James’s wife died back in the eighties, but not before she gave him two healthy boys. Courtland, and then two years later, Chancellor. Chance seemed destined to follow in his father’s footsteps from birth. He always wanted to wear his father’s police gear, or dress up like the Lone Ranger.
Court was night and day different from his little brother; he was obsessed with Indians as a child, he was more interested in horses than in police cars, and Court became the Indian outlaw to Chance’s U.S. Marshal. They chased each other all over the farm in character. Chance versus Court. Cowboy versus Indian. The good guy versus the bad guy.
The father’s son, and the rebel.
Both boys assisted their dad in his business, first by helping to pick up spent brass around the ranges and shoot house, then by cleaning the training weapons each night while the SWAT teams sat in meeting rooms, going over the day’s actions.
Even as a small boy Court had been a mascot of the school. Though he didn’t have his brother’s obsession with guns, he’d been a natural with firearms, even better than his brother, and students from all over the country training at the school would bet handfuls of ammunition they could outshoot the ten-year-old son of the legendary James Gentry.
The older Gentry took all their bets, and invariably he’d end up with more loaded ammo to throw into his oil drum full of Court’s winnings.
By the time Court was fourteen, he and his brother had found themselves at the center of the family business. Their dad would let them play hooky from school so they could serve as opposition forces pitted against visiting SWAT teams, waiting in the dark for cops to come into the shoot house with guns loaded with paintballs.
Often the Gentry boys would take down full eight-or twelve-man units without so much as a single splatter on their own bodies.
And more often than not furious police captains screamed red-faced at James Gentry, insisting the training was rigged against his men, because no one could believe a couple of teenaged brothers, one short-haired and personable, the other long-haired and reserved, could wipe out well-trained tactical units of veteran cops.
James Gentry sometimes allowed the captains to make the rules in the next drill, to stack the deck in favor of their own men, and often the result was the same.
But Court’s rebellious nature grew exponentially in his late teens and he ran afoul of his taciturn father. Though Chance did his best to keep the peace between them, Court and James were two stubborn personalities, and conflict between them became the norm.
Court drifted away from Glen St. Mary as soon as he turned eighteen, and he ended up in Miami. There, looking for work, he took a job in security for a shady businessman and, with no clear understanding of what he was involved with, he slowly realized he had managed to become a henchman for a drug dealer. This career lasted exactly two months, and it ended abruptly when an attempt on his boss’s life at Opa-locka Airport caused Court to pull out his Micro Uzi and open fire.
In five seconds three men were dead, and in thirty seconds more, Court was on his knees with his hands in the air, complying with the orders of the undercover DEA officer who stared him down over the barrel of his shotgun.
The fact that the dead men were all Cuban assassins did not get Court off the hook and, by age nineteen, it looked like he’d spend the rest of his life behind bars.
But a CIA officer who’d once taken a weeklong course at the tactical training center in Glen St. Mary found out about the older Gentry brother’s misfortune, and he sent recruiters to the penitentiary where Gentry was serving time.
Accommodations were made, his record was expunged, and soon Court Gentry was in training at the CIA’s facility in Harvey Point, North Carolina, to become a singleton operator for the CIA.
He never looked back, and he never returned to north Florida.
Until now.
Court lay prone under a pine tree, eighty yards from his father’s driveway. Through the scope of Zack Hightower’s rifle he had line of sight on the front door of the double-wide, and he could see all the lights were off in the windows inside. He’d detected no sign of surveillance, and an F-250 pickup truck was parked in the drive just exactly at the angle his dad had always parked his car, so he thought the odds were good his dad was home.
As the sun came up a little more and the light grew, he took in more of the property.
Court saw his old beloved Bronco sitting up on blocks next to the garage. It was half-hidden by the weeds and covered in grime from twenty years of accumulation from the crab apple tree above it.
He’d come to rescue his dad, but for a moment he thought about saying “Screw it,” leaving his father to the enemy, and just rescuing his old truck instead.