“So he tries to move fast, we try to move slow,” Bobby said quietly. “He tries to exert his expertise as a criminal court judge. We hope for a countering opinion from the DA. Then what?”
“Then it gets personal.”
Bobby stared at the lawyer. Harvey shrugged. “Basically, it’s he said/she said. You’re saying you saw a credible threat. The other side is saying you’re wrong. To do that, they gotta go after you. They’re gonna bring in your family. Were you a violent child, did you always love guns? They’re going to dig into your lifestyle—young, single officer. Do you frequent bars, sleep around, get into brawls? Too bad you’re not married with kids; it always looks better if you’re married with kids. What about a dog? Do you happen to own a cute dog? A black Lab or golden retriever would be perfect.”
“No cute dogs.” Bobby considered things. “I’m a landlord. My tenant has cats.”
“Is your tenant young and beautiful?” Harvey asked suspiciously.
“Elderly woman on a fixed income.”
Harvey brightened noticeably. “Excellent. You gotta love a man who helps the elderly. Which, of course, brings us to ex-girlfriends.”
Bobby rolled his eyes at that segue. “There’s a few,” he admitted.
“Which ones hate you?”
“None of them.”
“Sure about that?”
He thought of Susan. He honestly didn’t know how she was feeling. “No,” he found himself saying. “I’m not sure.”
“They’ll talk to your neighbors. They’ll look deep into your past. They’ll look for incidents of bias—that you don’t like blacks or Hispanics or people who drive BMWs.”
“I don’t have biases,” Bobby said, then stopped, frowned, and got a bad feeling. “The DUI arrest.”
“The DUI arrest?”
“Earlier that day. Guy was driving a Hummer while intoxicated. Did a bit of damage, then got bent out of shape when we actually tried to put him in jail. He had an attitude. We, uh, we exchanged some words.”
“Words?”
“I called him a rich prick,” Bobby said matter-of-factly.
Harvey winced. “Oh yeah, that’s gonna hurt. Anything else I should know?”
Bobby looked at the lawyer a long time. He debated what to say, how much to say. In the end, he settled on, “I don’t want my father to take the stand.”
Harvey regarded him curiously. “We don’t have to call him as a character witness if you don’t want us to.”
“What if they call him?”
“He’s your father. Assuming he’s going to testify in your favor, they won’t call him.”
“But if they do?” Bobby insisted.
Harvey was catching on now. “What don’t I know?”
“I don’t want him on the stand. Period.”
“If they know something, Bobby, if they know something you’re not telling me, we may not have a choice.”
“What if he’s … out of state?”
“They’ll subpoena him. If he doesn’t answer the summons, he’s in contempt of court and they can pursue legal action against him.”
Bobby had been afraid of that. “What if I don’t testify?”
“Then you’ll lose,” Harvey said baldly. “It’ll be just their word on what happened Thursday night, and their word will be that you committed murder.”
Bobby nodded again. He hung his head. He was looking into the future; he was trying to see beyond one night when he had done, honest to God, what he’d had to do. Nothing looked promising anymore. Nothing looked good.
“Can I win this?” he asked quietly. “Do I really have a chance?”
“There’s always a chance.”
“I don’t have his kind of money.”
“No.”
Bobby was honest. “I don’t have his kind of lawyer.”
Harvey was honest back. “No.”
“But you think you can pull this out?”
“If we can delay things long enough for the DA’s office ruling, and if the DA’s office ruling finds that it was justifiable use of force, then yes, I think we can win.”
“That’s a lot of ifs.”
“Tell me about it.”
“And then?”
Harvey hesitated.
“He can appeal, can’t he?” Bobby filled in the blanks for the lawyer. “If this is the clerk-magistrate, then James Gagnon can appeal to the district court, then the superior court, then the supreme judicial court. It goes on and on and on, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Harvey said. “And he’ll file motions, dozens of motions, most of them frivolous but all of them costing you time and money to refute. I’ll do what I can. Call in some favors. I know some young lawyers who will help out for the experience and others who will do it for the exposure. But you’re right: this is David and Goliath, and, well, you’re not Goliath.”
“All it takes is money and time,” Bobby murmured.
“He’s old,” Harvey threw out there.
“You mean one day he’ll die,” Bobby filled in bluntly. “That’s my best-case scenario. Another death.”
Harvey didn’t bother to lie. “Yeah. In a situation like this, that’s pretty much it.”
Bobby rose to his feet. He got out his checkbook. He’d had this nest egg he’d been building. Thinking of one day maybe buying more property, or maybe, if things between him and Susan had gone differently, it would’ve helped with a wedding. Now he wrote a check for five thousand dollars and placed it on Harvey Jones’s desk.
According to the good lawyer, that might last a week. Of course, Bobby already knew something the lawyer didn’t—if his father took the stand, he would lose.
“Is this enough for a retainer?”
Harvey nodded.
“If I’m going to pursue things,” Bobby said, “I’ll call you tomorrow by five p.m.”
They shook hands.
Then Bobby went home and got his guns.
The fifty-foot indoor shooting range at the Massachusetts Rifle Association in Woburn, Massachusetts, was slow for a Sunday afternoon. Bobby rolled two spongy orange plugs between his index finger and thumb, fit them into the canals of his ears, then adjusted his safety glasses. He’d brought his Smith & Wesson .38 Special, and just for the hell of it, a .45 Colt Magnum.
When Bobby took his proficiency test each month with his rifle, he never took more than one shot. That was it. You took up to an hour, you set up your shot, and then you fired one single bullet. The cold-bore shot. That’s because the very first shot out of any gun had the slug traveling down a cold barrel. That slug heated the barrel, which led to slightly different ballistics for every other shot fired.
As a sniper, the assumption was that he’d never fire any of those other rounds. One shot, one kill, so all that mattered, day after day, training exercise after training exercise, was that single, cold-bore shot.
Now, Bobby plunked down six boxes of ammo. The brass casings jingled inside the containers. He opened the first box and loaded up.
He began with the .38, starting at ten feet to loosen up, then moving the target back to twenty-one. Studies claimed that the average police shooting occurred within twenty-one feet, making it a favorite distance for marksmen. Bobby always wondered who did these studies, and why they never bothered to mention if the police were winning or losing in these infamous shootouts.
He started out horribly. Worst damn shooting of his life, and positively embarrassing for someone who’d earned the NRA classification of High Master. He wondered idly if some private investigator was already waiting in the wings to pluck this target for Bobby’s upcoming trial. Guy could hold it up on the stand, with its wildly scattered spray of shots: “See this, your honor. And this is from a guy that State says is an expert.”
Maybe he couldn’t shoot paper anymore. Maybe once you’d shot a real person, nothing else would do.
That thought depressed him. His eyes stung. He was sad. He was mad. He didn’t know what the hell to feel anym
ore.
He set down the .38. Picked up the .45. Set it down and, for a long time, simply stood there in the cavernous space, pinching the bridge of his nose and fighting for composure against an emotion he couldn’t name.
Down at the far end, the MRA’s gun pro, J.T. Dillon, was firing away. After a moment, Bobby stepped away from the shooting line and, receding into the shadows, watched the older man work.
This afternoon, Dillon was firing a .22-caliber target pistol that didn’t even resemble a real gun. The handle was a huge wooden grip that appeared less like a handle and more like a rough-hewn slab of tree. The barrel was squared off and edged in silver. The capping scope was bright red. All in all, the piece looked like something out of a Star Wars movie.
In fact, the custom-fit, superlight Italian-made target pistol cost upwards of fifteen hundred dollars. Only the big boys used these kinds of guns, and in the world of competitive shooting, Dillon was considered a very big boy.
Dillon was an IPSC competitor—International Practical Shooting Confederation. These guys were considered the martial artists of combat shooting. They were ranked on time and accuracy as they performed various bizarre drills, say, for example, shooting from the saddle, or running through an urban landscape with a briefcase handcuffed to their dominant hand, or shooting their way out of a jungle with an ankle in a splint. The tougher and nastier the drill, the more the competitors liked it.
IPSC shooters always said that bull’s-eye shooting, the kind of sniper drills Bobby performed, was like watching grass grow. Combat shooting was where the real action was.
Now Bobby watched as J.T. Dillon loaded the clip of his custom pistol, placed it in his weaker, left hand, and fired off a quick six rounds. Smooth. Controlled. Never blinking an eye.
Bobby didn’t have to look at the target to know all six shots were good. Dillon didn’t have to look either. He was already reloading his piece.
By now, Bobby had heard all the rumors—that Dillon was a former Marine, dishonorably discharged. That once he used to live in Arizona, where he’d supposedly killed a man. Maybe it was the jagged scar sometimes glimpsed across his sternum. Or the lean, rangy build the years did nothing to diminish. Or the fact that nearing the age of fifty, he could still cut down any man with his dark, forbidding stare.
Bobby didn’t know about those rumors, but being a Massachusetts State Police officer, he knew something about J.T. Dillon very few others did: a decade ago, a former police officer and serial killer named Jim Beckett had broken out of the maximum-security Walpole prison. In his brief few months of freedom, Beckett had sliced a long, bloody swath through various law enforcement agencies, murdering a number of state policemen, including a sniper, as well as an FBI agent.
Bobby didn’t know all the details, but the way he heard it, the police weren’t the ones who caught Jim Beckett in the end. Dillon did. After Beckett murdered his sister.
Now Dillon looked up from his pistol. He met Bobby’s gaze across the way.
“That’s the sloppiest damn display of shooting I’ve ever seen,” Dillon said.
“I’m thinking of burning the target.”
“That assumes you can hit it with a match.”
Bobby had to grin. “True.”
Dillon peered down his scope and Bobby wandered over. He’d never spoken much to Dillon, though both men knew each other by reputation.
Dillon had pushed the target back to fifty feet. Still using his left hand, he sighted the target. He inhaled. He exhaled. He inhaled one more time and Bobby could feel the man’s focus as a sudden physical presence. Dillon’s finger moved six times, the flexing of his index finger no greater than the whisper of a butterfly beating its wings against the air. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. The entire clip was unloaded in three seconds or less.
When Dillon pulled in the target, Bobby shook his head. This time, rather than annihilate the bull’s-eye, Dillon had formed a star.
“Show-off,” Bobby said.
“Gives me something to bring home to my girls.”
“Your daughters?”
“Yep. Two of them. One’s sixteen, one’s six.”
“Do they shoot?”
“Older one, Samantha, she’s pretty good.”
Bobby read between the lines. If Dillon said his daughter was pretty good, that probably meant she could outgun Bobby. Considering what Bobby knew of teenage boys, that skill could come in handy.
“And the younger?”
“Lanie? Takes after her mother. Can’t stand the sound of gunfire. But she has other skills. You should see her ride a horse.”
“Nice.” Dillon was gathering up his spent casings. Bobby helped him out. The brass was the most expensive part of a bullet. Serious shooters like to reclaim the casings for reuse in their own custom-made ammo. “Married?” Bobby asked now.
“Ten years,” Dillon said.
Ten years with a sixteen-year-old daughter. Bobby did the math on that, then gave up. “What does your wife do?”
“Tess teaches kindergarten. And chases our girls. And tries to keep me out of trouble.”
“Sounds like a good life,” Bobby said.
“It is.”
“Well, I should get back to practicing.” But Bobby remained standing where he was. Dillon was watching him, his gaze expectant. Shooters had a bond others didn’t have. They appreciated the art, they respected the technique. They understood that snipers didn’t get drawn to the craft because they were budding Dirty Harrys or lone gunmen anxious for another shootout at the OK Corral. Bobby did what he did because the skill challenged him, not because he’d ever wanted anyone to get hurt.
“Was it hard?” Bobby asked quietly. “Afterwards, I mean.”
“After what? After I shot the man in Arizona, or after I shot Jim Beckett?”
“Either one.”
“Sorry to say, son, but I’ve never killed a man.”
“Not even Jim Beckett?”
“No.” Dillon smiled ruefully, then flexed out his shoulder. “Though it wasn’t from lack of trying.”
“Oh,” Bobby said, though he hadn’t meant to sound so disappointed.
Dillon looked at him awhile, contemplating. Finally, the man gestured around the empty space. “Ten years ago,” he announced, “I would never have thought I’d be here. Never thought I’d have a wife. Never thought I’d have two daughters. Never thought I’d be … happy.”
“Because of Beckett?” Bobby asked.
“Because of a lot of things. Maybe I’ve never killed a man, but for a lot of my life, I came close enough.” Dillon shrugged. “I remember what it’s like to sit and wait with your crosshairs sighted on a human head. I know what it’s like to will yourself to pull the trigger.”
“I didn’t think much of it at the time.”
“Of course not. At the time, you were too busy. At the time, you were doing your job. It’s now, in all the hours and days to come, in all the moments when life gets quiet, that you’re gonna find yourself remembering again, wondering for the eleven hundredth time what you could have done differently. If you could have done something differently.”
“I keep telling myself it doesn’t matter. What’s done is done. No use torturing myself with it now.”
“Sound advice.”
“So why aren’t I taking it?”
“You never will. You wanna talk about regrets? I can talk about regrets, Officer Dodge. I can give you a whole laundry list of people I wished I had saved and people I wished I had killed. Give me five minutes and a bottle of tequila, and I can destroy my whole life.”
“But you don’t.”
“You have to find something, Officer Dodge. Something that anchors you, something that keeps you looking forward, even on the bad days, when you’re tempted to look back.”
“Your family,” Bobby guessed.
“My family,” Dillon agreed evenly.
Bobby looked him in the eye. “So who really killed Jim Beckett?”
“Te
ss did.”
“Your wife?”
“Yeah, that woman can sure wield a shotgun.”
“And she’s doing okay with that? Killing him?”
“Honestly? She hasn’t touched a gun since.”
Chapter
20
Catherine arrived at the hospital just in time to find her in-laws standing by the nurses’ desk.
“I’m the boy’s grandfather,” James was saying with his best you-want-to-cooperate-with-me grin. “Of course it’s okay for me to take the boy home.”
“Sir, Nathan’s mother signed the admit papers. I can’t do anything without consulting her.”
“And it’s wonderful that you’re so diligent. I commend you. Unfortunately, my daughter-in-law is extremely busy with funeral preparations right now. Hence, we were sent to get Nathan. It’s the least we could do during this very trying time.”
James tightened his arm around Maryanne. On cue, she joined him in smiling at the nurse. Maryanne was a shade paler than James, dark shadows bruising her eyes, but still with every hair and pearl in place. They made an impeccable united front. The powerful judge and his fragile, charming wife.
Already, the nurse seemed to be weakening.
James leaned forward, pressing the advantage. “Let’s go see Nathan. He’ll be very excited to go with us. You’ll see that it’s all right.”
“I should at least consult his doctor,” the nurse murmured, then glanced down at the admit papers and promptly frowned. “Oh dear.”
“What is it?”
“Nathan’s pediatrician, Dr. Rocco. I’m afraid … Oh dear, oh dear.” The nurse’s voice trailed off. She was clearly distressed by what had happened to Dr. Rocco, and now becoming quickly overwhelmed.
Catherine took that as her cue. She walked up to the desk, gaze going straight to the nurse’s name tag.
“Nurse Brandi, so good to see you again. How is Nathan this morning?”