Red Man Down(8)

The other thing she hadn’t known much about till that morning was rage. She’d learned a great deal about it in the next five minutes. Red hot rage had flooded her brain and helped her to go on fighting till she’d somehow rolled out from under him, jumped up and landed a couple of well-placed kicks she’d learned in Tae Kwon-Do. They’d been good enough to earn a welcome grunt of surprise and appreciation from the Red Man, and one of the observers had said, ‘That’s more like it. Now get the cuffs on him, Sarah.’ She’d been awkward with that, too, but she’d done it, and finally got to walk out of that terrible room, past the observers with their straight faces and amused eyes.

It hadn’t been pretty, but it must have been good enough, because she’d got to stay and try it again later. He’d been patient the next day when he said, ‘Let me show you what you missed at the beginning …’ and began pointing out the behaviors to watch for: the tense shoulders, hostile or dead-looking eyes – ‘And if he turns like this, making a wedge shape, see? That’s to protect as much of himself as possible when he clobbers you.’

Before she was done she’d had to learn how to respond effectively without the anger – to fight like a savage while staying perfectly calm. Rationalizing the battle had turned out to be one of her strengths, and she’d graduated with high marks from the academy. But she’d never forgotten the pain and terror of that first day’s battle.

‘And that’s what it’s for,’ Dietz had said when she’d told him about it. ‘Every time you ever think about it, you’ll remember that you didn’t curl up in a ball and try to hide. It costs a lot of money to train a cop. We have to spend it on people who aren’t going to quit in a fight.’

A homicide detective when she met him, Dietz had been on the training crew earlier and taken his turns as the Red Man. He had put in many hours pondering the best ways to train a cop. ‘Every time you think you’ve got all the answers,’ he’d told her, ‘something changes.’ Training would always be a work in progress, probably, especially in border cities like Tucson with constantly shifting populations – and now with technology that never stopped evolving.

They tried to spend the money on people who could keep their wits facing firearms, too.

‘You can’t just point and shoot,’ the Red Man had said to Sarah. ‘You gotta stay focused, but you don’t have time to hesitate.’ If Will Dietz hadn’t kept his head and fought back quickly in the totally unexpected gun battle he happened to walk into two years ago, he would have been dead in the first two minutes. No question, he had told Sarah, that his many hours of training had saved his life. All that drilling, over and over and over again, fixed target to moving target to running gun battle with a trainer shouting in your ear, was to develop the quick reaction to a threat that Dan Spurlock had displayed today.

Spurlock told Sarah and the IA man, Jeffries, everything he could remember about it that day, after she took him to their headquarters at South Stone. First they listened to the recording from Spurlock’s car, and the other side of the traffic from his dispatcher at the West Side station. Then they asked him to review the shooting as he remembered it.

‘Everything seemed to slow down,’ he said. He looked like he might be going into shock, not quite ready to puke but not in the market for snacks either. ‘All the rest of the world went, like, away someplace – there was just me and him with that gun in his hand. Like we were alone together in a tunnel – even the traffic noise went away.’

Sarah nodded and saw Jeffries nod too – involuntarily, she thought; he didn’t mean to be encouraging, but like her he remembered how it felt. There was never going to be anything again quite like the first time you saw a weapon aimed at you and knew this was it, The Big One, your ultimate question about your ability to do this job, getting answered right now.

‘Over and over during shooting drills they tell you, “You don’t have any time to think.” And oh, man is that ever true …’ He looked at Jeffries, whose square face showed nothing during these interrogations, and then at Sarah, who nodded, wanting to keep making eye contact so he’d know she was paying close attention. ‘You see the threat, pull your weapon and fire. It doesn’t take thought, it just happens. I mean, what else are you going to do?

‘In class, the trainer always says, “And when you shoot, you shoot to kill, understood?” Like we might be tempted to fire a warning shot over somebody’s shoulder. But shit – you’re never going to fire that Glock unless you have to, so if you have to fire it you sure as hell aren’t going to dick around. I mean, what? Knee-cap this bad guy while he shoots your head off? I don’t think so. I didn’t think about it at all. Soon as I saw that gun in his hand I slid sideways to get behind the door again, and I aimed for that kill zone each time.’