Sympathy for the Devil

by Justin Gustainis

  The button featured an artist's rendering of a demon - nothing remotely realistic, just the cute, Halloween version in red with a long tail and pitchfork. But the face wasn't a cartoon demon. It was Howard Stark's photo, with red horns added by the artist. The caption along the bottom read 'GIVE 'EM HELL, HOWIE!'

  Libby and Morris looked at each other, the button representing a lot of things they couldn't discuss while surrounded by so many people. Morris leaned toward Libby and asked "Bad taste?"

  She looked him in the eyes. "I hope not," she said. "I really hope not."

  The rally started punctually at 3:00, and it was a little less awful than what Libby had been expecting - but only a little.

  The Smoky Mountain Seven (unaccountably consisting of six musicians) were better than the venue would have suggested, the preacher was predictably sanctimonious, the two local politicos surprisingly brief. The recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance was uneventful, 'The Star Spangled Banner' was sung enthusiastically if not well, and then it was time for the great man himself.

  Senator Howard Warren Stark, (R-Ohio), looking tan and robust, was escorted to the podium by a man wearing a suit, sunglasses, and an earpiece.

  Stark stepped up to the microphone and adjusted it upward for his height. Then, in temporary abandonment of his Yankee origins, he shouted over the applause and cheering, "HEY, RICHMOND! HOW Y'ALL DOIN'?"

  The crowd, as they say, went wild.

  Removing the sixteen long screws that held the window in its frame was a piece of cake compared to the task of moving the chest of drawers so that it was lined up with the aperture they'd created by taking the glass down.

  Peters had been insistent. "Prone position's the most stable, and with sniping, stability is everything."

  "But it's going to be a huge pain in the ass getting it over here with so little room for maneuver. And I can't just levitate the fucking thing, you know. Maybe if you'd said something yesterday, I could've tried putting a spell together, but as it is, we're gonna have to do the hard way. It's stupid, Peters."

  "No, Ashley, what would be stupid is not doing everything possible to ensure that I make the shot. Firing offhand - standing upright - is the least stable and that makes it the last resort."

  "It was good enough for Lee Harvey Oswald."

  "Is that right? Oswald really did it, huh? The conspiracy nuts were all wrong."

  "I didn't say he managed it all by himself," she said, "and don't change the subject."

  "You're the one who changed it." Part of Peters's mind was detached enough to marvel that here he was, arguing with a millennia-old creature from Hell as if he were having a fight with his girlfriend.

  "Look, Ashley, I'm not doing this to piss you off. I don't know what distance Oswald fired from, but it can't have been any 500 meters. Firing offhand is the least reliable position. Prone is best, believe me. The whole body supports the weapon. Kneeling and sitting are both more or less in the middle, and the middle isn't good enough, at his range. The sooner we get started, the sooner I can start letting my arms rest from the strain of moving furniture."

  "Why can't you use the desk? It's already near the fucking window."

  "It's too small. Half my body would be hanging over the edge. It's gotta be the chest of drawers."

  "Shit!" Ashley spat the word. She'd walked over to the hole in the wall and stared over at Kanawha Plaza, hands on hips. Finally, she'd turned away, and her facial expression was resigned. "All right, let's get it fucking over with."

  And so they had, with Ashley cursing the whole way. She was profane in a number of languages, including one that Peters recognized as the tongue spoken by demons.

  Even with all the drawers removed, the chest of drawers was extremely difficult to move around. It took forty-five sweaty, profanity-filled minutes, but finally the immense piece of furniture was in position.

  "Satisfied?" Ashley asked, giving the clear impression that his answering "No" would be instantly fatal.

  "It's perfect, Ashley. Thank you."

  She began undressing, which never took her long. "I'm going to take a shower. Don't bother to join me."

  When the bathroom door closed behind her, Peters shook his head and said, quietly, "Women."

  He reminded himself what she really was, and tried to stop thinking of her as a woman, even though she was acting very human at the moment.

  He started flexing his arms slowly, to help the muscles relax from the strain of lifting and putting down the chest of drawers, over and over. He'd had enough sense not to remind Ashley that they were going to have to put the beast back in position, once he had killed Stark. He wanted to live long enough to do his job.

  Still flexing, Peters walked over to the rectangular hole in the wall where the window had been. None of the nearby buildings came up this high, or taking the window out would have been unacceptably risky. He stared across at Kanawha Plaza, which was already starting to fill up with people. Five hundred meters. Shit.

  He hadn't checked his watch when Ashley huffed into the bathroom, but it didn't seem to him very long before her voice came through the closed door, over the hiss of the shower.

  "Peters?"

  "Yes, dear."

  "Get your ass in here."

  When he was naked and under the water with her, she put her hands on his hips and tilted her head to look up at him. Since she was almost his height, not much of a tilt was necessary. "This body they gave me seems to come with human emotions, too," she said. "Astaroth's idea of a joke, perhaps. How do you humans stand it?"

  "Guess we just take them for granted."

  "Well, I've been acting a little too human - possibly to the detriment of our mission. If I were capable of apologizing to a mere human, which I'm not, I'd be doing it now. Okay?"

  He grinned at her. "Okay."

  She pulled him up against her, her erect nipples tickling his chest. "I want to ask you something, seriously," she said. "Would getting off now make it easier for you to shoot straight later, or more difficult? Say the word, and I'll make myself look like a repulsive old hag who you wouldn't fuck on a dare. I can always change back to my gorgeous, sexy self later. Or do you think it would relax you - coming, I mean?"

  "I never had the opportunity to make the choice before," he said. "The CIA didn't send sexy demons along as assistants when I had to use a rifle in the old days."

  "I might take exception to assistant, but go on."

  "It'll be at least two hours before I have to pull the trigger." He grinned at her again. "This coming you were talking about - it can't hurt, and could maybe help."

  "You don't know how glad I am to hear that," she said softly, her face inches from his own. "Maybe emotions aren't such a bad idea, after all."

  Chapter 33

  After delivering his redneck-style greeting, Stark stood there smiling, waiting for the cheering and applause to die down.

  Look at them - their pale faces all in a row, like sheep, ready for slaughter.

  He held up his hands, asking for quiet. Eventually, the crowd let him have some.

  "I can't tell you what a pleasure it is to be here in the Commonwealth of Virginia. I spend so much time in Washington, I almost forgot what real people look like!"

  More applause, cheering, whistles and rebel yells greeted this, as he knew they would - he had used the line in a hundred different places already, with the same result. In time, relative silence returned.

  "And it's real people, people like you and your friends and neighbors, that this campaign is all about."

  The cheers and applause were weaker now. The sheep were getting tired. Time to give them something to listen to passively, until he got to the next carefully-scripted applause line.

  "Because, you know, it's real people who are suffering, in this great land of ours. People whose jobs have been shipped overseas, or downsized, or just left to wither and die by Wall Street fat cats who just get fatter and fatter, while everyday men and women's lives and bank accou
nts get leaner and leaner."

  The Wall Street fat cats had given millions to Stark's campaign, and would give millions more. They didn't mind being called names out here in Hicksville. They knew what Stark was really about - or they thought they did.

  "After eight years of socialism at home and cowardice abroad, the choices remaining to us..."

  In Room 1408 of the Crowne Plaza, Malachi Peters, facedown atop the chest of drawers, settled the butt of the Remington into the hollow of his shoulder and waited for his heart rate to slow. He was breathing slowly and regularly, and that would soon tamp down the adrenaline rush that occurs in most people when they get ready to kill somebody. There are some who do not experience this excitement. They are called psychopaths.

  Peters closed one eye and with the other looked through the scope and its mil dot reticle, which was apparently what everybody was shooting with these days instead of crosshairs. Peters had to admit it was an improvement over what he'd used thirty-some years ago as a CIA assassin. The image he saw through the scope was still in the form of a cross, but now the intersecting lines, instead of being solid, consisted of evenly spaced dots. This allowed for very precise aiming at long distances, and Peters was glad to get it.

  He placed the center of the reticle on Stark's head, which appeared so clear to him he might as well be viewing it under a microscope. The chest, not the head, was the sniper's ideal target. It was bigger, didn't move around as much, and a hit anywhere in the chest area was almost guaranteed to get heart, lung, or spine - or some combination thereof.

  But diligent research had told him that, these days, more and more politicos wore lightweight body armor out in public. Back in Peters' day, such things were called bulletproof vests. They were big, heavy, and almost impossible to conceal under any clothing tighter than a Hawaiian muumuu. But, as if in compensation for improvements in rifle scopes and ballistics, protective clothing had become lighter, more flexible, and harder to detect.

  There was no way to be certain that a chest shot would kill Stark. It would have to be the head.

  Now it was time to call on Ashley. His demon companion had proved useful in many ways. She offered fantastic sex, stimulating conversation, encyclopedic knowledge of certain subjects, and a sarcastic wit that kept him on his toes.

  And she could do magic.

  He had explored Ashley's abilities in several long conversations. No, she could not use magic to simply cause Stark's head to explode. No, she could not make Peters invisible - not to Stark/Sargatanas, anyway, and he was the one who mattered. No, she could not cause objects to appear out of thin air wherever she wished; Peters had been thinking of a hand grenade, pin already pulled, dropped next to Stark's sleeping form late some night.

  But Ashley could, within limits, control elements of the weather - like wind.

  Wind was the sniper's enemy. At extreme distances, a moderate breeze could blow a bullet as much as ten degrees off course - and that could make all the difference.

  The Weather Channel had said the breeze in Richmond (at the last reading, anyway) was 12 miles per hour, with gusts up to 20. There were ways that snipers could overcome wind - that was one of the advantages of the mil dot reticle. You could calculate how the wind would affect your bullet's path, and compensate with the point of aim. But the wind could fuck it all up, if it changed on you. An erratic wind was the factor he'd been most concerned about. The shot was difficult, at best, and at 500-some meters, with the breeze variable, the odds against success would have made a Vegas croupier smile in envy.

  But Ashley could, for brief periods, stop the wind. She had prepared magic in advance in order to do just that.

  Without moving more than a few jaw muscles, Peters said, "Okay, baby, do it."

  Behind him, Ashley began to chant in words that Peters didn't recognize - perhaps one of the more obscure dialects of the demon tongue.

  Peters had been concerned about how he would know when the breeze dropped, assuming Ashley was successful. But his first look through the scope had given him what he needed.

  Seated on the stage a few feet to Stark's right was a pudgy local politician sporting a comb-over, one of those ridiculous methods by which balding men try to hide their condition and only succeed in calling attention to it. But Peters was glad to see Mr. Comb-Over today. The ebbs and flows of breeze that blew left to right across the stage caused loose strands of the man's hair to rise and fall. Through the scope, Peters could see those dark hairs against the pale scalp clear as crystal, and he watched them now.

  Behind him, Ashley chanted for almost a minute - then stopped.

  In the scope, the little strands of Mr. Comb-Over's hair moved in the breeze - and then they stopped.

  Slowly, Peters shifted the scope's viewpoint a bare inch, from Mr. Comb-Over to Senator Howard Stark, now caught up in the throes of oratory. He centered the reticule on Stark's forehead. With infinite slowness, Peters began to squeeze his hand, applying gradual pressure to the Remington's trigger. That's how you avoid jerking the trigger and throwing your shot off. "You should be increasing tension so gradually that you're surprised when the weapon goes off," Peters's rifle instructor had said at the Farm, all those years ago.

  Peters was anticipating his surprise sometime in the next few seconds.

  Libby Chastain didn't pay any attention to Stark's speech after the first few minutes. It was the usual political bullshit - full of applause lines and empty promises and utterly lacking any serious discussion of the issues. Libby was already in a bad mood from tension and lack of sleep; she didn't need any further aggravation.

  She let her gaze wander over the scene in front of her. She couldn't see the crowd, being in the thick of it, so she watched a couple of squirrels chasing each other around the huge fountain, checked out the goods on several young policemen who strolled by, and wondered what on Earth she and Quincey were going to do if it turned out that Senator Stark did, in fact, reek of black magic.

  And she made regular checks of a certain window on the fourteenth floor of the Crowne Plaza Hotel, some five hundred yards to her left. If the people standing nearby thought it odd that the woman near the rope line was periodically looking through the circles of her cupped hands as if they were binoculars - and in the direction opposite the speaker's platform, no less - nobody said anything.

  Before leaving the hotel, Libby had told Quincey what she wanted to do in order to locate Room 1408 easily from the middle of Kanawha Plaza. In a corner of his suitcase, he had found a roll of black electrical tape, claiming utter ignorance as to when or why he'd put it there. It was exactly what Libby needed.

  On her instructions, Quincey had gone up to her room and used the tape to make a big 'X' in the window that faced the Plaza. Since she knew her own room number, it had been easy to spot the 'X,' then count windows from there until she knew which one belonged to 1408. The angle to the hotel from where she stood meant she couldn't see into the suspect room, but at least she knew which hole in the concrete it was - for all the good that might do her.

  Libby checked the exterior of Room 1408 from time to time, finding nothing amiss. If asked, she couldn't have said what she was looking for, but her witch sense told her something was not right about that room and its occupant, and that was a good enough reason for her to keep an eye on it.

  At the moment, Libby was not looking toward the hotel. She'd noticed a bed of tulips that had been planted near the fountain. Too cold for them to bloom in New York, of course, but this was a different climate. Libby was watching the tulips wave back and forth in the breeze when suddenly they just stopped moving. She waited for the gentle swaying to resume - and it didn't. Libby hastily wet her index finger and raised it above her head, away from the crowd.

  The breeze was gone. Utterly.

  Mother Nature is a funny old gal, sometimes. She'll sneak up on you, usually with the wind or rain. You can be walking along, everything's quiet - then all at once you're either being blown off your feet or drenched. L
ike a well-tuned sports car, Nature has great acceleration.

  But, also like a lot of sports cars, she doesn't have very good brakes. Stopping on a dime? Forget it. A breeze will die down, but it takes a little while. The wind doesn't just stop.

  Except it just did.

  Libby curled her hands and brought them up to her eyes at once. She located the fourteenth floor of the Crowne Plaza quickly by coming down from the top. After that, she found, it wasn't necessary to count horizontally. Room 1408 was almost certainly the one from whose window she could see what appeared to her as thin black smoke - the unmistakable sign of black magic in use.

  Many people can think fast. Smart people think even faster. And smart witches are fastest of all.

  Item: the wind just stopped - dead.

  Item: black magic is currently being used in room 1408 of the Crowne Plaza.

  Item: the black smoke manifestation wouldn't appear as coming from the window unless the window was open.

  Item: windows of modern hotels don't open, to discourage suicides. To get one of those open would require either a strong blow with a heavy object, a small amount of explosives, or a great deal of time and effort.

  Item: a candidate for the office of President of the United States is about 500 yards from said building, orating.

  Query[1]: why would someone high up in a building go to considerable trouble to acquire an open window and stifle the breeze, while a prominent politician stood out in the open, some 500 yards away?

  Query[2]: do the names Kennedy, King, and Wallace have any relevance to the present problem?

  Query[3]: what behavioral intervention seems most appropriate?

  Conclusion[1]: intended assassination seems the most likely option.

  Conclusion[2]: you bet your ass they do.

  Conclusion[3]: ohhhhhh, fuck!