Justice Served? (Part Two)

Read Part One here...

***

I dropped to the deck, pulled the empty magazine, field stripped the rifle back down to two pieces and stuffed them back in my golf bag. I fished out Danny the security guard’s cigarette butt from my pocket and threw it on the deck at my feet.

    That ought to throw off the dogs for a bit. Sorry Danny, but better you than me.

I picked up my three brass shell casings and dropped them in my bag, zipped up the pocket, hoisted the bag and headed for the roof door. I kept my golf gloves on until I was through the door. There was only one flight of steps from the roof to the top office floor. I had no idea who would be on the other side of that door. I’d just have to take a chance.

I opened the door to the top floor offices and only saw one guy far down the hall walking away from me. He rounded the corner at the other end of the hall and was out of sight. I pulled off my gloves on the way to the elevators and tried to look as nonchalant as possible as I hit the down button. My heart was still beating in spasms from the adrenaline but I concentrated on keeping my breathing under control in case I had to speak to anyone when the elevator door opened. As I waited for the elevator I looked at my watch.

    Let’s see, I dropped my target two minutes ago. If I can get out of the building in the next two minutes, I’ve got a chance.

I looked up at the lighted numbers on top of the elevator doors as the elevator crawled up to my floor…4…5…6…7, then, I heard someone speaking unusually loud for being in an elevator. I heard the man’s words in a deep, anxious voice just as the bell rang at my floor.

“You go left, I’ll go right, don’t let anyone off the floor,” I heard him say through the doors just before they opened.

I hit the stairwell just to the right of the elevators as I heard the elevator doors open on the top floor.

“FBI, nobody leave this floor,” I heard the same man yell behind the stairwell door as I took the steps down two at a time.

I made it down one flight and heard the stairwell door above me swing open so hard it slammed the wall and reverberated through the concrete floors throughout the stairwell. I slowly opened the door to the seventh floor, one floor down, and walked to its bank of elevators. I hit the button and waited again. It seemed like it took the bright number eight above the polished metal elevator doors an hour to switch to a seven.

The bell rang and the elevator door finally opened. It was empty. I stepped in and hit the number two and continued to concentrate on my breathing, this time with my eyes closed. It was too nerve racking to watch the numbers count down. I opened my eyes when the bell rang and the elevator door opened onto the second floor. I walked the four steps around the corner to the stairwell door that led two more floors down to the underground garage. In the stairwell, I heard the commotion far away near the top floors and smiled as I got to the garage entrance.

Despite the commotion inside, the garage almost seemed too quiet. I hit my keyless entry button and the trunk button on my keychain. My black Ford Flex’s lights flashed as the doors unlocked and the tail gate raised automatically a few steps before I got to the car. I placed my golf bag in the back, got in, looked at myself in the rear-view mirror and smiled.

    Almost there.

I drove over the spiked pads at the garage exit and turned right onto the street. I saw some movement in my rear-view mirror and noticed that they had just lowered the security gate from the ceiling behind me only seconds after I’d left. I was the last car out before the building went into lock down. I practiced my cover story a dozen times on the eleven minute drive to my neighbor’s storage unit complex.

 My neighbor was a divorced naval officer who’d lived next to me for two years. He’d felt comfortable enough in our neighborly relationship to ask me to take his jet ski out a few times while he was gone on a six month deployment overseas so he wouldn’t have to winterize it while he was gone. I was happy to oblige. The storage unit where he kept it locked up along with a lot of his other belongings served as the perfect spot that couldn’t be directly traced to me to destroy my evidence.

About a month ago, I bought a hand-held circular metal cutting saw on Craig’s List for a hundred bucks. I plugged it in and its circular diamond blade made quick work of my M-16A4. It reduced my tool of justice (not murder weapon) to eight pieces that could fit into a can of muriatic acid I had standing by. The acid wouldn’t break down the weapon totally, but it would eat microscopic ridges in the metal, especially inside the barrel where the rifling leaves specific markings on a bullet like a fingerprint. The damage caused by the muriatic acid will make it impossible to prove it was the weapon that fired the rounds that killed Mr. Randolph. That is, of course, assuming anyone ever finds the bucket.

I put the chopped up weapon, magazine and my gloves into the bucket of muriatic acid and was placing the lid on it when my cell phone rang. I looked at my watch before I answered it: twenty-two minutes since I dropped my target.

“Special Agent Winters,” I said into my phone.

“Boss, you gotta get in here quick. We’ve been trying to reach you.”

“Oh yeah? What’s up?”

“Someone took down William Randolph outside the court house.”

“What do you mean ‘took down’?”

“Three rifle shots to the head. He’s deader than shit. They think the shooter was on the roof of our building.”

“Our FBI office building?”

“Yeah, how crazy is that?”

 “Pretty crazy. Anyone in custody?” I said.

“Not yet. We’re locked down here. They’re still searching the building. How quick can you get here? They want statements from everyone.”

“I’m about fifteen minutes away.”

“You at the driving range again?”

“Well, I was on the way, I’m turning around now.”

“Okay, I’ll tell them you’re on your way in. You’re lucky you weren’t here. I’m sure it’s going to be hell for anyone who was in the building at the time.”

“You can bet on that.”

“Okay, see you soon.”

“Copy,” I said and hung up.

I put the secured can of eroding evidence in the back of my car and drove two miles to an abandoned warehouse. I dropped the can down a manhole I’d scoped out a few days prior. I washed my hands up to my elbows along with my neck and face with hand sanitizer and changed my shirt so I wouldn’t be wearing one that had gun powder residue embedded in the threads when I showed up to the shit storm at the office.

On the ride back I couldn’t stop smiling as I tried to control my breathing and prepare my mind for the inevitable questions and lie detector tests. If I was going to get away with this I had to consciously purge the words “justice was served” from my mind, even if I believed them to be true.               

Todd Tavolazzi is a full-time Naval Officer stationed in Norfolk, Virginia and a part-time writer. He usually writes on his porch with a drink and a smoke. He is a frequent contributor to Potluck.            

Justice Served? (Part One)

My only regret was that I was unable to stop the killing. I knew about William Randolph’s threats against stem cell researchers since the FBI placed him on the domestic terrorism watch list eighteen months before he committed any crime. The point of the watch list was to focus surveillance resources on known international and domestic terrorist threats.

In his case, the FBI had access to William Randolph’s phone records, driving records, state and federal tax information, utility and water use (to track whether he was harboring like-minded potential terrorists or criminals at his residence), website traffic, point of sale transactions and even his general whereabouts. The FBI considered him enough of a threat to place a satellite tracking device on his vehicle to monitor his location (or at least the location of his vehicle).

Despite the green light to conduct surveillance on him, I was never convinced that the FBI was doing an adequate job in actually tracking Mr. Randolph or truly understanding his intentions with enough specificity to stop him from doing anything illegal. His home address happened to be within ten miles of where I lived and I spent more than a few weekends staking out his house and following him around.

I wasn’t formally trained for this type of work but couldn’t stomach letting a known domestic threat have the run of the country while lurking in plain sight among the sea of law abiding Americans. I figured it wouldn’t be too difficult to do my part since the FBI only had about 14,000 Special Agents and nearly a million names on its terrorist watch list.

Even with my extra vigilance I was unable to stop what Mr. Randolph had planned.  Of all the weekends, Mr. Randolph chose the one when I happened to be out of town at a friend’s wedding to launch what amounted to a brutal and well-thought out plan.

While I was taking down double rum and Cokes from the open bar and watched the mother of the bride do the chicken dance on the dance floor, Mr. Randolph donned a backpack and pedaled his mountain bike to his target. He had packed two hand guns, a disassembled assault rifle and several magazines of ammunition for each weapon into his pack and rode five miles to an office park that housed a bio-tech company known for its stem cell research.

He leaned his bike on a shady tree in the parking lot, assembled his assault rifle, pulled on a tactical load bearing vest to hold his magazines and two pistols and calmly walk into an office and killed people he didn’t know as punishment for a perceived moral slight in his delusional mind.

Although the quick call to 911 from the bio-tech receptionist before she was mortally wounded and the excellent reaction time from local authorities helped limit casualties, the real hero was a janitor with a concealed carry permit who got off three shots and landed two of them with his Kel-Tec P-3AT .380 caliber handgun before Mr. Randolph returned fire and killed him. The janitor managed to get Mr. Randolph in the right arm and the right leg which slowed him down long enough to allow the police to respond. Police officers found Mr. Randolph behind a desk, bleeding profusely, trying to reload one of his two pistols with one hand.

* * *

William Randolph’s trial lasted for a little over a year as prosecutors argued for the death penalty for taking three innocent lives as payment for being involved in what their defendant said was “usurping the privilege of creation reserved solely for God.” When the verdict was publicized, only one dissenter pushed the vote toward life in prison without the possibility of parole. One person was all it took. A death penalty vote must be unanimous.

I was pulling into my reserved parking spot at work when I heard the verdict reported on the radio. I turned off the engine and made a decision at that moment that my tax money would not be used to pay for the 24/7 supervision for this individual’s feeding, housing, clothing, medical care and recreation for the remainder of his life. Whether he ended up living for one year or fifty, it would be too long.

I had mentally and physically prepared for this eventuality over a few weeks prior to the verdict. I resolved to follow through with my plan immediately. My heart raced as I came to the realization that today was the day. I would have to act immediately or lose the opportunity. The clock was ticking.  

* * *

Sheriff’s deputies would have to transfer Mr. Randolph from the courthouse to a waiting armored van to transfer him to a Federal penitentiary. The challenge for them was the twenty yard open area he would need to cross where he’d be fully exposed. This brief exposure was my only chance to make right what the jury obviously got wrong. The Sheriff’s only possible precautions to keep their newly convicted inmate safe were a bulletproof vest and speed. Fortunately for me, both could be negated with a bit of planning. And I had planned appropriately.

The only way to negate a bulletproof vest is to get close with armor piercing rounds or land one or more head shots. Getting close was not an option so I prepared for a head shot or two which took about a month. I told my colleagues I was diligently working to improve my golf game with the goal of achieving bragging rights over my asshole brother-in-law. This tactic allowed me to set up a consistent time block a few times per week to hone my marksmanship skill well enough to keep a three round group no bigger than two inches at three hundred yards.

Negating the speed of transfer would be taken care of by hand and leg shackles connected at the waist. This system ensured the prisoner could not remove either their hand or leg shackles independently or move quickly while properly shackled, a must for the successful execution of my mission.

* * *

The layout of the open area, a small fenced in parking lot behind the courthouse, could only be covered from two possible locations with adequate distance and cover for my purposes. The first option was impossible. It was a building under construction with contractors swarming all over it, including the roof, from early morning until sunset. That left only one other possibility, the roof of the FBI building across from the courthouse. This too had its challenges, but wouldn’t be impossible.

* * *

At the FBI building, I put on my golf gloves to eliminate fingerprints as I pried open the roof door with a crow bar while the roving guard was in the bathroom on the ground floor. Danny, the day guard, complained to me himself one day, in the designated smoking area outside, that the building manager lost the key for the access door to the roof. He was told to coordinate a replacement with a locksmith so the HVAC people could do some maintenance on the roof units, but he hadn’t gotten around to it yet. He said he used to go up there to smoke but he hadn’t been up there since they’d lost the key.

Some days, Danny and I chatted at the gazebo around the shady side of the office building just before his lunch break ended. I made sure I was there to shoot the shit on execution day. We exchanged polite conversation for a bit before he mashed his cigarette out in the sand-filled ash tray and went inside as I lit up another smoke. Once he was gone I pulled his cigarette butt from the ash tray and pocketed it.

I had printed out a sign on a generic piece of printer paper at a local hotel business center outside of town on my long way home one night in preparation for the main event. After the fact, there’d be an exhaustive investigation to find out what exactly happened and how. If I expected to be successful I couldn’t risk having local paper or printer ink traced to me or my office or printers. I hung my sanitized sign on the inside of the door and went to work on the door lock with my crowbar. The sign read: NO ROOF ACCESS – LOCKSMITH HAS BEEN NOTIFIED TO COMPLETE REPAIRS.

The door finally gave way after prying on the lock for a few tense moments. If anyone would have come to investigate the noise and caught me in the act, I’m not sure I could have offered a logical explanation. The fact that I was prying open the roof access door with a crowbar while I carried a golf bag was weird enough activity to make any normal person suspicious let alone a building full of Feds. But the justice-loving gods smiled on me and I managed to get the door open, made sure my sign would stay put, ensured the damaged door would still allow me an escape route, and then stepped out onto the roof. I couldn’t help but smile at the perfect mission conditions: warm afternoon sunshine and a cloudless blue sky. I walked to the twin HVAC units and squeezed into the shaded shoulder-width space between them.      

There were surveillance cameras mounted on the roof at each corner of the building but they were all pointing out and down toward the street. There were no cameras covering the roof area.

    I’m sure they’ll correct that after today.

I sucked in a deep, soothing breath, exhaled and got to work. I pulled a two-by-four inch piece of wood from my golf bag and fished out four ten penny nails and a hammer that were hanging out amongst the golf balls and golf tees in my golf bag’s cavernous pocket. I hammered two nails per side through the wood and into the sheet metal sides of the HVAC units. It wasn’t perfect but was solid enough to take the weight of my rifle’s bipod.

I then pulled my two sections of my broken down M-16A4 from the golf bag, assembled it, extended the bipod and rested it on the two-by-four that now spanned the gap between the two HVAC units. I had a semi-concealed, steady, standing firing position with an unobstructed view of my kill zone. The position had to be standing because I needed to be set back and a little higher than the four foot wall that ringed the roof to maintain cover and have a clear shot.

With my gloved hands, I grabbed my single magazine with three rounds and loaded the rifle. I verified the distance to the kill zone with my laser range finder: 296 meters. Perfect range for my sights and almost the exact distance I’d been practicing for. All there was left to do was wait. Luckily, it wouldn’t be long. A little bird told me that they were planning on transferring the prisoner at four o’clock sharp. Good intel was essential.

After about fifteen minutes, I saw the media vans roll up followed by local news jockeys milling around checking their equipment and doing sound checks in front of their cameras. Then, the dark blue armored van that was scheduled to transport my target arrived and parked in front of the stairs where Mr. Randolph would have to descend in leg cuffs. Six minutes after the van arrived, I saw Mr. Randolph appear in a florescent orange jump suit with a Sheriff flanking each side holding his arms as he walked through the double doors and down the concrete stairs to the parking lot.

His slow waddle was perfect. I could see through my rifle’s scope that the speed of his choppy steps and the distance he had to cover would give me about five or six seconds to get two or hopefully three rounds off. No problem.

I began the mantra I’d been using for weeks as I practiced my marksmanship for this very moment: One, Inhale, exhale half a breath, hold it.

A few thoughts also creeped in behind my mantra threatening to waste my opportunity, Should I really do this? Have I thought of everything?

I saw the red dot on my scope bounce on his left cheek as it matched the quick rhythm of my heartbeat.

    Now or never.

    CRACK.

The rifle butt kicked my shoulder and I began the mantra for the second shot: Two, exhale, inhale, exhale half, hold it, reacquire the target.

I saw that the target was on one knee as one of the officers was trying to pull him up to his feet. The officer’s head blocked my target for a second, but then he cleared. The red dot rested on the target’s left ear.

    CRACK-CRACK.

I never looked through the scope after the third shot. I hoped they connected.

    Time to go.

Read Part Two here...

Todd Tavolazzi is a full-time Naval Officer stationed in Norfolk, Virginia and a part-time writer. He usually writes on his porch with a drink and a smoke. He is a frequent contributor to Potluck.