A Bullet for the Shooter

by Larry Hoy

  “You’ve never had banana pudding; you only think you have.”

  “Don’t make a promise you can’t keep.”

  “You’ll see.” They paused as the waitress returned with their drinks. “How long you been with LEI?”

  “Mmm.” She licked her lips. “Damn, that’s good. You can’t get sweet tea just anywhere. I’m technically not with LifeEnders. I’m with the SP.”

  “The Secret Police? I thought they were just a bunch of hackers living in their mother’s basements.”

  “Well, my mother lives with me, and I have a basement office. Of course, I own the house.”

  “Is that true?”

  She smiled. “Maybe.”

  “Does she know about your work?”

  “She does. She works for LEI.”

  “No shit? She’s not a Shooter, is she?”

  Warden smiled behind a glass of iced tea. “Not lately.”

  “So, does the SP have classes where they teach their operatives to fire at moving vehicles while in a car rolling end over end, or were you just improvising?”

  Her brown eyes crinkled ever so slightly, the only indication he might have overstepped his bounds.

  “What about you? Isn’t it said that all Shooters are inbred alcoholic rednecks that live in rusty old trailers?”

  “Changing the subject, huh? Okay, I’ll play along. All that’s true, but I’ve been dry for a month now. The rest is mostly right on the nose.”

  “Good. Now that we’ve got the awkward small talk out of the way, do you have any new ideas about who’s trying to kill us? I do have to say you did a good job finding that brass. Not to downplay your skill, but even a crack-head cop should have found it.”

  He shook his head. “If they gave a shit they would have, but we’re on our own. I’m surprised they didn’t just leave the bodies where they found ’em.”

  “That’s becoming more and more common, Luther. The boys in blue resent us, and I guess I can understand why.”

  “You said ‘us.’”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I think I do, yeah. ‘Us’ has a pretty definite meaning.”

  Warden ignored him for at least the fourth time that day, and talked right over him, but Sweetwater knew she was hiding something.

  “It was still a good find.”

  “They don’t like us even a little bit,” he said, still on the earlier point, “as you witnessed today. Even though the homicide rate has dropped to almost nothing.”

  “It’s down, yeah, but think about all those police jobs they don’t need anymore, all of those union police jobs lost by union police members who no longer pay union police dues.”

  “Why is everything always about money?” he asked, leaning back as the waitress put their food on the table. But as she reached across the table, his eyes widened. Why was everything always about money? The thought nagged at him and wouldn’t let go.

  Warden missed his change of expression, though, and was already digging into the mound of barbecue on her plate.

  What was he missing?

  “So, you’d work for free?” she asked around a mouthful of baked beans. “I’ll tell Witherbot if you want. Damn, this is really good.”

  “Point taken.” Using his incisors, Sweetwater stripped the meat off a rib bone in one pull, although he didn’t really taste it.

  “What’s the matter?” she said, licking her fingers before wiping them on a napkin. “Food not good, ’cause mine’s great.”

  “Food’s fine. Just trying to work something out in my mind.”

  “About our killer?”

  “I don’t know. It’s like I can almost touch it.”

  “I hate when that happens. Think about something else, and it’ll come to you. Tell me how you joined LEI; it’s not for just anybody.”

  “I’m betting you’ve read my file.”

  She nodded, picking up her first rib. “I have, but they don’t tell the whole story. This doesn’t have any sauce on it.”

  “I ordered dry ribs, they’re better than wet. There’s nothing really to add. I signed on to kick al Qaeda’s ass, the Marines trained me to be a sniper, then our pussy of a president wouldn’t let us engage the enemy. I watched the Enders do the job I’d trained to do and vowed to join ’em. Except by the time I could the mission had changed.”

  “Did any of your fellow Marines resent the Enders?

  “Of course they did. Me, too, for a while. Mercenaries getting paid big bucks to do the jobs we’d all dedicated our lives to doing? As Marines, we did what we were told, but that doesn’t mean we liked it. A lot of it was jealousy.”

  “And now you know why the cops hate you. All of those murders for hire, angry spouses, business murders, all of the premediated killings they used to get paid to solve, are now legal as long as you’re hired to do it. Courts don’t like you, either, and for the same reason. LEI is bad for the whole criminal justice business. Plus, they’re still getting jack for a salary while you’re getting paid big money to kill people, which they’re supposedly paid to prevent. To them you’re just a bunch of criminals with a license to kill.”

  “We are licensed under the law.”

  “C’mon, Luther, don’t play naïve again. Even if I’m not a Shooter, we’re on the same team, so let’s at least be honest between us. We’re mercenaries.”

  “That’s just politics.”

  “Of course it’s politics. Everything is politics.”

  “You know a lot about a lot for a teenage girl.”

  Warden smiled as if there was a joke to which only she knew the punchline. She slurped up the last of the tea and put her glass to the side for a refill.

  “That’s cute. My job ages you faster than anything else I know. I spend all day, every day, digging out all the dirty little secrets everyone tries to hide. I find the really bad guys that our field operatives, like you, can’t find. Once I track them down, we send that data to LEI, and they turn it over to you. Sometimes I have to wade through shit and depravity you can’t imagine.”

  “In case you didn’t know it before,” he said, picking up a spoon as the waitress put a bowl of banana pudding on the table, complete with vanilla wafer and homemade whipped cream on top, “humanity sucks.”

  Chapter 16

  Southeast Memphis, TN

  “You’re not gonna admit I was right, are you?” Sweetwater asked, standing on the restaurant’s steps while trying to remember where he’d parked.

  “I said it was good.”

  “It wasn’t good; it was fantastic.”

  “We have different definitions of that word.”

  “I wouldn’t put that half sandwich that’s in your purse too near me then.”

  “You’re still hungry? After all that?”

  “Maybe.”

  After what had started as a fun day with some friends and wound up with him being almost run off the road, then flipped, and torched, Sweetwater was surprised how sanguine he felt with his stomach full of smoked pork. Then he tensed and straightened, eyes roaming the darkened parking lot.

  “Is that pistol in your purse?”

  “I won’t shoot you over the sandwich, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  Instead of responding, Sweetwater stared where he thought he’d seen a shadow near their car. Only a single streetlight lit the gravel lot, and they’d had to park the Prius at the far end. He’d started to develop a sense of awareness for possible danger, like he could feel it, and after two attempts on his life in one day, a third seemed more than plausible. If it was nothing more than paranoia, he could live with that.

  “Let me have it,” he said, holding out his hand. She picked up on his tone and followed his gaze. “Stand behind me.”

  She hesitated only a second then did what he said.

  “What did you see?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe nothing, but for a second I thought there was a shadow over by our car.”

  “It’s pretty dark out
there.”

  “Stay here,” he said.

  “I’m coming with—”

  “No, you’re not. If there’s somebody out there hunting us, I don’t want to have to worry about you, too. Unless there’s something you’re not telling me, get back inside.”

  Now she hesitated longer, and Sweetwater got the impression there was something she wasn’t telling him, but then she ducked through the restaurant’s front door. Calling the police would only get him laughed at or cussed out so, holding the gun at high ready, he moved into the lot.

  He quickly got away from the lights around the restaurant porch and crouched to present a smaller target. A couple walking toward the front door spotted him and veered away. At the first chance, he ducked behind a car and began working his way toward the Prius.

  A scuffling of gravel alerted him to someone running away. Still not willing to present a target, he didn’t pursue until he heard a car door slam, followed by an engine starting. Then he sprang forward, but he only caught a glimpse of a car as it sped off. When it passed under a distant streetlight, he thought it had four doors and was red.

  Warden pulled on a latex glove and retrieved the bullet from the hot box. Holding it under a desk lamp, she turned it over, and they both saw a dark smudge on the side.

  “Is that it?” Sweetwater said.

  “That’s it. Let’s run it through the system and see if we can get a name.”

  “We have a system? I figured we’d take it to the cops.”

  “Right, because that’s worked so well up to now. You think you’re the first Shooter they’ve treated like flaming dog shit?”

  “So what kind of system do we have?”

  “Same as theirs; we’re tied into CODIS and all the federal databases, but with restrictions the police don’t have. Which is why we’re gonna use theirs.”

  “You’re gonna hack it?”

  “Thank God I didn’t have to draw you a picture.”

  “What the fuck is your problem? At dinner you acted like a human being, and I was beginning to like you. Now? Not so much.”

  “Holy crap, dude, grow a pair. At dinner we were off the clock. Now I’m working.”

  She took a picture of the print with her phone and sent it to her computer. Then she brought up a program with warnings about it being the property of LifeEnders, Inc., and promising dire consequences for any unauthorized use. Given that LEI was in the business of killing people, he assumed hackers might think twice about trying to break in. Warden pulled a small device out of her backpack, plugged it into a port on the computer, pressed it against her right eye and waited. There was a beep and the computer flashed positive identification and unlocked the program. After uploading the fingerprint, she pushed back in the swivel chair.

  “Now we wait.” But seconds later there was a ping, and an alert flashed on her screen. Suspicion crept into her voice. “That was too fast.”

  A new window opened on the screen. It was Luther Sweetwater’s booking photos. Of course, all LEI assets were required to be logged in the FBI databases.

  “Big yuck and very funny,” he said. “Now run it for real.”

  Warden clicked a popup-window.

  A headache had been growing all afternoon and finally became bad enough to distract him, so Sweetwater fell onto one of the double beds and bounced, his headed landing on a lopsided pillow. The cool fabric felt good against his injured face.

  “That is the real print, dumbass. I can’t believe you didn’t wear gloves. Don’t you watch cop shows? Everybody knows you’re supposed to wear gloves if you’re handling evidence at a crime scene. I just wasted hours to develop your fingerprints.” Warden turned back to the computer and started clicking.

  “Listen, I don’t know how it got there, but I didn’t leave my fingerprint on that casing, I only touched the ends. I never touched the side.” He sat up on an elbow, his expression serious but not glaring. “You’re really not fucking with me, are you?”

  “Not even on your birthday.”

  “Do you have a fingerprint kit in your bag?”

  “Why?”

  “Humor me.”

  “Sure, I’ve got one.”

  “Run my prints.”

  “I don’t work for you, you know? If you want me to do something try asking like you don’t own me.”

  “Please.”

  She spun in her chair and met his eyes. “You really didn’t touch the brass?”

  “Positive. I used the napkin in the bag to pick it up. If you’d said it had ketchup on it, that would have been possible, but I only touched the ends.”

  She stood up and started crawling through her bag of endless pockets again. “Come here, we’ll double check just to be sure.”

  Sweetwater rolled off the bed and let her press his fingers, one at a time, on an ink pad and then along the edge of a sheet of paper. Satisfied with the clarity of the prints, she opened the camera on her phone.

  “This is the print from the bullet casing.” She enlarged the image using her fingers, which blurred the lines on the photograph, but not enough that it wasn’t useable. Then she moved the image along the prints until she found the match.

  “It’s your right thumb. No doubt about it. Here, look for yourself.”

  Sweetwater shifted his gaze back and forth five times, until he was satisfied there was no mistake; the prints matched.

  “How can that be? I swear to God that I have never seen that brass before I found it at the park.” He searched her face, as if somehow he’d find the answer there. “How did he get my print?”

  “Coffee,” Warden said and turned back to her computer.

  “He got my prints from coffee?”

  “No, dummy, the coffee is for me.” She cracked her knuckles and rotated her head from side to side until it popped. “This is what I do, it’s why I get the big bucks. I sift through all the white noise to catch the bad guy, and you bring me whatever I need to do that. Right now, I need coffee.”

  “You get progressively less cute by the minute. There’s a machine at the end of the hall, I’ll be right back.”

  “Stop!” She turned to Sweetwater. “None of that machine shit; I need real coffee. Go find a Starbucks or something. Mocha with soy milk, biggest one they’ve got.” She waved with the back of her hand, dismissing him.

  “I thought you wanted coffee.” He left with a laugh.

  “Don’t mess with my java, Marine. Not all of us have lost all sense of taste. Now go; I have work to do.”

  Chapter 17

  Midtown Memphis, TN

  Erebus’ hands shook as he tried to push the key into the door. He fumbled it, dropped it, bent to pick it up, and snapped his head from side to side as he knelt in front of the door.

  Did they know? They had to by now, didn’t they?

  But no blue lights lit up the street. There weren’t even any suspicious cars. Sure, he’d taken his license plate off, but how many 10-year-old maroon Ford Tauruses could there be in Memphis? Not that many.

  With no cops in sight, he retrieved the key and steadied his hand before jamming it hard into the lock. He got the door unlocked and went inside, easing the door closed behind him. After locking all four deadbolts, he listened for a moment for signs of an intruder. Satisfied that he was alone, Erebus walked into his bedroom and stuffed the gun into the bottom of his sock drawer. He closed the drawer and took a deep breath, thinking about the last twenty-four hours. He’d gone toe to toe with a real-life killer and lived to tell the tale.

  Giggling, he realized he and Pat Garrett had something in common: they’d both killed Billy the Kid. Then he almost got the other guy, too, and would have if not for the Good Samaritan who’d dragged him free of his death trap of a truck. Looking into the dresser mirror he inspected the folds of his jawline, thinking he wasn’t such a bad-looking guy.

  He spotted Herbert stretched out on the bed. The boy had his nose in another book.

  “Hey, buddy.” His son never looked up. �
�I’m sorry I was gone so long. I wanted to be back a long time ago, but I had a big job to do.” Herbert turned a page, but still didn’t look up. A strand of dark hair fell forward but the boy left it hanging. “I hope you didn’t stay up too late reading.” Herbert held up his thumb. “Well, that’s good, how about I make us some hot-dogs? Sound good?” Herbert lifted his thumb again. “All right, I’ll call you when they’re ready.”

  He hurried down the hall, past the extra bedroom to the kitchen. He moved mechanically to prepare the food as his mind replayed everything. Now that it was over, Erebus felt kind of proud. He’d never been an action kind of guy, yet here he was, avenging the woman he loved in a way he never thought himself capable of doing.

  They ate their dinner in silence. Even then Herbert didn’t look up from a heavy hardcover book bound in brown cloth. Erebus bent his head to see the book’s title, nodding in approval. Endothermic Reactions and Their Role in Demonology by Silar van Troost. It was gratifying to see him reading something worthwhile, instead of junk like history or social studies.

  The boy finished his dinner quickly and retreated back to his own room, never looking up from the book.

  Erebus pulled a cold Busch from the refrigerator and sucked down a third of the can, not bothering to wipe foam off his upper lip. With his son off reading, he pulled a short stack of photos from the top of the fridge and sat down at the kitchen table.

  The top picture was a glossy 5x7-inch photo of a black man in a white polo shirt. Written in blue marker across the top was “Asshole,” and under that “William Bonney.” Using the marker, he scrawled the word “Dead” in front of “Asshole.” Despite the man being dead, Erebus curled his lips before setting the picture on the table and shuffling through the others.

  “There you are,” he said, selecting the photo of the man he’d been chasing all day. He read the name out loud, slowly sounding out each syllable, “Luther Sweetwater.” He was a young guy with dark hair, cut short but tousled on top, over a square face. There was a seriousness in his eyes that pissed Erebus off, like the man thought he was better than everybody else.