And James Gentry taught most of the state’s SWAT teams right here on Claude Harvey Road. By the nineties he was training federal law enforcement and even some CIA units, as well, all of whom knew he had the abilities to show them how to clean and clear houses without subjecting large portions of their units to near-certain death.
James’s wife died back in the eighties, but not before she gave him two healthy boys. Courtland, and then two years later, Chancellor. Chance seemed destined to follow in his father’s footsteps from birth. He always wanted to wear his father’s police gear, or dress up like the Lone Ranger.
Court was night and day different from his little brother; he was obsessed with Indians as a child, he was more interested in horses than in police cars, and Court became the Indian outlaw to Chance’s U.S. Marshal. They chased each other all over the farm in character. Chance versus Court. Cowboy versus Indian. The good guy versus the bad guy.
The father’s son, and the rebel.
Both boys assisted their dad in his business, first by helping to pick up spent brass around the ranges and shoot house, then by cleaning the training weapons each night while the SWAT teams sat in meeting rooms, going over the day’s actions.
Even as a small boy Court had been a mascot of the school. Though he didn’t have his brother’s obsession with guns, he’d been a natural with firearms, even better than his brother, and students from all over the country training at the school would bet handfuls of ammunition they could outshoot the ten-year-old son of the legendary James Gentry.
The older Gentry took all their bets, and invariably he’d end up with more loaded ammo to throw into his oil drum full of Court’s winnings.
By the time Court was fourteen, he and his brother had found themselves at the center of the family business. Their dad would let them play hooky from school so they could serve as opposition forces pitted against visiting SWAT teams, waiting in the dark for cops to come into the shoot house with guns loaded with paintballs.
Often the Gentry boys would take down full eight- or twelve-man units without so much as a single splatter on their own bodies.
And more often than not furious police captains screamed red-faced at James Gentry, insisting the training was rigged against his men, because no one could believe a couple of teenaged brothers, one short-haired and personable, the other long-haired and reserved, could wipe out well-trained tactical units of veteran cops.
James Gentry sometimes allowed the captains to make the rules in the next drill, to stack the deck in favor of their own men, and often the result was the same.
But Court’s rebellious nature grew exponentially in his late teens and he ran afoul of his taciturn father. Though Chance did his best to keep the peace between them, Court and James were two stubborn personalities, and conflict between them became the norm.
Court drifted away from Glen St. Mary as soon as he turned eighteen, and he ended up in Miami. There, looking for work, he took a job in security for a shady businessman and, with no clear understanding of what he was involved with, he slowly realized he had managed to become a henchman for a drug dealer. This career lasted exactly two months, and it ended abruptly when an attempt on his boss’s life at Opa-locka Airport caused Court to pull out his Micro Uzi and open fire.
In five seconds three men were dead, and in thirty seconds more, Court was on his knees with his hands in the air, complying with the orders of the undercover DEA officer who stared him down over the barrel of his shotgun.
The fact that the dead men were all Cuban assassins did not get Court off the hook and, by age nineteen, it looked like he’d spend the rest of his life behind bars.
But a CIA officer who’d once taken a weeklong course at the tactical training center in Glen St. Mary found out about the older Gentry brother’s misfortune, and he sent recruiters to the penitentiary where Gentry was serving time.
Accommodations were made, his record was expunged, and soon Court Gentry was in training at the CIA’s facility in Harvey Point, North Carolina, to become a singleton operator for the CIA.
He never looked back, and he never returned to north Florida.
Until now.
Court lay prone under a pine tree, eighty yards from his father’s driveway. Through the scope of Zack Hightower’s rifle he had line of sight on the front door of the double-wide, and he could see all the lights were off in the windows inside. He’d detected no sign of surveillance, and an F-250 pickup truck was parked in the drive just exactly at the angle his dad had always parked his car, so he thought the odds were good his dad was home.
As the sun came up a little more and the light grew, he took in more of the property.
Court saw his old beloved Bronco sitting up on blocks next to the garage. It was half-hidden by the weeds and covered in grime from twenty years of accumulation from the crab apple tree above it.
He’d come to rescue his dad, but for a moment he thought about saying “Screw it,” leaving his father to the enemy, and just rescuing his old truck instead.
But not for too long. By eight a.m. he saw the first movement of something larger than a rooster on the property — a new gray Chrysler 300 rolling up the dirt road towards his father’s farm. It looked like it was probably a rental car, but after it stopped and two men climbed out, Court knew in a heartbeat these guys were either FBI or state investigators, or perhaps CIA officers posing as law enforcement.
Court lowered his eye back into the rifle scope and tracked the men carefully as they parked by the F-250 and headed up to the front door of his father’s old trailer.
The door opened after a few knocks, and Court put his eyes in his binoculars. His father answered, and he stood there in worn boxers and an old gray T-shirt with the logo for the NRA on the front.
Court zoomed his binos in on his father’s face.
“Jesus, Dad. You got old.”
Court chastised himself immediately. The last time he’d seen his father’s face, James would have been in his late forties. Court himself had been a teenager, and since then his life had been hard lived, to say the least.
He figured if anyone looked twenty years older than the last time the two had spoken, it would be Court.
The three men on the little wooden porch talked for over a minute, and Court couldn’t hear a bit of it. The Walker’s Game Ear was in place, and he could clearly hear their voices, but with the ambient sounds of a steady breeze and the clucking chickens it was hard to make out much of the conversation.
Finally Court heard one word, spoken by his father, in a surprised, questioning tone.
“Breakfast?”
These goons were asking to take Court’s dad to breakfast on this fine Saturday morning.
And this told Court exactly where they were heading.
He wanted to back away right now, but instead he waited, and he was glad he did, because James Gentry invited the men inside, presumably so he could change clothes. As soon as the door closed, Court began a quick but careful egress across a small field till he got to the higher brush near the pond, and then he stood in a crouch and began hurrying back to his Bronco.
As soon as he made it to his vehicle, he pulled out all the clothes in his backpack and began digging through them. He wanted to pick just the right attire to wear for the surveillance he had planned.
Five minutes later Court had already changed clothes, and he was pulling out of the trees and onto a dirt road.
There wasn’t just one diner that served breakfast in Glen St. Mary. There were two. But as long as Court could remember, his father had only gone to one of them.