by Dan Simmons
“It’s a civilian version of one of the sniper rifles your SWAT team would use,” said Syd.
“Have we run down the make?” asked Captain Hernandez.
“I recognize it,” said Tom Santana. “It debuted at an NRA show in Seattle a few years ago. It’s a Tikka 595 Sporter with a Weaver T32 scope.”
“How far away was the rooftop?” asked Captain Sutton.
“Almost seven hundred yards to the north of here,” said Syd. “I actually saw the first muzzle flash and was on my way before the second shot was fired.” She nodded toward two uniformed officers sipping soft drinks in the kitchen area. “I was staked out on the hill above the condo, so I radioed the unmarked car out front to check on Dr. Minor while I went in pursuit of the assailant.”
“But you didn’t know about the fire escape,” said Special Agent Warren.
“No,” said Syd. “I went up the main stairs and onto the roof as fast as I could. I saw the suspect on the second level of the fire escape and still descending. I fired two shots, but missed.”
“One of them was a warning shot, presumably,” said Captain Hernandez dryly.
“The shots made the assailant drop the heavy rifle into the dumpster below the fire escape,” said Tom Santana. “But then he reached his car and got away before Investigator Olson could get down the fire escape.”
“No make on the car, Syd?” asked Captain Hernandez.
“I couldn’t see any plate numbers. It was American-made. Compact. And it was long gone by the time I was down the fire escape.”
“You missed from three flights above the assassin,” said the CHP’s Captain Sutton, “but the marksman put two bullets right on the mark from seven hundred yards…in a light drizzle? Incredible.”
“Not so remarkable,” said Syd. “The shooter had been up there for some time, waiting for Dr. Minor to turn on a light. He’d even dragged up two sandbags to create an optimal shooting position. You notice that the cheekpiece on the hardwood stock of these military-style sniper rifles is adjustable… Our man had time to adjust the locking screws so that the cheekpiece was raised just the perfect height for his angle shot.”
“No fingerprints,” said one of the forensics people.
Syd and the others gave the man a tired look. “Of course not,” said Captain Hernandez. “We’re dealing with a professional here.”
One of the ballistics men came over to the rifle. “Remarkable shooting from six hundred and eighty yards. We’ve calculated that the first was a perfect heart shot. We dug the slug out of the rear wall of the closet. The shooter was using Winchester .748 forty-five-gram handloads—”
“We know that,” said Syd. “There were still three cartridges in the five-capacity chamber when we recovered the weapon. No brass at the shooting site.”
“Bolt action,” continued the forensics man, undeterred. “He pocketed the brass from the first two shots, but he still got off the second shot in less than two seconds. And it would have passed right through Dr. Minor’s skull on the floor if Dr. Minor had fallen where the shooter rightly expected him to be. Also—”
“Would you all please quit referring to Dr. Minor in the third person?” said Dar irritably. “I’m right here.” He was sitting in his Eames chair, wearing a green bathrobe that didn’t cover all the dressings the paramedics had put on his chest and neck for glass cuts.
“You wouldn’t be there,” said Syd, “if the shooter hadn’t sighted in on your mirror reflection rather than you.”
“Lucky me,” said Dar.
“Damned right, lucky you,” agreed Syd, sounding angry. “If it hadn’t been for that very light drizzle, the slight fog that came in from the ocean this evening, a slight mist, this scope would have told the shooter he was looking at your reflection in the mirror rather than a flesh-and-blood target. Even from almost half a mile away, this guy put a bullet right through your heart.”
“In the mirror,” said Dar. “Seven years bad luck.” He sipped hot tea and paused to look at his hand as he held the cup. It was shaking very slightly. Interesting. “And why were you staked out there anyway, Investigator Olson?”
Syd’s eyes narrowed. “Just because you weren’t going to help us catch these bastards didn’t mean that I was leaving you unprotected.”
“Not much protection involved, was there?” said Dar. “The fellow got two shots off… By the way, are you sure it was a man?”
“Ran like a man,” said Syd. “Dressed in a windbreaker and ball cap. Average height. Average to slim build. Never saw his face and it was too dark to tell his race or nationality.”
Captain Hernandez was straddling a kitchen chair pulled into the circle around the coffee table. He put his chin on his forearm and said, “Is it standard procedure, Investigator Olson, for law enforcement officers from the state’s attorney’s office to go after shooters single-handedly…not wait for backup?”
Syd smiled at him. “No, Captain, it certainly isn’t. But Tom was my backup and he and I were going to take turns on shifts for a few nights. I’m sure that my superiors in Sacramento will remind me of proper procedure.”
“Good,” said Hernandez. “So where does that leave the investigation?”
Jim Warren of the FBI crouched next to the coffee table. “Well, we don’t have prints, we don’t have a description of the shooter or tag numbers on his car, but we’ve got his weapon. The Weaver scope isn’t that unusual, but there can’t be many of these Tikka 595s sold. And even though an initial dusting didn’t turn up any prints on the three cartridges still in the magazine, perhaps the FBI lab will find something. They usually do. And we’ll backtrack on the hand-loaded Winchester .748 MatchKing 8THPs… It’s not your usual deer-hunting ammo.”
There was more talk. Dar finished his tea and found himself half dozing, feeling the pain from the cuts and an ache from the tetanus shot but mostly feeling sleepy. Lawrence and Trudy called about 2:00 A.M.—they were plugged into a serious network—and it was everything Dar could do to keep them both from coming over, too.
It was dawn by the time the last of the uniforms and CHP people left. There were two San Diego PD unmarked cars on sentry duty now, a CHP cruiser on regular patrol, and Dar could just barely make out the uniformed officer with a rifle on the roof of the shooter’s building—an old warehouse two blocks north. Dar didn’t think the assassin was coming back today.
Finally only Tom Santana and Syd Olson were left; both looked very tired.
“Dar,” said Syd, setting her hand on his knee.
Dar snapped awake. He suddenly was very aware of the pressure of Sydney Olson’s hand, the presence of the other man, and the fact that he had only had time to pull on his bathrobe by the time the mob arrived. “What?”
“Does this change anything?”
“Getting shot at always changes things,” said Dar. “If it keeps up, I may become religious.”
“Goddammit, stop playing games. Will you consider helping us directly now? It will be the only way we can insure your safety and put these arrogant bastards away.”
“All of them?” said Dar. “You think you can catch all of them? Tom, how many cappers and bulls and cows and clinic workers and attorneys were there in that Vietnamese operation you broke up some years ago?”
“About forty-eight people,” said Tom Santana.
“And how many did you get indictments on?”
“Seven.”
“And how many did you send away?”
“Five…but that includes both attorneys, the only legitimate doctor in the bunch, and the head capper.”
“And they were out in…what? Two years? Three?”
“Yeah,” said Tom, “but the attorneys aren’t practicing anywhere, the doctor moved to Mexico, and the capper is still on parole. They’re not staging accidents any longer.”
“No,” said Dar. “Now it’s the Alliance and the Organizatsiya. The game never changes…just the faces.”
Santana shrugged and walked to the door.
&
nbsp; “Don’t forget to put the police bar in place,” Syd said, and turned to follow Tom Santana to the elevator.
Dar took her by the wrist. “Syd…thank you.”
“For what?” she said, looking deep into his eyes. “For what?” She left without waiting for an answer.
It was strangely dark in the condo, even after sunrise, because of the canvas over the tall windows. Dar made a mental note to have some blinds installed as soon as he could. He went back to the bedroom, shrugged off his bathrobe, and crawled under the comforter. He thought he would be asleep in seconds, but he lay there for some time, watching the filtered sunlight move across the high ceiling.
Eventually Dar slept. He did not dream.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“N IS FOR LOS NIÑOS”
WEDNESDAY WAS A lost day. Dar slept only a few hours—sleeping during the daylight made him feel creepy. When he got up, he found someone in the yellow pages who could install window blinds in a hurry and waited for them to come, puttering around the apartment. He was not afraid to go outside—he did not think he was afraid—but he also wasn’t ready to unless he had a reason.
Lawrence came over about noon with a hot lunch for them to share and made sure that Dar was hiding no horrific bullet holes. Lawrence said that he was working “in town,” which meant San Diego proper and usually meant testifying at the Justice Center. He said he’d be in town until late, and asked if he could crash on Dar’s sofa. Dar was suspicious—he suspected that his insurance adjuster friend was looking out for him—but Dar could hardly say no.
When Lawrence left and the venetian blind installers were finished, Dar finished his old case files, e-mailed his chess moves to all of his opponents except Dmitry in Moscow, and found himself in the bedroom, going to one knee and pulling the Remington 870 and the box of shells out from under the bed. He fed five of the clunky shotgun shells into the bottom of the receiver and then balanced the weapon on his knees. The embossed lettering on the left side of the chamber above and in front of the trigger guard read Remington 870 EXPRESS MAGNUM, designating a shotgun made after 1955, when Remington modified the 870 to accept modern 3-inch magnum shotshells as well as the older, 2¾-inch twelve-gauge shells. Dar touched the release catch for the sliding pump—a tiny latch on the left forward portion of the trigger guard—pumped the action once, chambering a shell, and then pressed the cross-bolt safety button at the rear of the trigger guard. The blue-steel touch of the weapon and the smell of gun oil coming from it reminded Dar of his childhood—of hunting ducks and pheasants with his father and his uncles in southern Illinois—of crisp autumn mornings, brittle cornstalks, and well-behaved bird dogs trotting behind them.
Dar put the weapon back under the bed and closed his eyes. Flashes of images were haunting him—not recent images, not of the mirror shattering, but images of shoes scattered across grass, shoes of every sort, men’s polished wing tips, children’s Keds, a woman’s sandals. After every air crash, the first thing the investigators noticed—even before the stink of aviation fuel, the torn and burned metal, or the bits of bodies—was the hundreds of shoes seemingly tossed at random around the site. It always said something to Dar about the terrible kinetic energies being unleashed in a crash that shoes—even those laced tightly—almost never stayed with the body. It seemed a final indignity somehow. Dar remembered the shoes in the Richard Kodiak a.k.a Richard Trace investigation. The young man had been completely knocked out of his right loafer, but the shoe was in the wrong place—Gennie Smiley had backed the van up too far the second time she ran over him. The boy’s a little light in his loafers. Dar could hear Dallas Trace saying that to some of his country-club friends.
As night fell, Dar wandered to the bookcases and pulled down a well-thumbed copy of the Stoics. He started with Epictetus but skipped ahead to Marcus Aurelius—Book XII of the Meditations. Dar had read and reread the passages so often in the last decade that some of the lines had taken on the singsong familiarity of a mantra:
The things are three of which thou art composed, a little body, a little breath (life), intelligence. Of these the first two are thine, so far as it is thy duty to take care of them: but the third alone is properly thine. Therefore if thou shalt separate from thyself, that is, from thy understanding, whatever others do or say, and whatever thou hast done or said thyself, and whatever future things trouble thee because they may happen, and whatever in the body which envelops thee or in the breath (life), which is by nature associated with the body, is attached to thee independent of thy will, and whatever the external circumfluent vortex whirls round, so that the intellectual power exempt for the things of fate can live pure and free by itself, doing what is just and accepting what happens and saying the truth: if thou wilt, separate, I say, from this ruling faculty the things which are attached to it by the impressions of the sense, and the things of time to come and of time that is past, and wilt make thyself like Empedocles’ sphere
All round, and in its joyous rest reposing:
and if thou shalt strive to live only what is really thy life, that is the present—then thou wilt be able to pass that portion of life which remains for thee up to the time of thy death, free from perturbations, nobly, and obedient to thy own daemon (to the god that is within thee).
Dar closed the book. Those lines—so many lines like those—had comforted him after Barbara and little David had died in the Colorado crash, after his own brief descent into madness and suicide attempt. He remembered the sound of the firing pin striking hollowly on that .410 shell that did not fire, did not fire. It had been the only time his father’s .410 had ever misfired; the hollow sound of that misfire woke him often but was counterbalanced by the sensible reply of the Stoics.
Not this night.
Dar made sure the blinds were closed and the police bar was in place, but tired as he was, he could not sleep. He did not believe in sleeping pills—he had seen too many accidents not that dissimilar from poor Mr. Hatton who answered his own .38 when the phone rang—but he knew the soporific potential of reading Immanuel Kant, and this he did until he was on the verge of sleep.
There was a knock at the door. Dar considered pulling the shotgun out from under the bed, but the knock had been the familiar shave-and-a-haircut. It was Lawrence, wrinkled, rumpled, and sweaty after a long day testifying. Dar went back to his Kant while Larry showered and came out in the extra, oversized bathrobe Dar kept for just these visits.
While Lawrence was straightening his stuff and fluffing his pillow on the couch, Dar was eyeing the shoulder holster and .32 Colt revolver that his friend had nonchalantly draped over a chair.
“You and Trudy going into L.A. for dinner tomorrow?” asked Dar.
“What do you mean?” said Lawrence from the couch. He was comfortable in his bathrobe, a Hudson’s Bay blanket over him, reading a Car & Driver magazine.
“You usually only pack heat when you guys are going into the city.” Dar knew that his friend had a permit to carry a concealed weapon because of all the threats the adjuster had received from car thieves and fraud artists, who were behind bars thanks to Lawrence’s testimony.
Lawrence grunted. “Coming to see you is enough reason to carry,” he said. “It’s like hanging around Charles de Gaulle in The Day of the Jackal.”
“Only in the original,” said Dar. “In the remake it’s the head of the FBI who’s being stalked. And not by Edward Fox but by Bruce Willis.”
“They always screw up remakes,” said Lawrence, putting down his magazine and snapping off the light at the head of the couch.
“Don’t they,” agreed Dar. He went to check that the door was locked and the police bar in place. He glanced at the ugly but closed blinds on all of his tall windows.
“Good night, Larry.”
Dar waited for the correction in the name, but Lawrence was already snoring softly. Dar went into his bedroom and was asleep within minutes.
Dar awoke on Thursday morning to the sound of the phone ringing. He grabbed t
he phone. Nothing. His bedside phone only gave him a dial tone. He jumped up and grabbed his cell phone from the dresser. It wasn’t even powered up. Dragging on a robe, he walked to his fax machine. Nothing there.
The phone rang again.
It was Lawrence’s cell phone. Dar had forgotten that his friend was sleeping on the couch, but now he sat on one of the high stools at the counter while Lawrence answered his Flip Phone and exchanged some fast but groggy sentences—obviously with Trudy, unless the totally faithful Lawrence had suddenly found someone else to call “Honey Bunch.”
Dar put the coffee on as Lawrence sat up on the couch, moaned, growled, tried to clear his throat, rubbed his eyes, rubbed his cheeks and jowls, growled again, and went through a series of throat-clearing exercises that sounded like a 240-pound cat being strangled.
How the hell does Trudy put up with that every morning? thought Dar, not for the first time. He said, “Coffee’ll be ready in a minute. Do you want any toast or bacon? Or just cereal?”
Lawrence put on his glasses, and grinned across the wide space at Dar. “Shut the coffee off. We’ll grab some coffee and a Toad McMuffin on the way. We’ve got a case already and you’re going to love it.”
Dar glanced at his watch. It was already eight-thirty, but strangely dark in the condo with all of the blinds closed. “I’ve got a lot of work to catch up—” he began.
Lawrence was shaking his head. “Nope. This is just a few miles out…halfway to my place…and you’d hate yourself if you missed it.”
“Mmmm,” said Dar.
“Attempted nunicide by a chicken cannon,” said Lawrence.
“Pardon me?” Dar shut off the coffee maker.
“Attempted nunicide by a chicken cannon,” repeated Lawrence as he flip-flopped into Dar’s bathroom to use the facilities and take a shower before Dar did.
Dar sighed. He found the rod that opened the venetian blinds and then the cord that tugged them up. It was a beautiful, sunny San Diego summer day. Every detail on the aircraft carrier permanently berthed across the bay stood out in the crisp light. The sound of traffic was a reassuring hum. A plane roared in to Lindbergh Field, some of the passengers staring up at the overtowering buildings in pure terror while the old hands kept reading their morning papers. Dar could almost read the headlines through the starboard windows as the DC-9 passed by.
