Redman’s lieutenant, Steve Canfield, had taken him aside.
“Don’t even read it, Mikey. You’ve saved our asses a dozen times. They don’t know shit about it,” Canfield said while Redman sat in front of his locker reading the editorial and quietly boiling. “They’re opinionist, man. They make up opinions. None of them are there when the shit is flying. They’re still watching the Lone Ranger shoot the gun out of the bad guy’s hand. None of them know how it really works, Mike. You remember that, partner.”
But Redman never considered himself the lieutenant’s “partner.” In the first of his so-called quick-trigger killings, his real partner, Marcus Collie, had been the first one in on a barricaded-man call. Within forty minutes the team had surrounded a dilapidated home in an upscale neighborhood, an eyesore that residents had complained about for years. The owner, the neighbors said, was an oddball who’d taken the place over when his mother died. He hadn’t paid the electric or water in several months and threatened every city code officer who’d tried to talk with him. When city officers tried to contact him, he threatened to shoot anyone who crossed his property. SWAT was called in. The guy had painted every window in the house black from the inside. There was no opportunity for sniper work. It had to be close quarters. The cops had bullhorned the guy for hours. All they got were more threats. The team then bashed out all four corner windows, tossed in smoke bombs and waited for the guy to come out coughing and sputtering. Still nothing. Finally an entry team was formed. As usual, Collie was on point. Redman, his partner, was behind him.
They took down the front door with a battering ram and went in low, flashlights mounted on their MP5s. Nothing. They went on a room-by-room search in the dark. The third room they encountered was the master bath. Because of the dark, they did not see the water on the floor at the edge of the door. If they’d noticed, they might have figured the guy had closed himself up in there and used wet towels under the door to keep the smoke out. Instead, Collie kicked in the door and jumped to the right. Redman stayed left. No sound. When Collie brought his gunsight around the doorframe, the guy must have timed the sweep of the flashlight, and fired a twelve-gauge loaded with deer slugs into the doorframe where Collie stood. Almost simultaneously Redman swung around and fired a three-round burst just above the flash of the shotgun and the bullets stitched across the man’s neck, nearly separating it from his shoulders. Lucky pattern in the dark. But the suspect had been just as accurate.
Redman yelled, “Medical,” before he even called, “Clear.”
He could only tell that Collie was down. Still, as he was trained, he stepped into the bathroom and ripped the shotgun from the suspect’s death grip and tossed it aside. Then he aimed his flashlight on his partner. He did not ask if he was OK because he knew that answer. Collie’s breathing was ragged and sounded like a kid sucking the last bits of soda through a straw. Redman went to his knees and tried to search for his partner’s eyes in the beam, but one was missing. A gaping hole was torn in his left cheek, and Redman could see broken teeth floating in blood inside.
He might have started screaming, “Man down! Man down!” as was his training, but Redman did not remember afterward. From then on he did not consider anyone a partner. And with Collie gone forever, no one on the team ever took point but him. And no one ever spoke of moral courage.
Redman looked at his watch now and then proceeded to bag the scope and the laser range finder and took an extra few seconds to mock the time it would take to also bag his rifle and pick up a shell casing. He inched backward from the roofline and then walked in a crouch to the fire escape. When he was back in the van, with everything stowed away, he rechecked the watch. He wanted the timing of his exit on Monday to be perfect, nothing left to chance, only training. One shot, one kill.
Chapter 17
On Sunday Nick spent two hours on the couch watching cartoons with his daughter. He drank coffee and munched on oven-baked crescent rolls and worked very hard against