Edward’s life-sized torso target is only ten feet away, but Dan Strickland knows that ten feet is farther than it sounds when your adrenaline is pumping and you’ve got a heavy gun in your hands. Edward is midway through his course but only half his shots this close are hitting the kill zone. Edward is a young gym manager who lives in a rough part of San Ysidro and sometimes sees gang activity in his neighborhood. Sometimes he has to carry cash from the gym to his car. He’s got a wife and a daughter. Strickland knows that because Edward is a bodybuilder, he thinks large muscles will make him powerful, but Edward strangles his pistol and the strain shivers the barrel, ruining his accuracy and jacking up his stress. Edward finishes his rapid volley, lowers his gun to the bench, and looks at Strickland through his shooting glasses, eyes bugged and sweating hard.
Strickland toggles in the well-perforated target, replacing it with a fresh one. “Let’s try ten feet again, Ed. You can’t be missing these shots. You’ve got to be perfect inside ten feet, great at twenty, and good at thirty. You’re still up from last week, so, right direction, Ed. Now, address the threat with calm and cool.”
The most valuable thing that Dan can do for his students is to make them positive and confident, but still aware of their weaknesses. The first is easy. By the time they’ve made it through eighty hours of shooting, hand-to-hand fighting, bear spray applications, weapon-retention, reaction conditioning, and fitness training — they’ll be positive and confident, all right. But if they’re not truthful about their weaknesses, those weaknesses might get them killed. You’re only as strong as your weakness, he tells them. Your goal is to walk way. Your goal is to stay alive.
From the moment his applicants sit down across from him in the Apex office, Strickland probes them for weakness. He senses it by their bodies, expressions, their words and clothes, their complexions, their smells, even their handwriting. After their first day of evaluation and training, Strickland knows exactly what these mortals must do to survive the things they fear. His job is to make them do it, and equip them.
Edward needs to fire another thousand rounds at ten feet into the paper torso.
Molly, the English teacher, needs eye surgery. She’s a natural with a pistol, shoots tight groups at ten feet and is capable at thirty. But she wears glasses, and her heavy lenses steam up when she’s under exertion, and she won’t wear contacts, and she doesn’t want some guy cutting into her eyes. Strickland has been cajoling her for four weeks now on the merits of LASIK. Some of his students have had it, all agreeing it’s the best $4,000 they’ve ever spent. Molly wants good eyes and she wants to please him. He’s offered to help pay for her surgery.
He stands behind her and watches. When she’s emptied her pistol, she turns and smiles at him.
“You’re killing them today, Molly.”
“Yes, I am. I hit the public range twice this week.”
“I see those glasses are a bit steamed up.”
“It’s like shooting through fog.”
“Get the surgery, girl. It could save your life.”
“I’m leaning in that direction but I will not accept one penny from you.”
“As you wish. Just do it.”
“I’d accept a cup of coffee or a beer, though. When this is over. When I graduate.”
“Let’s graduate you first.”
Her expression cools almost imperceptibly.
“You call the shots, Dan.”
After shooting is lunch, twenty minutes of meditation, then two hours of hand-to-hand, an hour of situational weapon retention, and another hour of de-escalation. Bear spray comes last, always last, showers optional.
In the hand-to-hand, short, slender Molly kicks and hits him hard. As instructor, Dan is padded up, but a mule kick to the balls is still a mule kick to the balls. The eye-rakes still smash the catcher’s mask into his face, as do the palm-heel nose blows thrown with a pivot of the hips. Dan has chosen the quickest and most debilitating moves from the several martial arts he knows. The only thing he’ll teach but won’t let them practice on him is biting.
His students end the day with a rough hour of weights and stretches and leave Apex well after dark, mentally and physically exhausted.
Dan stands by the door and shakes their hands as they leave. Then climbs the stairs to his penthouse, exhausted too.
He sits down at his computer and calls up his favorite Tijuana newspapers, searching their pages for any mention of a dog found dead or wounded at the Furniture Calderón shoot-out. Tries the gruesome, anonymously operated Blog Narco, always a good bet.
Nothing about a dog that night, shot or not. Of course not, thinks Dan. Tijuana is full of dogs. Why should even a wounded one make the news?
In the bedroom he gets ready to shower, looking down at Joe’s crate and all the dog’s beloved stuff. Joe loves plush toys. Dan has yet to know another dog that would leave the squeaker working in a plush skunk for months on end.
Joe.
Strickland checks his phone.
It’s Héctor:
?????
And a picture of a dog on the shoulder of a dirt road. It’s not Joe, but Dan’s eyes burn as he steps into the shower, and it’s not from the bear spray.
6
Bettina sits in her window cubicle at the Coastal Eddy offices in Laguna, looking out at Coast Highway. The last paragraph of her story on the rescue of Felix is done. The winter morning is bright and cool and the Pacific glimmers like a mirror. The cars on the highway glide.
Felix lies in a patch of sun beside her desk. He seems less fretful than yesterday, and slightly more curious about his new human.
Jean Rose, Bettina’s editor, bustles into the cubicle. “Betts, incredible — we put up the dog story two hours ago, and the views are incredible! Coastal Eddy has never seen this kind of engagement before. Messages still pouring in, and pictures of other dogs that look like our hero. Great work on the print story too.”
“I’m glad you like it.”
“Just a few questions.”
Jean Rose is a bright, optimistic woman, mid-sixties and always dressed more up than down. Tasteful jewelry, light makeup and lipstick, hair casually perfect. She treats Bettina as a promising, in-the-rough underling, but in a gracious and helpful way. She offers Felix a treat from the jar on Bettina’s desk and the dog politely takes it. Jean sits opposite her reporter.
“I had standard poodles in my dog days,” she says. “I miss them.”
“Get another one, Jean.”
“Too much work.”
“Get a lazy one, like a retired greyhound or something.”
“No, I like my freedom. Now, your print story — what about the boy who saved Felix? Can we name him?”
“Not a good idea if cartels were mixed up in Felix getting shot. Dr. Rodríguez didn’t get the boy’s name. The doctors didn’t even have time to thank him. Because of how serious it was.”
Jean Rose nods, purses her lips. Bettina thinks that she’d someday like to have what Jean has: brains and class. To be an arriver, not a striver. Arriving at yourself and liking what you find.
“I’d like to go back down there, find the boy, and get his story,” Bettina says. “I know where the shoot-out happened and I can ask around. Someone will know who he is. I’ll keep his name out of it. No pictures.”
“You know, Bettina, that’s worth pursuing at some point,” says Jean. “But first I’ll need the council wrap, and your summer festival preview. And, of course, the calendar. We are a community newspaper, after all. Not an international one. Which, I think someday would be a good place for you.”