Perfect Killer

by Lewis Perdue

As Vanessa spoke, movement from behind her caught my eye. Again, I found myself staring toward the big magnolia tree; this time, I registered movement far beyond, in the trees down by Roebuck Lake.

  Before I could react, a rifle shot thundered through the chill air. Vanessa pitched forward. I opened my arms to catch her and saw an evil void where her left eye had once been. The warm, red-and-gray eruption from the ghastly wound blinded me. I grabbed Vanessa, rolled us to the ground, and covered her with my body as a second shot tore through the morning silence.

  CHAPTER 6

  From a shadowy perch hidden beyond the silvery, weathered boards of a derelict and graffiti-smeared lakeside cottage, the shooter focused on the drama playing out in the perfect circle of the scope's eyepiece. The reddish mist from the lawyer's head appeared as a silent cloud of dust and created the familiar calming satisfaction that ran warm in the shooter's veins.

  The shooter paused to get the first real-life glimpse of the famed Dr. Bradford Stone, legendary Marine recon operative turned healer and scientist. He was such a big man—six foot five, 230 pounds—that he filled the scope's field of view and made it hard for the shooter not to take him out instead of the intended target. Before the first shot, the shooter had canvassed his face, looked into the deep green eyes and compassed the lines of his face and the arrow-straight part in his short, graying hair, and knew she could have taken him out in another split second, but her employer had other plans for him.

  The dossier they had given her on Stone tracked him through every country in Southeast Asia and included fitness reports that described a friendly, congenial, wellmannered, ethical, and deeply moral man with an outstanding record of killing those who were enemies of his country.

  Stone's lengthy and highly classified record of his service both as an active-duty Marine and a government contractor afterward showed an unusual proficiency for killing, whether at close range with bare hands, knife, garrote, or at the farthest distances as one of the best snipers ever to graduate Camp Pendleton.

  Then one day, he filed a request to train as his unit's medical officer. After Stone's request was approved, he became a gifted healer who could staunch a bleeding wound with one hand and kill an attacker with the other. Killing became preventive medicine.

  The dossier contained extensive psychological evaluations indicating that Stone still had no moral issues with killing in the service of his country or his own self defense, but that he had grown weary of dealing with his postbattle regrets of killing other humans. And that he was

  afraid that he'd stop having those regrets and begin to enjoy the process.

  The shooter remembered a time when she had had to struggle with the personal nature of reaching out and touching her targets, seeing their faces and regretting the deaths as a necessity of war. But that regret ended with her own wounds. Now, killing brought her profound joy. Other soldiers killed to live, but she lived to kill.

  "Bang," the shooter whispered faintly as the crosshairs of the Leupold scope tracked Stone and the dead lawyer as they rolled to the ground.

  Then she heard the reports of a small-caliber weapon, a handgun from the sounds. She played the Leupold around the cemetery and quickly spotted a man with a shaved head firing in her general direction.

  "Good-bye, motherfucker," the shooter said as she steadied her breathing and caressed the trigger like the lover it had become.

  CHAPTER 7

  It was too damned cold to be Thailand or Vietnam, but in the next split second, my body reacted with the old combat reflexes my brain had developed there and in a variety of other warm, humid places where I was officially not supposed to be. Slugs thumped into graves around me as I gave Vanessa a great bear hug and rolled with her into a pale protective penumbra in the lee of a polished marble monument.

  Slugs tracked us as I rolled, peppering my face with the sharp, stinging shrapnel of frozen earth. When the timbre of the slugs changed key and chewed at the soft stone of the marble monument, I knew we were safe, if only for a moment. I paused then to think, to plot a path of escape, or barring that, better shelter. I didn't want to die in a cemetery, although it did suggest a certain ironic propriety.

  Then, a second firearm weighed in from my left flank with a higher, shorter pitch. I looked over and watched Rex shooting from the safety of Mama's headstone. His return fire silenced our unknown assailant. In the brief lull, people yelled into cell phones for help. An instant later rapid semiautomatic weapons fire from somewhere beyond the magnolia plowed the earth around Rex into potting soil, shredded the green canvas canopy, and ricocheted off the heavy steel of the backhoe. There was an instant of silence, the distant snick and clatter of a magazine being ejected, a fresh one inserted, followed by a volley coming as fast as our assailant could pull the trigger.

  An instant later, the shots ceased. I focused my thoughts and stilled my ragged breath into the calm, steady rhythms that had served my survival so well in the past. I looked over at Rex. He gave me a thumbs-up and made a questioning nod toward Vanessa.

  I wiped at the tissue that covered my face, then examined her closely. As the medical specialist for small, agile detachments of highly mobile combat teams, I had seen wounds like hers before and had never seen anyone survive. Regardless, I laid her gently on the cold earth, ignored the hideous wound, and searched all the usual locations for some signs of a pulse.

  Finding none, I pulled back the lid on the intact eye and found the pupil wide, flat, and totally unresponsive even when I raked a fingernail firmly across her forehead. So dilated was the pupil that I had to close my eyes to remember the deep wisteria that had once made her gaze so compelling for me. I looked over at Rex and shook my head. From somewhere beyond the magnolia and, to my ears, farther down Lakeside Drive toward town came the high-pitched whine of an electrical starter, then the growl of a powerful motorcycle engine. It idled for only an instant, then accelerated swiftly into the distance.

  CHAPTER 8

  As the sirens regained the upper hand over the receding motorcycle noise, Rex made his way over to me in quick, erratic lunges, using the headstones and monuments for cover in a practiced manner far too accomplished to be self-taught. One more mystery. As he crouched beside me, he tucked a palm-sized, nine-millimeter automatic into an ankle holster.

  "Catch you later." He looked about with a quick, precise scan as the sirens grew louder. "Can't hang around." He gave me an enigmatic smile. "All those warrants, you know."

  Then he was gone, all swift, fluid moves and secure, confident steps. I was even more convinced than before that I would not want him as an adversary.

  With the immediate threat certainly gone, the great survival gate in my mind imploded beneath a flood tide of dark, biting grief. As I looked down at Vanessa—not really her, but at the deceptively dead sack of organic remains of what once had been her—I searched for a thought to tag this feeling with, a dust-to-dust sentiment or maybe something about remembering people as they had lived and not as they had died. But where I had remembered Psalms and sorrow and guilt with Mama, Nietzsche came to me now. Words I had not remembered since college filled my head and with the same dark emotional entourage that had accompanied my postadolescent Herman Hesse Steppenwoff phase. "Many die too late, and a few die too soon.... Die at the right time! ... Die at the right time—thus teaches Zarathustra."

  I shook my head, trying to shed the words. But it was all too clear to me Vanessa had not died at the right time, and that made me angry. I held my hand close to my face and looked intently at the bits of gray matter clinging there. Fractions of a second before, the tissue had held Vanessa's mind. I had devoted my life to figuring out how this biological jelly mysteriously orchestrated itself into the phenomenon of consciousness, how it defined who we were and how it gave us the unique human consciousness of being conscious, our awareness of being aware of being aware.

  I sat back on my haunches, transfixed by tissue that had once sustained genius and goodness, a sense of humor and o
ne of outrage. Now the shards of Vanessa's mind were just sticky dying bits of organic dust-to-be thanks to the simple transfer of kinetic energy from a few grams of lead.

  "Where are you?" I tried to imagine where her thoughts had gone.

  Sirens pulled me back into the cold, bitter day as first one, then a second squad car came flying into the cemetery showering gravel over the nearby graves. A big, white, boxy ambulance followed a few seconds behind. The driver's-side door of an Itta Bena PD squad car opened, and a moment later a defensive-tackle-sized black man in a police uniform climbed out. He reached deliberately into the car and pulled from it a large black cowboy hat, which he carefully placed on his head. Only then did he look slowly around the cemetery and pull a large automatic pistol from its holster and hold it along his thigh, index finger resting ready outside the trigger guard. Shouts echoed through the cemetery. Everyone pointed toward me.

  The cemetery grew silent again as the giant cop looked at me. His face was as broad and expressive as a cast-iron skillet as he took in my embrace of Vanessa. Something like disapproval rippled beneath his gaze, then turned to horror as he took in Vanessa's bloody, gaping wound.

  I saw recognition make its way across his face. Despair, then anger, and finally sadness played across his face in cinematically swift flashes as he recognized Vanessa. During all this, the ambulance attendants stayed close to their vehicle, looking to the giant cop for directions. Finally, he holstered the automatic and made his way slowly toward me. The paramedics came running behind; the contents of their kits rattled in the stillness. I thought to tell them they could take their time, but my words found no voice.

  CHAPTER 9

  Once across the Roebuck Lake bridge at the east end of Itta Bena, the motorcyclist settled into a breakneck pace that would have been suicide for a less experienced rider, especially when the blacktop ran out southeast of Runnymede and fed into a wide, rutted lane of still-frozen gravel, sand, and mud. She wore a black helmet and was androgynously clad entirely in the woodland camouflage favored by local deer hunters. With her rifle slung crosswise over her back she looked pretty much like most any other hunter that time of the year.

  The warmth glowed in her belly. Relaxed. Satisfied. At peace. The tingles of the orgasmic release crackled about her skin and warmed her thighs and groin where she hugged the saddle. She liked killing when it was quick and cold, but loved it like this morning, when she could expel every bit of anger and frustration from her body with just the right shot. Head shots were the best.

  Behind the helmet's visor, her face was a smooth postcoital mask that did not change as she blew quickly past groups of black people, walking along the road in twos and threes. She gave no thought to them or the groups of old black men with old cynical eyes sitting on the steps of cheap mobile homes, which had replaced the gray, weathered wood shacks in which they had grown up. Their old eyes had watched the world change from one of poverty, official segregation, and legal inequality to one of poverty, de facto segregation, and de facto inequality. This was progress as good as they expected in this life.

  The unpaved road cut through a winter Delta sameness as flat and featureless as an empty table. The motorcyclist glanced frequently in the rearview mirrors. Ragged tatters of bolls left behind by mechanical pickers clung to the sepia-black skeletons of last year's cotton crop and raced past her on both sides. In every direction, the fields gave way only to rows of winter-bare trees bordering water and marshy areas too wet to farm. The land was flat as a still pond, owing to the Yazoo and Tallahatchie rivers, the Big Sunflower and the Little Sunflower and the Yalobusha and a score of other tributaries of the Mississippi, which had meandered across the Delta for thousands of years, leaving behind countless oxbow lakes like Roebuck and depositing layer after layer of rich, black soil that still made for the best cotton growing in the world. The Delta's fetidly omnipresent moist smells were absent on this day, frozen to sleep by the winter cold.

  There were unseen and mostly unimagined hills beyond the cinched-down horizon. That much she knew: southeast of her at Yazoo City and east at Carroll County. But here, a lid of haze squatted atop the land, creating an artificially close horizon cutting off visions of what might exist a few miles beyond. The grinding flat sameness threw a blanket of myopia over Delta culture. Geography became destiny as the flat topographic conformity imposed its two-dimensional will on the people, rolling their ambitions as flat and thin as cheap grits.

  Some found the Delta inspirational in its adversity, especially those who had found their way to the hills and beyond.

  In moments, she had left behind the last of the mobile homes and pedestrians, then began to slow as she strained to discern the overgrown dirt ruts leading down to the lake where she had left her truck. She downshifted as the road made a gentle arc toward the gray-green canopies of the cypress trees she knew grew only submerged in the silty waters of the old Yazoo River oxbow.

  She found the frozen mud ruts easily enough, but less than twenty yards off the main road, the first complication of the day arose. Calmly, she rolled to a stop, stretched her left leg, and killed the engine. Options ran through her head as she took in the rusting Chevy Monte Carlo with a missing rear bumper and cardboard taped over one rear passenger-side window. The fabric of the landau roof had almost finished peeling off; a coat hanger emerged from a broken antenna. The loud, clear tones of a black gospel station reverberated from the car's radio. Her older, tan Ford 150 pickup truck sat less than ten feet away.

  She dismounted, rested the bike on its kickstand, and made her way down the path on foot, unslinging the M25 sniper rifle as she walked. The gospel music masked her steps as she made her way down a steep slope ending at the edge of the brown, still water where a stooped, gray-haired black woman stood patiently holding on to a long bamboo fishing pole, which had been patched with gray duct tape. In the water, a large red-and-white float bobbed with the faint movement of the water. Nearby, two small children, warmly bundled into roughly the same shape as two tan hush puppies, played with some sort of yellow, blue, and red plastic toy. Grandma and her daughter's kids, the motorcyclist assumed.

  Nailed high on a tree right next to the grandmother, a brilliant white sign with bright red letters warned of pesticide runoff from the adjacent cotton fields. The sign prohibited commercial fishing and cautioned individuals not to eat more than two meals per month of carp, gar, catfish longer than twenty-two inches, and no buffalo fish at all.

  The cyclist thought about this neutrally as she raised the M25 and squeezed off two quick rounds, neatly taking out the two mobile targets first. Grandma dropped her fishing pole and turned, her face wide with fear and confusion. Then the cyclist shot her too. The slug went neatly through the round O of the grandmother's surprised lips and showered fragments of her cervical vertebrae into the water. The woman staggered and fell backward into the lake.

  With quick, precise moves, the cyclist went back to her bike and drove it down to where the slope began. Then she dismounted and with the aid of a little throttle, ran the bike down the slope and into the water. The bike slowed, sieved, sank. The cyclist nodded, satisfied when the last inch of handlebar sank beneath the brown water

  Next, she took the time to administer confirmation rounds to each of her three targets, then hurled the rifle high over the lake. She felt a moment of regret as the rifle and its Leupold sight rotored lazily out over the brown water.

  The M25 had been tuned by one of the world's best gunsmiths, a man who had been her spotter when they'd picked off Taliban ragheads in the Shah-e-Kot Valley in eastern Afghanistan. She remembered sitting up in a notch of rocks on the border and dropping those crazy fucks who thought they were safe once they hit the Pakistan side of things. She'd been loosely connected with the Army's 187th Rakkasan Brigade in March of 2002, part of the fierce combat of Operation Anaconda. She had a contest going with one of the Canadians and dropped her eighty-third confirmed kill at 2,420 meters, a record for a combat sniper until one of
the Canadians dropped his target at 2,430 meters.

  He got a medal and the next day she got an Al-Qaeda round right through her forehead and out the top of her scalp. Her medical discharge had left her in a deep depression until the medicine and the new opportunities arrived at her door unexpectedly just nine months ago. The thought brought a faint smile to her face. Unconsciously she touched the bottom of the nearly invisible scar the plastic surgeons had left and followed it to her hairline. There had been problems until she got the experimental drugs.

  She cleared her mind and made her way calmly over to the pickup, opened the tailgate, pulled out the motorcycle ramp, and hurled it into the lake. Without watching it sink, she turned back and pulled a red, plastic, one-gallon gasoline container from the truck bed and set it on the ground about twenty feet from the truck. Blond hair cascaded onto her shoulders as she pulled off the crash helmet. She set it upside down on the ground, then stripped off all her outer clothes, leaving her in jeans, a Pendleton shirt, and the surgical gloves she always wore when she was working. She stuffed the helmet with her camouflage overalls.

  Next, the motorcyclist unlaced her boots, purchased at the same Goodwill store in Jackson as the outerwear, and set them next to the helmet. Standing there now in thick ragg wool socks, she emptied the gasoline on the boots and helmet and set the container down next to them. Finally, she stripped off the rubber gloves, set them on top of the pile of camouflage, and set the entire ensemble afire with a wooden kitchen match.

  Checking off the items in her head, she nodded to herself, then quickly made her way to the pickup's cab, exchanged her ragg socks for a fresh pair of white athletic socks, and slipped on her well-worn Nike cross-trainers. She scratched another wooden match on the steering column and waited while it flared off the sulfur and phosphorus before using it to light a Marlboro. She drew deeply on the cigarette as the fire established itself. When she was certain the fire had eaten any latent prints, she put the pickup in gear and drove away. She watched the smoke recede in her rearview mirror as she drove along, dragging furiously on the Marlboro. Finally, she tossed the lit butt out the window, reached for her cell phone, and hit the number one speed dial.