Hard Return (9 page)

“Nothing I can do about that,” Landry said.

“Nothing you can do about anything,” Gary said.

CHAPTER
13

Devin Patel, 18: Devin always had a smile for everyone he met. He transferred to Gordon C. Tuttle this semester from El Cajon. —“In Memoriam,” Special Section, the
Los Angeles Times

Landry lay awake in the lumpy motel room bed with the thin sheets that had been laundered a million times. The light from the sign threw a patch of yellow on the bed. He couldn’t sleep. His mind was brimming with theories and rat mazes and dead ends.

He admitted to himself that he had been looking for another reason for the school shooting. He did not want it to be on his head. He didn’t want to be the cause of all those kids dying. But the odds were in favor of someone trying to draw him out. He had reviewed that possibility, going back through all his years as a Navy SEAL, all his years in Afghanistan and Iraq, all his years working for Whitbread Associates—first in the Green Zone at the beginning of the war, and later here at home.

Whitbread Associates was one of dozens—now hundreds—of private military contractors that had sprung up after Vietnam. They had gone on to spread like wildfire after the United States and its allies invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. The job at Whitbread had been lucrative for Landry in the extreme. He had been wise with his money and hidden it in many places, including an offshore tax haven. Landry had always known that there might come a day when he would have to pull the plug, when he would have to disappear. Over the years, though, he’d become complacent. What had at first seemed like a temporary solution to his loneliness almost twenty years ago had turned out to be a true relationship—he became a husband and then a father. There was a whole other world he lived in when he was not deployed, when he was not working. Landry had always been a compartmentalizer, and it had stood him in good stead. He concentrated on what was in front of him, and in many ways, there were two Landrys. There was the happily married man who loved his wife and daughter and would kill to protect them, and there was the other Landry, who did his job without question. When he worked, he put his emotions away. As a Navy SEAL, he didn’t debate policy; he carried it out. There would always be pros and cons, but that wasn’t his job to sort out. His former employer, Mike Cardamone, liked to say that Landry was “mission centric.” Mike Cardamone also said that Landry was the purest of the pure, in that he was apolitical—he would kill anybody, no questions asked, as part of his job. Mike called him “Switzerland.”

Neutral.

Turned out that Mike Cardamone didn’t know Landry as well as he’d thought he did. He didn’t understand that the loner had a wife and a kid, and he wasn’t like Switzerland at all.

Landry thought back to the island in Florida, the place where, for all intents and purposes, he had died and gone to heaven. He went over who had been there at the end. The attorney general of the United States and his daughter and her daughter and her daughter’s best friend. And the sheriff’s detective, Jolie Burke.

Everyone else was dead.

The AG was in prison, which didn’t mean anything. He could still call the shots from prison if he wanted to, but Landry doubted that the attorney general would be interested. If it wasn’t centered around him and his needs, he wouldn’t care. And Landry was positive the AG thought he was dead—that all of them thought he was dead.

Scratch that—all of them thought he was dead except for the sheriff’s detective, Jolie Burke.

It was possible she might have seen him at the Washington National Airport months later, after the trial.

A moment of indulgence—disguising himself and attending the trial the day the verdict came in. He’d flown out afterward. It was bad timing that she had been at the airport the same day he was there. They had passed like ships in the night—or more like airline passengers in the day—and he was not convinced she’d recognized him. Although she did stop for a moment—like someone walking out to the car and suddenly remembering they’d forgotten their car keys.

Landry couldn’t remember any other time he would have left himself bare like that, but he had, and he thought he knew why.

She’d trusted him.

There was something about trust that got to Landry. Misplaced trust can lead to disaster, and so Landry didn’t depend on very many people at all. He could name those he trusted on one hand. His wife, his daughter, his brother Gary.

And Jolie Burke, the cop.

He looked at Devin Patel’s memorial again. “Devin Patel, 18: Devin always had a smile for everyone he met. He transferred to Gordon C. Tuttle this semester from El Cajon.”

Every kid had something they liked to do. Two were skateboarders. Several loved music. Some performed music. Some liked math, or cars, or had pets, or had fallen in love. But Devin Patel’s memorial wasn’t just short; it was skimpy. The kid had been here almost a whole semester. Did they have that little on him? He was eighteen. And all the memorial said was that he smiled at people and had transferred from a school in El Cajon this semester. Why was the Patel kid’s memorial so short? There wasn’t one specific trait or interest or attachment. By nature, the Patel boy’s memorial was different from every other memorial. Even the sentence “Devin always had a smile for everyone he met” sounded canned, as if someone took pity on the kid and thought they’d throw him a bone.

Landry looked at his diagram again. Devin Patel wasn’t the first kid shot. He wasn’t the kid whose car was across from Kristal’s car. He was three cars beyond Kristal’s car, in closer to the school. He was at the far end of the shooter’s outside radius. He was either the last or the second-to-last kid killed before the shooter turned back, and shot Luke.

Luke was the last, not the first. Which didn’t true up with the way Landry had been looking at it. If Kristal and Luke were the targets, why did he shoot at them last?

Except he didn’t. Kristal’s little yellow car had been hit on the passenger’s side, too. Did the shooter come around the car
because
they were on the driver’s side? In which case Devin Patel was probably collateral damage.

All he had was the Patel kid’s face and shoulders and the two simple sentences, but the boy’s face told him a lot. The kid looked unhappy. He was somewhat overweight. His complexion was white and pasty. His eyes were half circles, like two lemon slices lined up next to each other, curved at the bottom and straight lines on the top. Cartoon eyes. It wasn’t going too far in the imagination to see the kid’s lip quivering. He looked both cowed and resentful—but more resentful than cowed. Like the world owed him something and it hadn’t delivered.

Landry knew he might be completely wrong about the kid. It was just a school picture, and for some kids—like this overweight boy—posing for the picture could have been torture.

He wished he could ask Kristal about him, but that was impossible. And she might not even have known him at all. He decided to start with the simplest way to find someone. He typed the boy’s name into the Google search box—

—and found nothing on Devin Patel, except for the articles on the mass shooting. Landry assumed that there had been one or two major articles on the shooting and then many shorter pieces, probably disseminated by the Associated Press. All mirror images of what had been written in the paper—a list of names.

There was more on what the politicians said, what the cops said (not much), what the gun-control people said, and what the NRA said. But nothing else on the victims themselves. Aside from the memorials, the kids who died got no press at all—individually. Maybe because there had been so many shootings of late that it didn’t make that much of an impact.

If he wanted to know anything more about Devin Patel, he’d have to talk to someone who knew him. He wasn’t ready to do that just now. Mainly because there was the other theory, and that theory was a lot more obvious.

Someone knew he was alive.

There was Gary, his brother. And there was Jolie Burke—
possibly
Jolie Burke. She could have glanced at him at the airport and for a moment had a fleeting sense of having seen him somewhere. He could have reminded her of the man who had taken them hostage on the island off Cape San Blas, the man who had then fought beside her against the men who invaded the island.

He found another hotel. This one was downtown and very nice. He made it a practice of staying on the move, to remain anonymous. In a high-rise hotel he would be just another cog in the wheel, as he had been in Vegas.

And if need be, he could always drive to Torrent Valley and check on his wife and daughter.

He was pretty sure Gary could talk them into going to Louisville. Gary was a great talker. He could talk anybody into anything. Landry had seen him sell some pretty poor-looking horses in his day to people who weren’t just happy to buy them, but thrilled. Gary turned almost everything into a story.

The hotel provided a complimentary
USA Today
. Landry went through it, looking first for anything on the shooting, but there was nothing. It was as if it had never happened. The news cycles were getting shorter and shorter, especially when it came to public shootings. They had become the norm. There was almost a “here we go again” quality to the reporting. The news channels had their big story, so they ran with it—probably good for two or three days—before something else flitted across their ADHD brains.

But one article stood out to him.

“Female New Mexico Cop Thwarts Bank Robbery, Three Dead.”

Landry’d always had somewhat of a sixth sense. He knew when something was going to happen, especially if it was a danger to him. He knew when ordnance was about to explode in Iraq, he knew when someone had him in the crosshairs in Afghanistan, he knew when someone was gunning for him.

Even before he saw the name, he knew it was her.

He closed his eyes for a moment. Then started reading the article.

Jolie Burke.

Maybe it was because he knew she had the ability to do it. That she had taken on many killers on the island in Florida. Maybe because she’d told him she grew up in New Mexico. But it sounded like her.

He read through quickly. This was just a small piece in
USA Today
, but he imagined it would become bigger. It had only happened yesterday. He turned the news on and there she was, being interviewed.

She looked good, like he remembered her. She had the cop sunglasses on; her hair was pulled up tight in a bun. She wore a deputy uniform. The sun beat down on her—it was New Mexico, after all—and she gave the sense she was squinting behind her shades. The female reporter had thrust a mic in her face. Behind them was the bank and a crashed car. Pieces of the car all over the road—a smashed bumper, broken glass.

“Can you tell us how it unfolded?” the female reporter asked.

“Quickly,” Jolie said.

“But can you—”

“Can I what?” She had a poker face.

Somebody came over, also wearing a tan-colored sheriff’s uniform, and nodded to her. She said, “Excuse me, I have to go.”

She turned and was escorted away.

Landry waited.

She was gone, off the screen. But there would be a press conference by the sheriff. He just had to wait for it. He turned the sound down.

Jolie Burke, in another firefight. What were the odds? Even for a sheriff’s deputy, that was a little odd. It used to be that some police officers never shot their weapons in ten, twenty, thirty years. Those days were gone. There were a lot more shootings now. Times changed. But for Jolie to be in a firefight in Florida and three years later in another serious firefight probably beat those odds.

He read the article.

An audacious robbery, to say the least. Two cars had been used in the robbery, both of them stolen: a blue 2014 Acura MDX and a silver Mazda CX-5. The blue SUV was used to smash into the glass door of the bank next to the ATM. The silver car was the getaway car. There were three robbers. Two of them were brothers. The ringleader was the older brother, Joseph Terrazas. His brother, Arturo Terrazas, was with him in the first car that crashed into the bank. They had an arsenal of weapons, including an AR-15 and two nine-millimeter handguns with two magazines each. The driver, Monty Chessen, had a shotgun and a semiautomatic pistol. They also had forced the bank manager to open the vault at gunpoint. One of the bank employees was wounded, but it wasn’t too serious—she would live. But they were terrorized. The three robbers were confronted by Doña Ana County sheriff’s deputy Jolie Burke.

She dispatched all three of them in the gun battle that ensued.

“Damn fine shooting,” an unidentified Tejar police officer said.

Damn fine shooting
.

The statistics were piss-poor for cops hitting their targets in a stressful situation. It was not like aiming at a target on a shooting range. Mostly, they missed. They hit their target less than one-third of the time. Other statistics he’d read made it even worse than that: less than 10 percent of the time. That she could hit all three—kill shots no less—was remarkable.

More amazing than that: What were the odds that three years after Florida, she would be in the headlines again?

Until today, he hadn’t thought of Jolie Burke in years but now she was there, front and center.

Landry knew her. He had fought beside her. When you depend on someone in a battle situation, you get to know them in short order. There’s no mating dance. He felt he knew her as well as anybody, and Jolie Burke was not the type to seek headlines.

He imagined she would have been offered a whole string of elite positions after Florida. But there she was, in a one-horse town in New Mexico.

Some people just found trouble. The fact that she worked in law enforcement enhanced that probability.

He felt a sudden urge to see her. For one thing, she had a skill he did not have: she was a cop. Not just a cop—she had been a homicide detective back in Florida.

He needed to see her for another reason: If someone killed Luke to draw him out, Landry had an enemy who knew he was alive. And if that person had learned it—directly or indirectly—from Jolie Burke, he needed to know.