Eye of Vengeance

by Jonathon King

  A woman opened the door just a crack before he could step up onto the metal grated stairway. Nick lowered his eyes, just for a moment, and then looked into the light-colored eyes that peered out.

  “Good morning, ma’am. I’m looking for David Ferris. Is he home, please?”

  The eyes continued to look out and the crack widened, letting sunlight give blueness to their irises.

  “My name is Nick Mullins, ma’am, I’m a reporter for the Daily News.”

  “I know who you are,” the woman said. Her voice was neither accusatory nor contemptuous. Nick took it as a good sign.

  “Have I met you before, ma’am?” Nick said.

  “You interviewed my husband about four years ago, right here on these steps,” she said, opening the door wider, her hand high on the edge of the jamb. The sun glinted off thin strands of blond hair that dangled in front of her face like a spider’s web catching light. She was a small, thin woman dressed in a flower-patterned smock and loose matching pants, the kind of outfit a nurse would wear.

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry,” Nick said. “I, uh, I don’t recall your name.”

  She just nodded, offering nothing.

  “David isn’t in, then?”

  “He just called, Mr. Mullins. They got ahold of him on his cell phone at work. He’s on his way home.”

  Nick looked down again, as though he understood.

  “He’s still at the Motorola plant, then?” he said, recalling the reporting he’d done on the earlier Ferris stories.

  “We’re both still working, Mr. Mullins, trying to pay off the lawyer’s bills,” she said, only now letting an edge into her voice.

  Nick shifted his weight. He was still standing below her, looking up now into her face. He thought he’d remembered her being in her mid-twenties on the documents he’d dug up on the Ferris family. But the crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes and the pull of skin from her cheekbones did not fit that age. He felt somehow responsible, but could not leave it alone.

  “Was the phone call about Steven?” he finally asked and she simply nodded in the positive and looked off into the distance behind him. Again Nick let silence surround them, second-guessing whether she was relieved or saddened. He finally took a step back.

  “May I wait for David to get here?” he said.

  She fixed her dry blue eyes on his. “He doesn’t want to talk with you, Mr. Mullins. Enough has been said,” she said. “I know that people can’t understand it, why he stood up for his brother after what he did to those children. I don’t know that I even understand it.”

  She looked down for the first time, a crack in her show of defiance.

  “But David still loved his brother, sir. And now we have a funeral to plan.” Nick nodded his head again, this time in deference, and continued stepping backward.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Ferris,” he said and then closed his lips around the air that had started behind his teeth before he could say, Thank you.

  By the time he opened his car door, she was gone. He climbed in and the spiral wire of his notebook caught the fabric of the seat. He had not taken it from his back pocket.

  Chapter 5

  On the way back to his desk Nick made his obligatory stop at the assistant city editor’s pod.

  “I have an I.D. confirmation on the dead guy at the jail,” he said.

  The editor rolled back his chair while his fingers were still on his keyboard, reluctant to leave unfinished a sentence for a budget line item that would have to be presented in yet another news meeting at noon.

  “OK, great, Nick. Anybody we know?” he said, finally bringing his head and a grin around with the final word.

  “Yeah. It’s a guy they put away a few years ago on a double homicide and rape of two elementary school sisters.”

  “No shit?”

  “Yeah,” Nick said, knowing he’d finally gotten the guy’s attention. “He was coming back into court for a hearing on a change of sentencing and it looks like somebody from the outside popped him.”

  The editor’s name was John Rhodes. He’d only been at the Daily News for a year and had been told early that Mullins had an attitude, most of it coming after a car wreck that involved his family some time ago. He was told to walk lightly with him. But he’d also learned quickly that when Mullins brought something to the editors’ desk, the guy would have nailed it down.

  “No shit,” he repeated and looked around to see if anyone else was within earshot and sharing the news of the minute. “How long ago did this guy do the … uh, murder the kids?”

  “Four years,” Nick said. “Only the sentencing was in litigation.”

  “So people are gonna remember, right?”

  “Yeah, John. People will remember.”

  “OK, yeah, sure. Whadda you think, Nick. Page one?”

  “That’s your call, man. I got some more people to talk to,” Nick said and then nodded his head toward Deirdre’s office. “Tell her it’s Steven Ferris. I already got the clips from the library.”

  Rhodes got up as Nick started to walk away. “Hey, does anyone else have this?” he said.

  Nick turned around but didn’t say anything.

  “I mean, you know, do we have an exclusive here?” Rhodes said.

  “They’re just sources, John. I don’t know who else they talk to,” Nick said and went on to his desk. He wanted to ask what the hell difference it made if some other news outlet knew Ferris’s was the body now being shipped to the morgue. He wanted to ask when “exclusive” had become the value of a story. But he’d said those things before. Maybe he was learning to keep his big mouth shut.

  Morgue, Nick thought when he sat down and logged into his computer. While the machine booted up, he called the medical examiner’s office, bypassing the switchboard by using an inside extension to one of the M.E.’s assistants.

  “McGregor,” the deep baritone announced after eight rings.

  “Hey, Mac. Nick Mullins. Sorry if I pulled you away from something disgusting and violated.”

  “Nick? Nick?” said McGregor, making his voice sound like he was perplexed. “Nick, ahhhh. Sorry, I’m having a hard time coming up with the last name. Do I know you?”

  Nick smiled into the phone.

  “OK, Mac. So you must be working on this dead inmate with the head wound, right?”

  “Did I say that, Mr. Nick? I’m not sure I said that. You know this call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes.”

  “Jesus, Mac. Did they come down on you guys again for leaking stuff to the press?”

  “Come down on us? Christ, Nicky, we even had to do a goddamn hour-long seminar with the county attorney on right to privacy and HIPPA laws and then sign a fucking waiver sheet saying we attended and understood ‘all materials presented,’ ” McGregor said, his legendary sarcasm back in his voice. “I can see ’em waving that damn thing in court and pointing at us: ‘We told them, they didn’t listen, sue them, not the state.’ ”

  “OK, well, I wouldn’t want to get you into any trouble, Mac,” Nick said and then waited for what he knew would come.

  “Up their arse,” the baritone growled. “It’s a free country. I’ll say what I want, when I want. What do they think they are? British occupiers?”

  Nick always listened to McGregor’s Scottish rants. The guy was three generations removed from Edinburgh, but wore it like an honor.

  “Yeah, Nicky. We got your white male, six feet, two-twenty if he’s an ounce, dressed in tailored prison orange and a single bullet just missed his bloody ear hole by an inch.”

  “Who’s doing the autopsy?” Nick said.

  “We’re a bit in the weeds over here, lad. So the old man himself is going to take this one, but he won’t get to it till late tonight. Why don’t you come on over about midnight? Bring a snack. You two can swap stories like old times, eh?”

  “Thanks, Mac. I might take you up on that,” Nick said.

  “No thanks needed from you, Nicky. I haven’t said a
word.” Nick heard the chuckle in the voice before the connection clicked off.

  So the old man, Broward M.E. Dr. Nasir Petish himself, would be doing the autopsy in one of his peculiar “dead-of-the-night” sessions, as the seventy-three-year-old pathologist called them. Nick thought of the last such session he’d attended, snuffed the memory out of his nose and put off making any plans for his own evening. Now he had a story to write. He still had calls to make to the Department of Corrections and at least get their “No comment.” He’d get the prosecutor who had won Ferris’s conviction. He’d get a line on a couple of jurors in the murder trial from the court reporter who covered it four years ago. And he’d have to try to find the mother of the little girls, though he knew it would be difficult tracking someone who had been essentially homeless. He’d start with the prosecutor, who might know a way to contact her. He picked up the phone. The always-present deadline was creeping past midday.

  Chapter 6

  Michael Redman was at his makeshift table, breaking down the rifle he had used most of his adult life to kill dangerous human beings who did not deserve to walk this earth. “Break down,” though, was perhaps the wrong term for Redman. He could no more “break down” his weapon than he could break down his right arm. He handled the bolt from the H&K PSG-1 with just the tips of his fingers, feeling the weight and shape and the touch of finely crafted metal against his own skin. The smell of the Shooter’s Choice cleaner was as fond to him as perfume; a certain signaling sifted like smoke through his head when he used it to clean the rifle after a kill. It signaled an end. The final act of taking care of business. It made him relax, often for the first time in weeks.

  He had taken the door off the adjoining bedroom and laid the heavy plank across two nightstands, creating a wide bench on which to work. The only light was from the street lamp outside, seeping in through the window he faced. He liked the dark. You didn’t have to see so much in the dark. And you could feel more—the breeze across a sheen of sweat, the soft vacuum of silence that cupped your ears in the quiet, the weight of a careful footstep on a hallway floor. Michael Redman liked those sensations. Many times they had kept him alive.

  Redman caressed the bolt like a lover’s hand, wiped it down and set it next to the silencer he had removed from the barrel. He knew he would have to rezero the H&K before he used the suppressor again, but it had done its job this morning. Hell, the few reporter shitbirds that had gathered for Ferris’s perp walk hadn’t even flinched when his round fired. No one heard a thing except for the splat the bullet had made when it entered the edge of Ferris’s sideburn and burrowed through his head. The only sound was that of his lifeless body crumpling to the staircase steps, dead at the second of impact, an unavoidable blessing for someone who had deserved worse. Sometimes justice was swift but not always compensative, Redman thought. But that was not the gunman’s choice. He did only what he was trained to do, maybe born to do.

  Redman attached a rod guide into the breech of the weapon and then with the folding rod ran a brush up and back once through the barrel. One push through for each shot fired. And there had only been one. In the dark, he let his mind drift back to Falluja and Ramadi. He had been a law enforcement sniper for ten years, six before that in the Marine Corps. He had told friends that the only reason he’d joined the National Guard was to take advantage of the access to military gun ranges when he was traveling. He never expected to get called up to another war at age forty-six. But they said they needed his talent, his training. They attached him to a forward Marine infiltration squad. Let him pick his own high ground, always in a building, rarely one that seemed stable after the early bombing the cities had taken. The spotter they’d partnered him with was active duty and had rank. Their squad was good at close-quarter tactics and always cleared the building before they set up. High ground was a precious commodity over there. Enemy snipers coveted them. On occasion, Redman would hear the quiet spit of the clearing team’s silenced handguns or a muffled grunt, the sound of something heavy and soft and lifeless being dragged on the floor above. But when the spotter called him up, he never saw a body, just the drag marks leading to another room or behind a partial wall. Redman would set up with an optimum view of the streets below. By daybreak, the Marine units would begin to move into the city. The spotter would use his binoculars to sweep both streets and buildings. Their orders were to safeguard the advancing troops. When the spotter called out a target, be it a man in a window, a shawled figure moving carefully in the street or some thin-limbed kid struggling to carry the weight of an AK-47, it was Redman’s job to kill.

  “Take the shot.”

  He didn’t ask questions. After the first four months, he stopped adding the number of times he slid the brush through his weapon’s barrel. He was very good at his job. But unlike his police work, he never knew the dead, whether they were innocent or evil, dangerous or just unlucky. After the brush, Redman squeezed some Shooter’s Choice on a soft swab and ran it through the barrel and asked himself, Would Collie have done what I have done?

  His SWAT friend, his only true friend, Collie always had a way of working the bugs out of Redman’s head after a shoot, sitting in a bar washing the vision of blood down your throat. He’d grab Redman by the neck with those Vise-Grip fingers of his and say, “Moral courage, man. We do the job that no one else will do. We make the hard choices. And don’t you think any different, Mikey It ain’t the lieutenant. It ain’t the sheriff. It ain’t the range master. When your finger is on the trigger, buddy, you are ultimately the man. It’s your moral courage that lets you pull it.”

  Would Collie have pulled those triggers in Iraq? Redman couldn’t find the answer and it ate at him. But he’d sworn it would be different when he got home, and today he had known his target, he knew the man was deserving, knew he’d exacted a moral vengeance for two little girls whose innocence had been stolen. Collie would have pulled this trigger.

  Redman closed his eyes while he worked, his fingers moving with the precision of motor memory in the dark. He wondered what the newspaper story would say in the morning. He wondered if Nick Mullins would get the assignment, if the only journalist he trusted would get it right, would understand.

  Chapter 7

  The last call Nick made was to Joel Cameron. It was just after eight o’clock and his story was finished and ready to move on to the editors and copy readers. He had named Ferris and given a full background of his murder trial and the rapes and killings of the children. The bulk of the story was on the dead man. The main question of the piece was the identity of his shooter. Nick had left three phone messages for Detective Hargrave, knowing they would never be returned. He’d watched the six o’clock news on three local television channels and all were still reporting that the name of the dead inmate had not been released. His own editors had voted to keep Ferris’s name off the newspaper’s Internet site so they could scoop the competition. Every newsgroup monitored each other’s site. It had become laughable how one group now bragged that they got their story “up” on the Web ten minutes before the other.

  Nick tried out his “he’ll still be just as dead tomorrow” line on Cameron when the information officer started to whine after Nick told him he was naming Ferris in the morning paper.

  “Shit, Nick. The other guys are going to be all over me that I wasn’t being fair by treating everyone the same.”

  Cameron’s defensiveness was yet additional confirmation that Nick had the right guy.

  “So just don’t confirm it, Joel. I’ve got it and if anybody gives you a hard time, you can honestly say you didn’t give it to me,” Nick said.

  There was a silence. Cameron was thinking. Always a danger, Nick thought.

  “But you won’t give it out for the eleven o’clock television guys just because I do have it, right? That was our deal.”

  “Yeah,” Cameron acquiesced. “But Hargrave’s still going to be pissed.”

  “He’ll get over it, Joel. And while I’ve got you, is ther
e anything more on the shooting that you are giving out? Caliber of the bullet? Search warrant issued at the house of a pissed-off relative of dead girls? Anything more from our friend across the street who saw a man dressed in a SWAT uniform coming down off the roof?”

  “Shit, Nick. You’re not using that, are you?” Cameron said.

  “Actually, no,” Nick said. “I’m holding back on that for some later development. You might pass that on to Detective Hargrave—my cooperation, that is.”

  Cameron was quiet for a beat. “All we’re giving out is on the most recent press release, Nick. That’s it.”

  That was little more than nothing. Nick had read the release and spiked it on his desk.

  “OK, Joel. I’m outta here. Talk with you tomorrow.”

  “Word of advice, Nick,” Cameron said before clicking off. “Walk careful with Hargrave. He’s not like the other homicide guys.”

  Nick had already seen that in the detective’s eyes. He wouldn’t be the kind who sat around the desks in the squad room and hashed out his theories with the others. Not once had he written anything down, either while he was inspecting the blood spatter or up on the roof. His were the kind of eyes that absorbed everything and then let those images turn and twist in his head until they started to fit. Nick knew Hargrave’s kind. They were the ones who burned out quick, or were damned good because of the experience they gained by not giving in.

  “I’ll try not to piss him off, Joel,” Nick said and hung up the phone.