Grant Eustace’s happy vision of himself knocking over balaclava-clad terrorists like tin ducks in a shooting gallery quickly faded into frustrated tedium. He stopped counting Metro stations when he got to fifty and that didn’t include the Dulles and Reagan parking lots and the separate Amtrak lots at each airport and the ones around Union Station. What the hell kind of crap job has Kane stuck me with anyway? he grumbled. Still, Eustace reminded himself, Kane closed cases. Grant picked up the phone and made the next call on his list. What kind a cheapskate jerk buys a Volvo S60 and doesn’t get the GPS package? Eustace muttered then stood and tried to untwist the kink in his back.
Eustace looked at the clock. A quarter to twelve and Kane and the kid are still farting around in the field while I’m stuck here getting blisters on my fingers from punching so many fucking numbers into my phone. Eustace glared at the dog-eared list of Metro Station security offices then his eyes slipped down to the Washington Post’s front page peeking from beneath the Brownstein folder:
Court Tightens Security
More Threats In Gun-Law Appeal
Now there was a case that had “career advancement” written all over it, provided that you caught the guy before he shot Mr. Justice Hopper. Fucking gun nuts! Eustace thought, though his sentiments were neither politically nor ideologically motivated. For him it was much simpler. Grant Eustace was an “us versus them” kind of guy and on a tribal level he wanted his own gang to be the only one with weapons. It was in his self-interest to keep all other groups, gangs and organizations that might challenge his tribe as powerless as possible. Not that Eustace was stupid. He could understand the ideological arguments. It was just that he didn’t care. In that, as in many other ways, he was different from Greg Kane. Kane was a firm believer in the dictum: “Know your enemy” whereas Eustace’s philosophy was “Get him before he gets you.”
The court battle over the guns had started with the death of a child, but like World War I sometimes the murder of a single person can ignite a far vaster conflict. Nine-year-old Lyla Masterson had been standing in line with her mother, Sonya, at the Baskin-Robbins when the shooting started. Two gang-bangers with AR-15s had decided to rob the Elite Jewelry & Gold Exchange two stores down. One of the jewelry-store’s customers was a twenty-two-year-old carpenter named Ronnie Dubois who held a firm belief that everyone should carry a gun “just in case.” Today Dubois was convinced that his foresight was finally paying off.
Ronnie pulled his Sig Sauer Model 228 from the special holster he wore on his belt at the small of his back, shoved in a clip, and started blazing away at the closest robber. He missed. The gunman fired back and caught Ronnie in the right calf. Ronnie tried to crawl behind a counter and was rewarded with another swarm of bullets and a hail of shattered glass. Now with his adrenalin really pumping, Ronnie popped up and blasted away as fast as he could pull the trigger, soon emptying his entire fifteen shot extended-load clip.
Having planned on a nice quiet stickup rather than The Gunfight At The OK Corral the robbers hustled out the door while randomly blasting away until their fifty shot clips went dry. It took the crime scene techs twelve hours to catalog all the spent shells and bullet holes and splatters of blood. The final tally in human terms was surprisingly light: the store owner, Frank Shapiro, was hit twice by the robbers but was expected to survive. Ronnie Dubois had taken one bullet, also from the gunmen. The wound hurt like hell and he had lots of cuts from flying glass but he would recover.
The sole fatality was Lyla Masterson. One of Ronnie’s nine millimeter slugs passed through the jewelry store’s sheet-rock wall, through the adjacent dry-cleaner’s wall and came to rest in Lyla Masterson’s brain, staining her pink dress with blotches of red. She was dead before she hit the floor. When questioned by the police Ronnie explained that he had merely been exercising his Second Amendment rights and contended that he was a hero who had succeeded in driving off two “bad guys” before they could steal anything. When asked about Lyla Masterson Ronnie replied that he was sorry that the little girl was “hurt” but sometimes when you’re fighting crime there’s “collateral damage.”
Since state law allowed an adult to carry an unloaded handgun so long as it was “in plain sight” Dubois could not be charged with a crime. Of course he could be sued in civil court but since he had no substantial assets, even if they won Lyla’s parents would likely never collect a dime. Two weeks after the shooting the NRA put Ronnie’s picture on page one of their America’s First Freedom digital magazine. That’s when the offers started pouring in.
In some circles Ronnie Dubois was a celebrity. Now the inconvenience of having to deal with a civil suit coupled with the possibility that his interview fees and endorsement money might be seized motivated Ronnie to declare bankruptcy which would wipe out any debt that some bleeding-heart jury might see fit to award Lyla’s parents. Hell, he got $10,000 for posing with his Sig on the cover of next year’s Guns And Freedom calendar and he intended to keep it. The text beneath his photo read:
Bad Guys Beware
For Lyla’s parents this was a million miles beyond too much. They created their own poster, a picture of their smiling child superimposed over her gravestone and captioned with the words: “Collateral Damage?”
Thus began the ballot initiative for what was called “Lyla’s Law.” The measure contained nine provisions: