Third Degree

Chapter 15

Deputy Carl Sims turned right off of Highway 24 and drove through the wrought-iron gate into Avalon, a subdivision he had only seen through the windows of his patrol cruiser. Carl had grown up in Sandy Bottom, an all-black neighborhood in the river lowlands of Lusahatcha County, well outside the city limits. The only whites who spent any time in Sandy Bottom were the well-checkers who operated the oil wells owned by the white businessmen in Athens Point. When Carl was a boy, pumping units had operated right in people’s yards, but few of the residents ever saw a dime of the money that oil generated. Even if they managed to save enough to buy the land their houses stood on, they weren’t going to get mineral rights with it. Not in Sandy Bottom.

Carl drove past several six-thousand-square-foot houses set deep in the trees, then turned onto Lyonesse Drive and stopped at a makeshift roadblock. Deputy Willie Jones had parked his cruiser so that it blocked most of Lyonesse, and a sawhorse with orange tape on it blocked the rest. Willie was twenty-six, four years older than Carl, but he always treated Carl as if they were the same age. He walked up to Carl’s Jeep Cherokee and grinned broadly.

“What’s up, my brother? You off duty, huh?”

“Was. Not anymore.”

“This be some shit, don’t it?” Willie said with nervous excitement. “Dr. Shields all barricaded in his house and shit? Don’t make no sense to me.”

Carl nodded soberly. Warren Shields had been treating both his mother and father for the past six years, and they spoke of him almost reverently. Or they had until Carl’s mother had her stroke, which was what had brought Carl back to Athens Point rather than to Atlanta, where his girlfriend lived. Now only Carl’s father could praise Dr. Shields in intelligible words. Dr. Shields had spent several hours with Carl and his father over the past year, advising them on how best to care for Eugenia Sims, and Carl had instinctively liked the man. Shields treated his father with the respect due an older man, and he treated Carl just as he would anybody else, no better or worse. Carl liked that. Shields reminded him of doctors he’d known in the service, truly color-blind and focused on their work.

“You don’t think they’ll tell you to shoot Dr. Shields, do you?” Willie asked, his smile suddenly gone. “I mean, not without trying to talk him out first?”

Carl shook his head. “Let’s hope not.”

Willie gave an exaggerated nod.

“Is the sheriff here?” Carl asked.

Willie shook his head. “He fishing over in Louisiana. They sent Major Danny up to get him in the helicopter.”

Bad luck, Carl thought. “Who’s in charge now?”

Willie curled his lips and shook his head. “You know who. They done called out the TRU, ain’t they? Old Cowboy Ray hisself. Him and his little brother are up there unloading all their SWAT shit. Looks like the FBI at Waco or something.”

The Tactical Response Unit was Athens Point’s version of a SWAT team. It comprised fifteen officers recruited from both the municipal police and the Sheriff’s Department. About half had military experience, most in the National Guard. Carl was one of the few who had served in Iraq; he was the team’s designated sniper.

“Hey, Willie!” crackled Jones’s radio. “Any sign of Carl yet?”

Willie rolled his eyes at the heavy redneck accent coming from his radio. “Deputy Sims just pulled up, sir.”

“Well, send him back here. We’re setting up the position, and I want to get his input on interlocking angles of fire.”

“Jesus,” said Carl.

“Uh-huh,” Willie agreed.

“Has anybody even talked to Dr. Shields yet?”

Willie shrugged. Then his radio crackled again.

“We’ve set up the command post in the Shieldses’ front yard, under a stand of trees. Tell Carl to get his ass up here, ricky-tick.”

“You heard the man,” said Willie.

Carl exhaled long and slow, trying to prepare himself for the blast of testosterone he would encounter a few hundred yards up the street.

“I hope the sheriff gets here soon,” Willie said.

“You and me both, brother.”

Carl took his foot off the brake and idled up Lyonesse. Nearly two months since the TRU was last called out. In that case, they’d received a report of a man barricaded in his downtown house with his family. What the TRU found when it arrived on the scene was quite different: a local engineer lying in his bathtub with a homemade bomb in his lap and his family safe outside. The TRU didn’t have a trained hostage negotiator, so anybody might wind up talking to the subject, depending on circumstances. In the engineer’s case, the sheriff had spent two hours talking to him through the bathroom window, shielded by the wall, a flak jacket, and a bulletproof helmet. Sheriff Ellis had less than two years on the job, and his last law-enforcement experience had been as an MP in Germany twenty years before. He was a God-fearing man who had a good rapport with people, but it hadn’t been enough. The engineer blew himself up while the sheriff prayed for his immortal soul, repainting the bathroom with what had been his insides a millisecond before. Sheriff Ellis was wounded by ricocheting shrapnel that turned out to be a chunk of jawbone.

Carl had watched all this through his 10X Unertl scope, from a deer stand he’d mounted in a tree in a neighbor’s yard. He’d wanted to destroy the bomb’s works with a bullet, but since the device was clutched in the engineer’s lap, he couldn’t do it without killing the man. The hand holding the detonator was concealed behind the cast-iron side of the tub, so that option was out. The only other way to stop the bomb from exploding would have been to fire a round through the engineer’s brain stem, short-circuiting his nervous system, but the rules for bombers were different in Mississippi than they’d been in Iraq-at least when the only people they threatened were themselves.

Carl put the incident out of his mind as he rolled up Lyonesse, because thinking about it only led him to the incident before that one-the one that had caused friction between him and the sheriff. He didn’t need to cloud his mind with that right now.

Ahead, five cruisers sat parked on the street before a big Colonial set fifty meters back from the road. Mixed among them were civilian vehicles that belonged to the off-duty TRU men who’d been called up. Carl knew that his tactical commander was anxious, but he obeyed the speed limit and slowed for the speed bumps. He wanted to give the sheriff every opportunity to arrive before Ray Breen did something ill-advised.

Law enforcement in Athens Point was a curious thing. The police department had jurisdiction over the city, and by tradition the Sheriff’s Department took the outlying county. But technically the sheriff had jurisdiction over the city as well. Before 1968, both departments had been 100 percent white, but gradually the police department came to more closely resemble the city itself, which was 55 percent black. The county as a whole had a similar percentage, but geographically blacks tended to congregate in the city, while the outlying county was mostly white. This had somehow resulted in an unbroken line of white sheriffs (Carl figured it was the shape of the voting districts). He would have preferred working for the black police chief, but the pay and benefits were better in the Sheriff’s Department, so he’d opted to work in the county.

Most of his fellow TRU deputies were white country boys of a type Carl knew well. The majority were ten to fifteen years older than he, and some were over fifty. In a town with high unemployment, men didn’t give up jobs with benefits unless they were pushed out-usually after an election. But despite the age and background of the men, there was an attitude of benign tolerance toward black officers in the unit. Prejudice still existed, but it was an amorphous thing, difficult to point at and impossible to prove, except in a few cases. Even the hard-core, Southern-rock NASCAR types accepted that civil rights reforms were here to stay, and they tried to make the best of it.

Beyond this, Carl was a special case. His military record as a sniper gave him an almost magical immunity to prejudice. In his experience, white country boys were fairly primitive in their social habits, creatures of dominance and submission, like the hunting dogs he’d raised as a boy. Physical prowess meant a lot, the ability to withstand pain meant more, but nothing ranked higher in their estimation than combat experience. If a man had shed blood in the mud and held his nerve under fire, then it didn’t make a damn bit of difference what color he was-not to most of them, anyway. As a sniper with a near-legendary number of confirmed kills, Carl occupied rarefied air in the redneck firmament. The fact that he was black had put some of those good old boys in the curious position of almost fawning over a guy they might have tried to kick the shit out of if he’d wandered into their neighborhood at night.

Carl parked his Cherokee behind the rearmost cruiser and got his rain slicker out of the cargo compartment. He decided to leave his rifle case locked in the vehicle. The slower things moved, the more time there would be for hormones to stabilize and adrenaline to be flushed away.

He saw the mobile command post over the roofs of the cruisers. The camouflage-painted camper trailer had been towed under a small stand of trees and braced with cinder blocks. The steady rumble of a generator echoed over the flat ground, which meant lights in the trailer, if not air-conditioning. Carl reminded himself that he was only a deputy, not the ranking member of an autonomous sniper-scout unit, as he had been in Iraq. His job when he stepped into the trailer would be to take orders, not give them. And any advice he offered was likely to be rejected unless it reinforced what his superiors had already decided.

His biggest worry right now was the Breen brothers, one of whom was the commander of the Tactical Response Unit, subject only to Sheriff Ellis in a situation like this one. The Breen brothers looked to have been cut from the same piece of wood. They had farmer’s tans, cracked skin, and slit eyes that betrayed so much meanness it made people take a step back, even when they were out of uniform. Both were lean and gaunt, the younger one, Trace, so much so that Carl wondered if he’d suffered some nutritional disease like rickets as a child. But maybe Trace just stayed so pissed off all the time that his anger had begun to consume him. Ray, the elder of the pair, was bulkier and had a more open face than his brother, despite his cowboy mustache. He’d served in the army during the lean years after Vietnam, as an MP, like Sheriff Ellis. He was also a Weekend Warrior like Ellis, but though Ray’s unit had been called up for Bosnia, he hadn’t seen action there either. He’d worked as a welder for a while, but got fired because he kept getting into fights. Only when he hired on with the Sheriff’s Department had he found his calling; he wore the uniform like a suit of armor, and Carl could tell that the power of the job was what got Ray Breen out of bed every morning.

Ray reveled in the high-tech equipment of his Tactical Response Unit. Over the past few years, he had somehow scrounged together an arsenal that could adequately supply an urban SWAT unit. The TRU had automatic weapons, flash-bang grenades, shaped charges, advanced commo gear, and night-vision devices. In his off hours Ray read Tom Clancy, Dale Brown, and Larry Bond, or played Rainbow Six: Splinter Cell on his son’s Xbox 360. If Carl chanced to meet Ray Breen in Wal-Mart or at a high school football game, the commander would squint and give a slight nod, as though to say, We’re part of an elite team. These civilians know we’re always on the lookout for trouble.

Ray had pulled Carl aside dozens of times to talk shop, asking detailed questions about the capabilities of various sniper rifles, scopes, and night-vision systems. But inevitably, after all the hardware questions had been answered, Breen would circle down to the question he’d really wanted to ask: What’s it like to blow some unsuspecting raghead’s shit away from a thousand yards? Carl always answered the same way: I tried not to think about that side of it, sir. It was a job, and I focused on the mechanics of it. Guys like Ray Breen never grasped the true nature of sniping. It was as much about concealment as it was about shooting. Carl had once spent two days constructing a hide in Baghdad, then another waiting motionless with his scout to take a single shot that a twelve-year-old kid could have made in his backyard in Sandy Bottom. But he didn’t blame the TRU commander. The homeboys he’d played ball with at Athens Point High had asked the same question after they got a couple of beers in them. All human beings, Carl had learned, were fascinated with death. Only those who knew death intimately, as he did, understood its essential mystery.

Carl’s eyes tracked a thin form slinking out of the CP trailer. Trace Breen. In the vernacular of Carl’s father, Trace was a skunk. Lying was mother’s milk to him. He had no military experience, and Carl assumed he’d ridden his brother’s coattails onto the TRU, as nominal communications officer. From scuttlebutt around the department, Carl had gathered that Trace had worked a dozen different jobs before becoming a deputy, none of them productive. He’d been a roustabout at construction sites (where materials tended to disappear at night); he’d sold stereos out of the back of a van (most of those stolen, too); he’d worked as a hunting guide (poaching alligators at night); he’d also run dogfights, and pursued various other fly-by-night enterprises that went nowhere. Even now, Trace had some kind of cell phone scam going, selling disposable phones out of his car. Carl figured a truckload of the things must have been hijacked over in Texas or somewhere.

“Hey, Red Cloud!” Trace had caught sight of Carl. “Ray wants you in the CP like yesterday. You better double-time it, soldier.”

Carl let the nickname roll off him. He didn’t like anyone outside the Marine Corps using it. The local guys only got wind of Red Cloud after discovering an article about marine snipers in Baghdad on the CNN Internet archives. Carl raised his left hand to acknowledge the remark, then headed for the command post.

Unlike the other white deputies, Trace Breen made no effort to conceal his dislike of African-Americans. If Carl passed him alone in a corridor, Trace would look pointedly at the ceiling or chuckle softly, as though amused at the idea of a black man in a deputy’s uniform. If they met in public, Trace either pretended Carl didn’t exist or snickered in the ear of whatever trashy blonde happened to be hanging off his arm. Lately, Carl had heard rumors that Trace might be dabbling in the drug business-specifically crystal meth-a trade he’d apparently worked at as a teenager. Carl had already decided that if he picked up concrete information about this activity, he would follow wherever it led. The sheriff might not want to bust his own deputies, but Carl figured if he made the arrest, Billy Ray Ellis would have no choice but to follow through.

Carl stopped before the trailer door and looked up at the Shields house. If what the dispatcher had told him was true, his mother’s soft-spoken physician was barricaded behind the idyllic facade of that house, and he might already have killed someone. If Shields had done that, Carl might well be asked to take the man out, and soon. Before darkness fell, probably. He scanned the northern sky, hoping to see Danny McDavitt’s chopper zooming out of the dark clouds gathering there, but he saw nothing.

The trailer door opened suddenly, and Carl stood face-to-face with Ray Breen. Breen wore a dark brown cowboy hat pulled low over his mustached face, but it was the flak jacket that startled Carl. Body armor was SOP for hostage situations, but still. Carl realized then that deep down he had not quite accepted that Dr. Shields had taken anyone hostage.

“Where’s your weapon, Deputy?” Breen asked.

“In my Jeep.”

Ray frowned. “It ain’t gonna do us any good there, is it? Come on, Carl. We don’t have a lot of daylight left.”

“Eighty minutes,” Carl said. “Less, if those clouds come over, which it looks like they will.”

Breen gave a tight grin and slapped his shoulder. “I knew you were already thinking. Get your gear, son. This is big.”

Carl didn’t move. “Could I ask you something, sir?”

The grin vanished. Breen sensed resistance, and he didn’t like it. “Go ahead.”

“Has anyone talked to Dr. Shields yet?”

“Yeah, me. His wife and daughter are in there, and probably his partner, Dr. Auster. I spoke to the wife and kid, but I think Auster’s dead.”

“Why?”

“Shields wouldn’t let me talk to him. We know there were shots fired, but the kid who got out isn’t positive who fired them. He thought he saw a man lying on his back in the hall, but he was on the second-floor landing and didn’t get a good look.”

Carl wondered if this was the best intel they were going to get.

“We think they’re in the main downstairs room now,” Breen went on. “What they call the great room. I talked to the architect, and he’s bringing a set of plans out here. There’s big windows facing the backyard, but they’re those fancy ones with the blinds built into them, between two panes of glass. They pretty much wipe out all visibility.”

Carl nodded, surprised to find himself grateful for this obstacle.

“That ain’t all,” Breen said. “There was a fire at Dr. Shields’s office about an hour ago. We don’t have many details, but right now it’s possible that Shields set that fire himself. A nurse at the hospital also told me there are some state or federal agents in the ER. There might be some kind of investigation going on that we don’t know about. Something to do with Dr. Shields.”

Carl said nothing. None of this made sense to him, but then he had few facts to work with. For the time being, he’d have to leave the situation in the less-than-masterful hands of Ray Breen and pray that the sheriff got here quick. Even that prospect made him feel only slightly better. The sheriff had been a petroleum land man for much of his life. The only thing that might stop Sheriff Ellis from doing the same thing Ray Breen would do was fear of a negative reaction from the voters in the next election. What gave Carl the most comfort was knowing that Danny McDavitt would be sitting beside the sheriff during any negotiations that might happen in the next few minutes.

“Get your rifle, Carl,” Ray said. “The sheriff’s still thirty minutes out. The wheels could come off this thing any second.”

“Yes, sir,” Carl said, starting back toward his Jeep.

He kept looking northward as he walked. More rain was coming; he would have known that with a blindfold on. Carl was a country boy, too.

He could smell rain ten miles away.

Danny crossed the Mississippi River just east of Lake Concordia and dropped out of the rain clouds at five hundred feet. This leg of the Mississippi was dotted with oxbow lakes, and Lake St. John lay just ahead. He flew around the eastern rim of the C-shaped lake, his eyes tracking the well-trimmed lots that bordered the eastern shore. As he neared the midpoint of the seven-mile horseshoe, he saw a cluster of brightly colored pavilion tents beside a large cypress lake house. A group of men had gathered in a muddy cotton field across the road, and they began waving him down when they caught sight of the helicopter.

Danny descended rapidly toward the group, then flared at the last moment and touched down softly in the newly planted field. A big man wearing a brown uniform and clutching a Stetson to his head ran beneath the spinning rotor blades and opened the door on the Bell’s left side. Billy Ray Ellis was a big man, still muscular at fifty-three, with burly forearms covered in black hair. Despite his limited law enforcement experience, he was so popular in the county that he’d beaten the incumbent sheriff by twenty percentage points. Ellis heaved his bulk into the seat beside Danny, yanked the door shut, pulled on the second headset, and started talking as he fastened his harness.

“Get this baby back in the air, Danny. Push her hard as she’ll go. We got a bad situation waiting for us.”

Danny pulled pitch and applied power with the collective, then nudged the cyclic. The Bell tilted forward and bit into the sky. “What’s happened? The message I got said Code Black. Is it a school shooting or something?”

Ellis shook his big head. “Do you know Dr. Shields? Warren Shields?”

Danny felt as though the bottom had fallen out of the chopper. “Yeah,” he managed to choke out. “I taught him to fly last year.”

“That’s right, I forgot. Well, apparently, Dr. Shields has barricaded himself inside his residence, and he’s holding his wife and daughter hostage.”

Danny closed his eyes, fighting vertigo. After several moments of composing himself, he opened them again, picked out a landmark on the ground, and said, “How do you know that?”

“Shields’s nine-year-old son managed to escape the house and get to a neighbor’s place. Jumped off the roof or something. It’s the daughter who’s still in the house. The boy thinks his daddy shot somebody. We don’t know who that was yet, but it could be Shields’s partner, Kyle Auster.”

“That’s unbelievable,” breathed Danny, trying to mask his panic.

“I agree. There was also some kind of fire at their medical office a little while ago. Details are sketchy, but some people were hurt bad. It may be that Shields set the fire. I don’t know if the man’s lost his mind or what. I always liked him myself.”

“Who’s on the scene now?”

“Ray Breen’s assembling the TRU as they arrive.”

Shit. “Good, good.”

“Ray talked to the wife and little girl on the phone-”

Relief flooded through Danny like a narcotic.

“-but Shields wouldn’t put Dr. Auster on. Sounds fishy, don’t it?”

Danny nodded and pushed the engine to its limit. As soon as the sheriff got distracted, he would take out his clone phone and see whether Laurel had managed to send him any messages.

“Shields sure has a pretty wife,” Ellis said thoughtfully. “You know her?”

“She teaches my son.”

“Oh,” said the sheriff, his voice suddenly grave. “That’s right.” Ellis was a deacon in the Baptist church, and he tended to assume the manner of a pastor when discussing anything he saw as a sad circumstance. An autistic son obviously qualified in his book. “Have you heard any rumors of marital problems?” he asked, changing the subject. “Anything like that?”

Danny stared stone-faced through the windshield. “Nothing. But then I never hear anything like that.”

“Me either. But in my experience, when this kind of thing happens, there’s marriage trouble at the bottom of it. Does Shields have a hot temper?”

“No. The opposite, in fact.”

The departmental radio suddenly crackled to life in Danny’s headset.

“Sheriff, this is Ray at the command post. I got a fella down here claiming to be a government agent, and he’s causing me all kind of problems.”

Ellis picked up the mike and keyed it angrily. “What kind of government agent? An FBI man or what?”

“One ID says he’s a special investigator for the attorney general, and another says he’s with the state Medicaid office. Name’s Paul Biegler. Says he’s down here investigatin’ Dr. Shields and Dr. Auster for some sort of fraud.”

The sheriff knit his heavy brows in puzzlement. “Is he standing right there, Ray?”

“No, sir. I got him waitin’ outside the trailer. He claims he was in that fire over at Dr. Auster’s office. Claims one of the employees tried to blow the place up. He’s got bandages on his face, and he says he was wounded by shrapnel or something. He’s got two other boys with him, and he’s trying to take over the damn scene.”

“What? Repeat that.”

“I said, Biegler says he’s got federal warrants for Dr. Shields and Dr. Auster, and that makes this a federal case. He says if we don’t give him tactical command, he’s going to call the FBI down from Jackson to take over.”

Danny saw the sheriff’s knuckles go white. “Bullshit he’s going take over our scene. You keep that son of a bitch on ice until I get there, you hear?”

“Yes, sir. A big ten-four on that.”

“How far out are we, Danny?”

Danny scanned the river for landmarks, then checked his airspeed. “Twenty minutes, tops.”

“Tell him I’m almost there now, Ray. And put a man on him. Let me know if he makes any calls to Jackson.”

“You got it, Sheriff.”

“Out.”

Ellis turned to Danny. “What in the Sam Hill is going on? Sounds like our good doctors have got themselves into serious trouble. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Kyle Auster was up to no good. But Dr. Shields? I just can’t see that one.”

“Me, either,” Danny agreed. “He’s a straight arrow.”

“I got to think about this. You remember what happened with that engineer on Milburn Street? Blew hisself all over me without so much as a by-your-leave. And he was alone in the house. If Dr. Shields really has his wife and daughter in there, and if he’s really shot his partner, I might have to send the TRU in there hard.”

Danny closed his eyes in silent prayer. Most of Ellis’s deputies had only moderate training, and their practical law enforcement experience was limited. Worse, the TRU was commanded by a deputy with juvenile delusions of heroism. The possibility that those men might make an assault into Laurel’s house with grenades and automatic weapons nauseated him with fear. He could not allow that to happen.

When Sheriff Ellis settled back in his seat with his thoughts, Danny let go of the collective and pulled his cell phone out of his pants pocket. No new messages. Nevertheless, he flipped open the phone and began keying a message with his left hand. The first he sent read, On my way there wi sheriff. u or Bth hurt? Auster alive? If yes, condition? He started to put the phone away, then sent an immediate follow-up: No one knows we have this link. Tell me all u safely can. How W armed? He intend imminent harm? As Danny slid the phone beneath his left leg for easy access, Sheriff Ellis spoke again.

“Must be pretty important messages to slow us down for.”

Danny gritted his teeth. “We’re not going any slower. This is like taking your hand off the wheel in a car, but leaving your foot on the gas. I increased friction on the collective, so it stays in place.”

Ellis’s eyes were still on the cell phone.

“Problems with taking care of my boy,” Danny lied. “My wife didn’t come home to let the babysitter go on time.”

“You can’t just call her?”

“We don’t talk so much these days.”

Ellis grunted. “That’s a shame. Marriage ain’t easy, but you got to stick with it.”

Thanks a million, Dr. Phil.

“You don’t go to church, do you, Dan?”

Oh, boy. “Not much, Sheriff. Not for a while now. I’m not much for group worship. I get my quiet time in the woods. And in the air.”

“I hear you, brother. But it’s not the same, you know. You ought to come see us at First Baptist. I think you’d be surprised.”

Not if this is any indication. “I may give it a try.”

“At least talk to Reverend Cyrus about your marital problems.”

Danny cleared his throat and spoke as diffidently as he could. “Sheriff, could I offer a little input on the hostage situation?”

“Absolutely. This is one of those situations where there’s ten tragic things that could happen, and only one good thing.”

“You’re right. Sheriff, I would think long and hard before I considered sending Ray Breen and his boys into that house. Even the people who do that kind of thing for a living-I’m talking about Delta and the SEALs-they’re hesitant to go into a situation with innocent friendlies in a confined space. I’m not saying anything against Ray, but if you turn insufficiently trained men loose in a house with automatic weapons, God only knows who’ll wind up dead. The wife, the little girl, some of our own guys maybe. I’d sure hate to see that, and I know you would, too.”

Ellis was nodding as though in agreement. “You said a mouthful there. A standoff’s a tricky thing. On the other hand, I’ve got a responsibility to that wife and little girl, not to mention this community. How would it look if we just stood by while Dr. Shields executed his wife, his daughter, and his partner? That wouldn’t say much for my department, would it?”

Danny tried to hide his true feelings. Ellis was already as focused on how the drama would play out before the voters as he was on the safety of the people inside the house. “No, you’re in a tough position, that’s a fact. And I wouldn’t presume to tell you what to do.”

“But…?” Ellis prompted.

“If it comes down to having to take Dr. Shields out, I’d have Carl Sims do the shooting.”

“From long range, you mean.”

“Yes, sir. I’ve seen that boy shoot, and he’s as good as the snipers in the Secret Service. He could take out Shields with zero collateral damage, even if the doctor was holding his little girl in his arms.”

“He could,” said the sheriff. “But will he? That’s what’s on my mind.”

Danny cringed inside. Six months ago, Sheriff Ellis had given Carl Sims authorization to shoot a young black man who had taken a hostage while robbing a local bank. In Ellis’s mind, he had given a clear order to kill, effective as soon as Sims had a clean shot. But Carl interpreted the order differently and blasted the robber’s gun hand into pulp instead. Danny heard that the sheriff had nearly had a stroke over this, and only the media praise he’d gotten afterward for his “restraint” had saved Carl Sims’s job. Instead of getting a pink slip, Carl got a medal, one that probably didn’t mean much after the hatful he’d received from the Marine Corps.

It’s all fucking politics, Danny thought. Even the life-or-death calls.

He wanted to beg Ellis to at least consult with the FBI in Jackson, but he knew the sheriff would reflexively reject this idea. Why? Because the FBI could have a SWAT team at the Shields house in three hours, even if they had to come by road. If they used a chopper, they could be fully deployed in two. And unlike the Sheriff’s Department, the Bureau had strict rules of engagement for hostage situations, written in the wake of Waco and Ruby Ridge. They would only assault the Shields house as a last resort, after all other means of resolution had been exhausted. Billy Ray Ellis wanted no such constraints on his decision-making. Short of a written order from the governor, he would not hand over tactical command of the scene to a federal agency, not in his county. Some men might see a federal assumption of authority as the ultimate out, an ideal way to cover their ass, but ex-football stars didn’t think that way. Danny kept his mouth shut, figuring he could accomplish more from inside the tent than out of it.

“Are you pedal to the metal, Danny?” Ellis asked tersely.

“We’re at the VNE now, sir.”

“The what?”

Danny pointed at a small gauge in front of the sheriff. “Velocity never exceeded. She can’t do another knot without burning up the engine.”

“Okay, then. Just keep her at the redline.”

As the sheriff glanced out at the ever-darkening clouds, Danny checked his phone for text messages.

There were none.

Carl Sims slowly worked his way back to the front of the Shields property, naturally moving from tree to tree, assessing the cover-and-concealment potential of each position. Snipers liked open spaces about as much as deer and rabbits did; they would do almost anything to avoid them. Twelve minutes after he’d started, he returned to the stand of trees that half hid the trailer serving as the TRU’s tactical command post.

He needed to take a leak. The most sheltered spot was a narrow space between the trees and the rear of the trailer. He set his rifle butt-first on the ground and leaned it against a pine, then unzipped his fly and began to urinate against the next tree. He’d developed this habit as a boy and refined it in Iraq. Pissing against a tree or a wall could be almost silent, if you did it right; this practice had probably saved his life once in Baghdad. He was half-finished when he heard voices on the air. He quickly zeroed in on the source as a small, screened window in the back of the trailer. After zipping up, he moved toward the opening and peered through it from an off angle.

Ray and Trace Breen sat hunched over a Formica table, smoking cigarettes and talking in low voices. A pack of Camels and a.40 caliber pistol lay between them on a topographic map of the area. The smoke was so thick in the trailer that a steady draft of it was being forced through the window beside Carl’s face. He had to struggle not to cough.

“Hell, I wish he’d pop off a round in there,” said Ray. “Something. Shit, if he don’t, we’re liable to be here all night listening to the sheriff holler through a bullhorn.”

Trace nodded and blew out a long stream of blue smoke. “Yep.”

“I tell you what else worries me. Our sharpshooter.”

Trace snickered at the word.

“You know what I’m talking about?” Ray said.

“Damn straight. That nigger might of killed a bunch of towel-heads over in Iraq, but I don’t think he’s got the stomach for shootin’ Americans.”

Ray was nodding. “You saw what happened at the bank. Sheriff told him to take the perp out, and what did he do?”

“Blowed the motherfucker’s hand off instead. What if he missed? A hand’s a hell of a lot smaller than a head.”

“Moves a lot more, too,” Ray observed. “That coon can shoot, I’ll give him that. But what he can’t seem to do is follow orders. Which is strange in a marine.”

“Awful strange.”

Carl was tempted to shove the barrel of his Remington 700 through the window screen and scare the piss out of both Breen brothers, but he didn’t. He had been quiet before, but now he stood with the sniper’s stillness, a motionless state he equated with absolute zero, that condition of coldness in which not even electrons spin around their respective nuclei. Carl could remain in that state for many hours, and had, more times than he could remember. His respiration and heartbeat slowed until it seemed an age between each, an age during which he had almost infinite leisure to pull his trigger without being disturbed by the movement of breath or blood.

“You want to know something?” Trace said. “Something you don’t know?”

“If you ain’t told me yet, maybe I don’t need to know. ’Cause Lord knows you can’t keep a secret.”

“I kept this one.”

Ray chuckled and took a drag on his cigarette. “How long you kep’ it?”

“Twenty years.”

Ray coughed up smoke. “If this has anything to do with my wife, I’m gonna kill your ass. I’m telling you that right now.”

Trace shook his head. “It’s about that cocky sumbitch up in the house. The doctor.”

“Shields?”

“Yep.”

“What do you know about him?”

Trace’s eyes smoldered with secret knowledge. “Plenty. Remember when he kilt that boy in his parents’ house? Jimmy Birdlow?”

“Course I do. We were just talking about it outside.”

Trace nodded. “Well, I was there.”

Ray sat up at the table. “What?”

“Sure was. This was back when I was gettin’ high a lot. And Jimmy was always gettin’ high. He wanted some Dex to stay awake, and we didn’t have no money. We just happened to be over in that neighborhood, and the Shieldses’ house was the closest one that didn’t have no lights on. Jimmy figured he’d just slip in and grab a TV, something he could trade for the pills. But the old man must have been awake, ’cause next thing I know, I’m staring in from the back patio at Jimmy and Mr. Shields screaming at each other. Jimmy was trying to explain, but the old man wouldn’t give him a chance. He started yelling how he was going to call the police. And the next thing I know, Jimmy pulls out a gun.”

Ray was staring at his younger brother with wide eyes. Carl blinked slowly, then leaned forward so as not to miss a word.

“Jimmy wouldna shot him,” Trace asserted. “He just didn’t want the man to call the law.”

“Why didn’t he just run, then?” Ray asked.

“He tried to, but Shields’s daddy tripped him up. Then he got between Jimmy and the door. Then the mama come in there, too, wearing her damn housecoat.”

“When did Shields show up?”

“Hell, I didn’t even know he was there till he shot Jimmy in the back. Sumbitch didn’t give Jimmy no warning or nothing.”

Ray leaned back in his chair and silently regarded his brother.

“Bastard,” Trace muttered. “Blew Jimmy’s heart out the front of his chest.”

Ray shook his head. “You said Jimmy was holding a gun on his daddy.”

“He wouldna shot him!”

“You think Shields knew that? Jimmy broke in their goddamn house! I’d of shot him, too. You’re lucky he didn’t shoot your ass through the window.”

Trace shook his head bitterly. “I tell you one thing, if I had a gun that night, I’d of killed that motherfucker dead.”

“Boy, if a bird had your brains, he’d fly backwards. I can’t believe you didn’t wind up in Parchman before your twenty-first birthday.”

“I ain’t stupid. And I’ll tell you something else. I hope that sumbitch tries something up in that fancy house. I hope the sheriff sends us in there. ’Cause I will blow his shit away, no lie. For what he done to Jimmy.”

“Jesus, Trace. You need to calm down.”

“You said the same exact thing a minute ago!”

Ray sucked thoughtfully on his cigarette.

“I don’t like him,” Trace insisted. “People act like he’s a damn saint or something. You ever see him out at the baseball field? Sumbitch thinks the rules don’t apply to him. Or his kid, neither.”

“I forgot,” said Ray. “Shields’s team beat your boy’s like a drum last spring, didn’t they?”

“Cheated us, is what they done.”

Ray stubbed out his cigarette and stood as best he could in the low-ceilinged trailer. “Nobody’s called on the radio. Let’s get out there and see if we can’t make something happen before Billy Ray gets here.”

“Damn straight. What about that government man? Beagle.”

“Fuck him. Billy Ray ain’t gonna give him the time of day.”

Trace pushed himself up off the table, leaving his cigarette burning in the ashtray. “Damn straight.”

Like a lizard clinging to the window screen, Carl watched the two deputies leave the trailer. He wasn’t sure what, if anything, to do about what he’d heard. Sheriff Ellis wasn’t going to change the makeup of the Tactical Response Unit in the middle of a crisis. And Trace Breen’s presence at a shooting twenty years ago couldn’t be corroborated by anyone; therefore, his motive for revenge could not be proved. As for the racist remarks about Carl, that was just the reality that underlay the veneer of courtesy he encountered every day. The president of the United States couldn’t change that, much less the sheriff of Lusahatcha County. But Ray Breen was right about one thing: marine sniper Carl Sims did not intend to kill another living soul unless it was to save a life in clear and present danger.

He shouldered his Remington and walked soundlessly around the trailer to join his fellow deputies.