by Joshua Corin
“I always wanted to be a fireman,” replied Bob, loading his rifle.
“You are a fireman, aren’t you?”
“I was a volunteer fireman for twelve years, but once I got elected governor, it was decided to be in the ‘best interest of the state of Ohio’ that I ‘discontinue all risky activities.’ There was even a motion on the floor of the state legislature, if you can believe it.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Firefighting?” Bob took a long pause, then answered, “Every day, Tom.”
They fired off their rounds at the paper men, which fluttered harmlessly with each bullet strike. Tom could see through his slightly foggy goggles that he’d done much better shooting at a human shape than he had with the deer. His score looked to be a respectable eighty-eight. Conversely, Bob only scored a seventy-five, and had aimed solely for his target’s heart, not once trying for the head. There was meaning to be found in this, but Tom let it slide.
“How about you, Tom? Does a lawman like yourself have any regrets?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
They unclipped their bullet-ridden paper targets and replaced them with a pair of unwounded twins.
“You going to tell me what they are?” prodded Bob.
Tom flashed him a mischievous grin. “Nope.”
“Okay.” The fresh targets made their hundred-yard journey. “But just for that, this round, I’m so going to kick your ass.”
They raised their Smith & Wessons with near synchronicity and began shooting.
“Truth be told, I don’t really care about guns. I just came by to meet Governor Kellerman.” The sun was in his eyes, and his squinting bunched up his cheeks, making his sanguine grin even broader. “I read he was going to be here on his campaign Web site. Guess I got here too late, huh?”
Lisa smiled back at the tired man in the khakis. “I’m sorry.”
“Story of my life,” he replied.
They were about the same height, two attractive, athletic folk sharing a moment in the middle of April.
He turned to go, but then stopped. “Say, listen, can presidential candidates accept cash donations? It would really mean a lot if I knew I helped contribute, you know? I’m not a wealthy man, but I believe in a good cause when I see one. You don’t have to tell him who I am. It’s even better if you don’t. Just make sure he knows there’s one American out there who thinks he’s doing a good job.”
“A good job?” The man from the orange Chevy rolled his eyes. “He’s closing off a legitimate place of business in our allegedly ‘free country’ just so he can get his elitist jollies.”
“It’s for security purposes, sir,” answered Lisa curtly. “Perhaps you should leave. I hear the local authorities take trespassing charges very seriously.”
The tired man in the khakis ignored their bickering, reached into his pocket, and took out his plump calfskin wallet, which was old and bent out of shape.
“How much do you think I should give?” he asked. “What’s the right amount? A hundred dollars?”
He slipped a well-seasoned hundred-dollar bill out of his creaky wallet—and it fell almost immediately out of his hands to the grassy earth by Lisa’s feet.
“Nice coordination, buddy,” quipped the asshole behind him.
Lisa knelt down to pick up the hundred-dollar bill for him, and the man in the khakis brought his wallet down on top of her scalp with the full force of his weight. The wallet was thick and bent out of shape because it was stuffed with coins, and when it struck her scalp some of the coins spilled out and to the ground. Her blood soon joined them.
Still crouched, she gazed up at him, confused, even a little sad, and he brought the wallet down again against her face. It took two more blows before she was unconscious, and three more blows before he’d cracked her skull.
Then Galileo glanced over at the other guy, the guy in the hat, the guy who’d given Lisa such a hard time.
Finishing him off was a lot easier.
Galileo wasn’t especially fond of such guerilla tactics. They were messy, and bordered on barbaric, but he naturally hadn’t been allowed to bring a gun on the plane, so this method had to suffice for now. Also, this way created little noise, and didn’t alert the guards inside the store, not just yet. He also wasn’t concerned about the Lincolns’ chauffeurs because they had gone down the road to get a bite to eat. In fact, he had waited for them to walk off before he’d parked his rental.
He removed Lisa Penny’s sidearm from her shoulder holster. It was a Heckler & Koch USP. This was a good weapon, well-balanced, large trigger, rubber grip, short recoil. He would have preferred to have his M107 instead, but he would have preferred a lot of things to be different.
In no time at all, he had the two bodies in the trunk of his car. Their eyes stared up at him, but not accusingly. In fact, there was no emotion in them at all. These were pieces of meat.
He tugged on Lisa Penny’s white earpiece and followed its cord to its power pack, tucked in a back pocket, and then followed a second cord to the small communication mic attached to her left wrist. With the apparatus in hand, Galileo slid the receiver into his own ear and listened for a few minutes, hoping the guards had left the frequency open and were idly chatting. From this he would have been able to estimate how many guards there were—but all he heard was silence.
No matter. He’d get them talking. He activated the mic and rubbed it against his pant leg. The swishing sound echoed through his earpiece, magnified, almost resembling the crash of an ocean wave, and then came a voice:
“Lisa? Is that you? Over.”
Galileo answered the request with another wipe of the mic along his khakis.
“What the hell is that?” asked a second guard. His question wasn’t directed into the mic but was instead picked up as ambient noise. He must have been standing near the first guard. Galileo made a mental note: at least two guards inside the gun shop.
“Lisa?” This, again, from the first guard. Probably the leader. “Answer me. Over.”
Fifteen seconds passed.
Finally: “I’m going to check it out,” decided the leader.
Galileo cocked the H&K, left the trunk open, and waited for his quarry to emerge.
The final tally was this: Bob, 502 and Tom, 453.
Ever the sportsman, Bob offered his hand, which Tom gladly shook.
“Looks like your FBI is going to be getting a make-over,” Bob said.
Tom shrugged. “I’m not sure if that’s something I’ll regret.”
Bob smiled, then guffawed.
“I had a feeling,” he said.
They both stared down that hundred-yard alley of their large soundproofed room. Just two men and their guns.
“One more?” offered Tom.
“You didn’t even have to ask.”
They mounted the paper men onto their clips and sent them to their places. They each only had five bullets left, so this round would be abbreviated, but some fun was better than no fun.
Bob glanced at Tom. “Ready?”
Tom donned his earmuffs. Bob donned his, and they took aim at their targets. Feet apart, hips at an angle, dominant hand forward. The proper stance for firing a handgun created a triangle. These were men who knew what they were doing.
Bob, who was closest to the door, thought he felt a breeze between shots one and two, but ignored it. The floor was ventilated, of course, to handle the discharges from the firearms, but there were no windows or cracks in the walls. The idea of a breeze was preposterous—and distracting. Bob intended to get a perfect score, and his first shot had been dead-center. If only his cousin Margaret could see him now.
He fired off two more rounds. One actually passed through the bullet hole left by another! He felt like Robin Hood. Let his pre-judgmental liberal base disapprove of his gun-love. He was about to get a perfect score, damn it. He was in the zone. So much so that he angled his barrel up and instead of the easier target of the chest, he aimed for the head. Because my platf
orm will reach the American people in their hearts and their brains, he mused. The goofy thought stretched his lips in a smirk. He fingered the trigger and felt something hot touch the back of his head and he paused and he frowned and then the bullet from the H&K ripped through his skull and Bob died.
Tom, for his part, noticed Galileo approach out of his peripheral vision about half a second before the assassination occurred. He swung his Smith & Wesson around toward the sandy-haired man. Galileo glanced over at him and appeared confused. After all, what was Tom Piper doing here?
That confusion was all the opportunity Tom required. He shuttled past the obligatory demand of “Freeze!” and just fired away, two shots, to the killer’s chest.
Click, click.
His Smith & Wesson was empty.
He’d fired his last bullet at the paper target.
Fuck.
Galileo raised his own pistol and Tom lunged forward, tackling the man to the soft floor. First step: disarm. Tom slapped the H&K out of Galileo’s hands. It scuttled away, harmless. Galileo raised his left knee toward Tom’s groin, but the FBI agent was well-accustomed to wrestling thugs and he used the weight of his own knee to keep Galileo’s pinned to the ground. Second step: disable. Here, an amateur might resort to a fist-pummeling, but that risked at best bloody knuckles and at worst a broken hand so Tom chose to go a different route. He pressed his right elbow into Galileo’s windpipe and waited for the son of a bitch to black out.
Meanwhile, Tom caught a glimpse of Bob Kellerman’s body, crumpled in an undignified mess several feet away. Tom’s heart keened for the man. He returned his attention to Galileo. This man who had killed Darcy Parr, who had slaughtered countless men and women and even children, who had—
Wait. What the hell was Galileo doing here? Wasn’t he supposed to be in custody? In that moment, Tom knew. He knew that Norm and Daryl and everyone else were dead. He knew that someone had probably tried to contact him on his cell phone.
He pressed harder onto Galileo’s windpipe. If it snapped and the fucker died of asphyxiation, well, these things happened, didn’t they? Tom poured his grief and wrath into his violence. He could hear Galileo’s vague gasps of breath, but he didn’t care. Someone needed to end him. And he was so intent on doing so that he failed to notice the heavy wallet in Galileo’s hand until it smashed him in the left shoulder. His bad shoulder. The shoulder that had been shot back in February, at Baptist St. Anthony’s in Amarillo. It had mended, sure, but it was still sensitive and when Galileo struck it with the full might of a desperate man, the pain resounded through him like sound waves from a tuning fork. He flinched—and Galileo squirmed out of his grip. Tom reached for the man’s ankle, but Galileo was like a chased rabbit, too fast, too fast. Galileo went for his Heckler & Koch and Tom finally caught up with him and felt the bullets enter his chest and ignored them—he had a job to do, damn it—but then the world got so dark so quick, and cold, and quiet.
27
When they returned from the fundraiser, after they made sure Sophie was asleep and made sure Lester was preoccupied with the TV, Esme and Rafe retired to their bedroom and fucked like teenagers. Sheets were entangled. Alarm clocks were knocked to the carpet. Headboards were rattled.
The following morning, when Esme awoke, she was on the floor beside the alarm clock. Rafe was nearby, cocooned in their olive-colored comforter. She traced an index finger across the outline of his face. When she reached his lips, she could feel his breath exhale against her fingertip.
She brought her finger back, leaned across the carpet, and kissed him. His lips still tasted like Dom Perignon. She slid her left hand inside his comforter cocoon and against his smooth belly—and he awoke.
“Morning,” she said.
He smiled, then grimaced, then frowned. “Where…?”
Befuddled, Rafe sat up and looked around.
“How did we get on the floor?”
“Gravity,” Esme replied.
“Ah.” He reached for the alarm clock and checked its results. “We’ve got five minutes.”
Five minutes later, Esme wiped the fresh sweat from her forehead and watched her husband wobble into the shower. Between her still-mutinous backbone and her upsy-daisy equilibrium, she required the leverage of the bed to help stand up, but once vertical she quickly donned her pink bathrobe and went about her day. Her first stop was Sophie’s bedroom. Unsurprisingly, her daughter was already awake, although still in bed, and was playing with a few of her dolls.
“Morning, peanut.”
“Morning, Mommy!”
Esme climbed into her daughter’s bed, and they spent the next ten minutes selecting the proper ensemble for Skipper to wear on her big date with SpongeBob SquarePants. Sophie herself was wearing her Bugs Bunny nightgown in honor of Easter, which was next week.
Soon they could smell the sweet aroma of Grandpa Lester’s flapjacks, and Sophie scooted out of bed and down the stairs. Esme tried to keep up as fast as her back would allow, but by the time she reached the kitchen, her daughter was already sitting down beside a steaming plate of sugar-sprinkled fried batter.
“Need some tomato juice?” Lester asked Esme, which was his oh-so-clever way of asking if she had a hangover, but she just shook her head and sat beside her flapjack-inhaling daughter.
“Don’t forget to breathe,” recommended Esme.
Sophie took a deep breath, then launched back into some more.
By the time she was on her second plate, Rafe joined them, dressed for work. He had his specs on, and the blue of his irises appeared misty behind the glass lenses.
“Top of the morning to you, squirt,” he said, and dove down to give his daughter a bear hug. He made his way to the fridge and poured himself a glass of tomato juice. Lester, still flapping those jacks, took note of his son’s beverage and let loose a rubbery smirk.
It was Rafe’s turn to drive Sophie to school, so while she scampered to her bedroom to change into her “daytime clothes,” he took the time to click on the TV and catch up on the latest hoopla. Unsurprisingly, the top stories were Governor Kellerman’s speech and the capture of Galileo in Kansas City. Few knew the two were related, but Rafe was one of those few. He glanced back at Esme, who was stuffing her face with Lester’s cooking.
How had he forgotten how special his wife was? Never again.
He chugged down the remainder of his tomato juice, kissed his wife, shook hands with his old man (because that’s what men do), and escorted his little blue-eyed angel out to the car. She was wearing her polka-dot dress today. He complimented her on it. He told her it looked resplendent. She complimented him on his tie. She told him it looked shiny.
Esme stood by the kitchen window and watched them leave. She felt like a wife again, and a mother….
“You going to get dressed today?” murmured Lester.
…and a daughter-in-law.
She wanted to remain in her bathrobe just to spite her father-in-law, but mindful of the impression that sloth might imprint on the old man, she wandered back to her bedroom, enjoyed the massage of a very long shower, and slipped into a casual white blouse and brown slacks. By now it was almost 9:00 a.m. She absently wondered what Tom was up to, how he’d made it home from the fundraiser (home for a field agent being a relative term). His motorcycle was still parked wherever the valets had put it. She and Rafe, in their impatient desire to rip each other’s clothes off, had forgotten it at Amy’s mansion. Esme made a mental note to ask Amy about it when she showed up.
In the meanwhile, it was puzzle time. She booted up the desktop and navigated to a Web site she’d recently discovered which offered user-created Sudoku puzzles which were sorted by difficulty level and, best of all, timed. The clock factor turned a regular game into a suspenseful race. Once completed, she could compare her time with others who had worked the same puzzle.
As she surfed through the day’s newest offerings, her news feed application loaded along the bottom of the browser window. Just as with the TV, all
the online folk seemed to concentrate on was, as they so succinctly put it, “the serial killer” or “the atheist nominee.” There was also, it appeared, a genocide occurring in one of the former Soviet republics, but hardly anyone was blogging about that. She loaded up the Beta Band on her iPod and attacked one of the puzzles labeled Impossible. Nothing like starting the day with a challenge.
By noontime, after a few coffee breaks, a long argument with Lester about the merits of having Sophie attend sleep-away camp this summer, and a therapeutic walk up and down the street to strengthen her leg muscles, she was on her sixth puzzle. Her iPod growled out Irish punk rock courtesy of the Stiff Little Fingers. Her best time so far on an “impossible” puzzle had been eight minutes, forty-eight seconds. She aimed to beat that. She popped the joints in her neck, stretched her fingers, and, while the puzzle was loading, glanced down halfheartedly at the news ticker.
BREAKING NEWS…. Democratic nominee Bob Kellerman shot at firing range in LI…
Esme blinked. Shot at a firing range? It sounded like the punch line to a bad joke. She clicked on the ticker and the full article sprang to life and the bad joke transmogrified into a horrific nightmare.
…one bullet to the head…
…survived by a wife, Betsy, and two children…
…scheduled stop at a local business called Nassau Firearms…
Esme wiped at her eyes. Was she crying? Yes. She hardly knew the man, but had invested so much time in the past month into his campaign, and upon meeting him had been so impressed by his dignity and his integrity, and now, some religious extremist offended by his speech had gunned the man down. She shook her head in disgust, and read the rest of the article.
Other confirmed casualties in the attack include the owner of the store, Will Clay, 62; his wife Emily, 69; Kathryn Hightower, 40, who served as Governor Kellerman’s communications director; several members of the governor’s security detail: Devon Smith, 32; Lisa Penny, 28…
