The client was a real prince. Former aid to a right wing senator from Louisiana, this guy had been in charge of dirty tricks throughout the Eighties for numerous white supremacist candidates in the south. In 1990, the client had gone freelance, and some believe a little insane, setting up new computer networks for the Klan and various extremist militias. The client had become known simply as Big Foot among FBI branch offices across the south and the Midwest, partially due to his heavy-handed techniques of persuasion, and partially due to his physical size. Reportedly, the man was six feet seven inches tall and nearly three hundred pounds. He wore a size 62 long jacket and consumed enough food to feed a small platoon each and every day.
Joe zipped the portfolio closed and got out of the car. He went around back to the trunk, dug in his pocket, found his rubber surgical gloves and slipped them on. Then he opened the trunk and wrestled out another leather case, a satchel about the size of a bread box. Joe slammed the trunk and carried both items across the scarred pavement to a battered metal door embedded in the rampart. The door was marked STEVENS MACHINERY. The vibrations of trucks and buses groaning overhead made the ground rumble, and the occasional swish of a passing vehicle filled the air, but Joe ignored it all, going about his business like a milk man delivering the morning cream.
There was an incinerator to the right of the door, a hulking portal of soot-covered iron and riveted metal scorched with age and pollution. Joe went over to it, lifted the door and threw in the portfolio.
The sparks pulsed white for a moment.
Joe let the hatch bang shut, then turned and went over to the service entrance of Stevens Machinery. He entered a dank stairwell and trudged slowly up an iron staircase to the uppermost floor. When he opened the roof door, the wind and daylight slapped him in the face. The rooftop was a wasted platform of pebble-tar and heating chimneys about the size of a football field, nestled in a canyon of taller buildings. To the west rose the spires of the NBC building and the Hyatt Regency; to the east, Lake Michigan. In the distance to the north lay the vast summits of Marina Towers, the Standard Oil building, Prudential plaza, and the Helmut Jahn nightmares beyond. The wind roared in Joe’s face as he strode across the tar, satchel gripped tightly, the plumes of steam swirling around his pant legs. He went over to the edge of the roof and hunkered down between two trunks of pipe.
He opened the satchel.
The Galil Sniping Rifle was folded and nestled in plastic blister wrap. One of the best Israeli distance weapons, the Galil was semiautomatic, light weight, and impossible for forensic people to identify. It chambered 7.62-millimeter loads, and featured a twenty-round magazine. The Galil could score a head shot at 300 meters, half body hits at distances exceeding 600 meters. Joe rarely used high-powered iron to deliver a client; he preferred the cleaner intimacy of the handgun. Nevertheless, if faced with an Oswald, he usually went with the Galil or the West German Mauser. Nobody tooled rifles like the Germans, and Joe could usually purchase the kits at decent prices through the mail, through back-page ads in Soldier of Fortune, Trigger and Trail, and Shooting Times.
Joe assembled the rifle quickly, pausing only once to glance at his watch. It was 12:27, and the target would be emerging from the complex door any minute now. Joe snapped the butt stock and bipod in place. He attached the scope and tightened the lug screws, then propped the pod legs on the parapet. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small plastic case containing a pair of rubber-baffled earplugs. The Galil had a moderately loud report, and Joe couldn’t afford to lose any more of his hearing. He worked a plug into each ear. The plugs were designed for rock musicians, designed to filter out sudden jumps in decibels but still allow the music in. This enabled Joe to stay alert, stay in touch with ambient sounds and still protect his eardrums.
Joe peered into the scope, carefully aligning the sights with the door. The door was about two hundred yards away, three stories down. Fairly straight forward hit zone. Joe took a deep breath. Then he began the penultimate part of the process, the secret part, the part that his employers would never know.
He began working up the rage.
Staring through his scope at that inanimate door, caressing the trigger pad, Joe thought about the target’s legacy of death, the slain civil rights workers in the early seventies, the execution-style murders of the two ACLU reps in Little Rock, the hate mongering in Colorado that had led to the killing of an infamous left wing radio personality, and soon the outrage and the certainty were flowing through Joe like smooth electric current, the reptile-brain hot wire, the praying mantis poise, and Joe felt the stillness settling over him again, that hyper-meditative stillness only a sharpshooter knows. The cobra-calm just before the delicate squeeze.
He had learned this technique in Southeast Asia.
Southeast Asia....
It was after his dad had died a miserable slow death from stomach cancer, after all the grief and pent up emotion had turned Joe surly and mean, after all the fights with his mother had made him the bane of the Catholic nuns at Saint Vinnies, after all of this, Joe had discovered the Marine recruiting office on Halsted Street. A way out of the pain. The year was 1963, and America was still drunk on Camelot, and Indochina was about to erupt, and Kennedy was sending more and more uniformed “advisors” over there to keep things contained. Joe was only sixteen when he heard the call, and unbeknown to the drill instructors at the San Diego recruiting depot, Joe turned out to be a prodigy. Made the M21’V sniping gun do things that weren’t even in the brochure. Got the highest scores in the history of basic training, and got sent overseas immediately. Got stationed in the Ia Drang Valley, and got classified. Participated in secret ops that officially didn’t exist, and unofficially killed more targets than the bubonic plague.
Joe came to think of long-range terminations as the light socket. Always began with that weird calm before the storm, the centered calm, and then the adrenalin rush, and then the kill, always at a distance, glimpsed through the crosshairs of the scope, the target’s head turning to red mist. It was an ugly orgasm, a jolt of electricity. The light socket. And it was addictive.
He rotated back home in ‘65, back to a life that was not only mean but meaningless. Hardwired, stone cold, the echoes of Ia Drang bouncing around his brain, he yearned for the respect of the special ops guys, he yearned for meaning, and most of all, he yearned to put his finger in that light socket again. He started circulating word around the old neighborhood, he was available for dangerous duty, vigilante stuff, revenge jobs for innocent victims of organized crime, and it wasn’t long before somebody asked him to step over the line.
Put his finger back in the socket.
Now, in the distance, a faint noise.
All at once Joe glanced up and saw the big lumpy man known to field operatives as Big Foot emerging from the North Loop Atrium wearing a polyester sport coat and stepping into the crosshairs of Joe Flood’s scope.
Joe fired three times.
Through the scope Joe saw the fat man stagger, his head blooming red carnations. Direct hits. Quick and clean. The fat man crumbled to the ground, his bodyguards scrambling for cover. Joe kept his eye socket pressed to the cup for another moment, confirming the kill. In the green telescopic field, the man named Big Foot sprawled in the doorway, twitching, blocking open the door, his enormous work boots splayed at odd angles, a puddle of scarlet spoor spreading under his skull. Joe sighed and let his muscles relax.
Then something unexpected happened.
It only encompassed the better part of an instant, but it struck Joe between the eyes, the image fusing white hot, etching into his retinas: An overweight, racist man dying slowly on a stoop of bloody concrete, waiting for Death to come. A strange feeling turning in the pit of Joe’s stomach. What was it? What the hell was it?
Empathy?
“That’s it!” Joe’s voice yipped angrily under the swirling gusts. In the distance, the siren wail was starting up. The faint terror calls of the gathering crowd, and the Doppler w
hine of emergency units. Rising to feet, his bowels sizzling, gut twisting, Joe scooped up the Galil, folded the bipod, and stuffed it back into the case. He carried the satchel over to one of the massive exhaust vents and threw it into the furnace. Then he made his way back into the building, down the steps and across the loading dock to the Volvo.
He had some major thinking to do and not a lot of time in which to do it.
Chapter Two
There was an aging Rockola against the artificial bricks of Paddy’s Irish. It was playing a crackly old Grand Funk Railroad tune. Something about an American band. Joe could barely hear it. He was slumped in a stool near the front, belly pressed against the hardwood bar, his head full of narcotic cotton. He had five Tummy Nummers under his belt, and over the last ten minutes, everything in the pub had eased back a few notches, as though the whole room had become gauzy and slow, like some soft-core porno film shot through Vaseline.
Joe swallowed up the last of his chalky cocktail and gazed around the cool dim haze, taking a silent roll call. All the regulars were there. All the raincoats and denim jackets and Supercuts hairstyles. All the nameless working stiffs from up and down the north shore, sitting at torn naugahyde booths, drinking away another workday. Joe felt no connection to these people, none at all. Joe was a space alien from another world. He was from Krypton, the doomed planet, and it felt as though his entire homeland were about to supernova the fuck on out of here.
“Don’t tell me you want another one of those horrible fucking things.”
Joe looked up. The bartender named Debbie was standing over him. An acne-scarred blonde girl with a bad mall cut, miles of pink lacquered fingernails, and an imitation angora sweater from some discount place like The Fashion Bug or Hit-or-Miss. Debbie was Joe’s lifeline. The only barkeep along the Lake Michigan coastline who never asked Joe any personal questions, never gave him any shit, never got nosey. Better than that, she was the only one in Chicago who was willing to regularly stock Joe’s preferred poison: The inimitable Tummy Nummer. One part Bailey’s to three parts Maalox.
“Set it up, sweetheart,” Joe said, wiping the milky scum from his lips. His mouth felt as though it was getting fat and uncoordinated. The inferno in his stomach had cooled to a low simmer.
“I don’t know how you drink those things,” Debbie cracked as she reached below the stainless steel under-counter and uprooted the economy size bottle of antacid that she kept especially for Joe. She mixed him another colon cooler and traded it with the empty. “Gonna be shitting white for weeks,” she smirked and lit a Marlboro Light.
“It’s an acquired taste,” Joe murmured, staring at the water rings on the battered counter.
“You okay, Sport?”
“Yeah.”
The juke fell silent, and the hushed murmurs of other patrons seemed to feed Joe’s pain.
Debbie took a voluptuous drag off her cigarette. “Having a bad day?”
“Not at all, everything’s fine and dandy, couldn’t be better—why do you ask?”
“Because you look like somebody pissed on your birthday cake.”
“You could say that,” Joe murmured, rubbing his eyes. His bowels were sizzling. In about three seconds he was going to have to hit the head again for another round of diarrhea. The pain was a living thing inside him now, a tapeworm moving around his guts, chewing him up. His illness seemed to be thriving on his pain like flames on gasoline. Or perhaps there was more to it now; perhaps it was some greater malaise. The bane of every good hit man: The crisis of conscience. Joe couldn’t help hearing the dry cackle of his late mother Kathryn, her Old Testament litanies echoing in his midbrain: He who lives by the sword...
“Promise me something,” Debbie said all of a sudden.
“What?”
“Promise me you’re not going to sit there and bore me with some fucking hard luck story.” Debbie’s voice was pure Southside, the hard r of Blue Island and Cicero and Evergreen Park. Tough, coarse, no nonsense. “Because if you’re gonna do that, I want to go get a cot and lay it on the floor so I can catch up on my beauty rest.”
Joe smiled half-heartedly. “Don’t worry I’m saving it all for my memoirs.”
Debbie smoked her cigarette and gave him a sidelong glance. “The thing is, you don’t seem like that kind of guy to me,” she ventured. “The hard luck type, I mean you know what I’m saying? It doesn’t fit you.”
“Is that a fact?” Joe studied the counter. He could see his reflection in the water rings and droplets on the counter. The cubist distortion of his ruddy handsome face belying his agony. He could see his exaggerated brow furrowing, his fleshy jowls, his receding hair, and his eyes. His eyes had a glazed, feverish quality, like dirty diamonds, and all at once Joe seemed to lock onto something in his own reflection, a vision of himself he had never perceived before. He saw something primitive in his own face, feral, like that of a rabid dog. Volatile and desperate. And for one brief, woozy moment, Joe fantasized about putting himself out of his misery. He was so good at killing; it would be a piece of cake. Maybe a quick hollow-point to the temple. Maybe he’d open his veins in a hot tub at Sybaris. Or perhaps a midnight snack, maybe a Halcion sandwich, something along those lines. But as quickly as the thought crossed his mind, it dissolved in a fog of Catholic guilt, the infernal flames of hell, the commandments scorched into an ancient shroud in his imagination: The deadly sin of suicide.
The old lessons of his childhood always died hard in his mind. Transgressions leading down the road to hell. Suicide was one of the biggies. Whenever young Joey had thought of people who commit suicide, he had envisioned the surreal world of Sunday school hell. The heat of a lighted match multiplied a million times. Eternal pain, the kind of pain that lasts as long as it takes a single crow, pecking once a year at the stone of a mountaintop, to wear that entire mountain down to nothing. In other words, the kind of pain that could ruin your whole day.
Suicide....
Right then, all at once, a switch went off in Joe’s brain. An invisible guillotine switch. And all the angst and confusion and guilt seemed to coalesce inside him, a cubic puzzle clicking into place, forming an idea. An idea so simple, so diabolically logical, that he didn’t understand why he hadn’t thought of it the moment he had learned of his leukemia. It was perfect. It was pure. It was the only way out of this hell, this eternal Catholic hell.
The ideal solution.
He who lives by the sword...
“What’s wrong?” Debbie was eyeing Joe.
“Gotta go,” Joe said, and then gulped the remaining jiggers of his drink.
“Where’s the fire?”
Joe was already off his stool, buttoning his jacket. “It’s something I should have figured out this morning—if I wasn’t such a dope.”
“Secret to the universe?” Debbie picked a fleck of tobacco from her lips.
“Yeah, you could say that...” Joe dug out his wallet, fished for a couple of bills and laid them on the counter. His ears were ringing. He had to get out of there before anyone noticed his eyes welling up. “Secret to my universe anyway,” he added, putting his wallet back and winking at the bartender. “Arrivederci, Kiddo.”
He headed for the door.
“You take care of that stomach!” Debbie called after him, but Joe had already vanished into the neon blur of Clark Street. The bartender shrugged, and snubbed out her cigarette. Then she picked up a rag and started wiping down the watermarks on the counter where Joe had been sitting. She noticed his bills lying in the water rings. She paused. She picked them up, turned them over, studied them some more.
Two soggy hundred-dollar bills.
The sound of the dial tone was hideous, an inscrutable church bell clanging in his ear.
He punched in the area code, and the shrill electronic tones synchronized with his throbbing headache. Seven—zero—eight. It was a Forest Park prefix, a number Joe rarely called, especially at this time of night. Six—eight—seven. Joe knew the number by memory, which was t
he only way to safely keep it on file; and even in his current condition, with his trembling, sweat-slick fingers, and waves of vertigo, and stomach-acids churning, he still remembered it as though he had just called it yesterday. Five—seven—six—seven.
Joe held his breath as the connection clicked in his ear. It was hard to believe that Ma Bell was responsible for so many underworld milestones. The simple flicker of a twelve-volt signal through a polyethylene fiber optic tube, and kingdoms fell, regimes toppled and people died.
Joe had decided to make this call from the moment he had come up with his brilliant idea down at Paddy’s, but deciding to do it and doing it were two infinitely different things. It had taken an hour of pacing, and sucking down nearly a half a bottle of Gaviscon, and staring at the medicine cabinet mirror for endless minutes, before Joe was able to work up the nerve; and still, with his sweaty-hot grip on the handset, it was indescribably excruciating just listening to the electronics.
The second ringtone buzzed.
Joe swallowed hard, wetting his lips, preparing his words as carefully as he would a valedictorian speech. He had most of it worked out in his mind. He had anticipated the questions that the other party might ask, the twists and turns his conversation might take. He had worked out all the responses, and he planned to make it short and sweet—before he lost his nerve altogether.
The third ring was cut short by someone picking up the receiver. “Hello?” The voice sounded mildly annoyed at being called this late in the evening.
“Tommy?” Joe was gripping the phone hard enough to crack the plastic.
“Yeah, this is Tom Andrews. Who’s calling, please?”
“Tom, this is ‘X’.”
“‘X’?”
“Yeah, ‘X’... like in box two-two-four.”
There was an awkward silence as the lawyer put the pieces together. Box two-two-four referred to a safe deposit drop in an Uptown bank that Joe used to relay messages and security deposits on various hits. After a moment, the voice said, “Yeah, right, um... can you hold on a second? Need to grab another phone.”
The Sleep Police Page 26