by Stephen King
It’s all about that M151. It’s the optical scope the spotter used to calculate the distance from muzzle to target, and with eerie (it was to Billy, at least) accuracy. That distance is the basis for MOA, minute of angle. Billy needed none of that for the shot that took out Joel Allen, but the one he was responsible for making on that day in 2004, always assuming Ammar Jassim left his storefront to make it possible, was much longer.
Does he explain all that, or not?
If he does, that means he expects, or just hopes, that someday someone will read what he’s writing. If he doesn’t, it means he has given up that expectation. That hope. So which is it to be?
Standing there at the kitchen sink he flashes back to an interview he heard on the radio not long after he got out of the sand. Probably on one of those NPR shows where everyone sounds smart and full of Prozac. Some writer was getting interviewed, one of the oldtimers who was hot stuff back in the days when all the important writers were white, male, and borderline alcoholics. For the life of him Billy can’t remember who that writer was, except it wasn’t Gore Vidal—not snarky enough—and not Truman Capote—not quacky enough. What he can remember is what the guy said when the interviewer asked him about his process. “I always keep two people in mind when I sit down to write: myself, and the stranger.”
Which brings Billy back full circle to the M151. He could describe it. He could explain its purpose. He could explain why MOA is even more important than distance, although the two are always joined together. He could do all of those things, but only needs to if he is writing for a stranger as well as himself. So is he?
Get real, Billy tells himself. I’m the only stranger here.
But that’s okay. He can do it for himself if he has to. He doesn’t need… what would you call it?
“Validation,” he murmurs as he goes back to the laptop. He once more picks up where he left off.
7
Other than my rifle, the biggest piece of equipment we had in the bucket with us was the M151, also known as the Spotter’s Friend. Taco set up the tripod and I shuffled out of his way as best I could. The platform bounced a little and Taco told me to hold still unless I wanted to put a bullet in the sign over the shop door instead of in Jassim’s head. I stayed as still as I could while Taco did his thing, making calculations and muttering to himself.
Lieutenant Colonel Jamieson had estimated the distance as 1,200 yards. Taco took his readings on a kid bouncing a ball in front of Pronto Pronto Photo Photo and called it 1,340 yards. A long shot for sure, but on a windless day like that one in early April, a high confidence one. I had made longer, and we had all heard stories of world-class snipers making shots at twice that distance. Of course I couldn’t count on Jassim being perfectly stationary, like the head on a paper target. That concerned me, but the fact that he was a human being with a beating heart and a living brain didn’t. He was a Judas goat who had lured four men into an ambush, guys guilty of nothing but delivering food. He was a bad guy and needed to be put down.
Around quarter past nine, Jassim came out of his store. He was wearing a long blue shirt like a dashiki and baggy white pants. Today he was wearing a knitted red cap instead of a blue topper. That was a wonderful sight marker. I started to line up the shot, but Jassim just shooed the ball-bouncing kid away with a swat on the butt and went back inside.
“Well doesn’t that suck,” Taco said.
We waited. Young men went into Pronto Pronto Photo Photo. Young men came out. They were laughing and scuffling and grab-assing around as young men do all over the world, from Kabul to Kansas City. Some of them had no doubt been shooting up those Blackwater trucks with their AKs just a couple of days before. Some of them were undoubtedly firing at us seven months later as we went from block to block, cleaning them out. For all I know, some of them were in what we called the Funhouse, where everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
Ten o’clock came, then ten-fifteen. “Maybe he’s taking his smoke break out back today,” Taco said.
Then, at ten-thirty, the door of Pronto Pronto Photo Photo opened and Ammar Jassim came out with two of his young men. I sighted in. I saw them laughing and talking. Jassim clapped one of them on the back and the two men strolled off with their arms around each other’s shoulders. Jassim took a pack of cigarettes from his pants pocket. I was in the optics and could read Marlboro and see the two trademark gold lions. Everything was clear: his bushy eyebrows, his lips as red as a woman’s wearing lipstick, his salt-and-pepper beard stubble.
Taco was sighting with the M151, now handheld. “Fucker’s a dead ringer for Yessir I’m-a Fat.”
“Shut up, Tac.”
I laid the crosshairs on the knitted cap and waited for Jassim to light up. I was willing to allow him one last drag before putting out his lights. He stuck a cigarette in his mouth. He put the pack back into his pocket and came out with a lighter. Not a cheap disposable Bic but a Zippo. He might have purchased it, either in a store or on the black market. It might also have been looted from one of the contractors who had been shot, burned, and hung from the bridge. He flipped it open and a tiny sunstar winked off the top. I saw that. I saw everything. Master Gunny Sergeant Diego Vasquez at Pendleton used to say that a Marine sniper lives for a perfect shot. This one was perfect. He also said, “It’s like sex, my little virgins. You will never forget your first.”
I drew in a breath, held it for a five-count, and squeezed the trigger. The recoil hit the hollow of my shoulder. Jassim’s knitted hat flew off and at first I thought I had missed him, maybe only by an inch, but when you’re sniping, an inch might as well be a mile. He just stood there with the cigarette between his lips. Then the lighter fell out of his fingers and the cigarette fell out of his mouth. They landed on the dusty sidewalk. In the movies, the person who gets shot flies back when the bullet hits. That’s rarely how it happens in real life. Jassim actually took two steps forward. By then I could see that it wasn’t just the hat that had come off; the top of his head was inside it.
He went to his knees, then full on his face. People came running.
“Payback’s a bitch,” Taco said, and clapped me on the back.
I turned and yelled, “Get us down!”
The platform started to descend. It seemed very slow, because the gunfire had begun on the other side of the river. It sounded like fireworks. Taco and I ducked as we left the canvas sand-shield behind, not because ducking made us safer but because it was instinctive. I listened for bullets passing and tried to get ready to be hit, but I didn’t hear anything or feel anything.
“Get out of there, get out!” Jamieson shouted. “Jump! Time to didi mau!” But he was laughing, triumphant. They all were. I had my back slapped so often and so hard that I almost fell over as we ran back to the dirty Mitsubishi the l-c had used to drive us out. Albie, Donk, Klew, and the others ran for the little power trucks, a scam that we’d never be able to use again. We could hear yelling across the river, and now there was even more gunfire.
“Yeah, eat it!” Big Klew shouted. “Eat it big, motherfuckers! Your man just got run over by the big dark horse!”
The l-c’s old station wagon was parked behind the Iraqi power trucks in the turnaround. I opened the back to put in my rifle and Taco’s gear.
“Hurry the fuck up,” Jamieson said. “We’re blocking those guys in.”
Well, you were the one who parked there, I thought but didn’t say. I tossed in our stuff. When I slammed the hatchback shut, I saw something lying in the dirt. It was a baby shoe. It must have been a little girl’s, because it was pink. I bent down to get it and as I did, some shooter’s blind-luck round punched into the bulletproof glass of the hatchback’s window. If I hadn’t bent down, the round would have gone in the nape of my neck or the back of my head.
“Get in, get in!” Jamieson was screaming. Another blind-luck round pinged off the Eagle wagon’s armored side. Or maybe not so blind; by then the shooters had to be all the way down by their side of the river.
>
I picked up the shoe. I got in the ’Bishi and Jamieson tore out of there, fishtailing and throwing up a cloud of dust the trucks would have to drive through. The l-c wasn’t thinking about that; he was concentrating on saving his ass.
“They’re shooting the shit out of that boom lift,” Taco said. He was still laughing, high on the kill. “What have you got there?”
I showed it to him and said I thought it had saved my life.
“You keep that thing safe, brah,” Taco said. “And keep it with you.”
I did. Until the Funhouse, that November. I looked for it just as we started to clear that house in the Industrial Sector and it was gone.
8
Billy finally shuts down and stands at the periscope window of his landlocked submarine, looking out across the little patch of lawn, to the street, to the vacant lot on the other side where the train station once stood. He doesn’t know how long he’s been standing here. Maybe quite awhile. His brain feels blasted, as if he’s just finished taking the world’s longest and most complicated test.
How many words did he write today? He could check the counter on his document—now Billy’s story instead of Benjy’s—but he’s not that OCD. It was a lot, leave it at that, and he’s still got a long way to go. There was the April assault that started less than a week after he killed Jassim, followed by the pullback when the politicians got cold feet. Then the final nightmare that was Operation Phantom Fury. Forty-six days of hell. He won’t put it that way (if he even gets that far) because it’s a cliché, but hell is what it was. Culminating in the Funhouse, which seemed to summarize all the rest. He might skim through some of it but not the Funhouse, because the Funhouse was the point of Fallujah. And what exactly was the point? That it was pointless. Just another house that had to be cleared, but the price they paid.
A few people walk by on Pearson Street. A few cars drive by. One is a police car, but it doesn’t concern Billy. It’s moving leisurely, heading nowhere special and in no hurry to get there. He is still amazed that this part of the city, which is so close to downtown, feels so deserted. On Pearson Street, rush hour is hush hour. He supposes that most people who work in the city’s center haul ass to the suburbs when the workday is done—nicer places like Bentonville, Sherwood Heights, Plateau, Midwood. Even Cody, where he won a little girl a stuffed toy. The neighborhood of which he is now a part doesn’t even have a name, at least that he knows of.
He needs to catch up. Billy flips on Channel 8, the NBC affiliate, wanting to stay away from 6, which will still be running the footage of Allen being shot. 8 comes on with a BREAKING NEWS logo and a soundtrack of ominous violins and thumping drums. Billy doubts that there’s any serious news breaking with the assassin still at large. The assassin has spent the day writing a story that is in grave danger of becoming a book.
It turns out there have been developments, but nothing Billy hasn’t expected and not anything that warrants the disaster soundtrack. One of the anchors says that local businessman Kenneth Hoff has been implicated in “the widening assassination conspiracy.” The other anchor says that Kenneth Hoff’s apparent suicide may have been murder. Holmes, your deductions astound me, Billy thinks.
The anchors hand it over to a correspondent standing across the street from Hoff’s home, an expensive crib that is still several rungs below Nick’s rented McMansion on the grandiosity ladder. The correspondent is a leggy blond who looks like she might have gotten out of journalism school the week before. She explains that Kenneth Hoff has been “positively linked” to the Remington 700 rifle that was used to kill Joel Allen. This is in addition to plenty of other links to the presumed assassin, who has now been “positively identified” as William Summers, a Marine veteran of the Iraq war and winner of several medals.
Bronze Star and Silver Star, Billy thinks. Also a Purple Heart with a star on the ribbon, indicating not just one wound suffered in battle but two. He can understand them not wanting to do that particular rundown. He’s the villain of the piece, so why muddle things up with a heroic background? Muddling things up is for novels, not news reports.
There are side-by-side pictures. One is the photo Irv Dean took of him at the Gerard Tower security stand on his first day as the building’s resident writer. The other shows him as a new recruit, looking both solemn and goofy in his jarhead haircut. It was taken on Photo Day. In it he looks even younger than the blond correspondent. Probably he was. They must have gotten it from some Marine archive, because Billy had no family to give a copy to on Family Day.
Local police believe that Summers may have fled the city, the correspondent says, and because he may also have fled the state, the FBI is now on the case. With that the blond sends it back to the studio, where the anchors next display a picture of Giorgio Piglielli, and yes, they give his mob nickname, as if Georgie Pigs is an alias he might be traveling under. He’s been linked to organized crime operations in Las Vegas, Reno, Los Angeles, and San Diego, but hasn’t yet been apprehended. The subtext is that if you see a middle-aged Italian guy who goes 370, possibly wearing alligator shoes and drinking a milkshake, get in touch with your local law enforcement.
So, Billy thinks. Hoff is dead, Giorgio is almost certainly dead, and Nick’s alibied up the ying-yang. Which makes me the last melon in the patch, the last pea in the pod, the last chocolate in the box, pick your metaphor.
After an ad for some wonder pill with about two dozen possible side effects, some lethal, there are more interviews with his neighbors on Evergreen Street. Billy gets up to turn off the TV, then sits down again. He flew under false colors and hurt these people. Maybe he deserves to watch and listen as they express that hurt. And their bewilderment.
Jane Kellogg, the block’s resident alcoholic, doesn’t seem a bit bewildered. “I knew there was something wrong with him the first time I saw him,” she says. “He had shifty eyes.”
Bullshit you did, Billy thinks.
Diane Fazio, Danny’s mom, shares how horrified she was when she found out they had allowed their children to spend time with a cold-blooded killer.
Paul Ragland marvels about how smooth he was, how natural. “I really thought Dave was the real deal. He seemed like a totally nice guy. It sort of proves that you can’t trust anybody.”
It’s Corinne Ackerman who says the one thing everyone else seems to have ignored. “Of course it’s terrible, but that man he shot wasn’t going to court for shoplifting, was he? From what I understand he was a stone killer. If you ask me, David saved the county the cost of a trial.”
God bless you, Corrie, Billy thinks, and actually finds his eyes are welling up, as if it’s the end of a Lifetime channel movie where everything comes out right. Always supposing your concept of right includes a dose of vigilante justice… and in cases like Joel Allen’s, Billy has no problem with that.
Before moving on to the traffic (still slow because of police checkpoints, sorry folks) and the weather (turning colder), there’s a final item in the courthouse assassination story, and Billy has to smile. The reason Sheriff Vickery was initially cut out of the investigation isn’t because he skedaddled when his prisoner was shot, leaving only his ridiculous Stetson behind, or not just because of that. It’s because he brought his prisoner up the courthouse steps instead of through the employees’ door further down. There was initial suspicion that he might have been part of the plot. He has since convinced them otherwise, probably admitting that he wanted the press coverage.
And I could have made the shot either way, Billy thinks. Hell, I could have made it in the rain, unless it was a deluge out of Genesis.
He turns off the television and goes into the kitchen to inspect his stock of frozen dinners. He’s already thinking about what he’ll write tomorrow.
CHAPTER 13
1
Three days pass in a dream of Fallujah.
Billy writes about the Hot Nine: Taco Bell, George Dinnerstein and Albie Stark, Big Klew, Donk Cashman. He spends one morning writing about how Johnn
y Capps more or less adopted a bunch of Iraqi kids who came to beg candy and cigarettes and stayed to play baseball. Johnny and Pablo “Bigfoot” Lopez taught them the game. One kid, Zamir, maybe nine or ten, used to chant “He was safe, mothafuckah!” over and over. Other than “Gedda hit” it seemed to be the only English he had. Somebody would pop out to the shortstop and Zamir, sitting on the bench in his red pants and Snoop Dogg tee and Blue Jays cap, would scream, “He was safe, mothafuckah!” Billy writes about how Clay Briggs, the corpsman they called Pillroller, kept up a lively and pornographic correspondence with five girls back in Sioux City. Tac said he couldn’t understand how such an ugly guy got so much pussy. Donk said it was fictional pussy and Albie Stark said “He was safe, mothafuckah!” which had nothing to do with the issue of Pill’s lively and pornographic correspondence, but which broke them up every time.
Billy exercises between stints at the laptop: pushups, situps, leg-lifts, squat thrusts. For the first two days he also runs in place, hands held out and down, smacking his palms with his knees. On the third day he suddenly remembers—duh!—that he has the house to himself, and instead of running in place he pelts up and down the stairs to the third floor until he’s out of breath and his pulse is racing along at a hundred and fifty per. He’s not exactly going stir-crazy, not after less than a week, but long spells of sitting and writing aren’t what he’s used to, and these bursts of exercise keep him from getting squirrelly.
Exercise also aids thinking, and on one of his sprints up the stairs Billy has an idea. He can’t believe he hasn’t thought of it before. Billy uses the Jensens’ key to let himself into their apartment. He checks Daphne and Walter (both doing well), then goes into the bedroom. Don is a certain kind of guy, likes his football and NASCAR, likes his BBQ ribs and chicken, likes a few brewskis on Friday night with the boys. A man like that almost certainly has a gun or two.
