he lowered his weapon and switched off his Lynx. There was blood in his mouth. He had bitten halfway through his tongue.
Hogantown’s Rough-and-Tough had just gotten him killed—for the third time.
‘Mr. Griffin, you are a pissant.’ Farrow came around the corner of the observation deck and descended the metal stairs into the shoot house with quickstep precision. He stood six and a half feet tall and weighed in at two hundred and thirty pounds. With a bristle-fuzz of blond hair, a dubious squint, onyx eyes, and a face that seemed always on the edge of a cruel grin, Farrow looked more like a Bond villain than an FBI agent.
‘Sorry, sir.’ William had been second in a team of four going into an apartment. All his partners had been virtual. They had waltzed through the rooms with precision and then there had been gunshots and smoke and confusion. Dripping red letters across his visual field announced that he had taken two in the chest and one in the head. To emphasize the point, Farrow had unleashed the slammer.
Even before the pain, the simulation had been so real that William could still feel the acid in his gut and the sweat under his body armor.
Farrow took William’s Glock and with the click of a hidden switch removed it from the grid of computer tracking and control. ‘You heard shots. You saw Agent Smith go down. Then you saw Agent Wesson go down. Then you saw a miscreant come from behind the fridge.’
‘There was a child.’
‘The murdering SOB was right in front of you. The child was not in your line of fire.’
‘I’m not making excuses, sir.’ He could barely talk.
Farrow hitched up his pants. He had the kind of build—barrel chest and slim hips—that precluded getting a good fit anywhere outside of a tailor’s shop. ‘Your squeeze and firing patterns are daggers, same height, all in a row, just fine—whenever you’re shooting at a target. Otherwise, you’re a complete, balls-to-the-wall pissant. Have you ever gone hunting, Mr. Griffin?’
‘Yes, sir,’ William said, his shoulders falling about as low as they could go. ‘I mean, no, sir.’
‘Your daddy never took you hunting? That’s a disgrace.’
‘Sir, I do not understand what you mean by “pissant”.’
‘Look it up. A useless, insignificant creature. It means you’re not worth your native clay. It means in a situation of selfdefense, with clearly defined antagonists whose mission in life is to put you down like a mangy dog, you cringe. To me, specifically, it means you have buck fever. Put anything living at the end of your nine mil and you start to shake like a cup of dice. Your teeth click like castanets, mister.’
‘Yes, sir. I would like to try one more time, sir.’
‘Son,’ Farrow said, his face an ominous shade of pre-heartattack red, ‘this shoot house consumes twenty-five thousand watts of electricity. I will not waste any more of our nation’s valuable energy. I brought you here this late to see whether you could acquire your live target skills if we subjected you to a little less peer review. You have not done me proud. Nobody gets through the Academy without passing Rough-and-Tough.’
‘I need one more chance, sir.’
Farrow stood with hands on hips, the perfect figure of fitness and power. ‘Buck fever, Griffin. Some people just cannot kill. Your father was a Marine, right?’
‘Navy Seal, sir.’
‘Did he ever talk to you about killing people?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Did he ever kill people in the line of duty?’
‘He did not talk about it, sir.’
‘I know for a fact that as an FBI agent he has killed three people. How does that make you feel?’
William swallowed. At times, Griff had been hard on his family—irrational fits of anger, silent drinking, and one awful night, wailing and shrieking long into the morning. His mother had grabbed William’s shoulders, pulling him back to keep him out of the den. He had so much wanted to comfort his father.
William had been nine years old.
Griff had sung an awful song in the den, twenty years ago, the words slurred by a pint of Johnny Walker: ‘Bullet to the thorax, cried the Lorax. Bullet to the brain, what a pain. Bullet to the gut, then you’ll know what’s what, and mister, you’ll never be the same, all the dead are in your head, not the same.’
Had Special Agent Erwin Griffin killed a man that day?
William had spent five years in NYPD and not once had he drawn his weapon while on duty—and he had been grateful for that. He closed his eyes and recalled Griff’s face on the morning after that bout, puffy yet still hard, a face that had once again learned how to hide what was inside, to tamp down the hopefulness that it could not get any worse.
After William’s mother and father had finalized their divorce, Griff had moved to Washington state. He currently worked out of the Seattle Field Office.
William felt like he wanted to throw up. ‘For my father’s sake, sir.’
Farrow did not look pleased. ‘Last chance, Griffin. One more bout of buck fever, and the blue is not for you.’
Special Agent Erwin Griffin—known as Griff to practically everyone—removed a pair of wire-rim sunglasses from his faded blue eyes and slipped them into his pocket. The snowdusted mountains to the east caught the last of the daylight like blunt rock fingers with flaming tips. The interior of the fire tower cabin was quiet, just a soft, stubborn whistle of wind through the boards and occasional creaks and groans, like a boat caught in a slow wash. Rising forty feet above the ridge, supported by a slender lattice of iron beams and cedar planks, the cabin peered over the listless crowns of the second-growth hemlocks and gave a good vantage on the valley to the east.
Griff had occupied the cabin for two days, tending a telescope, two pairs of high-powered binoculars, digital cameras, and a small computer. He wore jeans and a zipped-up navy blue windbreaker with ‘FBI’ printed in yellow on the back.
The windbreaker had a pinky-sized hole to the right of the ‘I’, just below his shoulder blade.
It had been a peaceful time, mostly alone, with a Port-a-Potty and an ice chest full of sandwiches and canned ice tea. Time to think. Time enough to wonder why he hadn’t worked for the Forest Service or become a hermit. It seemed all his life he had been chasing and catching. He had hundreds of felony arrests and convictions to his credit. He had helped lock up bad guys and sometimes judges and juries threw away the keys but it never seemed to do a damned bit of good. There were always more.
Tides of crime, sweeping in, sweeping out, always leaving the bodies behind. So many bodies.
Griff wiped his eyes and prepared to move things around in preparation for the coming darkness. At night all he had was a single red lantern mounted under the lookout’s north-facing window. It made him look like a submarine captain.
