg. He was still recovering from a stress fracture he had suffered earlier in the year.

I kneeled to retie the laces on my sneakers. Just as I did, I heard the sharp repeat of a semiautomatic weapon fired from within the stand of trees closest to the entrance where dozens of police officers had parked their cars.

I fell to the ground as bullets dimpled the side of the gray shingled gatehouse. Mike thrust himself onto the dirt and crawled over to me, shielding my body with his own, screaming at me to stay down. I could barely breathe, between the fright of the close call and the pressure of his body on my chest.