Hard Return (7 page)

CHAPTER
10

Luke Brodsky, 17: Luke was a free spirit who marched to his own drummer. His favorite song was Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky.” He was good at math, loved his little brother Chad and his girlfriend Kristal, but his passion was skateboarding. Some of his stunts defied gravity. Earlier this year, he placed in the Central Valley AM JAM in Riverbank (16–17 years of age) and planned to go on to the second leg of the competition. Luke was a hero who pushed Kristal under her car and covered her with his body. —“In Memoriam,” Special Section, the
Los Angeles Times

Landry sat at the desk by the window in his Las Vegas hotel room and looked up from his computer at the blue sky. Cars honked and he heard a bus slowing and stopping. One car’s thudding bass cut through the thin glass to reside in his gut. Eight dead. Six boys and two girls:

Hunter Tomey

Mike Morales

Noah Cochran

Danielle Perez

James Schaffer

Devin Patel

Taylor Brennan

Luke Brodsky

Luke Brodsky.

A good kid
.

For now, Landry set aside the eleven wounded. He could always add them back in later, if need be. But he didn’t think he would.

The shooter was a pro. Landry had read between the lines. No ID. No credit cards. Apparently no fingerprint matches. A Chevy Tahoe that had been wiped down. The SA didn’t say, but Landry guessed the Tahoe was stolen. Or it could be that they had that information but were not releasing it. The shooter was in his late twenties, older than your average angry young male, and apparently in excellent condition. His teeth matched no dental charts. He had no Social, he had no driver’s license, he had no credit cards.

Unless the SA had been lying. But Landry doubted that. Why would he?

Even before their meeting of the minds over Montana and fishing, Keller’s first instinct would be to lessen the intrigue, not expand on it. His instinct would be to pretend the shooter was an average guy who’d “just snapped.”

The “just snapped” theory was all over cable television. It was one of the few things they could say, because they had no real information. The TV pundits and cable hosts and experts had plenty of time to fill and very little to fill it with, except the shock, the horror, the stories of the dead and wounded. These Landry listened to, recorded, and made notations on. He wrote down every piece of information on the kids, including Kristal.

Cindi had managed to keep Kristal from being interviewed; all the cameras got of their townhome in Torrent Valley was the entryway—tan stucco alcove, wooden door, the potted palm that always looked half-dead, and the concrete driveway. They were free to film that all they wanted, but a Navy SEAL’s wife knew better than to respond. She knew how to keep her silence, knew how not to
engage
.

His wife had always been a good soldier.

School was closed for the week at least. Cleanup of the parking lot was already under way. Landry had seen that parking lot probably twenty times on the cable channel shows and the nightly news. The blood-blotched asphalt, books and backpacks and other detritus lying on the ground, crime scene tape. The elm tree near the football field was festooned with streamers for “The Eight.” At its base was a shrine to the victims—teddy bears and candles and balloons. Just like every other massacre. Everything went the way it was expected to go. No surprises.

Except for the coverage.

Still
, nothing on the shooter.

They couldn’t identify him. In addition to that, the FBI wanted to keep the fact that he was a pro to themselves. Landry understood that. Why tip your hand?

But it didn’t help him. All he had were the names of the kids. He knew that the shooter was a cipher and a pro, and he knew where to look for him. Where to look for his kind. But he had plenty of questions.

Someone hired the shooter to kill students at random for some reason—just another school shooting. Which didn’t make sense. The people who shot up theaters and gatherings and schools wanted attention. They wanted the hands-on experience of killing people, because generally they were disturbed, angry individuals. They wouldn’t want someone else to do it for them.

So why hire it done?

To make it look like a massacre. To target one kid?

One of the eight.
One among many.

Landry saw it like this. The school shooter would come in, make sure of his target, and shoot additional victims as cover. Because he was good—a trained, hired gun—he would have an escape plan. By the time the police arrived he would be gone. Problem solved.

But he didn’t figure on Landry. He didn’t figure on another professional across the street, across four lanes of traffic. He didn’t figure that that professional would have a sniper rifle and was an expert marksman. He didn’t figure that his life would be over even before he hit the ground.

Landry ran the tape of the shooting back through his mind.

When did he first notice the man? Did he see him first? Or hear him first?

He closed his eyes. Shut out the muted traffic noise coming through the window. Sent himself back to the parking lot.

He had been in countless firefights. Time always slowed. He saw it now, as if he were watching a television show. A threat here, a potential threat there. The moment the shooting started, he had clicked into combat mode.

He replayed the scene. Kristal and Luke walking to the car. Luke’s arm around her shoulder, the two of them bumping hips as they moved. She was thumbing her phone. He was speaking into her ear as if he were telling her a secret. They stopped by the driver’s side of the car and made out. She reached down for his crotch . . .

The other kids were walking out, too, at various rates of speed. Some peeling off to go to their cars. Some stopping to talk. Landry had zeroed in on Kristal and her boyfriend. He had concentrated on them. He didn’t like the intimate way they moved against each other.

The background was filled with other kids. They were superfluous to him. But now he had to focus on them. He rummaged through his memory.

One kid had called out to another. No—he’d whistled. Loud and harsh. Boys and girls walked down the patch of asphalt, breaking up to go to their cars. A car backed up and stopped as a knot of kids funneled past, then completed the arc backward. Changed gears, turned the wheels, and drove out. Music blaring; loud woofer thumps.

The car was cruising to the exit when Landry first heard the sound of automatic gunfire, coming in bursts. It sounded like Iraq. Like Afghanistan.

A kid slumped to the asphalt. Bullets ripping through him, kicking up the asphalt.

The man in black walking through, coming from the direction of the entrance-slash-exit to the parking lot. He may have walked in through the gap where the kids could reach the sidewalk, or the open gate where the cars went through. Landry could see him in his mind’s eye, sauntering down between the two rows of cars, waving his rifle back and forth, aiming sometimes and other times just mowing them down indiscriminately. Bursts of automatic fire.

Landry missed seeing it all. He estimated it had taken him a minute and ten seconds to assemble the rifle, and twenty seconds to assess the situation with the flap in the van door, push open one of the doors, and acquire the target.

He did see Luke pushing Kristal under the car.

But before that . . .

A memory.

The shooter had been aiming at a kid near the row of cars opposite Kristal’s car. Stepping toward that kid. Definitely aiming. Which could mean nothing, or it could mean everything. He’d shot the kid. Then he’d come back in the direction of Luke and Kristal.

Hitting Luke.

The next second, he turned slightly away, still shooting, and Landry put him down.

So Landry had possible targets.

The first kid, and the other kid near the car opposite Kristal’s car. And Luke.

Three kids. It could be the shooter had intentionally gone after three kids. It was possible that Luke was one of them.

Another thought shouldered its way into his skull.

Maybe the shooter wasn’t aiming at Luke.

Maybe Luke was just in the way.

It could be he was aiming at Kristal.

Landry punched in a number he almost never used. It was a secure number he’d set up two months ago, replacing five other numbers he’d used over the span of three years. He waited for the beep and left a message. The message was simple. “Hey, bro, how you doing? Give me a call when you get the chance.”

Ten minutes later his brother Gary called back. Landry said, “Speak.”

“It was you, right?”

“I’m throwing this phone as soon as we’re done,” Landry said. “You know the drill. Speak.”

“This was because of you. Am I right? Were you the one who killed him?”

“Progress report?”

“What do you expect? They’re shattered. Don’t tell me this is just a coincidence.”

“There’s a fifty-fifty possibility that it was a coincidence.”

“But you were there, right? You should have acted faster.”

Landry said nothing. In truth he did blame himself. His motto was “Be prepared,” but he’d cut the wrong corner this time. He should have lined the van up to make sure the trajectory was right—just in case—but he’d eyeballed it instead. The flap in the van was too narrow to account for error. If he’d taken the time to do it right, if he had set a pen down on the pavement and lined it up with the pepper tree where Kristal usually parked, if he had marked the trajectory and lined the van up with the chalk line on the pavement, he wouldn’t have had to take the extra fifteen seconds to decide on Plan B, to open the back doors of the van and move the sandbags to set up.

Gary said, “You do know about Cindi?”

“
What
about Cindi?”

“Her fiancé.”

“Fiancé?”

“Yeah, fiancé. Todd Barclay. He’s a comptroller for a finance company.”

That was a blow to the gut. “The guy she was seeing? I thought that was more of a friendship.”

Landry had seen Barclay once, from a distance. Balding, skinny with a paunch. White as a grub. Madras shorts and a limp T-shirt, boat shoes. If it was the eighties he’d be called a yuppie. They hadn’t seemed to be anything special to each other. He’d thought that maybe the guy lived in the neighborhood, or maybe had a kid Kristal’s age. He couldn’t imagine a weakling like that would interest Cindi. But now it was clear he hadn’t read between the lines. It was hard to get a good read on a situation, looking through high-powered binocs.

Cindi was the love of his life. His best friend—and for a man like him, that was a big deal. In the back of his mind he had planned for their reunion. He had always planned on reuniting with his family.

“It’s
been
almost three years,” Landry’s brother said.

Your fault
. That was what Gary was saying. But Landry knew that Cindi wouldn’t take a soft-looking comptroller over the husband she had lived with for eighteen years. They loved each other; there was no doubt about that. She just hadn’t been given the choice—yet. “What about the boy, Luke?”

“Kristal is all torn up—why wouldn’t she be? The body hasn’t been released yet, so they can’t even plan the funeral.”

Landry said, “That kid’s a hero.”

“A lot of comfort
that
is.”

Gary, his little brother, the one who always looked up to him, the only person on earth Landry trusted with his whereabouts—the only person who knew of his existence—was judging him. Landry almost said something, but his other motto was “Never apologize, never explain.” Their mother had drummed that into them at an early age.

Gary said, “Who is that guy? Is this because of you? Because—”

“It has nothing to do with me.”

“You’re sure?”

Landry wasn’t, so he changed the subject. “I want you to hire a bodyguard. You have the money.”

“How do I—”

“Not any guard. I’ll give you a list of names.” He rattled off three, and made sure that Gary was taking it down. “Tell whichever one you talk to he has to take the job. In my memory.”

“In your memory,” Gary repeated. He sounded like he was eating an unpalatable vegetable.

“Make sure you do it now.”

“I’m on it.”

Landry checked his watch. He had been on too long. “I have to go. Call you later.”

He disconnected.

CHAPTER
11

Hunter Tomey, 17: Hunter was a star on the field, a wide receiver for the Tuttle Tigers. He received a football scholarship at UCLA, where he was accepted into the premed program. Hunter leaves behind a brother, James, 14, and a sister, Tanya, 13. Hunter was an honor student and Student Body President. His girlfriend, Alexis Borowic, says, “He was always considerate of people. It didn’t matter who you were, a football player or a freshman. He made me a better person just being around him. —“In Memoriam,” Special Section, the
Los Angeles Times

Landry checked out of the Xanadu, turned the Mercury Marquis in at the rental car company, and walked five blocks to a used car lot where he bought a 2012 Ford Explorer with tinted windows, using another one of his names, Perry Groves. The Ford Explorer was a popular product—there were millions of them on the road. The vehicle was dark gray, a common color. On the way out of Vegas, he picked up his parcel from the post office—his sniper rifle, Betsy. He was on the road out of Vegas by three p.m.

He stopped to eat dinner at a HomeTown Buffet in Victorville. Victorville was not far from Apple Valley, the home of Roy Rogers. Landry was a little young for Roy Rogers, but he’d seen a few reruns of the television show on their small TV in their trailer at the racetrack. He knew that Roy had his beloved palomino, Trigger, stuffed and mounted. Landry tried to picture what that would be like, but couldn’t. It seemed ghoulish to him. If Roy loved Trigger so much that he wanted to keep a stuffed version of him around, what about his wife, Dale? Would he do the same to her?

It was a moot point. Dale outlived Roy. But the thought was macabre enough that it kept him occupied. Had he ever loved someone enough that he couldn’t bear to be parted from them even after death? Was there anyone he’d want to have stuffed so he could touch them or just look at them?

Dead was dead. You couldn’t bring a person back, no matter how much you wanted to.

He asked the waitress at the HomeTown Buffet about the Roy Rogers Museum.

“It’s closed. They packed it up—lock, stock, and barrel.”

“Where’d they move it to?”

She brushed a lock of blond hair from her sweating brow. “I have no idea. They probably put everything in trunks and left ’em in a storage shed somewhere.”

She didn’t seem too put out by the fact.

An elderly man at the next table said, “They auctioned the whole shebang off. Everything. Even Trigger.”

“They did?”

“Yup. Made a mint, too.”

Landry was surprised at the sadness he felt. Roy Rogers was part of Americana. But now Americana wasn’t quaint and striving and earnest. It was all over the map. It was just a string of disconnected places held together by freeways and overpriced diners like the HomeTown Buffet. America was both amorphous and disjointed at the same time. But then, things weren’t so great even back then. Landry recalled reading somewhere that unbeknownst to Roy Rogers, an assistant to the taxidermist who mounted Trigger parceled out the famous stallion’s meat to local restaurants.

Landry realized he had been feeling melancholy most of the day. It was tied to the massacre at Gordon C. Tuttle High, but it was more than that. He felt alone.

Actually, he felt lonely.

Landry was never lonely. He had what was called an introverted personality. That did not mean he was shy, because he wasn’t. He just needed a lot of downtime from people. A little bit of people went a long way, even if he enjoyed their company. Even if he liked them, he often needed to get away and recharge his batteries. There were times in his life when he was part of a team—in fact that had been his entire career as a Navy SEAL—but left to his own devices, he preferred to be by himself.

The only exceptions to this rule were Cindi and Kristal. Cindi and Kristal were family, and their proximity didn’t take energy away
from
him. Their presence added to his feeling of well-being. All three of them were independent by nature, so their relationship worked like a well-oiled machine. They each had their own rituals, private jokes, annoyances—a whole history of being together in every conceivable circumstance.

Family.

He loved them and they had loved him . . .

But was that true now? Did love fade as time went by?

Did love fade if you thought your loved one was dead?

He got back into the Explorer and drove back onto the freeway. As his headlights pierced the dusk and the night closed around him, Landry felt something stutter in his heart. He found himself asking the eternal question people ask themselves in the quiet and the dark of their loneliness.
How the
hell
did I
get
here?

The answer was clear, now that he was looking straight at it. He had turned his back on the people who meant the most to him.

His wife was engaged to be married to some pale bald guy who worked for a finance company. His daughter barely avoided being shot to death. Her boyfriend was shot dead before her eyes.

Luke had
tried
to save her. He had sacrificed his life for her.

Luke, not Landry. Landry himself had
been too late. He made it a rule never to second-guess an action—it was a zero-sum game in his line of work—but this time . . .

He couldn’t help but think: If he’d been able to act a hair faster, would Luke still be alive?

Driving through the moonscape of the desert in the dark, the headlights like pinpoints that grew and grew and then flashed by in the other lanes, Landry felt he might as well be on the moon.

Because he was all alone.

The traffic picked up heading into LA—a stream of red and white. Like blood cells teeming through an artery. Every car a self-contained pod, rushing in the same direction.

It wasn’t as if Cindi didn’t know that Landry could disappear. They had talked about it in the abstract: “I may have to go off the grid. When it’s safe, I’ll come back.” But they both knew that if he went off the grid, it would be impossible to come back. Cindi had friends whose husbands were SEALs. They knew it was unlikely their husbands would just disappear, but they also knew that the men they loved were trained to do one thing better than any other thing.

And that skill set would be hard to translate to civilian life.

A lot of men he knew had suffered, once their usefulness came into question. A guy you could depend on in a firefight was suddenly trying to sell shoes in a strip mall sporting-goods store—if he could get the job. Or a fast food place.

His superior officer called it “repurposing,” but it didn’t make it any better.

Landry had taken the easiest route. He’d worked for Whitbread Associates during the Iraq War, and he stayed on with them afterward.

He was paid well and he’d socked a retirement away. Two retirements. He did well in the stock market. Money seemed to come to him.

But he didn’t quit. He didn’t enjoy retirement, because he
couldn’t
enjoy retirement. He was skilled. He was one of the best at what he did. And Whitbread worked for the United States government, so Landry could even tell himself he was still working for his country.

Until Florida.

He skirted LA and took an off-ramp into Fullerton. He had a friend, a former Navy SEAL, who lived there. Dan was out of town most of the year, but Landry and Dan had an agreement. Landry kept a mono vault in the backyard of his condo in Lake View Terrace for Dan, and Dan did the same for him in Fullerton. It was just another option they both had.

The neighborhood was quiet. Landry parked under a tree along the sidewalk and climbed the wall. The house was dark, but there were security lights everywhere. A dog barked three houses down. Landry waited, expecting to hear a door open or close or someone rebuking the dog, but the dog just kept barking halfheartedly, and finally stopped. Landry headed for the back terrace. Standing at the edge of the terrace was a large Mexican Talavera flowerpot.

He hauled the pot sideways. Instead of the brick that covered the rest of the terrace, the place where the flowerpot had been was a round patch of dirt. Landry brushed away the dirt and unscrewed the polyurethane lid, setting it to the side, and aimed his flashlight down into the vault. There was the packet, wrapped in oilskin: a passport and a driver’s license under the name Jeffery Peterman.

Landry was out in five and back on the freeway in nine.

He went south to I-8, and found a hotel just off the freeway in El Cajon, east of San Diego. He checked in using Jeffery Peterman’s driver’s license.

Thinking about the kids.

Inside the room, Landry fired up the laptop and searched for articles on the shooting. Right at the top on Google was a new story from the
Los Angeles Times
, perfect for his purposes. Profiles of the kids who were shot and killed, one paragraph each.

He lay against the headboard fully clothed, propped up against the pillows, and read the story.

Luke first.

Luke was seventeen. The photo they had of him was a selfie. To his right Landry saw a bare shoulder and a swatch of longish dark blond hair that might have belonged to his daughter. Luke’s expression was goofy. With his free hand he flashed some kind of gang sign. Your average high school kid, not old enough or smart enough to look into his future.

And in Luke’s case, there was no point.

He wore a long-sleeved shirt with the word “Quiksilver” on the front. His black hair on the long side. Landry knew from looking up his clothing, his skateboard, and his attitude that he was a “skater,” and this wasn’t just a style but a
lifestyle
. The memorial named Luke’s favorite music—Daft Punk, some musical group Landry had never heard of. They wrote a song called “Get Lucky.”

This was not so different from Landry’s day. Kids were kids. They identified with a group and dressed that way. It was protective coloring. They tried to fit in with their tribe.

If he saw a kid like that on the street, he wouldn’t give him a second look, but Landry was possessive of his daughter. He had disliked Luke from the beginning, even though they’d never met face-to-face. It was enough that he knew Luke had either had sex with his daughter or was about to. The thought of that alone had simmered and threatened to boil over if he ever came face-to-face with the kid.

But instead, Landry had remained on the sidelines, helpless. It was hard for him to reconcile this with who he was. He knew it was for the safety of his wife and daughter, but it still rankled. But now Landry felt some pride that his daughter had chosen right. The boy had turned out to be a hero.

Now the kid was dead and Landry pictured his mother folding the Quiksilver shirt and putting it away.

Landry scanned down the photos of the dead and read their stories. Nothing popped out. They were typical high school kids. Maybe one of them had a father or mother who was an FBI agent. Maybe one of them was involved in the occult. But from the short bios, he couldn’t read between the lines. Most of them he could identify now by their clothing—which group they belonged to. Landry needed to pare down the number.

He had to start somewhere. He’d already picked out two besides Luke and Kristal. His choices were purely based on instinct and on the memory of what he’d seen. The first kid who was killed, and the boy opposite Kristal’s car.

The first boy could have been shot just to let the shooter get his head into the game.

So Landry homed in on the boy across the parking lot from Luke and Kristal:

Hunter Tomey.

Hunter was a nice-looking kid. Blond hair and blue eyes. Startling eyes. He could have been a model, like you’d see in a catalog. All-American kid, uncomplicated smile. Not preppy, exactly—
preppy
was an old word—but clean-cut.

So, two ways to go. Hunter Tomey, and Landry’s own enemies.

He read the bio again.

The kid sounded like he was comfortably middle class. Typical American family fare, down to the football team, college, the girlfriend. He could have been living in the 1990s, the 1980s, the 1970s, or even earlier. Which in itself was unusual in 2014. But the school catered to upper-middle-class and even wealthy residents, so he fit in. Handsome and blond—a standout, but not that much of a standout. White bread. Maybe he’d gotten into a scrape or two, but as he was a juvenile it would be hard to find out if he did. So Landry took him at face value for now.

The shooting seemed random, but it was not. It was clear the shooter wasn’t a disaffected youth, but a hired killer. He was good at his job. If Landry hadn’t been there, he might have killed twenty or even thirty more.

But Landry knew this about the military, and he knew this about cops. You take out the biggest threat first. In this case you would take out your target first. You’d make sure you’d get the one you’re after before adding window dressing.

This was truer of cops than the military. Landry’s uncle was a cop. Cops looked for trouble, and their plan was to cut that trouble off at the knees before it got out of control. You could say cops were proactive. They had the upper hand and they wanted to keep it that way, so they always saw trouble and ran to meet it, to shut it down so that they were in charge and out of danger.