by Tom Clancy
“Cause of death,” the coroner observed with early-morning irony, “is the total vaporization of his heart. The only way we’ll even be able to identify heart tissue is under a microscope. Steak tartare,” the man added, shaking his head.
“An obvious contact wound. The guy must have jammed the muzzle right into him, then triggered it off.”
“Jesus, he didn’t even cough up any blood,” Douglas said. The lack of an exit wound left no blood at all on the sidewalk, and from a distance Bandanna actually looked as though he were asleep—except for the wide and lifeless eyes.
“No diaphragm,” the ME explained, pointing to the entrance hole. “That’s between here and the heart. We’ll probably find that the whole respiratory system is wiped out, too. You know, I’ve never seen anything this clean in my life.” And the man had been working this job for sixteen years. “We need lots of pictures. This one will find its way into a textbook.”
“How experienced was he?” Ryan asked the uniformed officer.
“Long enough to know better.”
The detective lieutenant bent down, feeling around the left hip. “Still has a gun here.”
“Somebody he knew?” Douglas wondered. “Somebody he let get real close, that’s for damned sure.”
“A shotgun’s kinda hard to conceal. Hell, even a sawed-off is bulky. No warning at all?” Ryan stepped back for the ME to do his work.
“Hands are clean, no signs of a struggle. Whoever did this got real close without alarming our friend at all.” Douglas paused. “Goddamn it, a shotgun’s noisy. Nobody heard anything?”
“Time of death, call it two or three for now,” the medical examiner estimated, for again there was no rigor.
“Streets are quiet then,” Douglas went on. “And a shotgun makes a shitload of noise.”
Ryan looked at the pants pockets. No bulge of a money roll, again. He looked around. There were perhaps fifteen people watching from behind the police line. Street entertainment was where you found it. and the interest on their faces was no less clinical and no more involved than that of the medical examiner.
“The Duo maybe?” Ryan asked nobody in particular.
“No, it wasn’t,” the ME said at once. “This was a single-barrel weapon. A double would have made a mark left or right of the entrance wound, and the powder distribution would have been different. Shotgun, this close, you only need one. Anyway, a single-barrel weapon.”
“Amen,” Douglas agreed. “Someone is doing the Lord’s work. Three pushers down in a couple of days. Might put Mark Charon out of business if this keeps up.”
“Tom,” Ryan said, “not today.” One more folder, he thought. Another drug-pusher ripoff, done very efficiently —but not the same guy who’d taken Ju-Ju down. Different MO.
Another shower, another shave, another jog in Chinquapin Park during which he could think. Now he had a place and a face to go along with the car. The mission was on profile, Kelly thought, turning right on Belvedere Avenue to cross the stream before jogging back the other way and completing his third lap. It was a pleasant park. Not much in the way of playground equipment, but that allowed kids to run and play free-form, which a number of them were doing, some under the semiwatchful eyes of a few neighborhood mothers, many with books to go along with the sleeping infants who would soon grow to enjoy the grass and open spaces. There was an undermanned pickup game of baseball. The ball evaded the glove of a nine-year-old and came close to his jogging path. Kelly bent down without breaking stride and tossed the ball to the kid, who caught it this time and yelled a thank-you. A younger child was playing with a Frisbee, not too well, and wandered in Kelly’s way, causing a quick avoidance maneuver that occasioned an embarrassed look from her mother, to which Kelly responded with a friendly wave and smile.
This is how it’s supposed to be, he told himself. Not very different from his own youth in Indianapolis. Dad’s at work. Mom’s with the kids because it was hard to be a good mom and have a job, especially when they were little; or at least, those mothers who had to work or chose to work could leave the kids with a trusted friend, sure that the little ones would be safe to play and enjoy their summer vacation in a green and open place, learning to play ball. And yet society had learned to accept the fact that it wasn’t this way for many. This area was so different from his area of operations, and the privileges these kids enjoyed ought not to be privileges at all, for how could a child grow to proper adulthood without an environment like this?
Those were dangerous thoughts, Kelly told himself. The logical conclusion was to try to change the whole world, and that was beyond his capacity, he thought, finishing his three-mile run with the usual sweaty and good-tired feel, walking it off to cool down before he drove back to the apartment. The sounds drifted over of laughing children, the squeals, the angry shouts of cheater! for some perceived violation of rules not fully understood by either player, and disagreements over who was out or who was “it” in some other game. He got into his car, leaving the sounds and thought behind, because he was cheating, too, wasn’t he? He was breaking the rules, important rules that he did fully understand, but doing so in pursuit of justice, or what he called justice in his own mind.
Vengeance? Kelly asked himself, crossing a street. Vigilante was the next word that came unbidden into his mind. That was a better word, Kelly thought. It came from vigiles, a Roman term for those who kept the watch, the vigilia during the night in the city streets, mainly watchmen for fire, if he remembered correctly from the Latin classes at St. Ignatius High School, but being Romans they’d probably carried swords, too. He wondered if the streets of Rome had been safe, safer than the streets of this city. Perhaps so—probably so. Roman justice had been . . . stern. Crucifixion would not have been a pleasant way to die, and for some crimes, like the murder of one’s father, the penalty prescribed by law was to be bound in a cloth sack along with a dog and a rooster, and some other animal, then to be tossed in the Tiber—not to drown, but to be torn apart while drowning by animals crazed to get out of the sack. Perhaps he was the linear descendant of such times, of a vigile, Kelly told himself, keeping watch at night. It made him feel better than to believe that he was breaking the law. And “vigilantes” in American history books were very different from those portrayed in the press. Before the organization of real police departments, private citizens had patrolled the streets and kept the peace in a rough-and-ready way. As he was doing?
Well, no, not really, Kelly admitted to himself, parking the car. So what if it was vengeance? Ten minutes later another garbage bag filled with another set of discarded clothes found its way to the Dumpster, and Kelly enjoyed another shower before making a telephone call.
“Nurses’ station, O’Toole.”
“Sandy? It’s John. Still getting out at three?”
“You do have good timing,” she said, allowing herself a private smile at her stand-up desk. “The damn car is broke again.” And taxicabs cost too much.
“Want me to look at it?” Kelly asked.
“I wish somebody could fix it.”
“I make no promises,” she heard him say. “But I come cheap.”
“How cheap?” Sandy asked, knowing what the reply would be.
“Permit me to buy you dinner? You can pick the place, even.”
“Yes, okay . . . but . . .”
“But it’s still too soon for both of us. Yes, Ma’am, I know that. Your virtue is not endangered—honest.”
She had to laugh. It was just so incongruous that this big man could be so self-effacing. And yet she knew that she could trust him, and she was weary of cooking dinner for one, and being alone and alone and alone. Too soon or not, she needed company sometimes.
“Three-fifteen,” she told him, “at the main entrance.”
“I’ll even wear my patient bracelet.”
“Okay.” Another laugh, surprising another nurse who passed by the station with a trayful of medications. “Okay, I said yes, didn’t I?”
&nbs
p; “Yes, Ma’am. See you then,” Kelly said with a chuckle, hanging up.
Some human contact would be nice, he told himself, heading out the door. First Kelly headed to a shoe store, where he purchased a pair of black high-tops, size eleven. Then he found four more shoe stores, where he did the same, trying not to get the same brand, but he ended up with one duplicate pair even so. The same problem attended the purchase of bush jackets. He could find only two brand names for that type of garment, and ended up getting a pair of duplicates, then to discover that they were exactly the same, different only in the name tag inside the neck. Planned diversity in disguise, he found, was harder than he’d expected it to be, but that didn’t lessen the necessity of sticking to his plan. On getting back to his apartment—he was, perversely, thinking of it as “home” though he knew better—he stripped everything of tags and headed for the laundry room, where all the clothes went into the machine on a hot-hot cycle with plenty of Clorox bleach, along with the remaining dark-color clothes he’d picked up at yard sales. He was down to three clothing sets now, and realized he’d have to shop for more.
The thought evoked a frown. More yard sales, which he found tedious, especially now that he’d developed an operational routine. Like most men Kelly hated shopping, now all the more since his adventures were of necessity repetitive. His routine was also tiring him out, both from lack of sleep and the unremitting tension of his activity. None of it was routine, really. Everything was dangerous. Even though he was becoming accustomed to his mission, he would not become inured to the dangers, and the stress was there. That was partly good news in that he wasn’t taking anything lightly, but stress could also wear at any man in little, hard-to-perceive ways such as the increased heart rate and blood pressure that resulted in fatigue. He was controlling it with exercise, Kelly thought, though sleep was becoming a problem. All in all it was not unlike working the weeds in 3rd SOG, but he was older now, and the lack of backup, the absence of companions to share the stress and ease the strain in the off-hours, was taking its toll. Sleep, he told himself, checking his watch. Kelly switched on the TV set in the bedroom, catching a noon news show.
“Another drug dealer was found dead in west Baltimore today.” the reporter announced.
“I know,” Kelly said back, fading out for his nap.
“Here’s the story,” a Marine colonel said at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, while another was doing much the same thing at exactly the same time at Camp Pendleton, California. “We have a special job. We’re selecting volunteers exclusively from Force Recon. We need fifteen people. It’s dangerous. It’s important. It’s something you’ll be proud of doing after it’s over. The job will last two to three months. That’s all I can say.”
At Lejeune a collection of perhaps seventy-five men, all combat veterans, all members of The Corps’ most exclusive unit, sat in their hard-backed chairs. Recon Marines, they’d all volunteered to become Marines first—there were no draftees here—then done so again to join the elite within the elite. There was a slightly disproportionate representation of minorities, but that was only a matter of interest to sociologists. These men were Marines first, last, always, as alike as their green suits could make them. Many bore scars on their bodies, because their job was more dangerous and demanding than that of ordinary infantrymen. They specialized in going out in small groups, to look and learn, or to kill with a very high degree of selectivity. Many of them were qualified snipers, able to place an aimed shot in a particular head at four hundred yards, or a chest at over a thousand, if the target had the good manners to stand still for the second or two needed for the bullet to cover the longer distance. They were the hunters. Few had nightmares from their duties, and none would ever fall victim to delayed-stress syndrome, because they deemed themselves to be predators, not prey, and lions know no such feelings.
But they were also men. More than half had wives and/or children who expected Daddy to come home from time to time; the rest had sweethearts and looked forward to settling down in the indeterminate future. All had served one thirteen-month tour of duty. Many had served two; a handful had actually served three, and none of this last group would volunteer. Some of them might have, perhaps most, had they only known the nature of the mission, because the call of duty was unusually strong in them, but duty takes many forms, and these men judged that they had served as much as any man should for one war. Now their job was to train their juniors, passing along the lessons that had enabled them to return home when others almost as good as they were had not; that was their institutional duty to The Corps, they all thought, as they sat quietly in their chairs and looked at the Colonel on the stage, wondering what it was, intensely curious but not curious enough to place their lives at risk again after having done so too often already. A few of them looked furtively left and right, reading the faces of the younger men, knowing from the expressions which ones would linger in the room and place their names in the hat. Many would regret not staying behind, knowing even now that not knowing what it was all about, and probably never finding out, would forever leave a blank spot on their consciences—but against that they weighed the faces of their wives and children and decided no, not this time.
After a few moments the men rose and filed out. Perhaps twenty-five or thirty stayed behind to register their names as volunteers. Their personnel jackets would be collected quickly and evaluated, and fifteen of their number would be selected in a process that appeared random but was not. Some special slots had to be filled with special skills, and in the nature of volunteering, some of the men rejected would actually be better and more proficient warriors than some of those accepted because their personal skills had been made redundant by another volunteer. Such was life in uniform, and the men all accepted it, each with feelings of regret and relief as they returned to their normal duties. By the end of the day, the men who were going were assembled and briefed on departure times and nothing more. A bus would be taking them, they noted. They couldn’t be going very far. At least not yet.
Kelly awoke at two and got himself cleaned up. This afternoon’s mission demanded that he look civilized, and so he wore a shirt and a tie and a jacket. His hair, still growing back from being shaved, needed a trim, but it was a little late for that. He selected a blue tie for his blue blazer and white shirt and walked out to where the Scout was parked, looking like the executive salesman he’d pretended to be, waving at the apartment manager on the way.
Luck smiled on Kelly. There was an opening on the traffic loop at the hospital’s main entrance, and he walked in to see a large statue of Christ in the lobby, perhaps fifteen or twenty feet high, staring down at him with a benign expression more fitting to a hospital than to what Kelly had been doing only twelve hours earlier. He walked around it, his back to the statue’s back because he didn’t need that sort of question on his conscience—not now.
Sandy O’Toole appeared at three-twelve, and when he saw her come through the oak doors Kelly smiled until he saw the look on her face. A moment later he understood why. A surgeon was right behind her, a short, swarthy man in greens, walking as rapidly as his short legs permitted and talking loudly at her. Kelly hesitated, looking on with curiosity as Sandy stopped and turned, perhaps tired of running away or merely bending to the necessity of the moment. The doctor was of her height, perhaps a little less, speaking so rapidly that Kelly didn’t catch all the words while Sandy looked in his eyes with a blank expression.
“The incident report is filed, doctor,” she said during a brief pause in his tirade.
“You have no right to do that!” The eyes blazed angrily in his dark, pudgy face, causing Kelly to draw a little closer.
“Yes, I do, doctor. Your medication order was incorrect. I am the team leader, and I am required to report medication errors.”
“I am ordering you to withdraw that report! Nurses do not give orders to doctors!” What followed was language that Kelly didn’t like, especially in the presence of God’s image. As he watched, th
e doctor’s dark face grew darker, and he leaned into the nurse’s space, his voice growing louder. For her part, Sandy didn’t flinch, refusing to allow herself to be intimidated, which goaded the doctor further.
“Excuse me.” Kelly intruded on the dispute, not too close, just to let everyone know that someone was here, and momentarily drawing an angry look from Sandra O’Toole. “I don’t know what you two are arguing about, but if you’re a doctor and the lady here is a nurse, maybe you two can disagree in a more professional way,” he suggested in a quiet voice.
It was as though the physician hadn’t heard a thing. Not since he was sixteen years old had anyone ignored Kelly so blatantly. He drew back, wanting Sandy to handle this herself, but the doctor’s voice merely grew louder, switching now to a language he didn’t understand, mixing English vituperation with Farsi. Through it all Sandy stood her ground, and Kelly was proud of her, though her face was growing wooden and her impassive mien had to be masking some real fear now. Her impassive resistance only goaded the doctor into raising his hand and then his voice even more. It was when he called her a “fucking cunt,” doubtless something learned from a local citizen, that he stopped. The fist that he’d been waving an inch from Sandy’s nose had disappeared, encased, he saw with surprise, in the hairy forepaw of a very large man.
