by Larry Hoy
“You’re talking to me now, PS4213,” Witherbot said. “You can use your phone’s fingerprint scanner and get the contract’s thumbprint. That will verify his identity.”
“How the fuck do I get his fingerprint?”
Her tone was scolding, like an English schoolmarm from an old movie. “If you want your place in the company, PS4213, then be resourceful and figure it out. Transmit the print as soon as you have it. I’ll be waiting. And remember, you currently are not authorized to execute the contract, so any collateral damage is on you. Be careful. Oh, and one more thing. Do not curse when speaking to me, is that clear?”
He waited, but she clearly expected an answer.
“Yes, ma’am.”
His earwig clicked as she disconnected the call.
Damn, damn, damn!
He looked around. The hotel room was a perfect sniper’s nest with a picture window overlooking the road. He’d selected the ammo load to blast through the car’s window if need be, while still maintaining lethal force. Plus, for Sweetwater’s purposes, it had a comfy bed, an ice machine down the hall, and even cable TV.
Snatching up his Texas Rangers baseball cap and a bright blue windbreaker as an improvised disguise, Sweetwater headed out the door. Disgusted with how such a relatively easy assignment had gone off the rails, he flipped over the Do Not Disturb sign and moved it to the outer door handle.
“I hate fieldwork,” he said and then sprinted down the hall to the staircase. He’d have to hurry.
Chapter 2
Downtown Dallas, TX
Sweetwater shouldered his way through crowds of pedestrians rushing to beat the clock and get to work on time. Whenever he stopped to crane his neck and search for the target, Mr. Cooper, people bumped him from behind and walked away cursing. He tried to speed up since it was less than two blocks to Cooper’s office, and once inside there was no way Sweetwater would make it past the front counter security. And even if he somehow managed that, he couldn’t imagine how he’d get Cooper’s fingerprint. It’s not like he could ask.
Pardon me, sir, may I please verify your identity so I can kill you?
Vicious curses followed him as he bulled through the crowds, no longer bothering with maneuvering politely around walkers. The sounds of downtown Dallas during rush hour filled his ears with a storm of blaring horns, screeching tires, and screaming drivers.
Somewhere ahead of him, an engine roared above the deafening din followed immediately by the unmistakable crash of breaking glass and the squeal of metal scraping metal. A car wreck, but Sweetwater ignored it, his business lay elsewhere, until a crowd of onlookers started gathering, completely blocking his way. Sweetwater shoved and pushed, but it was no good. He would never catch up with Cooper now.
Then he heard more screeching tires, followed by another crunching impact. A car horn blared like a wailing siren. Shards of steel and glass rained on the bystanders, who were scattering like a flock of grackles after a gunshot. Sweetwater sprinted down the rapidly clearing sidewalk to the intersection, not caring who he knocked down. Dread filled his stomach, and he didn’t know why. He didn’t believe in premonitions, and yet...
Once at the corner, the scene was clear-cut. A semi had turned left. A small Mercedes had turned right at the same time, and the sports car was now wedged up to its shattered windshield under the semi’s trailer. The lady behind the wheel was in full-blown panic mode. The car windows muffled her screams as she wriggled against the airbag, but the horn worked just fine. The crash had jammed it in the On position.
The second accident involved a mid-size Chevy that was obviously following the sports car and failed to stop in time, rear-ending the Mercedes. It must have glanced off the back driver’s side quarter-panel because now the little Chevy lay angled in the middle of the street. The three cars together formed a nice neat little triangle, completely blocking the intersection.
A middle-aged woman grabbed Sweetwater’s shoulder, her voice a near shriek of panic. “It hit him. Can you help him?” She was pointing at the middle of the mess, and he followed her finger to the Chevy. The driver was unconscious, laid out across the steering wheel. Either the car didn’t have an airbag, or it didn’t deploy upon impact. White smoke plumed from the seams of the engine hood, obscuring vision, and adding to the overall chaos of the accident. The woman jerked on Sweetwater’s jacket sleeve and pointed again to the middle of the accident. “Not the driver; the car hit a man who was in the crosswalk! It ran over him!”
Most of the crowd that had run away from the shower of debris was now holding up their phones, either taking pictures or videoing the carnage. None of them appeared to be calling 911. Sweetwater’s Corps training kicked in and he ran to help.
From a dead run he slid across the trunk of the Mercedes and landed between the three cars. Steam and smoke boiled up from all three vehicles and he smelled hot oil and, ominously, gas. One of the radiators hissed from a puncture.
Sweetwater found Mr. Cooper splayed on the pavement like a roadkill armadillo. Blood covered the side of Cooper’s head from a deep slice on his scalp. One leg was trapped under the Chevy, but he was still alive. His eyes were open as he gasped for air. Sweetwater dropped to one knee to check his pulse.
He pressed his fingers to the side of Cooper’s neck and felt a pulse, but it was weak and was running as fast as a hummingbird’s wing. Blood flowed in thick ribbons from his mouth and nose, and when he coughed crimson bubbles covered his chin. Sweetwater steadied Cooper’s face and looked him in the eyes.
“Mr. Cooper, we’ve called for help,” he said, hoping it was true. Surely somebody had. “Stay still and don’t move, the paramedics are on their way.” Then Sweetwater realized that he was actually trying to help the man, whereas minutes before Cooper was a target to kill in fulfillment of a contract. Now, lying on the hot asphalt in a spreading puddle of blood, the target had a name, had become an actual person.
A more experienced hitter would have ended the man’s pain and collected on the contract, whether there were witnesses or not, and Sweetwater knew that’s what he should do. God knew he needed the money, but he wasn’t cleared to kill the man, damn it!
Suddenly, Cooper reached up and grabbed his arm with the powerful grip of a man who knew he might be dying. He pulled Sweetwater close and spoke in a croaking whisper, which was barely audible over all the noise.
“I have a daughter; you have to help me. I can’t leave her like this,” he said in between coughs, which left a fine spray of blood splattered on Sweetwater’s cheek. The would-be Shooter reached out to peel Cooper’s fingers from his coat sleeve but couldn’t do it.
“Mr. Cooper,” he repeated, “help is on the way.” Reaching under the man to pull him to a sitting position, Sweetwater stopped when Cooper screamed in pain. He jerked back, afraid someone saw him. In the video-happy, “gotcha” post-9/11 world, everybody tried to be somebody by accusing anybody of anything. Fortunately, the smoke and imminent likelihood of a fuel tank explosion kept onlookers at bay.
“I’ve got money,” he begged. “Help me. I’ll make you rich.” Tears ran down the sides of his face. He coughed again, and more blood spurted from his mouth. “I can’t die like this…my phone…Can you help me find my phone? I need to call my wife.” Sweetwater had to put his ear up to Cooper’s lips to hear him.
“Sure.” Sweetwater wasn’t sure why he was helping the man, but he pawed through Cooper’s coat pockets and retrieved the phone. He didn’t know why his hands shook when he turned the phone on and held it where the dying man could see it.
“Call Shelly.”
Luther felt a thick line of sweat running down between his shoulder blades as he sat crouched in the middle of the intersection. The phone rang four empty rings. Sirens screamed in the background, though they were still a few blocks away. If he acted right now, he could still complete the contract before they arrived. After six rings it clicked over to a recorded voice. Cooper gave a weak laugh. His head slowly drooped lower
as he lay on the bloody asphalt. His skin grew pale.
“Hi, honey, I love you and Jenny with all my heart…” He panted and sucked in a wet breath. “I just wanted…” Then his hand fell away from the phone and his head slumped. Sweetwater reached out and lightly felt his chest. Two shallow breaths later, it stopped moving.
Sweetwater snatched up the phone, hung up, and slipped it into a jacket pocket. Still kneeling in the middle of the road, he apologized to dead Mr. Cooper that he couldn’t save his life, the life of the man he was paid to kill. A heavy sense of guilt and sadness settled over him.
“Is he all right?” said a woman’s voice from somewhere behind the Chevy. “I called 911.”
It took all he had to pull his eyes away from the dead man. That’s when he realized what death really looked like. Being a sniper had always felt like playing the world’s most realistic video game. There was no screaming or crying. Line up the crosshairs, squeeze a trigger and presto. It was just a simple point and click. And, of course, he had never actually shot anybody.
He clambered back over the Mercedes. It was empty now. Someone had opened the passenger door, and the lady was standing on the curb, screaming obscenities at the empty tractor-trailer. Sweetwater craned his head around to see that the rig’s passenger door was open and there was no driver anywhere, evidently adding fleeing the scene on top of whatever other charges were headed his way. What the hell, how much worse could it be?
The woman on the corner was back. She put her hand on his chest, and Sweetwater shrank back. He didn’t like being touched by strangers unless they were hot, young, and female; she only scored one out of three.
“What happened?”
The excitement of the crowd was infectious. Some heard the question, saw blood on his hands and sleeves and gathered close to eavesdrop.
“He didn’t make it.”
Sweetwater retraced his earlier steps and shook his head. Mr. Cooper’s pale death mask was burned into his memory. At the moment he died, Cooper’s gory face had taken on a surprised look Sweetwater would never forget, as if seeing something beyond the world of men. Remembering it, he wanted to be anywhere except near the dead man. His pace increased until he was running from the scene of the crash until he found an alley where he leaned against one wall.
“Now I get it,” he mumbled, panting, the confession falling unheard. “Everybody warned me. The closest I ever got to action was tagging paper targets.” Turning into the alley he slowed to a shamble, feeling hungover, and moved away from the bloody street. “God help me, I didn’t know…”
Chapter 3
Downtown Dallas, TX
It was about five miles to LifeEnders Inc. Worldwide Corporate Headquarters. Sweetwater walked the whole way. Once he ducked into the alley it didn’t take him long to get away from the crowd. The twin wrecks attracted people like buzzards to a dead deer, all of them climbing over each other to get video of someone else’s tragedy. At the next trash can, he stripped off his hat and jacket and used one of the coat’s sleeves to wipe the blood off his hands. Then he used the rest of the walk to calm down and think.
More than once, he wiped his hands across his shirt. There was no blood left, but he could still feel where Cooper’s fingers had dug into his arm. Some inner sense told him that the memories of the last half hour would never fade, and not just what he’d seen, either. The trauma left the odors surrounding the dying man imprinted on his brain like a carving in stone. The unique stench of hot asphalt, blood, fear, smoke, oil, excreta…all of it combined to form the unique reek of Cooper’s death, an unforgettable stench. But for Sweetwater, by far, the worst of it was the dying man begging for help, words that would forever haunt him.
He was the first person Sweetwater had ever watched die. He’d been at the capital on 9/11; he had seen more than his fair share of bodies, but Mr. Cooper died right in front of him, which made it personal. Then I stole his phone like a fucking needlehead, he thought. The only difference was that he planned to swap it for a lot more than just a bag of smack.
His fingers slipped into his pants’ pocket for at least the tenth time, and traced the smooth plastic case, the last thing Cooper had ever touched on Earth. Then he realized that he was caressing the phone of a dead man and jerked his hand out. He wiped his fingers on his shirt again.
Somewhere out of sight, an ambulance sped away as the sirens blared out a warning. Sweetwater suddenly wondered if Mr. Cooper was in the back. Maybe he’d been wrong, and he wasn’t dead; maybe they’d revived him and he was on his way to the hospital where he would eventually ask for his phone and remember the stranger who’d crouched over him and knew his name.
Objectively, Sweetwater knew there was no chance of that. Cooper’s shattered body and mangled leg trapped under the Chevy, the blood covering his face and the fading strength in his fingers, the fading pulse that finally stopped. He was as pale as a corpse when he finally died because he was a corpse. Nobody could have saved him, yet Sweetwater still felt guilty, like he had failed.
Because, he realized, he had failed. He’d had a chance to fulfill the contract and didn’t take it. Killing a man who was almost dead would have solved everything. Cooper had been nearly dead anyway, right? But Sweetwater would have passed his probation, gotten his license, and been on his way to getting paid. Kill targets, get paid, right? He’d read something like that in his favorite science fiction series.
Or if he had just trusted his gut and taken that damn shot, he would have been golden. The British Bitch might not have liked it, might even have washed him out, but by now he probably would have been stretched out in his hotel room, sipping a cold rum and Coke with a porn movie on the tube, and a fat fee in his bank account.
Instead, he was trudging across downtown Dallas, determined not to tell Witherbot about his self-doubts. Whatever he felt privately wasn’t relevant, not if he wanted a license. Because a Shooter couldn’t empathize with his or her contracts. Once they signed for a job it was a legal and binding document, and they sure as hell couldn’t let it affect their performance. A signed contract meant the target had to die. It was just that simple.
In another part of Dallas, Adrian Erebus hit the controls to the air conditioner with his palm. It had finally died with a wheeze and cough. Instantly the vents started blasting him in the face with the dry burning heat of Texas. A red light appeared on the dashboard, warning the engine was overheating. He checked the temperature gauge and saw the needle was pegged to the far right.
“Sorry, Herbert.” He looked into the rear-view mirror and caught sight of his eight-year-old son engrossed in a book. The boy’s T-shirt was already showing sweat rings under the arm pits. “It might get a little hot. I’ll see if we can catch a breeze.”
Erebus rolled down the driver’s window, and then the passenger’s side. “This is the best I can do, buddy. You going to be all right?”
The boy in the reflection held up his thumb without looking up from his book.
“All right, this shouldn’t be too long. Once I get a chance to talk with your mom, we’ll all head home together.”
Heat rose from the mall parking lot in waves, like mirages in the desert. Erebus adjusted the focus on the binoculars, and he spotted her car as she came close. Her pink Porsche tended to stand out in a crowd. Her car slowed before turning into the underground parking garage. He caught sight of her face for a brief second as her car disappeared. Her red hair was pulled back, and she was wearing a large pair of sunglasses.
In that brief second, he knew she was unhappy and ready to come back to him.
“I knew it.”
He angled the binoculars up, scanning the side of the building. He could already picture their reunion. He’d sweep her into his arms, and she’d kiss him. Then he’d dance her around the room, as the music played their song in the background. Then when the song ended, they’d each take Herbert by the hand and walk back to their car.
He returned the binoculars to the glove box. She was
still sharing the penthouse with some rich guy, and it couldn’t be seen from this side of the building. Erebus turned the ignition key, but the engine just clicked. And even more frustrating, there were more warning lights on the dashboard.
“Hey buddy, you up for a little walk?” He looked into the rear-view. Herbert closed his book and sat up. “Good boy, let’s go.” He quickly rolled up the windows and locked the doors. He paused only a second to consider, but finally retrieved the binoculars before shutting the car door. “All right, let’s go see if we can find out what your mom’s up to.”
Chapter 4
LifeEnders Incorporated, Worldwide Corporate Headquarters, Dallas, TX
Luther stood outside the building’s front doors and went through the mental exercises he’d learned at Scout Sniper School to slow his pulse. Security likely had him on multiple cameras, while facial recognition scans had undoubtedly already identified him. He just stood there as seconds ticked away, but he wasn’t ready to go in and have his voice crack from nerves. It was child’s play to hit a target a thousand yards away. Dealing with corporate managers—that was hard.
Four sets of beveled glass doors opened into the LifeEnders, Inc. Worldwide Corporate Headquarters building. The lobby was an elegant mix of form, function, and ostentatious wealth. On the wall behind the long security desk, fifty feet inside the doors, hung the LEI logo. Sweetwater took a deep breath and then slowly exhaled. Inhale for four seconds, hold four seconds, exhale for eight seconds, repeat. He had practiced the breathing mantra of snipers for so long it was almost second nature.
