Standing just inside the door, Harold Petersen was enjoying Donna’s struggle with the gas cap and he smirked at her sudden yelp of pain. Serves the ugly bitch right, he thought. And after all that, she’s prob’ly only going to put in ten dollars.
Suddenly, the color drained out of his face as he realized what she was doing. He burst through the door just as she lit the cigarette.
“Put that out, get away from there,” he screamed, stopping on the cement sidewalk that fronted the store.
Donna turned and casually flipped him the bird, before leaning back in to watch the gauge on the pump.
“Get away from the pump, you stupid bitch,” Harold yelled. He wanted to run over and stop the pump but was afraid to get any closer.
In his nest, the sniper wore a grim smile, not because of Donna’s misfortunes, but because his target had presented himself so obligingly. He pulled the rifle firmly into his shoulder and even though it was an easy shot, took a moment to steady his breathing and concentrate on sight picture and trigger squeeze.
As it had countless times before, his shoulder easily absorbed the shock as the rifle slapped him reassuringly with the solid feel of a fine shot.
At about 2700 feet per second, the semi-jacketed, 168-grain silver-tip bullet took just a fraction over half a second to cover the distance from the rifle’s muzzle to the Hal’s Handy Stop parking lot, on a trajectory that would take it to the center of Harold’s chest.
But in half-seconds, universes are born and die, the fates of nations are decided, and fate sometimes becomes reality.
This particular half-second saw Donna goggling in indignant disbelief at the word bitch and grabbing for the gas hose, determined to end her relationship with Hal’s Handy Stop and its sleazy owner forthwith.
At her touch the hose swayed in the air—not much, just an inch or two, but enough to intersect the path of the bullet and deflect it from its fatal course into a much kinder trajectory on which it merely blew off the top of Harold’s left shoulder. A spray of pressurized gasoline erupted from the hose and fogged the crisp morning air in scintillating rainbow arcs for just a second before it ignited with a loud whomp and a concussion that blew Harold backwards through his store window.
In the next split second, an automatic safety system had sealed the underground gas tank and released a fire-retardant spray over the pumps, extinguishing both the blaze and Donna, whose gasoline-soaked jacket and hair had been ignited by the flash fire.
Clipper was lingering over coffee with Janice when John Peters called. “Harold Petersen just got blown up in a gas pump explosion at his store,” Peters said.
“He dead?” Clipper stood and reached for his coat.
“Naw, ambulance guys say he’ll make it, but he’s pretty messed up. There’s a woman, too. Burned pretty bad, prob’ly won’t make it.”
There was one fire truck still standing by when Clipper got to the scene. Two maintenance men were already fitting sheets of plywood into the blown-out window opening, and Peters was just walking a young man towards his car. He changed direction when he saw Clipper’s truck; speaking to a uniformed officer, he put the young man into the back of a marked cruiser, which pulled out of the lot as Clipper parked.
“Getting interesting,” Peters said when Clipper got out. “That kid’s a clerk. He says Petersen was outside yelling at the woman for smoking at the pump, when it exploded and blew him back through the window. Curious thing is, he swears he saw a bullet hole appear in the glass just before it broke. Didn’t see anyone or hear any shots, but he’s sure about the bullet hole.”
Leaving Peters to supervise the scene, Clipper drove to the hospital and found an emergency room nurse he knew.
“They sedated him while they try to find an Orthopedic Surgeon,” she said. “His left shoulder looks to be pretty much destroyed.”
“Does it look like a gunshot wound?” Clipper asked.
She gave him an odd look. “Well, yeah. That’s what we assumed it was.”
“How ’bout the woman that they brought in?”
The nurse shook her head. “She never had a chance.”
Clipper got back in the truck, this time driving to the station to talk with the store clerk. Gabe Liberty was a high school senior, working part time for Petersen before and after school. He was intelligent and adamant.
“I’m positive,” he said. " Mr. Petersen was yelling, and I was looking at him, and I saw the hole in the window just over his shoulder—just for a split second before the explosion, but I know I saw it.”
Clipper was just wrapping up with Liberty when Peters called again. “Kid was right,” he said. “We found the bullet. It was in the back wall on a line with the window and the pump. It’s not jacketed, looks like some kind of hunting round. Randy’s here working the scene, so I’m going to take a look in the woods across the road.”
“Grab a uniform, and be careful. The hospital verifies that it was a gunshot wound, but Petersen’s already sedated for surgery. I’m going to get a uniform over there to stand by, and then see if I can find out where our friend Sergeant Rojas is this morning.”
Clipper called Nelson Miller and found out that Ramon Rojas was staying at the Howard Johnson’s in Bangor. He grabbed Caleb Cross, who had been reading the Amburg casebook, and Ellen Davis; on the way out of the station he stopped in to dispatch to arrange for a couple of marked units to stand by a block from the motel, and another to stick with Petersen at the hospital.
John Peters took some satisfaction in the fact that his heavy breathing was mostly drowned out by the gasping of the out-of-shape patrolman behind him as they crested the ridge above Route 2. He moved cautiously to his left until he could line up the burned-out gas pump with the boarded-up window of the distant convenience store, then paced slowly to his right.
Three steps, six, and there it was: an indistinct rectangle of cleared space with a handful of stones and branches swept off to one side. As faint as it was, he might have missed it except for the quick glint of color that caught his eye.
He pulled a pen from his pocket and bent down to retrieve the brass shell casing from its hiding place amongst the leaves.
Chapter Sixteen
Rojas’s room was off an interior hallway, about midway down, so Clipper brought the uniforms inside and stationed one them out of sight at each end of the hall. He’d left Ellen Davis outside with a view of the room’s window and he and Cross now stood against the wall to either side of the door. With his hand on the grip of his Kimber, Clipper gave the door a sharp rap. “Sergeant Rojas, it’s Tom Clipper. Open up.”
After a long moment, there was a click, and the motel room door swung inward. Ramon Rojas stood silently in the doorway, his hands at his sides. When Clipper stepped forward, Rojas stepped back, face impassive, his dark eyes locked on Clipper. When they reached the center of the room, Clipper spotted a rifle on the bed and moved quickly to get between it and Rojas.
Rojas turned to follow the movement. “Did I kill the son of a bitch?” he asked evenly.
With Rojas cuffed and transported to the police station by Caleb Cross, Clipper and Ellen Davis searched his room. Besides the rifle on the bed, an older Savage model 110 with a scope and leather sling, they found a box of twenty rounds of Winchester .270 silver tip ammunition with four rounds missing, and a light canvas ground cloth rolled up under the bed. The ammunition had a Walmart sticker, and in the wastebasket they found a receipt for it, dated the day before.
Between them, they gathered all of Rojas’s belongings and took them out to the car, leaving the room locked with a police seal on the door.
Back at the station, Rojas remained impassive, the news that he had only wounded Petersen eliciting only a small shrug. “I took him off the street,” he said. “Someone had to.”
A gunshot residue test performed by Ellen Davis had confirmed the presence of nitrates on Rojas’s hands, and he waived his Miranda rights and freely admitted to buying the rifle at a local pawn shop wi
th the express intent of killing Harold Petersen. He was matter-of-fact and unapologetic, nodding calmly as Clipper told him that he would be charged with one count of attempted murder and one count of felony murder.
Rojas shrugged again. “It’s too bad about the woman, but I know some of you can understand that I did what had to be done,” he said. “My daughter, and probably a lot of other young girls, won’t have to worry about him anymore.”
“We need to answer this.”
Cal Ettenger tossed the newspaper into the middle of his desk. Clipper had started composing the answer as soon as he had seen the headline:
Violence Rocks Bangor
In the past five days, six people have died in Bangor, including two shot by police, and two others remain critically wounded in the unprecedented wave of violence that has ravaged the Queen City.
The article and photos covered the entire front page with a sidebar reminder that there were also three other unsolved homicides in the area.
It was Thursday morning, and Clipper was with Chief Norris in the city manager’s office. Before he and Chief Norris had answered the manager’s summons, Clipper had already discussed a press conference with Norris and Josh Preston, and had blocked out the main points of a press release with assurances that each of the violent crimes had been solved and that there was no ongoing danger to the public.
“We’ve got one sniping and two different sets of shootings that are all unrelated and all closed,” he said. “That’s the message we need to put out.”
Ettenger nodded. “Good. Do it as soon as you can.”
The rest of Thursday was devoted to finishing the case book on the Sterns and Day murders, and the subsequent shooting of their killer by Mandy Sikes. At three o’clock, Dave Adams called from the state lab where he was attending the autopsies of Turk Nason and Connie Bonny.
“Thought I’d let you know,” he said, “we got the slug that killed Mrs. Bonny and the lab just confirmed that it came from Nason’s gun.”
“What about Nason?”
“He took four hits to the chest and one to the head. We got three of the slugs, but they haven’t done the comparisons yet.”
At four o’clock, Clipper joined Chief Norris, Josh Preston, and a jam-packed crowd of TV, newspaper, and radio reporters in the conference room.
He kept his remarks positive.
“In the past five days, the Bangor Police Department has solved three homicides and one attempted homicide in two unrelated cases. Those cases were closed by the self-defense shooting of a double murder suspect by a Bangor officer, and by the arrest of the man responsible for the death of one person and wounding of another at Hal’s Handy Stop on outer Broadway. In a third, unrelated incident, officers were fired on while attempting to serve an arrest warrant and they returned fire, killing their assailant.”
“Will the cops be disciplined?” The question was shouted from a gaggle of reporters in the back of the room.
“All officers involved, including one recovering from gunshot wounds, have been placed on administrative leave while their actions are investigated by the State Attorney General’s office, as mandated by Maine State law. As always, the department is cooperating fully with those investigations.”
Clipper eventually escaped the press conference and stopped by the hospital on his way home. There was no bluster left in Harold Petersen. When Clipper peeked into his room, he found Petersen lying still and deflated on his back in the hospital bed, his left arm encased in some sort of mechanical brace, his shoulder lightly bandaged and IVs in his right arm and hand. His eyes were closed, but he was slowly licking cracked lips that stood out as a red slash against his sallow skin.
Petersen opened his eyes as Clipper entered, and his tongue froze between his lips like a tiny pink bubble.
“How’re you feeling, Harold?”
Petersen made no answer, but he tracked Clipper’s movement into the room with dull eyes.
“I wanted you to know we got the man who shot you. He’s in the County Jail, and he won’t be getting out any time soon.”
Petersen said nothing.
“It was Ramon Rojas, the father of the girl that was attacked at the University last week. He confessed, but we’re going to need a statement from you,” Clipper said. “That can wait a bit, though. The doc tells me that you’ll be out of here in a few days, so I’ll drop by your house one day next week.”
Petersen gave the barest of nods and closed his eyes again. Clipper left quietly and walked down two doors to Allen Oaks’s room.
Oaks was awake and talking to his wife, a willowy brunette who ran a daycare out of their home, and his brother, who worked for the city as a firefighter. When Oaks saw Clipper, he held up a finger to interrupt something his wife was saying.
“Did I get him?” he asked.
“We don’t know yet,” Clipper said. “You and Ed both got off shots, so until we know for sure, you’ll both be on administrative leave.”
Oaks’s wife put her hand to her throat. “Is there a problem?”
Clipper shook his head. “Just a formality,” he said. “The shooting looks completely justified, and we may never know who fired the fatal shot, but we just have to follow the protocol.”
Clipper stayed and chatted for a short time, then drove home determined to spend the evening puttering in his workshop—and not to jinx himself again by imagining that things had finally calmed down.
Chapter Seventeen
“Do you suppose he was right?”
It was Friday morning, and Irwin Myer sat in Clipper’s office, along with John Peters and Nelson Miller. Myer was glancing through the nearly complete case book on Rojas. “About Petersen, I mean.”
Clipper shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “He’s pretty well alibied for Amburg, and Mosier’s pretty sure he’s not the guy that attacked her. There’s nothing solid on any of the others either, other than he was around and he’s a sleaze. There’s someone else out there.”
Myer tossed the case book back on the desk with a grunt. “This area’s turned into a real hotbed of crime,” he said. “With all your murders and assaults and that University sniping case, I might as well move up here permanently.”
“You guys getting anywhere with the sniper?” Clipper asked Miller.
“Nah. Right now, the best guess is that it was probably some rival dealer, but they haven’t found anything to back it up. No talk on the street and, other than the body, there’s not one damn bit of physical evidence.” He hesitated. “Uh, look guys, I feel like I should apologize for bringing Rojas into this. I mean, I had to notify him and all, and you like to help out another cop, but I’m sorry as hell I ever brought him in here and introduced him.”
Clipper waved it off. “Not your fault,” he said. “That man was going to get his revenge no matter what you did.”
Myer got to his feet. “Well, you got a solid case on him anyway. Let me know when the book’s finished, and we’ll sit down.”
For the rest of the day, Clipper and most of his investigators spent their time doing the work and generating the reports that would close out the Sterns and Day homicides and finish the case book on Rojas. By five o’clock, Clipper was thoroughly sick of the paperwork and looking forward to Saturday’s planned visit to Doug Holland’s range with Janice and her new rifle.
“The idea of real long-range shooting’s been around for quite some time—started to come into its own during the Civil War, with the advent of the British .45 caliber Whitworth rifle. The Whitworth used a hexagonal five-hundred-grain bullet, and Confederate snipers recorded kills out to a thousand yards with it, and they did it with mostly open sights.”
Doug Holland, Clipper, and Janice were standing at a shooting bench behind Holland’s house. The day was unusually warm and windless, and they were enjoying the Cleo’s coffee and donuts Janice had provided for her first shooting lesson, while Holland prepared her rifle. He’d already hung a two-foot square target on a wooden fr
ame at the two-hundred-yard mark and had removed the bolt from Janice’s rifle; he peered down the bore as he spoke.
“’Course, it’s a little easier now with equipment like this out.” He grinned. Slipping the bolt back into the rifle, he motioned Janice up to the bench. “What we’re going to do here today,” he said, handing her the rifle, “is sight this weapon in at two hundred yards. That means it will hit exactly where you put the sights at that distance. After you’re comfortable with that, we’ll see about some longer shots.”
He seated Janice at the side of the L-shaped bench, gave her a set of ear protectors, and showed her how to hold the rifle into her shoulder with the bipod folded out of the way and the forearm resting on a small sandbag. They’d already talked about the need for breath control and a delicate trigger squeeze, so he lifted the rifle, opened the bolt, and slid a gleaming round into the chamber.
Closing the bolt and handing the rifle back to her, he said, “Let’s give it a try. Just put the crosshairs on the center of the bull and squeeze it off.”
Janice pulled the rifle in tight and concentrated on the sight. When she had it where she wanted it, she pulled the trigger firmly and started visibly at the muffled click. She looked up in dismay. “What happened? It didn’t shoot.”
Holland took the rifle and ejected the cartridge he had loaded. “Lesson number one,” he said, turning the case so Janice could see the empty primer pocket in its base. “Well, one and two. You always want to handle your own ammo—but also, more importantly, you don’t want to anticipate the shot. You thought about the noise and recoil and flinched because of what you expected would happen.” He handed her the rifle and placed a box of ammunition on the bench. He had her dry fire a few times, then said, “Try it again, and this time concentrate on the sight picture, squeeze very slowly, and let the shot surprise you.”
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