“Dropping a dime? Becoming an informant?”
She rolled her eyes: Do we need to talk like white people? “How else he get out in two nights. Wasn’t like he had a million bucks lying around for bail.”
Her logic made sense to Shafer. But if the Drug Enforcement Administration had arrested Shakir and released him as an informant, the DEA agents would have kept a closer eye on him, at least for a while. He would have had to have paperwork, too, a cooperation agreement and a lawyer to represent him. Miami Vice notwithstanding, these deals weren’t done on a nod-and-handshake basis.
Could the DEA have tried to make the agreement disappear once it realized its informant had carried out the most serious attack since September 11? Possibly. But a cover-up would be insane. Months had passed. The case would have moved ahead since the arrest. There would be court filings. Sealed, but not under the DEA’s control, and impossible to erase. Anyway, Shakir’s lawyer would have come forward, to the FBI, or the media, or both.
“You think he got angry at the way the DEA was treating him?” Shafer said.
“And did that?” She shook her head.
The other possibility, that someone had targeted Shakir in a fake sting, seemed even more unlikely. “I don’t get it.” Shafer’s head was starting to hurt again, as if thinking too hard had damaged the fracture.
“I’m telling the truth.” The real reason she’d agreed to meet with him. She couldn’t figure out what had happened to Shakir either, and the mystery was eating at her.
“I believe you.” He did, too. Mainly because Jeanelle Pitts had no reason to make up this story.
“Listen, I have to go.” Seller’s remorse, now that she’d told him.
“If I have questions—”
“Call me.” She stood, chugged off.
When the door had closed behind Jeanelle, Rachel came around, sat beside him.
“You look fine to me,” she said, mocking him lightly. “Didn’t know that was your thing.”
“Variety is the spice of life.” In fact, Shafer had slept with only one other woman in his life, his junior-year college girlfriend. Almost five decades now he’d stayed true to Rachel. He’d never felt he was missing out.
“Like you’d know.” She squeezed his hand. “Now what?”
“Now we’re staying in Dallas.”
“That story she told didn’t make any sense, Ellis.”
“Exactly. Why it matters.” He turned to look at her, and a white flash of pure uncut pain exploded in the back of his head. The brain might not have nerves, but the skull sure did. Shafer reached for his own coffee cup, held it tightly in both hands, hoping Rachel wouldn’t notice it shaking.
“Ellis.” She gently took the cup from his hands, put it on the table.
“Vicodin.” The bottle was in her purse.
She tapped out a pill, then one more. He choked them down with a slurp of coffee. She looked at him with the cool anger of a parent at a misbehaving child.
“Is this worth dying for, Ellis?”
The wrong question. “Why don’t you ask those folks at the game?”
16
ST. PETERS, MISSOURI
Finding the right hide had always been Tom Miller’s biggest weakness as a sniper.
No more.
The bed on the Ram 1500 extended almost six and a half feet behind the cab. Miller was five foot seven in sneakers. Plenty of room for him back there, even with his Remington beside him.
At an AutoZone off I-90 in Spokane, he bought a tonneau, a fancy name for a pickup-bed cover. He chose one made of thick but breathable black mesh. It unspooled in seconds from a rod attached behind the cab. Extended, it hid the Ram’s bed and everything in it. Three hundred sixty-five dollars plus tax. Miller paid cash. Already covering his tracks.
Back home, Miller drilled a quarter-sized hole through the truck’s tailgate, left of the centerline, four inches above the bed. Then another hole above the first, this one the size of a half-dollar. The bottom hole for the muzzle of his rifle. The top for the scope.
Covering the holes proved trickier. Miller tried plastic first. He cut a tarp in strips, four inches long, two inches wide, and taped on the strips. But even from twenty feet away, they looked obvious and weird.
“Bumper stickers,” Allie said. “Two, one on top of the other. I peel them off when you’re back there and ready to shoot. Put them back on when you’re done.”
At the Walmart in Pullman, Miller bought a dozen bumper stickers: American flags, DON’T TREAD ON ME, LIVE FREE OR DIE, THE CLOSER YOU GET . . . THE SLOWER I DRIVE!
He slapped a HORN BROKE: WATCH FOR FINGER tag on the Ram’s bumper and a couple UNITED STATES OF AWESOME tags above them. “Going full redneck.”
“Full what?”
“Redneck.” He was surprised to see she still looked puzzled. “You know, a country boy. What’s thirty feet long and has sixty teeth? A bus full of rednecks.”
“Hah. Redneck.” She rolled the word around her mouth. “I didn’t hear.” She leaned over, put her lips to his before he could say anything. Her kiss was sweet and light. He stopped wondering why a woman who’d grown up in Texas didn’t know what a redneck was.
Miller spent the afternoon in the hills east of his trailer, making sure he had the rifle zeroed. His first two shots barely grazed the tree where he’d tacked the targets. He feared his concussions might have ruined his shooting. He forced himself to breathe deep, relax.
As the sun moved behind him, his training from Fort Benning came back. Adjusting his head to keep his cheek flush with the rifle, making sure his view through the scope aligned with the muzzle. You don’t have to know how to spell parallax long as you know how to make sure it doesn’t happen to you, one of his instructors liked to say.
Pulling the bolt back smoothly, popping it home firmly but not too fast. Haste makes an empty chamber. Squeezing the trigger on the pause between breaths. The sudden crack as the pin struck home. The gun kicking into his shoulder, the scope staying perfectly on target even with the recoil.
He remembered now. Sniping was beautiful. He’d been good at it, too. Lousy at finding cover, but not many guys could outshoot him. After four hours of fine-tuning, he put three straight shots within one inch at a hundred yards. He was ready.
But as he packed up the Remington, the world spun. He closed his eyes, sagged against a tree. He’d pushed himself too hard. The concussions had made him more fragile than he’d realized. His earplugs didn’t fully protect him from the thunderclaps that came with each shot. The pain was centered behind his eyes. He focused on the pine bark scratching his back. Anything to remind him that he existed as more than this agony.
After a while, the vise opened, and he stumbled home.
He found Allie vacuuming the trailer, a rumble that did his headache no favors.
“You look sick, Tom.” She brought him to their bed, pulled the curtains, turned out the lights. He must have slept, because when he opened his eyes he was alone.
“Allie?” He felt better, though still tired.
She came in, sat beside him. “Maybe you shouldn’t do this.”
He forced himself up. No way would he let her think he couldn’t protect her. “I shot great. Just wore myself out at the end.”
She nodded. He couldn’t help feeling that he’d passed.
“Good. Because I know where to start.”
She tilted her phone to him. Miller found himself looking at the web page for the Abundant Life megachurch, an evangelical congregation in St. Peters, Missouri, thirty miles west of downtown St. Louis. Join our twelve thousand members in joyful prayer this Sunday!
“Twelve thousand?” Miller said.
Allie scrolled through the website: pages titled Tales of Redemption, Sermons & Song, Abundant Life for Children, and Your Abundant Life! Video, too. A thirty-person
choir belted out So much to thank Him for . . . as colored floodlights swung overhead. The place looked nice enough. Mostly white folk, but black and brown, too. Miller had never been the churchy type. The website made him wish he were.
Allie opened another screen, pointed at a handsome fiftyish white man, salt-and-pepper hair, striking blue eyes. Our Pastor: Luke Hurley. “His hair was black when I knew him. Otherwise, he hasn’t changed much. The Fountain of Youth, sex with thirteen-year-olds.”
Hurley looked nice enough, too. “You’re sure?”
“That smile, it’s a lie. He told me the pain would help me, Jesus suffered, and I needed to suffer, too.” Her voice rose. For the first time since she’d come back, she was losing control. “Want to hear what he did? Would that turn you on? It turned him on. He’d tell me what he was about to do—”
“Allie.” He put a hand on her back. She laughed, half hysterical.
“Even then I knew that’s not how the Bible worked.”
She found another photo of Hurley, standing at a table with a group of teenage girls, finger raised as he made a point. Pastor Luke drops by the Girls-Only Bible Study Class to talk about what we can learn from Mary Magdalene!
Allie magnified the photo. “Look at him.”
Miller picked up a gleam in the minister’s eyes, a curl to his lips that could have been a smirk.
Maybe.
Miller wouldn’t be the first sniper to use a vehicle as a rolling nest. In 2002, a two-man team had terrorized Washington for a month from a sedan with a hole drilled into its trunk. Lee Boyd Malvo and John Allen Muhammad—together known as the Beltway Sniper since authorities didn’t know at the time that two people were involved—gunned down ten men and women before police caught them. They had killed seven other people in other shootings earlier in the year, though those were only connected after their arrests in the Beltway case. Their run was especially noteworthy because they used an old Chevrolet Caprice with heavily tinted windows and New Jersey plates. It should have attracted attention. At one point, a police officer even stopped it near a shooting. But he let it go without a search.
Miller figured he and Allie had edges over Malvo and Muhammad. The Ram, clean and new, should draw less attention than the Caprice. And Malvo and Muhammad weren’t trained as snipers. They had used a Bushmaster, a civilian version of the Army’s M16 assault rifle, instead of a more accurate single-shot, bolt-action rifle like Miller’s Remington. As a result, they had needed to shoot from close range, less than a hundred yards. The fact that no one had noticed them at that short distance testified to the panic that sniper attacks produced.
Miller planned to shoot from a quarter mile away or more. Even trained soldiers couldn’t spot a sniper from that distance, not without binoculars or specialized radar to track shots. By the time anyone figured out what had happened, the Ram would be gone.
But Miller and Allie would be up against one big hurdle the Beltway snipers hadn’t faced. Since 2002, cameras had become ubiquitous in public spaces. Smartphones had video and zoom lenses. Big intersections had cameras to catch drivers who ran red lights. Bridges and tunnels used automated toll collection systems that tracked license plates. License plate readers were standard equipment on police vehicles, too. Simple ballistics would tell the police where Miller had been when he’d fired. They would start there and work outward, combing all the surveillance footage they could find.
A pickup truck with out-of-state plates and a covered cargo bed would stand out in the footage. Its mere presence wouldn’t be proof. Or even enough evidence for a bulletin. Not by itself. But when the cops ran the plates and found out the truck was registered to a former Army sniper, they’d want to talk to Miller. If the truck popped near a second shooting, they’d want to do more than talk.
Of course, Miller and Allie could always lift the plates from a Ram 1500 in Missouri. But that move came with its own risks. They had to assume the police response would increase as the shootings continued. Eventually, the cops might start locking down whole neighborhoods, running random roadblocks on highways. Stolen plates would grab their attention faster than anything else.
So Miller and Allie would have to try to avoid cameras, especially on the local roads close to the church. The good news was, they could get to an arterial highway quickly after shooting Hurley. Not just any arterial either, but Interstate 70, a crucial east–west highway. In the St. Louis area, I-70 carried thousands of cars and trucks every hour. Washington State plates wouldn’t stand out on it.
The other bit of good news was, they didn’t have to rush. They would have time to scout the best path once they reached St. Louis.
Allie wanted to leave the next morning. Miller told her he needed a dry run, taking shots from inside the cargo bed. He lay in the pickup bed as she pulled the tonneau over his head. She piloted the Ram to a railroad crossing a couple miles northeast. The nearest houses were nearly a mile away and hidden behind low hills.
When the Ram stopped, Miller flipped on a battery-operated lantern and pulled out the rifle and scope. He heard the driver’s door open. Allie pulled off the bumper stickers, allowing daylight into the covered bed, as Miller finished mounting the scope. He slid the muzzle of the Remington through the smaller hole until the rim of the scope was flush with the hole above. With the holes blocked again, Miller dimmed the lantern so it wouldn’t distract him.
He peered through the eyepiece of the scope. He had a clear view through it, plenty of light for targeting. But he couldn’t swing the rifle more than a couple degrees left or right. He would need to widen the muzzle hole to give himself more flexibility. No matter. The bumper sticker would still easily cover it.
For now, though, he focused on a red-and-yellow railroad sign mounted on a steel post a quarter mile down the tracks. He realized another problem he hadn’t anticipated. Being inside the bed made adjusting for the wind more difficult. In the Army, he worked with a spotter who carried an automated wind gauge and could give him the correct scope adjustments. Miller could have bought a gauge for Allie. But using it would distract her before the shot. He wanted her to focus on the area around the truck, make sure no one was watching them.
Even without the gauge, good snipers learned to read the wind, the biggest variable on longer shots. How did it feel? Was it gusty, swirling, broken by trees along the path the shot would take? Unfortunately, the walls of the truck bed insulated Miller from the touch of the wind. Instead, he had to depend on the scope, another trick he’d learned at Fort Benning. Anything but the lightest breeze would visibly move leaves and grasses. Today, they were rustling slowly but steadily, the wind coming from the west, left to right, through his scope. Miller put the breeze at five miles an hour, enough to push the shot seven or eight inches to the right at this distance. He didn’t bother to dial in an adjustment but instead simply ticked the muzzle left as far as it would go. He would settle for hitting the sign at all on this first shot.
They’d bought short-range children’s walkie-talkies at Walmart. Miller hit the push-to-talk button on his.
“Clear?”
“Clear.”
Miller clapped in his earplugs, chambered a round, counted to five, watched to see if the wind would pick up. It didn’t. He took a breath, exhaled slowly. And squeezed the trigger.
The explosion echoed off the metal walls of the truck bed. As if by magic, the sign quivered, and a hole appeared, an inch low, maybe five inches right of center. Not perfect, but most likely a kill shot against a live target. And once Miller opened the muzzle hole, he’d have more flexibility.
It worked. He could shoot from inside here. He felt weirdly proud of himself. One added bonus: If he needed to take a second shot, he wouldn’t need to worry about finding the spent shell. It would be stuck in here.
He heard Allie, faintly, through the walkie-talkie. He ignored her. She had no way of seeing the hole in the sign. He pulled back t
he Remington’s muzzle, telling her they were done. After a moment, the holes darkened as she reapplied the bumper stickers. Fifteen seconds later, the truck started up.
Back at the trailer, she unrolled the tonneau, and he slipped out and hugged her.
“You hit it, Tom?”
He nodded.
“It was loud.”
“Can’t help that.” The .308 rounds produced more than 160 decibels at the muzzle. Suppressors, also known as silencers, were a pleasant fantasy. Buying one took months and attracted the close attention of the Feds.
“It works,” she said.
“It works.”
At dawn the next morning, they packed up. Allie made peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and filled a thermos with coffee. The day was unseasonably warm, birds twittering, the sun glowing over the hills to the east. Miller felt almost festive. His headache was gone. His uncertainty, too. If Allie said Hurley had hurt her, he’d hurt her.
“I’ll miss it here,” Allie said.
“For real?” Miller had never thought of her as sentimental.
“It’s where we met.”
Miller locked up the trailer, vaulted over the tailgate into the Ram’s bed. Allie unrolled the tonneau, blotting out the sky. He wanted to get used to being in back for long stretches, just in case.
The truck bounced over the dirt roads for a while, stopped, turned left on 195, accelerated. Now the ride was smoother but colder. No surprise. This bed was unheated, meant for cargo, not people. Miller crossed his hands over his chest and let himself shiver. If the Army taught anything, it was how to handle casual discomfort.
A sliver of light leaked through the bumper stickers. Otherwise, the space was coffin-black. He wondered what would happen next. Maybe they’d wind up someplace like Nicaragua and live on the cheap. Hang out, teach English. For once, being brown would help him.
But probably not. Probably the police and FBI would catch them sooner or later. Yet as Miller lay in the dark, the pavement rushing by underneath him, he found the idea of being captured didn’t bother him. Not that he’d let the cops take him alive. No, he’d save them the trouble of a verdict, pronounce his own guilt with a single round.
The Deceivers Page 21