The Rescue

5

Apex Self-Defense sits in a tangle of streets, overpasses, power lines, and light rail tracks that link the San Diego Convention Center, downtown, the airport, and the Transit Centers. Some of the buildings are old, some new, and from certain heights the graceful blue span of the Coronado Bridge can be seen reaching across to land. From other angles, it’s all steel and concrete, bright sun and shadow, unhoused people strewn upon the ground like rags.

Apex Self-Defense is a brick industrial structure built in 1938. There is no exterior signage except for the ancient rusted emblem of the former owner, hanging over the dated front door: San Diego Sandblast.

Dan Strickland is hard at work here now, deep in the basement gun range — six stations, motorized target pulleys, walls and ceiling all baffled with soundproof batting. Its far end is a concrete wall faced with railroad ties and hay bales. Despite the earsplitting handguns deployed inside the range, from outside it is silent, thanks to the City of San Diego’s strict noise codes.

Above him is floor 1 — the office, combat ring, wrestling arena, weight room, lockers, and showers.

Floor 2 is classrooms, lounge, gaming arcade, lunchroom, and dormitory.

The first two floors have a drab, not-new feeling; furnished for utility and value.

But the remodeled floor 3 is Strickland’s lair, his pride and joy — a steel-and-glass penthouse, all hard lines and right angles, with views of the city, the Coronado Bridge, and the Pacific. One big room with everything he needs. A space for contemplation, books, art, music. For a gigantic TV. A good kitchen and a big firm bed.

Joe’s crate is in the bedroom, heaped as always with his blankets and pad, his chew hooves and antlers, the plush toys that he preserves rather than destroys. His pink bunny. His chimp. Here at home, Joe was all puppy, even as a retired narcotics and currency specialist. His food and water dishes are on the slate kitchen floor.

Earlier this morning, Strickland looked at all of Joe’s things and wondered again how to get through another day without him.

His heart ached because he loves Joe and he loves the money Joe makes him.

Strickland has been waiting for one of his business associates south of the border to message him with good news: Joe has been found. Joe is alive. Joe was wounded but it was not serious. We have him. He’s waiting for you at Platinum Foreign Car in Otay Mesa.

But only silence from south of the border. Which to Strickland means that the worst has happened.

Now he watches his current undergraduates blasting away in the basement. There are six students, his maximum per class. The course is ten weeks — one day per week for eight hours. He’s booked four days a week with four concurrent courses, well into the year.

Strickland stands behind the firing line with his arms crossed. He’s wearing foam ear inserts and a good sound suppressor but he feels the gunfire in his body, a steady, concussive whop, whop, whop whop whop, that is really not like any other sound on earth, he thinks. From a distance it might sound like firecrackers, but close like this it’s another dimension of sound altogether. It goes through you, just like the bullets would.

Overall, this is a pretty good class for four weeks in, he thinks. He watches Edward trying to keep his rounds in the kill zone of the paper target — a life-sized human torso — ten feet away.

Then there’s Molly, the high school teacher, her glasses starting to fog up again as she inexplicably places another tight group, all in the black, from twenty-five feet out.

Next to her is Kim, who owns a jewelry store in La Jolla, also a good shot.

And Mario, the Starbucks manager, and D’Andre, the nightclub owner, and finally Tucker, the actor from up in Silver Lake.

Strickland doesn’t issue diplomas or certificates but he does promise that each graduate will have the training necessary to effectively defend against a life-threatening attack. If graduates don’t have confidence in their skills and the equipment they’ve bought, then they can take the course again for free. The ten-week course runs $2,000 per person, earning Strickland roughly $480,000 a year for four days of work per week, and twelve weeks off. His business is a great laundry for his jobs with Joe. This is Apex Self-Defense’s fourth year. The only people who have tried to take the course again for free were a woman and, later, a man, both of whom ended up making sexual propositions to Strickland and dropped out shortly thereafter.

He offers training of attack dogs and their owners, but few people will accept the liability for a lethal animal, where a simple verbal miscue can unleash otherworldly violence.

Guns are much easier. He helps his graduates apply for concealed-carry permits, still not easy to get in California, but doable if you have connections in the county, which Strickland does.

He likes this work and he loves not so much the money but what the money buys.

He’s thirty-three years old.

He moves behind Edward, and of course, he has to shout to be understood.

“Edward, keep your elbows in and bend your knees! Relax! Breathe evenly! It’s not about muscle.”

Edward’s life-sized torso target is only ten feet away, but Dan Strickland knows that ten feet is farther than it sounds when your adrenaline is pumping and you’ve got a heavy gun in your hands. Edward is midway through his course but only half his shots this close are hitting the kill zone. Edward is a young gym manager who lives in a rough part of San Ysidro and sometimes sees gang activity in his neighborhood. Sometimes he has to carry cash from the gym to his car. He’s got a wife and a daughter. Strickland knows that because Edward is a bodybuilder, he thinks large muscles will make him powerful, but Edward strangles his pistol and the strain shivers the barrel, ruining his accuracy and jacking up his stress. Edward finishes his rapid volley, lowers his gun to the bench, and looks at Strickland through his shooting glasses, eyes bugged and sweating hard.

Strickland toggles in the well-perforated target, replacing it with a fresh one. “Let’s try ten feet again, Ed. You can’t be missing these shots. You’ve got to be perfect inside ten feet, great at twenty, and good at thirty. You’re still up from last week, so, right direction, Ed. Now, address the threat with calm and cool.”

The most valuable thing that Dan can do for his students is to make them positive and confident, but still aware of their weaknesses. The first is easy. By the time they’ve made it through eighty hours of shooting, hand-to-hand fighting, bear spray applications, weapon-retention, reaction conditioning, and fitness training — they’ll be positive and confident, all right. But if they’re not truthful about their weaknesses, those weaknesses might get them killed. You’re only as strong as your weakness, he tells them. Your goal is to walk way. Your goal is to stay alive.

From the moment his applicants sit down across from him in the Apex office, Strickland probes them for weakness. He senses it by their bodies, expressions, their words and clothes, their complexions, their smells, even their handwriting. After their first day of evaluation and training, Strickland knows exactly what these mortals must do to survive the things they fear. His job is to make them do it, and equip them.

Edward needs to fire another thousand rounds at ten feet into the paper torso.

Molly, the English teacher, needs eye surgery. She’s a natural with a pistol, shoots tight groups at ten feet and is capable at thirty. But she wears glasses, and her heavy lenses steam up when she’s under exertion, and she won’t wear contacts, and she doesn’t want some guy cutting into her eyes. Strickland has been cajoling her for four weeks now on the merits of LASIK. Some of his students have had it, all agreeing it’s the best $4,000 they’ve ever spent. Molly wants good eyes and she wants to please him. He’s offered to help pay for her surgery.

He stands behind her and watches. When she’s emptied her pistol, she turns and smiles at him.

“You’re killing them today, Molly.”

“Yes, I am. I hit the public range twice this week.”

“I see those glasses are a bit steamed up.”

“It’s like shooting through fog.”

“Get the surgery, girl. It could save your life.”

“I’m leaning in that direction but I will not accept one penny from you.”

“As you wish. Just do it.”

“I’d accept a cup of coffee or a beer, though. When this is over. When I graduate.”

“Let’s graduate you first.”

Her expression cools almost imperceptibly.

“You call the shots, Dan.”

After shooting is lunch, twenty minutes of meditation, then two hours of hand-to-hand, an hour of situational weapon retention, and another hour of de-escalation. Bear spray comes last, always last, showers optional.

In the hand-to-hand, short, slender Molly kicks and hits him hard. As instructor, Dan is padded up, but a mule kick to the balls is still a mule kick to the balls. The eye-rakes still smash the catcher’s mask into his face, as do the palm-heel nose blows thrown with a pivot of the hips. Dan has chosen the quickest and most debilitating moves from the several martial arts he knows. The only thing he’ll teach but won’t let them practice on him is biting.

His students end the day with a rough hour of weights and stretches and leave Apex well after dark, mentally and physically exhausted.

Dan stands by the door and shakes their hands as they leave. Then climbs the stairs to his penthouse, exhausted too.

He sits down at his computer and calls up his favorite Tijuana newspapers, searching their pages for any mention of a dog found dead or wounded at the Furniture Calderón shoot-out. Tries the gruesome, anonymously operated Blog Narco, always a good bet.

Nothing about a dog that night, shot or not. Of course not, thinks Dan. Tijuana is full of dogs. Why should even a wounded one make the news?

In the bedroom he gets ready to shower, looking down at Joe’s crate and all the dog’s beloved stuff. Joe loves plush toys. Dan has yet to know another dog that would leave the squeaker working in a plush skunk for months on end.

Strickland checks his phone.

It’s Héctor:

And a picture of a dog on the shoulder of a dirt road. It’s not Joe, but Dan’s eyes burn as he steps into the shower, and it’s not from the bear spray.