“So it would be safe to assume that you’ve used a handgun before—that you have some experience?” The rising inflection in Dave Thompson’s voice made it sound as if he were asking a question, but Joanna understood that he already knew the answer.
A vivid flush crept up her neck and face. The last thing Joanna wanted was to be singled out from her classmates, the other academy attendees. Dave Thompson seemed to have other ideas. He focused on her in a way that caused all the other people in the room to recede into the background.
“Yes,” she answered softly, keeping her voice level, fending off the natural urge to blink. “I suppose it would.”
Thompson smiled and nodded. “Good,” he said. “You come on up here then. We’ll have you take the first shot, if you’ll excuse the pun.” Visibly appreciative of his own joke, he grinned and seemed only vaguely disappointed when Joanna didn’t respond in kind.
Unsure what the joke was, Joanna rose resolutely from her chair and walked to the front of the classroom. Her hands shook, more from suppressed anger at being singled out than with any kind of nervousness or stage fright. Weeks of public speaking on the campaign trail had cured her of all fear of appearing in front of a group of strangers.
The room was arranged as a formal classroom with half a dozen rows of tables facing a front podium. Behind the podium stood several carts loaded with an assortment of audiovisual equipment. As he spoke, Thompson moved one cart holding a video console and VCR to a spot beside the podium. He knelt for a few moments in front of the cart and selected a video from a locked storage cabinet underneath. After inserting the video in the VCR, Thompson reached into another locked storage cabinet and withdrew a holstered service revolver and belt.
“Ever seen one of these before?”
The way he was holding the weapon, Joanna wasn’t able to see anything about it. “I’m not sure; she said.
“For your information,” Thompson returned haughtily, “it happens to be a revolver.”
His contemptuous tone implied that he had misread her inability to see the weapon as total ignorance as far as guns were concerned. “It’s a thirty-eight,” he continued. “A Smith and Wesson Model Ten military and police revolver with a four inch barrel.”
He handed the belt and holstered weapon to Joanna. “Here,” he said. “Take this and put it on. Don’t be afraid,” he added. “It’s loaded with blanks.”
Removing the gun from its holster, Joanna swung open the cylinder. One by one, she checked each of the rounds, ascertaining for herself that they were indeed blanks, loaded with paper wadding, rather than metal bullets. Only after reinserting the rounds did she look back at Dave Thompson, who was watching her with rapt interest.
“So you do know something about guns.”
“A little,” she returned with a grim smile. “And you’re right. They are all blanks. I hope you don’t mind my checking for myself. My father always taught me that when it comes to loaded weapons, I shouldn’t take anybody else’s word for it.”
There was a rustle of appreciative chuckles from a few of Joanna’s fellow classmates. Dave Thompson was not amused. “What else did your daddy teaich you?” he asked.
“One or two things,” Joanna answered. “Now what do you want me to do with this pistol?”
“Put it back in the holster and strap on the belt.”
The belt—designed to be used on adult male bodies—was cumbersome and several sizes too large for Joanna’s slender waist. Even fastened in the smallest hole, the heavy belt slipped down until it rested on the curve of her hips rather than staying where it belonged. Convinced the low-slung gun shade her look like a comic parody of some old-time gunfighter, Joanna felt ridiculous. As she struggled with the awkward belt, she barely heard what Thompson was saying.
“You ever hear of a shoot/don’t shoot scenario?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re about to. Here’s what we’re gonna do. Once you get that belt on properly, I want you to spend a few minutes practicing removing the weapon from and returning it to the holster. No matter what you see on TV, cops don’t spend all their time walking around holding drawn sidearms in their hands. But when you need a gun, you’ve gotta be able to get it out in a hell of a hurry.”
Joanna attempted to do as she was told. By then the belt had slipped so far down her body, she was afraid it was going to fall off altogether. Each time she tried to draw the weapon, the belt jerked up right along with the gun. With the belt sliding loosely around her waist, she couldn’t get enough leverage to pull the gun free of the holster. It took several bumbling tries before she finally succeeded in freeing the gun from the leather.
“Very good,” Dave Thompson said at last. “Now, here’s the next step. I want you to stand right here beside this VCR. The tape I just loaded is one of about a hundred or so that we use here at the academy. In each one, the camera is the cop. The lens of the camera is situated at the cop’s eye level. You’ll be seeing the incident unfold through the cop’s eyes, through his point of view. You’ll see what he sees, hear what he hears.
“Each scenario is based on a real case,” he added. “You’ll have the same information available to you as the cop did in the real case. At some point in the film—some critical juncture in the action—you will have to decide whether or not to draw your weapon, whether or not to fire. It’s up to you. Ready?”
Joanna nodded. Aware that all eyes in the room were turned on her, she waited while Thompson checked to be sure the plug was in and then switched on the video.
For a moment the screen was covered with snow, then the room was filled with the sound of a mumbled police radio transmission. When the picture came on, Joanna was seeing the world through though the front windshield of a moving patrol car, one that was following another vehicle—a Ford Taurus—down a broad city street. Moments after the tape started, the lead vehicle, carrying two visible occupants, signaled for a right-hand turn and then pulled off onto a tree-lined residential side street. Seconds later the patrol car turned as well. After it followed the lead vehicle for a block or two, there was the brief squawk from a siren as the officer signaled for the other car to pull over.
In what seemed like slow motion, the door of the patrol car opened and the officer stepped out into the seemingly peaceful street. The camera, positioned at shoulder height, moved jerkily toward the topped car. In the background came a steady murmur of continuing radio transmissions. Standing just to the rear of the driver’s door, the camera bent down and peered inside. Two young men were seated in front.
“Step out of the car please,” the officer said, speaking over the sound of loud music blaring from the radio in the Taurus.
The driver hesitated for a moment, then moved to comply. As he did so, his passenger suddenly slammed open the rider’s door. He leaped from the car and went racing up the toy-littered sidewalk of a nearby home. For a moment, the point of view toyed beside the door of the stopped Taurus, but the scene on screen swung back and forth several times, darting between the passenger fleeing up the sidewalk and the driver who was already raising his hands in the air and leaning over the hood of his vehicle.
“How come you stopped us?” the driver whined. “We wasn’t doin’ nothin’.”
By then Joanna had lost track of everything but what was happening on the screen. A sudden knot tightened in her stomach as she was sucked into the scene’s unfolding drama. She felt the responding officer’s momentary but agonizing indecision. His hesitation was hers as well. Should he stay with the one suspect or go pounding up the sidewalk after the other one?