Chapter 1 - The Barbecue on the Firing Line
The Fourth of July sun hung over the Spokane Valley like an open blast furnace, baking the red clay berms of the private shooting club until the air shimmered with waves of mirage. Beneath the corrugated tin roof of the range pavilion, the heavy, sweet stench of hickory barbecue smoke battled the acrid tang of burnt gunpowder and warm Hoppe’s No. 9 bore cleaner. An oversized nylon American flag, anchored to the center post with rusty zip-ties, snapped violently in the hot canyon breeze, its red, white, and blue synthetic weave humming against the timber frame.
For Dennis, this annual holiday gathering was not a celebration of national independence; it was his personal coronation.
At sixty-two, the retired county detective possessed the dense, thick-necked build of an aging middleweight who had long since traded sparring rounds for steak dinners and domestic beer. His weathered face was permanently creased into an expression of skeptical derision, framed by a coarse gray beard cut square along the jaw. He wore an olive-drab ball cap with a subdued tactical patch, the frames of expensive ballistic sunglasses resting casually on the curved brim. An open olive overshirt hung loose over a dark-green T-shirt, draped haphazardly over his bulging waistband and worn cargo trousers. He held court behind a battered wooden picnic table cluttered with half-empty foam coolers, cardboard ammunition boxes, greasy paper plates, and the collective bravado of six retired police buddies.
“See, the academy kids today, they got no fundamentals,” Dennis boomed, his voice carrying the rasp of four decades of filtered cigarettes and roadside arguments. He slapped the wooden bench with a heavy palm, gesturing toward the paper silhouette targets stapled fifty feet downrange. “They rely on red dots. They rely on twenty-round magazines. In my day on the road, if you couldn't draw from a thumb-break leather holster and put three rounds center-mass before the suspect cleared the dashboard, you didn't belong in uniform.”
Murmurs of agreement rumbled through his cronies—men in their late fifties and sixties sporting faded department windbreakers, faded tattoos, and the smug complacency of a generation that believed history had stopped evolving when they handed in their badges.
Standing ten paces away, at the edge of the firing line where the hot gravel gave way to dry cheatgrass, stood Willa Sutter.
At thirty-two, Willa looked like an instrument forged under pressure and tempered in cold oil. She stood with her feet planted at shoulder width, her spine upright with the effortless, relaxed balance of a career soldier. Her dark brown hair was swept up into a messy high bun, loose strands whipping across her fair, rosy cheeks in the gusting wind. Her eyes, clear and unblinking, were fixed on the black silhouette of the B-27 paper target hanging downrange.
She wore an olive tactical combat shirt, the sleeves rolled cleanly to the mid-forearm, displaying corded muscle and zero jewelry save for a subdued black digital compass watch. Sewn to her right shoulder was a muted olive-and-black American flag patch, sitting squarely above the subdued insignia of an Army Sergeant First Class. Her matching cargo trousers were tucked into scarred, desert-tan combat boots, anchored by a rigid black duty belt that supported a molded polymer retention holster holding an issue-black sidearm.
For eleven years, ever since she walked into an Army recruiting station in downtown Seattle the week after her high school graduation, Dennis had treated her military service as an ongoing personal insult. To Dennis, the Army was a place people went when they couldn't pass a municipal civil service exam. Whenever family dinners rolled around, Dennis made sure everyone at the table knew that Willa was just “shuffling requisition forms in air-conditioned trailers.”
He had never asked what she actually taught. He had never asked why she spent six months at Fort Leonard Wood, or why the Department of Defense kept renewing her special duty assignment. In Dennis’s narrow mind, the real world belonged to local street cops, while the military was an oversized daycare for clerks.
Willa adjusted her ear protection around her neck, remaining silent. She had learned long ago that arguing with Dennis was like pouring water into a cracked bucket; the noise was loud, and nothing ever stayed inside.
Behind the table, standing beside an insulated cooler, stood Martha. Willa’s mother was fifty-eight, dressed in a soft blue button-down and dark slacks, her shoulder-length blonde hair tucked nervously behind her ears. Martha had spent twelve years acting as the human shock absorber between her husband’s monstrous ego and her daughter’s quiet steel. Now, sensing the predictable shift in the wind, Martha brought a hand to her mouth, her hazel eyes darting anxiously between the two of them.
May you like
Dennis drained the last swig of his light beer, tossed the crushed aluminum can onto a cardboard flat, and wiped his gray beard with the back of his forearm. His small, calculating eyes settled on Willa’s holster.
“Hey, Willa,” Dennis called out, raising his voice so every retired officer under the tin roof would turn their heads. “Before you go fetching your mother another bottle of iced tea… why don't you show the boys how they teach you girls to shoot down in Missouri?”
