The Listener

He didn’t answer, and yelling his name again, louder than was necessary, Maria leaned over the side of the car. “Christopher! Come back here and—”

Her demand broke off in midsentence. Christopher was nowhere to be seen, but the towering shape of Ryan Lukas stood beside the fender of her car. He was dressed in his SWAT uniform—a tight black T-shirt and black pants—and he looked every inch the intimidating man that he was. Tall, powerful…scary.

“Lieutenant Lukas!” Maria straightened and met his eyes, feeling her face go warm as she did so. Had he heard her yelling for her son? He’d probably grab the opportunity to ask if she did counseling for children. “I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “I didn’t see you standing there—”

“Lena sent me out here to look for you,” he said. “She said you had some boxes to carry over to the booth. I can get them.”

It wasn’t a very gracious offer, but under the circumstances, Maria understood. “Yes,” she said, “I do. This is all the food for the hot dog concession…”

He didn’t wait for her to finish but reached into the trunk. Lifting out the largest and the heaviest of the cartons, he tucked it under one arm then reached in and got a second. “I’ll be back for the rest.”

Standing by the car, Maria watched him walk away. Like some kind of dark ghost, he moved without making a sound then disappeared into the sparse crowd. It was uncanny. One minute he was there and the next he was simply gone.

Deciding she’d just as soon carry the rest by herself, Maria pulled out the remaining paper plates and napkins then closed the trunk. Juggling the bags, she started toward the back of the area, one eye looking for Christopher and the other searching for the booth. She found the latter first.

Ryan was talking to Lena as Maria walked up.

“I told you I’d come get those.”

Her gaze met his over the awkward bundles. “It wasn’t a problem,” she answered. “I didn’t want to put you out.”

Ryan’s eyes sparked, then he turned abruptly to stalk away from the booth. The two women watched him blend into the crowd.

“Does he always do that?”

“Act obnoxious?” Lena shook her head. “No, actually, he’s a very nice guy. Or at least he used to be before—”

“That’s not what I meant.” Maria tilted her head in the direction he’d taken. “I mean how he disappears like that. I see him walk away then all at once, he’s gone…. Poof!”

Lena laughed, then raised one eyebrow. “It’s a SWAT trick,” she said. “We have special ploys, you know.”

Maria added her own laughter to Lena’s and they began to set up the booth. As she worked, Maria thought about Lena’s words. In a lot of ways, the SWAT team was special. The stress they faced every day would have killed some men, but time and time again, as Maria had counseled various members, she’d come to realize they actually thrived on the intensity. They were a breed apart. As the sniper of the team, Ryan Lukas was at the top of that chain. He had to be. No other kind of man could have done what he did and survive.

The question was…would he survive?

RYAN STRODE to the other side of the facility, past the training building and through the crowd. He was in charge of a lecture about weapons later on and he had to make sure everything was ready. His mind wasn’t on the guns or targets, though. It was back in the hot dog booth with Maria. When Lena had told him she was coming and asked if he’d go help her, he’d wanted to scream, “Hell, no!”

But he hadn’t, of course. Lena was his boss and she was already very unhappy with him. She’d made it a point to come by his desk the afternoon following Maria’s appearance at the station to tell him so.

He took the well-worn path toward the range and the unexpected image of Maria Worley’s shoulders came to him. She’d been wearing a sundress, a white, backless thing that tied around her neck, leaving her shoulders exposed. Without even knowing why, he thought of Ginny. Maria Worley was dark and petite with deep-brown eyes. Ginny had been a blonde, blue-eyed, and plump—she’d always battled her weight, bemoaning every inch. But he’d loved her curves and softness.

Without any warning, a searing pain shot through his chest. It wasn’t physical, he knew at once, but it was real all the same. He gasped and stopped abruptly, reaching out blindly toward the nearest tree. It was a pine, and the rough sticky bark bit into the skin of his palms. He could see Ginny perfectly. Every inch of her, every little detail, even the mole she’d had in the center of her left calf. He tried to shut off the memory but the harder he tried, the more real it became.

Finally, he did the only thing he could—he relaxed and concentrated on the image instead of fighting it. Like a wisp of smoke, it disappeared. He took a deep breath and then another, lifting his head once more.

A kid stood on the path in front of him.

About thirteen, maybe fourteen, he had on a black T-shirt, baggy jeans and a baseball cap. His hands were stuffed into his pockets as he stared at Ryan with a scared expression. “Hey, man, you okay?”

The youngster seemed familiar, but Ryan couldn’t place him. Did he belong to one of the team members? Ryan tried to concentrate but couldn’t. “I’m all right,” he said slowly. “It’s nothing….”

“You want me to go get somebody?”

“No, no. I’ll be fine.” Ryan straightened slowly. “I feel better already.”

The boy nodded. He’d heard adults lie before, the motion said, and he knew better than to challenge them. Without another word, he edged around Ryan and headed back to the crowd. Ryan turned and strode in the opposite direction, toward the range, the kid already forgotten.

Damn Maria Worley. What in the hell was she doing to him?

“I’LL HAVE three dogs, two with chili, one without. And lots of onions. Oh, and we want three lemonades, too. No…make that one lemonade and two iced teas….”

With a frazzled nod, Maria took the older man’s order and began to prepare it. Business had been nonstop all morning and she was ready to collapse. Lena had promised to help but once the organized activities had begun, she’d disappeared, her presence needed elsewhere. Just as Maria was about to scream, her relief appeared. A teacher from the elementary school, Cindy took one look at Maria and waved her off. “I’ll handle this now,” she said with practiced aplomb. “You go on…”

With a grateful nod, Maria removed her apron and stepped outside the booth. She wanted to find the nearest picnic table and collapse but she’d only been able to check on Christopher once since they’d arrived. She needed to find him first, then she could relax.

Wading into the crowd, she searched for him. The task seemed impossible. A lot of people had shown up in the past few hours and there were even more arrivals pouring into the gates as she walked about. Just as she was thinking of giving up, Christopher materialized at her elbow.

“Hey, Mom…” He seemed in a much better mood, his earlier surliness a distant memory.

“Hey, yourself,” she answered with a smile and a secret sigh of relief. “Are you having any fun or is this as terminally boring as you thought it would be?”

“It’s kinda interesting,” he said, surprising her once more. “I’ve seen where the cops work and where they train and stuff….” He turned slightly and pointed over his shoulder. “Back there, they even have a shooting range. In a few minutes they’re gonna show off some of the weapons they use. Wanna go?”

“Weapons? You mean with guns?”

Christopher rolled his eyes. “Yesss, Mom, guns! Whaddaya think they use to get the bad guys? Bows and arrows?”

She’d asked the question to gain some time—she barely heard her son’s smart-aleck reply. There was only one person who would be running that operation, and she wasn’t really sure she wanted to see him in action. Ryan Lukas was scary enough just standing still and saying nothing. What would he look like with a gun in his hand?

“C’mon, Mom,” Christopher urged. “I wanna see, but they aren’t lettin’ kids in by themselves. Come with me…please?”

She looked down and into Chris’s excited eyes. It was the first time in weeks she’d actually seen him interested in something other than giving her a hard time. She couldn’t refuse. “Okay,” she said, throwing up her hands. “You lead the way, I’ll follow.”

He took off so fast she had trouble keeping up with him. In just a few short minutes they were at the rear of the facility. People were being funneled into a cordoned area, passing by a uniformed officer first, a man Maria didn’t recognize. He smiled at them both in a friendly way and waved them through. Christopher pushed into the throng to head for the front, Maria apologizing for him as she dogged his steps. They came to the edge of the roped-in crowd where Ryan Lukas was already speaking.

His voice was low and steady. Maria might have had to strain to hear him except everyone around her was completely quiet. They were focused on the sniper, she realized at once, and when she followed their stares, she understood why.

He was mesmerizing. His commanding presence made it impossible to look elsewhere. Tall and muscular, Ryan Lukas appeared as if he were ready for anything. But only part of his magnetism was physical; the rest came from the unspoken sense of purpose that seemed to radiate from an internal source of energy.

Even Christopher fell under Ryan’s spell. Usually fidgeting, easily bored, her son leaned over the yellow ribbon and stared at the sniper with fascinated concentration.

“We didn’t always have SWAT teams,” Ryan was explaining as Maria began to listen. “The first one came into existence after an incident in Austin, Texas, in August of 1966. Does anyone here know what I’m talking about?”

The people around the rope shook their head. Maria had no idea herself. She’d been born that year.

“A man named Charles Joseph Whitman, an honor student at the University of Texas in Austin, climbed into the elevator of what was known as the Texas Tower. At that time, it was the tallest building in Austin—308 feet high. Whitman was twenty-five and he was wheeling a dolly that contained a foot-locker. Inside the footlocker was a sawed-off shotgun, two handguns and three rifles. He also had hundreds of rounds of ammo, a container of gasoline, a gallon of water and his lunch.”

Christopher hadn’t moved an inch, and neither had Maria. She felt herself tense as Ryan began to speak once more.

“No one knew at the time, of course, but Whitman had already murdered three people—his mother, his wife and a receptionist inside the tower. When he reached the thirty-second floor of the building, he shot three more people, a woman and her two children who happened to be looking over the campus. He then set up his equipment. For an hour and a half he fired. He killed more than a dozen people and wounded over thirty.”

The group of people standing around Maria and Christopher murmured quietly. She felt her stomach roll over at Ryan’s calm description, but underneath his outer shell, she sensed a deep disquiet. He’d obviously told this story more than once, yet the details continued to disturb him.

“Officers from every law enforcement agency in the area responded—the Texas Highway Patrol, the Austin Police force, the Capitol Grounds Police Force, even the campus police—but they were helpless. They even tried to fire on him from a plane above. Nothing worked. The cops and medical people couldn’t even rescue the wounded or dying. Finally, two officers from the Austin police department gained entry by using a tunnel located underneath the tower. Once inside they climbed up. Whitman spotted them when they came out to the observation deck and shot at them. They returned fire and wounded him. He continued to shoot until they killed him.” He paused and took a breath. “Some people believe this was when the need for a SWAT team—Special Weapons and Tactics—was born.”

Maria blinked then glanced down at Christopher. He was completely enthralled, and she felt uneasiness brush over her.

“The tools of the SWAT team are just one of the things that set them apart, allowing them to disable people like Charles Whitman,” Ryan continued. “Today I’m going to show you a few of the guns. We won’t be firing them, of course, but you can see what they look like and how they work….”

As he brought out a variety of wicked-looking weapons Maria suddenly wanted to pull her son away from the gleaming barrels and turn and run. Just as quickly, though, she realized she was being silly. Guns didn’t create violence on their own. Maybe it was good for Chris to realize how carefully they needed to be handled. Ryan’s large hands wrapped around the grips comfortably, she saw, but still he was treating them with a great deal of respect.

In the end, she stayed where she was and let Christopher listen to it all. When Ryan finished and the crowd began to disperse, she moved away as well, but Christopher tugged her back.

“Mom, I saw him earlier, but I didn’t know who he was then.” He tilted his head toward Ryan and spoke in a low, almost confidential voice. “He was on the path out back. He seemed sick, but he looks okay now, doesn’t he?”

Maria’s attention focused at once. “You saw Lieutenant Lukas? And he looked sick?”

Christopher nodded importantly. “He was standing on the path all by himself. I thought he wanted to puke or something but when I asked him if he was okay, he said he was.”

Maria started to reply but Ryan had already crossed the patch of ground between where he’d been lecturing and the roped-off area where she and Chris stood. She fell silent. Christopher’s eyes grew huge as he took in the tall man who now addressed his mother.

“Are you interested in weapons, Dr. Worley?”

Maria’s pulse surged unexpectedly. She wasn’t too sure why she had the strange reaction, but she was sure she didn’t like it. “Not really,” she replied coolly, “but my son wanted to see.” She turned to Christopher and reluctantly made the introductions. He immediately put on an air of indifference and shook Ryan’s hand with conscientious disregard.

Ryan didn’t return the casual attitude. He studied Christopher carefully. “I think we saw each other earlier, didn’t we?”

Christopher shrugged.

“Did you enjoy the demonstration?”

“It was okay.”

“There’s a lot of information about the team on our Web site if you want to know more. I’m in charge of maintaining it. I’ve posted some photos and other material about our weapons and the War Wagon, too. You might want to check it out sometime.”

From the pocket of his black T-shirt, Ryan took out a small notebook and scribbled something on it. From her upside down advantage all Maria could read was “www…” Ryan ripped off the page and handed it to Christopher who stuffed the paper into his pocket and mumbled a quick thanks.

Before Maria could add her own thank-you, someone called out Christopher’s name. He raised his head and she followed his glance. A group of his school buddies stood by the other end of the fence, snickering and trying to act cool. Pretending he hadn’t been caught talking to some adults, Christopher sent them a nonchalant wave, then he glanced askance at Maria, his brown eyes begging her not to embarrass him.

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