Eye of Vengeance

by Jonathon King

  Hargrave took a sip of his whiskey, looked down into the glass. “Yeah, I read your stories. You never called her homeless. The rest of the media kept calling her a homeless woman bringing her kids up in a car.”

  Nick remembered the arguments he’d had with editors over that.

  Hargrave let him think and then said, “She give you anything you didn’t tell us about in that room?”

  This guy was going to be hard to slide anything by, Nick thought. “Not really,” he said, taking a long drink of the tea, trying to judge the guy. Hargrave was pushing this investigation, up late on a Saturday, reworking the already unusual ground of talking to a reporter. Would it hurt to give him the mention of the letters? Would the detective give him anything in return? Nothing ventured, as they say.

  “You get the letters she said her attorney kept forwarding on to her? The ones from sympathy folks and people encouraging her?” Nick said.

  Hargrave lifted one eye at him, making Nick think maybe something was wrong with the guy’s peripheral vision. “No. It wasn’t mentioned.”

  “She said that she had held on to some of them, put them in a box someplace. I figured, you know, that I might go back,” Nick said, avoiding Hargrave’s look. “Might be some names, maybe some threats against Ferris, you know, ‘We’ll get that son-of-a-bitch’ types.”

  “We’ll have to look into it,” the detective said, but Nick could see the mental note-taking going on in Hargrave’s head. He’d probably be at her door Monday morning, if not sooner.

  He drank his tea. Maybe it was time to get something back.

  “So what’s with the federal guy at the meeting?” he asked, knowing Hargrave would have checked the guy out with his own law enforcement contacts as soon as he could get out of the lieutenant’s sight.

  “OK,” Hargrave said, recognizing the game of give-and-take. “He’s with the Secret Service. Sources say he’s down here as security on a political junket, but he’s got this hairbrush up his ass about snipers. They say he’s got a whole list of shootings that have anything to do with long-distance kills and high-powered rifles.”

  “They say? Who’s they?”

  Hargrave let something that might have been a grin come onto his face. “My unnamed sources.”

  Nick tried to give the information an appropriate “That’s interesting” response. But he was thinking about his own list of shooting victims, the one he’d asked Lori to put together. It was still in his computer at work and he hadn’t taken the time to look at it all.

  “You’ve seen this list?” he asked Hargrave.

  “No. But Fitzgerald’s definitely got a hard-on about it. And with all this homeland security shit, that puts the pressure on us to cooperate with him.”

  “And with me,” Nick said.

  “The guy’s on a timetable,” Hargrave said, sipping again at his drink, but Nick could see there was nothing but ice left in the bottom.

  “What do you mean?”

  The detective again gave Nick another sideways look, while sucking a cube into his mouth and then gnashing the thing between his teeth.

  “Jesus, Mullins. Don’t you read your own paper?”

  “Yeah, but I only believe half of it,” Nick said.

  Hargrave looked over the top of his whiskey glass as though he were trying to tell whether Nick was serious or joking. Nick shrugged.

  “He’s Secret Service. The Secretary of State shows up next week for a meeting of the Organization of American States down at the convention center,” Hargrave said. “I figure this guy to be part of the advance team, but he’s a little too focused on the sniper bit. That’s usually taken care of in protocol, part of the overall security plan.”

  Nick knew about the upcoming OAS confab. Representatives from most of Latin America would be present. Miami was pretty much the gateway to the United States for the Hispanic and Caribbean world now, and the Broward County convention center was north of Miami. Protestors would have a harder time getting there and the center was right next to the Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport. They picked the site because it meant less travel for the dignitaries and was easier to secure. In fact, Nick figured Deirdre would be pulling him aside to do a piece about that security anytime now. But as a rule, Nick rarely paid attention to politics until it lapped over into his coverage of death or law enforcement. He recalled the time he was asked to write a story about some dustup after the President started using scenes of September 11 in his reelection advertisements. The editors came to him because Nick had interviewed families in South Florida who had lost loved ones in the Twin Towers. He had at least a fledgling relationship with them, along with their contact numbers. Death revisited. It was a shitty assignment, having to call people still emotionally raw and ask stupid questions. But he did it. And everyone he talked to said they were bothered by the use of 9/11 in any advertisement, political or not. Nick had written their responses, and had only the President’s press secretary’s rebuttal to balance it. The next day his phone and e-mail were filled with angry readers pissing on Nick personally and the “Liberal press” in general for being one-sided and taking a political stand against Republicans. Nick endured until the eighth or ninth call and then spouted off at some condo political captain: “It’s not a political story. It’s a human story, man. It’s about people’s feelings. It’s about people who lost sons and daughters and family and felt like they just got gouged again. Can’t you understand that? It’s about humans, not politics.”

  The guy on the other end of the line just laughed at what he considered Nick’s naïveté. “Everything’s about politics, young man. You’ll learn that.”

  Nick went back to his regular police reporting that day when the dismembered body of a prostitute was found in a Dumpster only thirty yards away from Federal Highway, and Nick was taken off the political advertisement story.

  “You think the Secret Service has some kind of credible threat that a sniper is tailing the Secretary of State?” Nick said.

  “Christ, I don’t know,” Hargrave said, hissing between his teeth. “I’m sure as hell not thinking that my guy is assassinating felons just to warm up for the Secretary of State. But if he finds something to link our guy to whatever he’s looking for, I’ll take the help. Right now I’ve got a homicide to work even if no one else gives a damn.”

  Nick wasn’t sure how many whiskeys Hargrave had downed, but the reticent man was showing the pressure. The detective pushed his glass toward the bar gutter and peeled off a few bills and left them as a tip.

  “I’ll give Ms. Cotton a visit on Monday for those letters, and maybe if I get a look at Fitzgerald’s list, I’ll let you know.”

  He got up and slid past Nick without so much as letting his coat sleeve make contact. Nick said, “Thanks,” to his back as the thin man walked away.

  Chapter 16

  Get in. Kill quickly. And get out without being seen.

  Sniper Theory 101. He had learned it and earned it in his first stint with the military, and gave it all up after the first Gulf War when he came home to be a cop.

  Out here in the civilian world, he’d also learned intelligence and careful planning and specific targeting and, he admitted, a hell of a lot of patience and frustration had replaced the kill-quickly rule. He’d been proud of his abilities in both theaters before. He had always, in his head, done the right thing. And now, he told himself, he was doing the right thing again.

  From the parking lot a block behind a row of street-side businesses Redman sat in the dark van, doing surveillance. His gear was in a bag stuffed in a concealed drop box in the floor. He’d had a welder hang the box under the frame, just behind the rear axle, so he could get to it easily enough. From the outside it was hard to spot, obscured by a low-hanging license plate and a trailer hitch that would never be used. The mechanic had used reverse hinges so the plate door was nearly seamless and difficult to recognize from inside the van. If he was stopped for any reason, he wasn’t going to be caught
carrying an H&K sniper rifle and try to say he was going deer hunting in the Glades.

  With patience, he watched the coming and going of traffic for an hour, long past midnight. He’d already used a night-scope spotter to check the fire escape that led to the roof of the office building he wanted. From the front he knew the business plaque read: MYERS & HOPE, ATTORNEYS AT LAW. But back here it was just as dark and unpainted and weather-stained as all the rest in the line. He’d already spotted the burglar alarm lights on the back door and the magnetic slide bars on the windows. But he wasn’t going inside, and no such devices were on the fire escape.

  He’d long ago unscrewed the bulbs inside the van, so he held a small Maglite between his teeth and scrambled between the seats and into the back. He opened the drop box, left the rifle and took out a night spotting scope and a laser range finder. If he got caught on a dry run, there would be no sense getting caught with a gun. He might get picked up for attempted burglary, but he wasn’t there to steal anything. He got out quietly through the rear doors and clicked them shut.

  The fire escape took him to the roof and he stayed low crossing the graveled tarpaper, stopping at an air-conditioning unit that was as big as his van. The thing was humming. It was after one AM, but the air temperature was still in the high seventies. He could feel the heat of the day coming off the roof surface when he went to all fours and crossed to the building’s front edge. Down on his belly, he checked the street north and south and then brought the scope to his eye. Across the avenue and one hundred yards down the line, he focused and watched the BAIL BONDS sign twitch through the green glow of the scope lens. A slip to the right and he found another door with its own small letters painted on the glass: DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS. He had always found the locations humorous. The bail bondsman sitting right next door to the parole office. One-stop shopping.

  From a computer printout, Redman had the specifics of the felon he called Mr. Burn-Your-Girlfriend-to-Death. Out on parole after doing time for attempted murder, Trace Michaels was required to show up at this office every second Monday of the month. Due up in two days. And a bullet with his name on it would be waiting.

  Redman took out the laser range finder, pointed it at the door and checked the distance: one hundred twenty-eight yards. A fish-in-a-barrel shot. And from this far back, he’d be down the fire escape and in his van before people could figure out why a man was suddenly lying on the sidewalk. Redman would be driving in the opposite direction. No reports to fill out. No shit to take from the media. He glassed the building again, thought about a night just like this three years ago.

  He and the SWAT team had been after bad guys that night too. The ATF unit out of Fort Lauderdale had turned a pile of investigative tapes over to the sheriff’s investigators. On the recordings, three wannabe gun dealers in Deerfield Beach were trying to set up a buy for several 9mm handguns and supposedly an MP5 semiautomatic rifle, the same kind the SWAT members carried. Everyone on the team gathered in the planning room and listened to the men brag to the potential buyer, “We got the firepower, man. And we know how to use them too.”

  The confidential informant said he wasn’t looking for that kind of trouble. He had the cash and just wanted a smooth deal.

  “You wanna smooth deal, you be smooth.”

  The CI and the gunrunners set the sale at a two-story motel just off the interstate. Easy in, easy out. Two hours ahead of time, the SWAT sergeant met with the motel manager and cleared the rooms of other guests with quiet requests over room phones. The team then set up in an unmarked van in the horseshoe-shaped parking lot. Three officers were in the van, watching a video screen. They would send in the CI with a bag of money and a concealed camera and the guys outside would be able to see exactly what they were dealing with. Michael Redman was the ultimate backup. He was in a second-story room on the other side of the horseshoe, directly across from the dealers’ room. He set his tripod on top of a dresser shoved four feet back from the window so that no passersby would see the barrel of the sniper rifle. When the team went green-light, he would open the sliding half of the window and have a perfect line on the bad guys’ doorway, just in case someone came out shooting. It wasn’t likely, but the voices on the tapes had convinced the team that these assholes could talk the talk. They weren’t taking chances they might walk the walk.

  The team had also rigged the room next to the gun sellers. Like most cheap motels, it had a suite door that connected the rooms. One of the team had disabled the dead bolt, but left the turn knob intact. The bad guys on the other side could throw the bolt, it would feel and sound like it was locked, but two members of the team would simply spin the knob on their side and charge on in. Complete surprise.

  When everything was set, the team commander sent in the informant. From the van, half the team listened to the audio and watched the video being transmitted from a hidden camera in the CI’s bag. Three men were inside, 9mm in their waistbands. The CI played it pretty cool.

  “Hey, man, come on, ya’ll. I ain’t carryin’ nothin’, just like you said, man. How come ya’ll bristlin’ with your personal shit an’ all?”

  “We told you we know how to use what we sell,” said the dealer, who called himself Freddy. “You do things smooth, they don’t come out.”

  The CI said he was only there to do business and asked to see the merchandise out on the bed. On the video screen the SWAT sergeant watched six handguns and the assault rifle being placed on the mattress. He made a determination that moment: The team was not going to let those weapons back out on the street. That contingency plan had already been set. When the key words came out of the CI’s mouth, the team would move simultaneously. Most of the men in the van were holding their breath when the informant said, “OK. This all looks right. I got your money right here.”

  The sergeant called a “Go” on his radio. Redman already had his scope on the door and even from his distance he heard the whump of the inside suite door as one of the team gave it the shoulder and rushed in on the dealers shouting, “Police, don’t move! Police, don’t move! Police, don’t move.”

  At the same instant three deputies jumped from the back of the van and headed for the stairs. They were dressed in black with yellow letters across their chests and back: POLICE.

  Two team members also burst from the front door of the room next to the dealers’ to cover the second-floor walkway. Redman let a breath out and pulled two pounds of pressure on the three-pound trigger. Despite the order not to move, the bad guys did.

  The first man out of the dealers’ room was a guy with a baseball cap. He instantly wore Redman’s crosshairs on his chest. Redman saw that the grip of the man’s 9mm was still sticking out of his belt and held off as the deputies on the walkway continued yelling. But Baseball Cap kept going, starting down the outside stairwell as the team had figured, funneling into the hands of the van team. The second man out had his gun in his hand. When he came out the door, Redman put the scope on him. When the guy turned to look at the deputies on the walkway and began to raise his 9mm, Redman fired a .308 WIN boat-tail bullet into the man’s chest, one inch below his heart and slightly anterior. It sheared the breastbone as it went in, and the velocity expansion that fans out three inches in diameter around the bullet pulverized the two right chambers of the heart. He was dead within seconds.

  That was when Redman heard the reports of the van team’s own MP5s. The first man down the stairway had pulled his 9mm from his waistband but did not get the chance to fire. Redman moved the scope down in time to see two blossoms sprout on the man’s chest like tiny roses opening in an accelerated-time-flash film.

  Voices continued to sound and Redman swung the sights and caught a glimpse of a booted foot leaving the targeting field. He moved his eye from the scope and watched a man leap over the walkway railing and hit the ground. The guy rolled, using his rifle to absorb the shock, and scrambled to his feet: a runner. Up on the walkway, the deputies plowed full into the fourth man who stepped out of the ro
om, tackling him but also losing chase on the runner. Watching the confusion, Redman lifted his rifle, slid on his ass across the top of the dresser and took two steps to the window. From there he had an angle on the runner, who had in his hands the automatic rifle he’d been trying to sell. The parking lot deputies never saw him and Redman called out, “On the fence! On the fence!” as a warning and then swung his scope to the right, steadying the rifle against the window frame. He had a full view of the runner, who had made the chain-link fence and was scrambling up. He watched him throw one leg over and then, straddling the top, sling the rifle up to his shoulder and aim back at the parking lot. Redman’s shot was perfect given the circumstances. The boat-tail caught the man just below the left sideburn, half an inch in front of the earhole. He was dead in a millisecond.

  In the investigation that follows every time a lawman fires his weapon, the operation came out clean. The SWAT team acted exactly as it had been trained to. They’d done an assessment of the danger and secured the room. They’d assigned adequate overwhelming force. When hostile weapons were identified, and when those weapons became a danger to team members, those members shot to kill. It all went down as it should have under quickly changing circumstances.

  Only the media questioned the operation, which, Redman knew, is what the media does. When someone dies by the hand of a cop, journalists seem to be sent out to determine if it was a fair fight. But SWAT officers know it is never a fair fight. It’s never supposed to be. It’s not a game.

  The sheriff was adept at spinning the local media. The public information officers dealt with the reporters they had relationships with. But it had been Redman’s fifth killing in the line of duty. The editorial writers, dusty white collars in isolated offices who only watched TV and hadn’t been on the streets in years, had their opinions.

  Redman could still quote the editorial written in the Daily News only two days after the SWAT shooting: