Yes, this one. By all means, this one.
Range: three hundred yards.
Adjust sight focus.
Rifle stock tight against right shoulder.
Finger inside guard, poised at trigger.
Cheek firm against wooden gunstock; eye to rubber scopepiece.
Line crosshairs on target.
Steady breathing.
Tighten trigger finger slowly.
Fire!
The man dropped forward to the walk like a clubbed animal, dead before he struck the pavement. Someone screamed. A child began to cry. A man shouted.
Pleasant, familiar sounds to Jimmie Prescott.
Calmly, he took apart his weapon, cased it, then carefully dusted his trousers. (Rooftops were often grimy, and although he would soon discard the trousers he liked to present a neat, well-tailored appearance —but only when the disguise called for it. What a marvelous, ill-smelling bum he had become in New Orleans; he smiled thinly, thinking about how truly offensive he was on that occasion.)
He walked through the roof exit to the elevator.
Within ten minutes he had cleared central Baltimore—and booked the next flight to the West Coast.
Aboard the jet, he relaxed. In the soft, warm, humming interior of the airliner, he grew drowsy... closed his eyes.
And had The Dream again.
The Dream was the only disturbing element in Jimmie Prescott’s life. He invariably thought of it that way: The Dream. Never as a dream. Always about a large metropolitan city where chaos reigned—with buses running over babies in the street, and people falling down sewer holes and through plate glass store windows. Violent and disturbing. He was never threatened in The Dream, never personally involved in the chaos around him. Merely a mute witness to it.
He would tell himself, this was only fantasy, a thing deep inside his sleeping mind; it would go away once he awakened and then he could ignore it, put it out of his thoughts, bury it as he had buried the hatred for his father and mother.
Perhaps he had other dreams. Surely he did. But The Dream was the one he woke to, again and again, emerging from the chaos of the city with sweat on his cheeks and forehead, his breath tight and shallow in his chest, his heart thudding wildly.
“Are you all right?” a passenger across the aisle was asking him. “Shall I call somebody?”
“I’m fine,” said Jimmie, sitting up straight. “No problem.”
“You look kinda shaky.”
“No, I’m fine. But thank you for your concern.”
And he put The Dream away once again, as a gun is put away in its case.
In Los Angeles, having studied the city quite thoroughly, Jimmie took a cab directly into Hollywood. The fare was steep, but money was never an issue in Jimmies life; he paid well for services rendered, with no regrets.
He got off at Highland, on Hollywood Boulevard, and walked toward the Chinese Theater.
He wanted two things: food and sexual satisfaction.
First, he would select an attractive female, take her to dinner and then to his motel room (he’d booked one from the airport) where he would have sex. Jimmie never called it lovemaking, a silly word. It was always just sex, plain and simple and quickly over. He was capable of arousing a woman if he chose to do so, of bringing her to full passion and release, but he seldom bothered. His performance was always an act; the ritual bored him. Only the result counted.
He disliked prostitutes and seldom selected one. Too jaded. Too worldly. And never to be trusted. Given time, and his natural charm, he was usually able to pick up an out-of-town girl, impress her with an excellent and very expensive meal at a posh restaurant, and guide her firmly into bed.
This night, in Hollywood, the seduction was easily accomplished.
Jimmie spotted a supple, soft-faced girl in the forecourt of the Chinese. She was wandering from one celebrity footprint to another, leaning to examine a particular signature in the cement.
As she bent forward, her breasts flowed full, pressing against the soft linen dress she wore—and Jimmie told himself, she’s the one tor tonight. A young, awestruck out-of-towner. Perfect.
He moved toward her.
“I just love European food,” said Janet.
“That’s good,” said Jimmie Prescott. “I rather fancy it myself.”
She smiled at him across the table, a glowing all-American girl from Ohio named Janet Louise Lakeley. They were sitting in a small, very chic French restaurant off La Cienega, with soft lighting and open-country decor.
“I can’t read a word of this,” Janet said when the menu was handed to her. “I thought they always had the food listed in English, too, like movie subtitles.”
“Some places don’t,” said Jimmie quietly. “I’ll order for us both. You’ll be pleased. The sole is excellent here.”
“Oh, I love fish,” she said. “I could eat a ton of fish.”
He pressed her hand. “That’s nice.”
“My head is swimming. I shouldn’t have had that Scotch on an empty stomach,” she said. “Are we having wine with dinner?”
“Of course,” said Jimmie.
“I don’t know anything about wine,” she told him, “but I love champagne. That’s wine, isn’t it?”
He smiled with a faint upcurve of his thin lips.
“Trust me,” he said. “You’ll enjoy what I select.”
“I’m sure I will.”
The food was ordered and served—and Jimmie was pleased to see that his tastes had, once again, proven sound. The meal was superb, the wine was bracing and the girl was sexually stimulating. Essentially brainless, but that didn’t really matter to Jimmie. She was what he wanted.
Then she began to talk about the sniper killings.
“Forty people in just a year and two months,” she said. “And all gunned down by the same madman. Aren’t they ever going to catch him?”
“The actual target total is forty-one,” he corrected her. “And what makes you so sure the sniper is a male? Could be a woman.”
She shook her head. “Whoever heard of a woman sniper?”
“There have been many,” said Jimmie. “In Russia today there are several hundred trained female snipers. Some European governments have traditionally utilized females in this capacity.”
“I don’t mean women soldiers,” she said. “I mean your nutso shoot-’em-in-the-street sniper. Always guys. Every time. Like that kid in Texas that shot all the people from the tower.”
“Apparently you’ve never heard of Francine Stearn.”
“Nope. Who was she?”
“Probably the most famous female sniper. Killed a dozen schoolchildren in Pittsburgh one weekend in late July, 1970. One shot each. To the head. She was a very accurate shootist.”
“Never heard of her.”
“After she was captured, Esquire did a rather probing psychological profile on her.”
“Well, I really don’t read a lot,” she admitted. “Except Gothic romances. I just can’t get enough of those.” She giggled. “Guess you could say I’m addicted.”
“I’m not familiar with the genre.”
“Anyway,” she continued, “I know this sniper is a guy.”
“How do you know?”
“Female intuition. I trust it. It never fails me. And it tells me that the Phantom Sniper is a man.”
He was amused. “What else does it tell you?”
“That he’s probably messed up in the head. Maybe beaten as a kid. Something like that. He’s got to be a nutcase.”
“You could be wrong there, too,” Jimmie told her. “Not all lawbreakers are mentally unbalanced.”
“This ‘Deathmaster’ guy is, and I’m convinced of it.”
“You’re a strongly opinionated young woman.”
“Mom always said that.” She sipped her wine, nodded. “Yeah, I guess I am.” She frowned, turning the glass slowly in her long-fingered hand. “Do you think they’ll ever catch him?”
“I somehow
doubt it,” Jimmie declared. “No one seems to have a clear description of him. And he always manages to elude the police. Leaves no clues. Apparently selects his subjects at random. No motive to tie him to. No consistent M.O.”
“What’s that?”
“Method of operation. Most criminals tend to repeat the same basic pattern in their crimes. But not this fellow. He keeps surprising people. Never know where he’ll pop up next, or who his target will be. Difficult to catch a man like that.”
“You call them ‘subjects’ and ‘targets’—but they’re people! Innocent men and women and children. You make them sound like... like cutouts in a shooting gallery!”
“Perhaps I do,” he admitted, smiling. “It’s simply that we have different modes of expression.”
“I say they’ll get him eventually. He can’t go on just butchering innocent people forever.”
“No one goes on forever,” said Jimmie Prescott.
She put down her wineglass, leaned toward him. “Know what bothers me most about the sniper?”
“What.”
“The fact that his kind of act attracts copycats. Other sickos with a screw loose who read about him and want to imitate him. Arson is like that. One big fire in the papers and suddenly all the other wacko firebugs start their own fires. It gets ’em going. The sniper is like that.”
“If some mentally disturbed individual is motivated to kill stupidly and without thought or preparation by something he or she reads in the newspaper then the sniper himself cannot be blamed for such abnormal behavior.”
“You call what he does normal?”
“I... uh... didn’t say that. I was simply refuting your theory.”
She frowned. “Then who is to blame? I think that guy should he caught and—”
“And what?” Jimmie fixed his cool gray eyes on her. “What would you do if you suddenly discovered who he was... where to find him?”
“Call the police, naturally. Like anybody.”
“Wouldn’t you be curious about him, about the kind of person he is? Wouldn’t you question him first, try to understand him?”
“You don’t question an animal who kills! Which is what he is. I’d like to see him gassed or hanged.... You don’t talk to a twisted creep like that!”
She had made him angry. His lips tightened. He was no longer amused with this conversation; the word game had turned sour. This girl was gross and stupid and insensitive. Take her to bed and be done with it Use her body—but no words. No more words. He’d had quite enough of those from her.
“Check, please,” he said to the waiter.
It was at his motel, after sex, that Jimmie decided to kill her. Her insulting tirade echoed and reechoed in his mind. She must be punished for it.
In this special case he felt justified in breaking one of his rules: never pre-select a target. She told him that she worked the afternoon shift at a clothing store on Vine. And he knew where she lived, a few blocks from work. She walked to the store each afternoon.
He would take her home and return the next day. When she left her apartment building he would dispatch her from a roof across the street. Once this plan had settled into place in the mind of Jimmie Prescott he relaxed, allowing the tension of the evening to drain away.
By tomorrow night he’d be in Tucson, and Janet Lakeley would be dead.
Warm sun.
A summer afternoon.
The sniper emerged from the roof door, walking easily, carrying a custom-leather guncase.
Opened the case.
Assembled the weapon.
Loaded it.
Sighted the street below.
Adjusted the focus.
Waited.
Target now exiting.
Walking along street toward corner.
Adjust sight focus.
Finger on trigger.
Cheek against stock.
Eye to scope.
Crosshairs direct on target.
Fire!
Jimmie felt something like a fist strike his stomach. A sudden, shocking blow. Winded, he looked down in amazement at the blood pulsing steadily from his shirtfront.
I in hit! Someone has actually—
Another blow—but this one stopped all thought, taking his head apart. No more shock. No more amazement.
No more Jimmie.
She put away the weapon, annoyed at herself. Two shots! The Phantom Sniper, whoever he was, never fired more than once. But he was exceptional. She got goosebumps, just thinking about him.
Well, maybe next time she could drop her target in one. Anybody can miscalculate a shot. Nobody’s perfect.
She left the roof area, walking calmly, took the elevator down to the garage, stowed her guncase in the trunk of the stolen Mustang and drove away from the motel.
Poor Jimmie, she thought. It was just his bad luck to meet me. But that’s the way it goes.
Janet Lakeley had a rule, and she never broke it: when you bed down a guy in a new town you always target him the next day. She sighed. Usually it didn’t bother her. Most of them were bastards. But not Jimmie. She’d enjoyed talking to him, playing her word games with him... bedding him. She was sorry he had to go.
He seemed like a real nice guy.
00:06
DEATH DECISION
An example of sheer perseverance. As a writer, I hate to give up good ideas; it took me 26 years to work out the plot of “Death Decision” to my satisfaction. I wrote the first draft in 1954, basing the idea directly on what a friend revealed to me about his father. The man had used a sick (but brutally effective) method of discipline on his son and I was both shocked and fascinated by what my friend told me of his childhood, I determined to get a story out of it.
That first draft in 1954 lacked an ending. I had a situation but no climax; I’d written myself into a blind corner with the story. I put the draft away in my files and moved on to other projects. In the summer of 1980 I got a phone call from Charles E. Fritch, editor of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. He wanted a story from me. I told him, sorry, everything was sold —that I was working on a novel and a movie script, so no time for new stuff.
Which is when I thought of “Death Decision.” I dug it out of the file drawer, blew off the dust, and read that long-ago first draft. And liked it. But it had no ending. Back it went into the file.
That night, abruptly, the ending popped into my mind, fully plot-fleshed. I retyped the original draft (with a bit of polish along the way), put on my new ending and mailed the story off to Chuck Fritch the next morning.
The ending is now self-evident to me. Logical. Simple. Easy to come up with.
After only 26 years.
DEATH DECISION
Michael followed his younger sister up the sloping ramp, the heavy leather suitcase bumping his knee, the cool dusk of the station tunnel behind him—seeing the snake-length of train ahead of them, the gleaming passenger coaches waiting on the tracks in the glare of late afternoon sunlight.
He paused for a moment on the edge of the blazing white expanse of concrete and allowed the hot, unfamiliar iron-and-steel smells of the platform to envelop him.
His first train... his first trip outside the city... his first real adventure.
Then his fathers hard voice probed at him sharply. “Hurry along, Michael. And take sister’s hand. We don’t want the train to leave without us.”
The tall figure moved past him, a lean silhouette against the reflecting silver of the coaches, and Michael followed, switching the suitcase to ease its weight, taking Lucy’s small hand. He thought: Lucy is too young to understand death. When you’re seven, death is a dark fantasy you can’t really believe in. But she was learning, thought Michael bitterly; she was learning all about death, as he had learned. Father was seeing to that.
Michael tried to imagine what they would find in Los Angeles, California; he tried to envision his mother lying starched and painted like a plaster saint in a flower-banked coffin with organ music playing softly in the
background and people moving past her in a dreamlike procession, silent and, tight-lipped. When his uncle had died of a heart attack it had been that way, with the flowers so sickeningly sweet that Michael had nearly become ill. He remembered it all, every detail.
But now it was different. He had not seen his mother in six years, not since he was eight, when she had gone away from them forever, and it was impossible to imagine her lying cold and unmoving somewhere in a strange city. She still seemed alive to him; he could hear her repeating his name over and over again, the favorite name she’d had for him: “Mikey, oh, Mikey...”
“Michael!” the lost voice of his mother became the hard, commanding voice of his father. “I told you to move along.”
A round-faced, smiling porter took the suitcase from Michael as they mounted the iron coach steps and led them toward their compartment. The coach interior was cool, cooler even than the long station tunnel, and Michael moved behind his father with a feeling of having entered a new world, separated utterly from the city-world beyond the glass windows. He’d seen trains, heard them roar past in the night, but this was his first time on one. It was nothing like the bus that held taken them into Jefferson, here to the big station. Not like the bus at all.
His father gave the porter some change and the man disappeared down the narrow corridor, leaving them alone in their compartment. It was like a little room, with a silver wash basin over to one side and green velvet seats.
“Well, don’t just stand there, Michael. Close the door and put away our things. What is the matter with you today?”
Mr. Leonard Bair, Michael’s father, was a tall man with a thin, corded neck and small black bird’s eyes. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles which made his eyes look even smaller and more birdlike, and when he smiled, which was infrequently, his lips twisted up from porcelain dentures which seemed at least a size too large for his spare face.
Michael helped his father put away their coats and the leather suitcase. Then he sat down opposite him. Lucy pressed her nose flat against the cool glass of the window. “Will we be starting soon?” she asked, watching the pre-journey activity outside.
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