After an hour with Brian, Steve Sommers, who had watched much of the sparring, laid claim to me and we were off to the range. Located in the same vast building but seemingly half a county away, the range was mostly empty and we had one end all to ourselves.
“First, let's see how you handle your issue sidearm,” he said.
So I drew my Glock 19 and worked through a couple of qualification targets. It had been awhile since I had been to a range, but my enhanced vision and reflexes handed me perfect scores.
“Excellent shooting! Let me guess, you've been shooting long before the academy?”
“Actually, since I was twelve.” I filled him in on my teenage training years.
He just looked at me for a moment, then grinned. “We're gonna skip all the basic crap and get right to the good stuff!” he said with enthusiasm. He pulled out a molded plastic handgun case and opened it up. Inside was another Glock, this one looking almost identical to a Glock 17, the larger service model of my 19. But this gun had a small circular switch on the left side of the rear slide, and that one difference told me all I needed.
“That's a Glock 18!” I said, as excited as he was. He nodded and pulled a loaded thirty-three round magazine from another bag. Locking the extended mag into the gun's grip, he racked a round into the chamber and handed it to me. “The selector is on full auto. Show me what you can do.” he said.
The Glock 18 is a select fire full automatic pistol originally developed for Austrian counter terrorist forces. In semi auto mode it fires just like the model 17, but in full auto mode it will fire at rates of up to twelve hundred rounds per minute. A two second pull of the trigger will empty a thirty-three round magazine. I'm pretty sure that's what Steve expected me to do. But my childhood instructors had given me a good grounding in full auto technique. Instead of spraying the mag empty, I tapped the trigger for a series of five-and ten-round bursts, keeping all the rounds on target. The gun was ridiculously easy to control and I had a huge grin on my face when the slide locked back on an empty chamber. Seeing the results of my first attempt, Sommers took the gun back, placed it back in its case, packed up his stuff and said simply, “Come on!”. He led me through short series of doors till we came to another range, this one open without shooting lanes. A control panel sat on a desk at the back and as he powered up the range systems he instructed me to retrieve the Glock and several mags of ammo. Shooting glasses and earmuffs on and I was on the firing line. What followed was a full hour of action shooting on automated popup targets. It was the most fun I'd had at work since I started with the NYPD. When we finished, I cleaned the 18 to his satisfaction, packed it away and we headed back to the squad's offices.
Roma greeted us as we entered. “How he do?” he asked.
“He cleared the first four simulations almost perfectly. We ran outta time for the other two, but I'm ready to issue him the 18 right now!” Sommers answered.
“Really? Well, by all means proceed. Chris, when you’re done I’d like to see you.”
“Sure thing Inspector.”
Sommers had a small forest worth of papers for me to sign, formally issuing the Glock 18 to me. He pulled out a kydex holster, double mag carrier, three twenty round mags and three thirty-three round mags. Then he went to closet door next to his gun safe, unlocked it and pulled out a metal GI ammo can. Popping it open, he showed me the contents, six fifty round blocks of nine millimeter ammunition. He plucked a round out of its individual slot and offered it to me for inspection. Viewed from the side, it looked like a standard hollowpoint round. A look at the business end revealed that the hollow cavity was filled with silver. “Silver itself is hard enough to make a decent bullet, but casting them is a bitch. The melting point is ridiculously high, and the metal cools so fast that there are almost always serious flaws with the finished bullet. So, we’ve opted to fill standard copper jackets with silver instead. They fly true and are quite effective on impact. They behave more like a flatnose solid, with little expansion, but penetrating heavy muscle is usually of more concern than anything else.” He said.
“So silver really is effective against weres?” I asked.
“Yes, as well as on vamps and most other supernaturals. Something about the metal is poisonous to them.”
I knew from personal experience that silver worked on vampires -- my introduction to Tatiana had demonstrated that. I was also aware that silver killed most viruses and bacteria on contact as well.
“Conventional rounds will eventually kill weres and vamps too. Just takes a ton of them on target to get the job done. Not likely with the speed they both can move at. As it is, we have to shoot the crap out of them with the silver. They’re friggin’ tough!”
“How many have you shot?” I asked.
“I shot one vamp in Dallas. I used to be a feddie, but Roma recruited me. But shootings happen very rarely. Mostly, they take care of their own problems for us. We just sometimes have to show them that we’re aware of an issue.” He said. “Tomorrow, we’ll run the other two scenarios. Both are run at a much faster speed than the four you did today. I’ll be interested to see how you handle them. You pretty much cleaned house today!”
I thanked Steve, grabbed the gun bag he had given me and headed out to find Roma.
The Inspector was in his office with the door open, when I knocked.
“Come in Chris.” He said.
He pushed a small, tidy stack of files across his desk top to me as I took a chair.
“It occurred to me that we come from very different backgrounds and experiences in the supernatural world. Gina helped me understand that you deal with the worst of the worst – the demons. As such, it’s natural for you to view the others as more…benign, maybe?”
Not sure where he was going, I just nodded my head.
“Right, well, as you indicated the last night, they’re not all the same. Some might be relatively okay—“ He frowned as he spoke, “ and others are very, very malignant indeed.”
I opened the first file and found a table listing missing person statistics for the United States over the past decade. A second table showed unsolved murder statistics in the U.S. for the same time frame. The files that followed were all homicide cases that a quick glance showed to be horrifically violent. Roma continued when I looked back up at him.
“Each year well over one hundred thousand people go missing without being found. Each year there are thousands of murder cases that go unsolved. Those are just the reported cases. It is fairly safe to assume that thousands of other missing person cases go unreported. That first file works through the numbers and you’ll see a close correspondence with the kill ratios that scientists have observed in natural predator prey relationships. Some are the work of humans, but, as you’ll see from the rest of the files, some are the work of supernatural predators, vampires and weres.” He rubbed his temples for a moment before continuing.
“Chris, I want you to read through these files tonight with an open mind. My goal is to make sure you have the proper….respect for these predators. We run various shifts as needed here, but why don’t you come in tomorrow at nine. That way, you can make it to that important party tomorrow night. Good night.” He said, in obvious dismissal.