Greg Iles - Third Degree

“You heard the man,” said Willie.

Carl exhaled long and slow, trying to prepare himself for the blast of testosterone he would encounter a few hundred yards up the street.

“I hope the sheriff gets here soon,” Willie said.

“You and me both, brother.”

Carl took his foot off the brake and idled up Lyonesse. Nearly two months since the TRU was last called out. In that case, they’d received a report of a man barricaded in his downtown house with his family. What the TRU found when it arrived on the scene was quite different: a local engineer lying in his bathtub with a homemade bomb in his lap and his family safe outside. The TRU didn’t have a trained hostage negotiator, so anybody might wind up talking to the subject, depending on circumstances. In the engineer’s case, the sheriff had spent two hours talking to him through the bathroom window, shielded by the wall, a flak jacket, and a bulletproof helmet. Sheriff Ellis had less than two years on the job, and his last law-enforcement experience had been as an MP in Germany twenty years before. He was a God-fearing man who had a good rapport with people, but it hadn’t been enough. The engineer blew himself up while the sheriff prayed for his immortal soul, repainting the bathroom with what had been his insides a millisecond before. Sheriff Ellis was wounded by ricocheting shrapnel that turned out to be a chunk of jawbone.

Carl had watched all this through his 10X Unertl scope, from a deer stand he’d mounted in a tree in a neighbor’s yard. He’d wanted to destroy the bomb’s works with a bullet, but since the device was clutched in the engineer’s lap, he couldn’t do it without killing the man. The hand holding the detonator was concealed behind the cast-iron side of the tub, so that option was out. The only other way to stop the bomb from exploding would have been to fire a round through the engineer’s brain stem, short-circuiting his nervous system, but the rules for bombers were different in Mississippi than they’d been in Iraq-at least when the only people they threatened were themselves.

Carl put the incident out of his mind as he rolled up Lyonesse, because thinking about it only led him to the incident before that one-the one that had caused friction between him and the sheriff. He didn’t need to cloud his mind with that right now.

Ahead, five cruisers sat parked on the street before a big Colonial set fifty meters back from the road. Mixed among them were civilian vehicles that belonged to the off-duty TRU men who’d been called up. Carl knew that his tactical commander was anxious, but he obeyed the speed limit and slowed for the speed bumps. He wanted to give the sheriff every opportunity to arrive before Ray Breen did something ill-advised.

Law enforcement in Athens Point was a curious thing. The police department had jurisdiction over the city, and by tradition the Sheriff’s Department took the outlying county. But technically the sheriff had jurisdiction over the city as well. Before 1968, both departments had been 100 percent white, but gradually the police department came to more closely resemble the city itself, which was 55 percent black. The county as a whole had a similar percentage, but geographically blacks tended to congregate in the city, while the outlying county was mostly white. This had somehow resulted in an unbroken line of white sheriffs (Carl figured it was the shape of the voting districts). He would have preferred working for the black police chief, but the pay and benefits were better in the Sheriff’s Department, so he’d opted to work in the county.

Most of his fellow TRU deputies were white country boys of a type Carl knew well. The majority were ten to fifteen years older than he, and some were over fifty. In a town with high unemployment, men didn’t give up jobs with benefits unless they were pushed out-usually after an election. But despite the age and background of the men, there was an attitude of benign tolerance toward black officers in the unit. Prejudice still existed, but it was an amorphous thing, difficult to point at and impossible to prove, except in a few cases. Even the hard-core, Southern-rock NASCAR types accepted that civil rights reforms were here to stay, and they tried to make the best of it.

Beyond this, Carl was a special case. His military record as a sniper gave him an almost magical immunity to prejudice. In his experience, white country boys were fairly primitive in their social habits, creatures of dominance and submission, like the hunting dogs he’d raised as a boy. Physical prowess meant a lot, the ability to withstand pain meant more, but nothing ranked higher in their estimation than combat experience. If a man had shed blood in the mud and held his nerve under fire, then it didn’t make a damn bit of difference what color he was-not to most of them, anyway. As a sniper with a near-legendary number of confirmed kills, Carl occupied rarefied air in the redneck firmament. The fact that he was black had put some of those good old boys in the curious position of almost fawning over a guy they might have tried to kick the shit out of if he’d wandered into their neighborhood at night.

Carl parked his Cherokee behind the rearmost cruiser and got his rain slicker out of the cargo compartment. He decided to leave his rifle case locked in the vehicle. The slower things moved, the more time there would be for hormones to stabilize and adrenaline to be flushed away.

He saw the mobile command post over the roofs of the cruisers. The camouflage-painted camper trailer had been towed under a small stand of trees and braced with cinder blocks. The steady rumble of a generator echoed over the flat ground, which meant lights in the trailer, if not air-conditioning. Carl reminded himself that he was only a deputy, not the ranking member of an autonomous sniper-scout unit, as he had been in Iraq. His job when he stepped into the trailer would be to take orders, not give them. And any advice he offered was likely to be rejected unless it reinforced what his superiors had already decided.

His biggest worry right now was the Breen brothers, one of whom was the commander of the Tactical Response Unit, subject only to Sheriff Ellis in a situation like this one. The Breen brothers looked to have been cut from the same piece of wood. They had farmer’s tans, cracked skin, and slit eyes that betrayed so much meanness it made people take a step back, even when they were out of uniform. Both were lean and gaunt, the younger one, Trace, so much so that Carl wondered if he’d suffered some nutritional disease like rickets as a child. But maybe Trace just stayed so pissed off all the time that his anger had begun to consume him. Ray, the elder of the pair, was bulkier and had a more open face than his brother, despite his cowboy mustache. He’d served in the army during the lean years after Vietnam, as an MP, like Sheriff Ellis. He was also a Weekend Warrior like Ellis, but though Ray’s unit had been called up for Bosnia, he hadn’t seen action there either. He’d worked as a welder for a while, but got fired because he kept getting into fights. Only when he hired on with the Sheriff’s Department had he found his calling; he wore the uniform like a suit of armor, and Carl could tell that the power of the job was what got Ray Breen out of bed every morning.

Ray reveled in the high-tech equipment of his Tactical Response Unit. Over the past few years, he had somehow scrounged together an arsenal that could adequately supply an urban SWAT unit. The TRU had automatic weapons, flash-bang grenades, shaped charges, advanced commo gear, and night-vision devices. In his off hours Ray read Tom Clancy, Dale Brown, and Larry Bond, or played Rainbow Six: Splinter Cell on his son’s Xbox 360. If Carl chanced to meet Ray Breen in Wal-Mart or at a high school football game, the commander would squint and give a slight nod, as though to say, We’re part of an elite team. These civilians know we’re always on the lookout for trouble.