Skyshooter Chapter 1 It was easy,...

 


 Skyshooter 
Chapter 1
 
It was easy, killing the old man.  Necessary, just to shut him up.  He won’t be missed, she thought.  He had been craven as all hell.  A disgusting old fart, just as his brother had been.  And he’d begun to run his lips way too loosely.  About things he hadn’t seen with his own eyes nor heard with his own ears, but thought that he knew, nonetheless.  So he had to go.  Simple. 
Much easier than the woman had been – scheming, conniving, stupidwhore.
            “Wasn’t right,” was what he’d said – repeatedly.  “What you did.”
He was dying by then and she had thought that he might have something important to say, so she listened.  But all he wanted to do was bitch and accuse.
“My brother knew,” he said. 
Big fuckin surprise, she thought.  Of course he knew.
“He knew and he told me.  He showed me!”
Now, that just wasn’t good at all…
            The knife was a Wusthof 10” chef’s knife that had belonged to her grandmother.  Thick-bladed and heavy enough to glance off bone.  It went in and it came out.  With two hands.  Again and again.  The blood produced was warm and sticky and very satisfying to her.  
Satisfying for how long, she couldn’t guess. 
Probably not so long.  Not so very long at all.
            “It wasn’t right!” he’d repeated.  A desperate, gurgling whisper. 
“It wasn’t right!” the words were hung with awful implications, gummy and hard to spit out.
He was lying in his own mess.  Then he was dead, and they were his last words.
 
***
 
Early on Saturday morning the week before Thanksgiving it was cloudy; above, below, and all around, the snowcapped, tree-carpeted, farm-quilted, and otherwise ever-changing landscape obscured by clouds.  Was cold and wet when the plane from Seattle to Mazatlantook off three hours ago.  Sipping his fifth coffee refill, black, Air Marshal Ezra Hooten was beginning to feel somewhat überamped on caffeine.  Fully aware when cruising altitude was attained that his pulse had quickened by a half-beat, Hoot was feeling only slightly more fidgety than usual.  His normally-pale complexion had become washed out to a nearly corpselike pallor, but his pale-blue eyes were as sharp as lasers behind their slightly darkened polarized lenses.
            Routine.  Everyday stuff.  Hoot was always a bit fidgety on a flight.  At sixty-three years-old, six-feet, four-inches tall, and uncomfortable in more spacious first-class seating on principle alone, he accepted that he was doomed to be physically as well as mentally uncomfortable in any seat on a plane – he accepted it as penance of a sort.
He flinched almost imperceptibly when his ears popped.  Again.  This was a normal function, Hoot knew – eardrums constantly flexing due to changes in atmospheric pressure lost or gained from altitude changes.  But knowing what caused it to happen didn’t make him like it.  Didn’t keep him from feeling as if his head had become firmly caught between the jaws of an ever-tightening vice immediately upon takeoff.  Nothing he could do but endure it.  Chew gum like a madman to work his jaw, flex his inner ear canals and maybe ease the pressure – or not – but, mostly, simply endure it.  Hoot had become fairly adept at enduring it.  He turned his head and felt a satisfying crack, a momentary relaxing of the tension in his neck.  Used the motion to take another look around.
Matching if not trumping the physical discomfort for Hoot, there’s always the relentless sound of a plane in flight.  Any plane – helicopters too – but especially commercial jet airliners.  The droning sound of any engine/jet/turbine held at a constant speed – he hated it.  He especially hated the neverending background roar of massive twin jet engines mounted under wings just outside the aircraft’s thin-skinned fuselage.  Engines large enough to swallow entire automobiles without choking, laboring to move a full load of eager passengers through the air with mind-numbing speed.  It was a roar both amplified and contained by the pressure in his ears, all of it building and growing constantly more insistent over the ever-present ringing of his tinnitus, until he felt as if the very core of his being was about to crack.
Can’t allow that to happen, Hoot derided himself with a pinch of sarcasm.  Forced himself to relax.  He discreetly replaced the flavorless lump of chewing gum in his mouth with a fresh sugar-free stick and chewed earnestly while covertly looking around.  Very much aware of his surroundings, Hoot considered his charges on this flight.  Families and couples, boisterous holiday travelers mostly, roast turkey and pumpkin pie their only concerns; or maybe – considering their destination – fajitas and flan instead of the more traditional fowl and pastry. 
To Hoot, this was a study of familial dynamics in action; a little game he often played in his mind to make his job seem less boring than it actually was.  He idly wondered how many of these passengers were simply hoping for nothing more than to get past T-day without a major family incident.  How many of them had their sights already set on Santa Claus?  New Years?  Next summer’s vacation? 
Most of them?  Allof them? 
Most of them were slouched in their seats with their seatbelts loose, grinning like certified idiots as the Seattle-made, largely union-made, and therefore presumably flawless projectile containing them climbed ever higher, rushed ever farther southward. 
They were maniacs to assume there was any such thing as a flawless aircraft – therefore, they were manically grinning, Hoot decided with mild disgust.  Still, he appreciated the unbelievable tenacity of their holiday cheer worn like heavy winter coats.  All for the fam.  Even if much of it was bogus. 
Three hours wearing the same goddamned glued-on grin! he thought.  It was as if a viral outbreak of happy-face rigor mortis had spread throughout the plane.  Appalling!
Have to love ‘em… Can’t shoot ‘em, he concluded, taking another clandestine look around, a bit of droll humor getting caught in Air Marshal Hoot’s mental throat.  At that same moment a detached part of his imagination took a quick sidestep; thinking for the zillionth time since he had taken this glorified sheepherder’s job how sweet it would be to start a charter fishing service out of Ilwaco once the economy got back on its feet. 
Yeah…that’s what I should do.  Go fishing…
With less than a full year invested in the Federal Air Marshal’s Service, the charter fishing idea was starting to gain more traction with every flight he took.  Perhaps he’d been hasty to take another badge so soon after turning the last one in, the wound still raw, so to speak – literally as well as figuratively – his career-spanning pursuit of a friend-turned-psychopath suddenly over.  Meanwhile, this Sky Marshal job was a serious job, and Hoot certainly took it seriously.  How could he not here in the Age of Terrorism?  But did it hold his interest and challenge him the way Fugitive Apprehension had done when he was a USmarshal?  No…it did not.
Hoot pantomimed reading a Kindle novel and carefully kept watch over his maniacally grinning and chit-chatting flock from behind the cover of his photochromic sunglasses.  He was always watching.  Always appraising his charges.  He wanted to feel empathy for these travelers.  He really did.  After all, for the duration of the flight, they truly were a vulnerable flock under his protective wing whether they appreciated him for it or not. 
But true empathy was a stretch for Hoot.  What he mostly felt was the ever-present in-flight sense of vibration in everything around him; the physical hum of flying high above the landscape at more than 500 miles-per-hour; the pressurized, germ-infested cabin air; the roaring jet thrust; and, trumping it all, the anxious energy of a plane full of passengers blinded by the bling of excitement on the cusp.  Holidaylunacy speeding across the sky like a thrown snowball.
Honestly, Hoot had never liked flying – even before he became a sky marshal and flew daily.  Often, in his career as a US marshal, Hoot had imagined how it must’ve been in the old days; butt parked in a saddle all day, calluses on your ass, kidneys down around your knees at the end of the day.  His father a lifelong commercial fisherman, nobody had ever promised Hoot an easy job.  Not once.  And he didn’t expect anyone to do so now.  To Hoot, the planes that he flew in were simply the current version of his saddle.  Could be worse. 
But in addition to the physical discomfort and relentless noise, he especially disliked the droning monotony of it.  The sardine-can coziness with migrating strangers who imposed themselves on you.  Personal space by the cubic inch.  Yet, here he was, previously US Marshal Ezra Hooten – briefly retired and quickly reincarnated as Air Marshal Ezra Hooten – and in less than a year flying had moved beyond something he disliked to become as routine and boring as clean socks every morning.  Thin, ambivalent socks, wearing thinner flight after flight.  At least back in the real marshals your feet were on the ground, you had elbow room.
Twenty minutes shy of this particular flight’s scheduled refueling and customs stop at LAX in Los Angeles, Hoot’s ever-vigil attention was drawn to an annoyance happening all the way up front in the plane.  A flight attendant was busy with some guy loitering near the door to the forward lavatory, just outside the cockpit door.  He remembered meeting her, the first-class attendant, prior to boarding.  Marceline was her name.  She wore award pins bragging that she was a million-miler several times over.  From his location way back in row 20, Hoot couldn’t hear what she was saying, but he could see that she was asking the man to return to his seat.  Telling him, no doubt, how he’s not allowed to wait in the aisle for his turn in the lavatory.  Telling him the plane would be landing soon and there was no time. 
            The man harassing Marceline was not a first-class passenger.  Hoot had noticed him when he walked up the aisle from his seat farther back, so he certainly didn’t belong up near the first-class lavatory, but he wasn’t budging.  Of medium build, Hispanic complexion and straight black hair, he was wearing a plain gray sweatshirt and baggy black trousers.  Medium and colorless.  Hoot instinctively understood the man would be nearly invisible in a crowd.  One of a zillion.  Or a hundred.  Or even of ten.  He would blend in – except for his nervous eyes.  Hoot always noticed a person’s eyes.
            Time seemed to stand absolutely still for a brief instant, no noise, no motion, everything frozen, everything suspended on aluminum wings at 30,000 feet while Hoot looked this troublesome passenger over.  Registering details.  He removed his polarized glasses to get a better look at the man’s eyes and allow his own pale blue’s to be seen.
With stark, almost avian pupils beneath invisible eyebrows, thick head of straight white hair, Hoot took advantage of his vampire-like persona, sending a message; I’m watching you…you’ve been noticed, but he was too far away to make good eye contact.
Hoot’s partner on this flight, fellow sky marshal Jessica Vega, was sitting in row 9, the first row of the economy-plus section, much closer to the action outside the first-class lavatory.  Hoot didn’t care to sit in the plus or first-class sections unless he was working a flight solo and needed close proximity to the cockpit door.  Working with a partner, he preferred to take a seat midway back in regular economy-class, a much better vantage point to observe trouble in the making.  And he preferred to board the plane along with the paying passengers instead of ahead of them.  Just another ordinary fella sucking down copious amounts of coffee while going somewhere ordinary – except this one was discreetly packing a loaded SIG Sauer P250 Compact pistol in a holster under his jacket.
It was impossible for Hoot to tell from this vantage point if Vega was paying close attention to what was going on at the front of the plane.  She’d better be, he thought.  But he didn’t really know what to expect from Jessica Vega since he’d met her only minutes before they boarded the plane in Seattle.  Assigned together as part of a last-minute switcheroo, they’d barely shared a dozen words. 
Silas Wilson, the SeaTac TSA director, had intercepted Hoot in the terminal security office, preflight; “Something came up, Hooten,” he said.  “You’ll be leaving for Mexico in ten minutes instead of Alaska in a half-hour,” and Hoot had replied, “Well, shit!  And here I stand in my mukluks without my sombrero and sun block.” 
Actually, Hoot was unfazed by the flight switch because it was something that seemed to happen often.  And he was thinking that his comeback had been hilarious in view of his ultra-gringo complexion and white hair.  But Wilson, one of those bureaucratic middle-management-types who evidently come cheaper by the gross, didn’t crack a smile, a sense of humor deemed unnecessary baggage in the TSA and therefore subject to suspicion. 
“My orders are to put two sky marshals on the next flight to Mazatlan instead of one,” he said, “Short notice.”  He nodded toward the outer office, said, “Vega, your partner for this trip, is the woman walking toward us right now.  There will also be a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent aboard escorting an undesirable back to where he came from.  Details are in the folder.” 
Director Wilson gestured toward a nearby desk, adding, “Read it,” before turning his attention to the slender, and indistinctly ethnic-looking female air marshal who was approaching with businesslike strides. 
And that’s how Hoot first met Jessica Vega, “Jesse – as in Jesse James, the famous outlaw,” she explained, expressing her preference for the shorthand version of her name.  Seeming almost petite standing next to Hoot’s long-legged frame, she was a thirty-something ex-marine warrant officer, once military police according to her sheet, now a sky marshal, wearing a snug, navy-blue, barely-to-the-knee-length business skirt with a matching tailored blazer that was securely buttoned from the center of her breastbone down.  Above that point a slight shadow of cleavage was perfectly accented by a cabernet-colored silk blouse, a hint of something lacy, black, and minimal underneath, an altogether too-sexy-for-undercover ensemble that encouraged Hoot to wonder where the hell she concealed her weapon.  
“So you’re Ezra Hooten, the famous shooter,” she said with a heavy hint of derision in her otherwise sultry voice, offering a firm handshake.
“Pardon me?” Hoot answered, feeling a bit off balance from the combination of Jesse Vega’s alpha demeanor and the sensation of being halfway sucked into her dark chocolate-colored eyes.  A gut-level challenge?  This was a rare experience for Hoot, the quintessential alpha male, and he liked it.  Deeply tanned skin the color of cinnamon, there was something odd about the texture of the left side of her face, heavy makeup concealing a blemish of some kind, scar tissue, but her eyes drew him past it without close scrutiny.  She was the sort of woman, he suspected, could be trouble without even trying, and the tone of her voice combined with the look in her eye told him that she was probably trying.
“The famous shooter…” she repeated.  “Called Troubleshooter, way I heard it.  And I’ve heard all about you, Sky Marshal Ezra Hooten – ex-US Marshal Hooten – ex-Green Beret sniper back in the day as they say.  Way back in the day, before I was even born, actually.  You’re currently the best shot in the Federal Air Marshal’s Service, they say.” 
Her tone growing even more challenging, she added, “That’s something I’d like to see.  I’m a bit of a shooter, myself.  Maybe we could meet at the firing range when we get back from our little jaunt across the border with Mister Cartel.”
Roughly half my age…great!  Hoot thought, knowing that, in his heart – and keeping his own best interests in mind – he wantedto be attracted to older, more experienced women, but kept backsliding.  The younger ladies were like cupcakes everywhere he looked; sweet and lovely, decorated…and not good for you at all – this one mocha-flavored with a pinch of spice.  His inner humorist briefly conjured a mental image of Jesse Vega as a toddler crawling around in diapers and booties while he was pussyfooting through the jungles of Vietnamavoiding punji stakes.  He brushed aside the implied nips his new ‘partner’ was taking at his résumé and age, said, “Are you telling me the escorted prisoner flying with us is a member of a Mexican drug cartel?”
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you.  One of the worst.  A known member of Los Hermanidad.  Suspected member of Los Negros.  A suspected enforcer in Los Negros, in fact, but no proof of it.  He’s a genuine Latino sicario – a death-squad member.  And he’s supposedly a fallen favorite nephew of Edgar Valdez – one of the bloodiest men in Mexico.  We’re sending him home so el tio can spank his naughty ass since the current administration in our country doesn’t seem to have the balls to do it.”
“We gotta squeeze a suspected professional hitman onto a sold-out flight the Saturday before Thanksgiving?” Hoot asked, genuinely appalled at the obvious lack of Justice Department foresight this sort of exercise demonstrated.  “This surely could’ve waited until after the holidays”
“No.  It couldn’t.  Tight timetable.  His extradition got rushed through as part of the prep for the President’s annual holiday amnesty review.  Cleaning out some dirty corners.”
“It’s all in the file,” the TSA director repeated over his shoulder.  “Readit.”
“Bring it along…,” Vega said with a look in her eye that left little doubt who she considered to be the senior member of the team, their relative ages notwithstanding.  “Read it later.  We have to hurry to our boarding gate…”
            And now Carlos Rico – the undesirable, as director Wilson had called him – was sitting four rows ahead of Hoot, starboard side, in the window seat.  The seat next to him empty by protocol.  His ICE escort was sitting on the aisle.  Jesse Vega was seven rows further up ahead of Rico on the left, aisle seat, the shoulder of her tailored blazer just visible to Hoot. 
Nothing sticks to you like hard-earned experience in the law enforcement business.  Makes you cautious.  And Hoot didn’t like it that his partner was caught between an obnoxious asshole at the lavatory door in front of her and a known hit man sitting behind her.  He knew that the ICE agent sitting next to the cuffed cartel member had the worst seat of all – too close to potential trouble from his prisoner to see it coming until it was already there.  
Hoot nonchalantly reached inside his jacket and fingered the butt of his pistol, his gut instinct warning him that something could easily come unglued in this situation between the first class flight attendant and the lavatory asshole, but not knowing what it might be.  That’s when the lavatory door suddenly opened and a portly gentleman sidled out, squeezing past the aisle jam into his nearby seat, the obnoxious asshole nimbly ducking inside the now-vacant facility and pulling the door closed before Marceline could stop him. 
Foiled, the first class attendant turned on a mirthless all-purpose smile that didn’t quite make its way to her eyes and went about checking to insure that passengers’ seatbelts in the near vicinity were buckled.  She was a grandmotherly gal, this Marceline.  But still sexy in a mature way, Hoot thought with sincere appreciation.  She looked to Hoot like a cross between Mary Tyler Moore in the golden years of her career and Sandra Bullock today.  Compact and tight from long hours on her feet.  One of the sweet-and-smooth but no bullshit sort of flight attendants.  The kind he liked except for the phony smile.  Moments later she hardly gave mister asshole a second glance when he exited the lavatory and began making his way back to his seat.
            Marceline’s preoccupation was unfortunate.  Had she paid closer attention she might have noticed something odd coiled in the man’s hand as he passed – a garrote made from carbon-fiber, as thin and flat and flexible as a length of dental floss, non-metallic but with razor-sharp edges and enough tensile strength to suspend a metric ton of weight, a sticklike handle at each end.  He had been quick to strip this item from inside his belt, the remains of which were left behind in the lavatory trash receptacle.  And if Marceline had only noticed it in his fist, her expression alone might have alerted Hoot that the event his gut had warned him of was actually happening.  Instead, Hoot was watchful as usual, but not especially so, when the lavatory asshole came abreast of Carlos Rico and his escort.
            There the man stopped, and quick as a lighting flash, he drew out his garrote in both hands, wrapped it around the unsuspecting ICE agent’s neck, and nearly decapitated him with a fast jerk.  A gusher of blood splattering the trays and seats of the row ahead a heartbeat before the agent would’ve even had a chance to realize he was dying. 
            Twitching, the body slumped forward. 
With the practiced grace of a highly focused assassin, the killer performed a dancelike maneuver similar to a calf roper at a rodeo.  Unwrapping the garrote from the slumping border agent’s neck in a single fluid move, he reached across the empty seat, looped his improvised lethal weapon around the neck of Carlos Rico with a flick of his wrists, jerked, and did him too…
            Two men dead in two seconds and a rapidly-growing pool of blood in row 16.  Passengers were instantly stunned.  Heartbeats were skipped on the verge of panic.
            It took Hoot three seconds to draw his pistol, stand, and fire a single deafening shot to the center of the assassin’s back as he dashed back up the isle toward the stunned first class flight attendant.  Dropped him like the proverbial bag of wet sand before Marceline’s feet. 
Idiot! Hoot thought, exhaling a long breath.  He had not hesitated.  His first and only instinct; to deny the asshole presently lying prone on the aircraft floor any chance to make a hostage or third victim of Marceline or anyone else on this flight. 
His flight.  His watch.  His call.
Still, second guesses started coming almost immediately. 
They always did.  Whenever he’d had to use lethal force. 
Oh yeah, he’d had some previous experience with this sort of thing. 
Too much experience…
Could I have stopped him before any of this happened?
Could I have taken him down without shooting him?
These were normal but irrelevant doubts, and they bounced off the stone wall of Hoot’s resolve like swatted tennis balls.
The shot still ringing in everyone’s ears, pandemonium suddenly broke loose in the plane.  Cockpit-to-tail section, a surging wave of terrified passengers panicked, tried to regain, and then totally lost their wits.  Most of them were cowering and hushed.  Some were shouting and screaming.  Babies wailed.  And allof them scrambled in their rows to back as far away from Hoot as possible as he walked up the aisle, his Sig Sauer at the ready. 
Frightened eyes, darting back and forth between the bloody messes in row 16 to the inert body in the aisle at Marceline’s feet, ultimately locked on Hoot as if expecting horns to sprout from his head, flames from his nostrils.
Jesse Vega had jumped up with her weapon drawn the instant Hoot’s shot rang out.  But the main event was already over.  She looked at Hoot approaching, turned, and looked down at the motionless form at the feet of the very pale but otherwise nonplussed first-class attendant.  She hurried up the aisle ahead of Hoot, knelt, and checked the downed man’s vitals.  Then she looked up at her partner with a probing expression on her face. 
            Hoot shook his head, thinking that there was no way the damned fool could’ve thought he might escape – making this a planned suicide hit from the start. 
            Explosive vest wearers… 
Shoe bombers…
Underwear bombers…
Hoot could just imagine a radical cell’s recruiting pitch for thatjob; “We don’t know for sure if it’s enough explosive to bring down the airplane, but we do know that sacrificing your ‘nads will guarantee you a place in heaven.  Virgins galore!”
With no ‘nads?  Yeah, sure! 
And now the drug cartels send us goddamned wire-strangling suicide assassins! 
Imaginative but stupid.  What makes someone decide to do a thing like that? Hoot wondered.  Brazenly kill two airline passengers in plain sight of two-hundred twenty with virtually no chance of escape? 
Suicide hits had never made sense to Hoot.  The very idea pissed him off, in fact.  The worst sort of indoctrination and manipulation lurked behind it; nothing less than the fomentation of mental illness. 
The Good Guys like to call it war.  The Bad Guys enjoyed that label, too.  The waron terror.  The war on drugs.  Makes it official.  Makes their feelings about it…okay.  Makes people like Hoot excusable.
Was he excusable?  Hoot had always thought that he was, tried to keep himself so, but he’d hung by that thread for far too long.  Wasn’t such a simple question anymore.  The justifiability of his actions.  The justifiability of war.
Hoot had had plenty of experience with actual war, and knew it was no place for psychos, even while serving as a Petri dish for psychosis of the darkest sort.  Deviant, self-destructive and senseless insanity motivated them all; the Bad Guys, the Good Guys Turned Bad, the Revolutionaries.  Twisted idealists, he would never understand them.  Nevertheless, if that’s really what they wanted, these psycho assassins for a cause – good or bad – if it meant that much to them to go out in a flaming ball of glory…then Ezra Monroe Hooten was happy to oblige.