Page 2 of Absent Remorse

The last message there was from Joseph, her former colleague on theWashingtonNews.

Hi Amber, just wondering if you wanted to meet up some time tomorrow? You have the day off from your training, right? I got us a table at Bullo’s.

It was sweet that he’d paid enough attention to her schedule that he knew when she had a break. Just the thought of meeting up with Joseph again was enough to put a smile on Amber’s face. They’d had a couple of dates so far, but they hadn’t really had much time to get together, not when Amber was out here and Joseph was still back in Washington, working.

I’m looking forward to it,Amber messaged back, and not just because it meant that she got to go on a date with the reporter who had always been the hottest guy at theNews. It was nice to remind herself that there was still a whole world out there beyond the walls of the training facility. It was nice to be able to take a breath.

For now, though, Amber still had work to do preparing for a test on her legal responsibilities in the chain of evidence. It was the kind of studying that she might have done before all of this on the names of world leaders or the tributaries of major rivers, but now, she needed the information for her potential future role, rather than just to be able to bring it back out in quizzes.

Because it was a similar kind of work, Amber found this aspect of it all pretty easy. She already had every mental trick she needed to be able to retain information. She started to weave the process of the evidence chain into a mnemonic story that would be easier to recall, fixing each point in the process with a memorable image.

She was good at this part, so it was almost a shame when she saw the clock starting to tick over towards the next set piece of training in her schedule. Amber had to get moving; she was due on the gun range.

Just the thought of the gun range made Amber’s heart beat a little faster with worry. Shooting, it turned out, was the thing she was the worst at in the whole training process. Even so, Amber hurried to get her things together and head down there. It wasn’t just that it would be counted against her if she was late; Amber was determined not to let the fact that she was bad at this part of her training show. She was going to put as much effort into this as into the rest. More, if she had to.

Amber ran down to the range, with the result that she was one of the first trainees there. The group’s firearms instructor, Agent Rauzer, was waiting. He was a large man in his fifties who had retired from active field work to train would-be agents. He had salt-and-pepper hair and a perpetually stern expression.

He held up a pistol. “Can any of you recruits tell me what this is?”

“A sidearm,” one of the trainees called out.

“Be more specific,” Rauzer snapped back. Amber saw his gaze fix on her. “Young? What is this?”

“It’s a Glock 19a,” Amber replied. Guns weren’t her thing, but information on the types the FBI used was as easy to memorize for her as the rest of the things she was likely to be tested on.

“That’s right. There’s one for each of you at your firing stations. You need to know your weapon, need to be able to trust that it will function in the most difficult circumstances. I want you to disassemble the weapon, then reassemble it, load it, and send a single round downrange into the target at twenty-five yards. That is the furthest target we ask you to hit with a pistol on this course. Almost all use of force encounters take place much closer than that.”

Amber thought back to the suspects she’d helped Simon bring down in the course of the investigation that had dragged her into this. Every encounter had been close range, physical, and terrifying. The memories of that adrenaline only added to her nerves now.

“What are you waiting for?” Rauzer demanded. “Go!”

Amber hurried forward to one of the firing stations. There was a gun waiting for her along with a clip and some earmuffs. Amber threw on the earmuffs first, then started to break the gun down, disassembling it as fast as she could and then starting to put it back together.

Amber could treat this part the same way that she might treat putting a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle back together. Her hands flew over the pieces, slotting them into place one by one, able to do it almost by instinct now that she’d worked on this repeatedly. The Glock slotted back together smoothly, and as Amber did it, she could see that she was well ahead of the trainees in the stations next to her. It was just a matter of seconds before she had the whole thing together, and it was time to fire off the shot that would end the exercise.

This was the part that was more difficult. Amber had never fired a gun before she signed up for the FBI course. Even now, just the thought of using the weapon made her feel uncomfortable. Amber had to force herself to slide the clip home and chamber a round.

Now, it was a question of firing the shot that the exercise required. Amber could see the target, what seemed like a huge distance away. She took up the shooting stance she’d been trained to use, with a two-handed grip on the weapon, her eyes looking down the sights.

The last part was the hardest, trying to squeeze off that shot. Amber felt herself hesitating even then, trying to will her finger to close around the trigger.

She heard shots to either side of her as others began to finish the exercise. The sound of the shots shocked Amber into pulling the trigger, but even then, the noise and the recoil made Amber flinch. She knew without having to look that her shot had gone well wide.

“Now, I want to see you work the target at different ranges,” Rauzer called out. “We’ll start at two yards and work outwards.”

At two yards, the target seemed almost ludicrously close.

“If a suspect is almost on top of you with a weapon, or if you have cleared your weapon during a hand-to-hand fight, this might be the range at which you have to bring them down,” Rauzer said. “I want two rounds, center of mass. Go!”

Amber pointed the weapon and forced herself to fire, not quite holding back the urge to close her eyes as she did it.

“Now out to three yards. Three rounds. Start with the weapon on the table. Go!”

Amber snatched for it, firing off the shots required. Each one was an effort, the recoil from the previous shot making the whole thing feel weird.

“Four shots at four yards, then reload, then four more!” Rauzer yelled.

It was all getting too much. Amber had to force herself to get the rounds away and even then, her accuracy was terrible. Unless a bad guy pretty much walked onto her gun, she suspected that she wouldn’t be able to hit him. Amber hated being so obviously bad at something, and that feeling only made her shoot worse.

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