I Kill Rich People: New Edition Released 11/27/14

by Mike Bogin

  Perry could picture him in the distance, through the heat rising off the runways. Kicking, twisting, throwing punches at imaginary enemies for half an hour at a time, non-stop, in ninety degree heat.

  “Man, we would have been laughing, sir, but we wouldn’t laugh about him, not even when he was a mile away,” Perry said. “He always was keeping a Barrett 107 one reach away, so we all knew he was a sniper, but this one, he don’t talk or smoke or eat with nobody else. He’s all by hisself. Wouldn’t go to the mess even, not until the lines were down to nothing, and then he finished in a minute and went back to that big-assed rifle. Sir, you can imagine what shit we’d be putting on a strange character like that, but I’m telling you—nobody said nothing. Whole company of Belching Buzzards right back from country, and nobody messed with that dude. One time Top makes the whole place jump for some green bar, except for that one dude. Top just let it slide. That man won the Big Dick Contest without even trying. Never talked to nobody, not one time, and then he says he wants to use my address.

  I wanted no part of the man. I guess I was thinking that was bullshit, but it was kinda cool, too, since this dude was all ninja. But then it didn’t feel right, you know?”

  Perry halted as a shiver caused him to clench his upper body.

  “I can totally remember how I was thinking I was going to say no, but then he…I didn’t want to say no to this dude, you know? This guy was a sincere trigger-puller. His head was still out in country even when he wasn’t. I was even thinking about giving him some other address, like I’d never see him again. But then I gave him this place.” Perry’s voice trailed off.

  Gonzalez squared himself, elbows off the picnic table. “First, I need the name. Name.”

  “Spencer, sir. Sir, Belen, my fiancée, she has all this mail that nobody ever came for. She won’t throw anything away or it’s like a soldier is never coming home.”

  “Rank and unit?”

  “Sir?”

  “What was Spencer’s rank?”

  “Three and three, sir. MSG. Same as me before I got to second hat. Can’t say what unit, sir.”

  Gonzalez reviewed all the information with First Sergeant Perry. “Spencer, Master Sergeant. When were you cycling through Bagram?”

  “May ’07, sir. Already getting hotter than hell.”

  “Spencer, MSG, Bagram, May ’07. Let’s go see if Belen has any of his mail.”

  * * * * *

  On E. 144th, Tremaine had to squeeze past a guy who was even heavier than he was to get inside the building. The man was sitting on his heels, looking at a splintered mess and considering how to go about fixing the broken front door. Tremaine climbed two dark flights (the hall fixtures were seven feet up, but every bulb had been removed). The apartment door had been obliterated. The unoccupied apartment had been stripped clean. Even its refrigerator and range were gone. Someone had taken the toilet and the bathroom sink cabinet, leaving behind a dripping toilet valve. A puddle spread across the vinyl floor. Tremaine looked over the spaces. Only the front windows allowed in light and these were inoperable. Not much better than

  a crack house.

  Owen relayed, via Major Gonzalez, for Tremaine to ask about soldiers, to see if the name “Spencer” rang any bells. Tremaine went back down to the ground floor to look over the mailboxes. No.1 was Olviera. No. 2, Colon. No. 3 scratched out…just the R was readable. Ends with an R.

  “You a cop?” the fat guy asked him. “Somebody ought to pay for the door.”

  “Fucked it up pretty good, looks like,” Tremaine commented. The raid had left a gap big enough for a basketball to fit between the door and the frame.

  The man turned out to be Olviera. His family owned the tri-plex. Olviera had a chunk of four–by-four lumber and had begun using a chisel to shape the inside edge to fit inside the broken frame. He had already sistered 2” x 6” pieces to both sides of the door itself and had them through-bolted in place. Ugly, but serviceable.

  Tremaine took hold of the block and steadied it in place, then reached down to Olviera’s pencil and marked off the depth on his side. Olviera said nothing but accepted the help.

  Olviera found a dowel rod and watched Tremaine tap in nails to the center spot then press in to mark where to drill into the wall.

  “Pretty good,” Olviera responded, admiring Tremaine’s contribution. When the block was glued in place and toed-in with three-inch finish nails, Olviera offered to get Tremaine something to drink. He came back with tamarind soda.

  “You know tamarindo?”

  Tremaine shook his head no as he took a deep swig.

  “What you think?”

  Tremaine looked at the bottle, thought about it, and took another long gulp. “It’s sour, but it’s sweet, too. And I like that it’s spicy.”

  “It’s all natural. Frutas from tamarind, the sugar cane, and little chilies. There is the spice.” After a beat, Olviera offered, “You looking for the upstairs guy?”

  Tremaine tipped back the bottle and finished the last, then pulled the pencil from behind his ear and placed it against the door, looking to Olviera for the height measurement where Olviera wanted to set the new deadbolt.

  “He left end of May. Didn’t give no notice, just went. I gotta rent it again, but it needs appliances now and a new sink. He didn’t steal nothing. It was the guy in number Two. I know it, but I can’t prove it.

  As he kneeled down next to Tremaine, he continued: “He was here from February. I don’t know why a white man wants to live around here, but he paid on time, never no trouble.” Olviera kept talking while Tremaine took a collapsible knife from his pocket and cut through the plastic holding the deadbolt. The instructions were for two door thicknesses. He eyed the edge and guessed one-and-three-quarters but picked up Olviera’s tape to make sure.

  One-and-three-quarters.

  “You got any tape?”

  Olviera fumbled through his tool bucket and came up with a near empty roll of duct tape, which he handed over. Tremaine centered the paper template over the spot and taped it in place. Tremaine stepped back and looked at the height, thinking it could come down some. Olviera backed up beside Tremaine and looked, too, then pointed to bring it lower.

  Tremaine braced his shoe and both hands against the door and put his weight behind it so Olviera could drill it out, turning his face to the side as sawdust flew. A little boy, about the same age as Owen’s Casey, came out into the hallway and looked on with silent big-eyed curiosity. He must have been Olviera’s, because Olviera shooed him back inside the lower apartment.

  “Quiet. No music. No television I ever heard. He read lots of books. Serious books. I saw one was Plato or about Plato. He was a Greek philosopher. Not the guy. Plato, I mean.”

  Once they had the bore completed and mortised, Olviera pre-drilled before screwing the deadbolt into place. It lined up with plenty of throw to secure into the doorframe. Olviera handed the key over to Tremaine to test the movement. It turned easily. Olviera could take it from there; all he had left was to extend the mortise into the frame and chisel out for the strike plate.

  He went inside his apartment and came back with an envelope. He also retrieved Tremaine’s jacket from the newel post and handed it over to Tremaine along with the electricity bill sent to Jonathan Spencer. Both men shook hands.

  “Did he ride a motorcycle?” Tremaine asked. That was his only question about Jonathan Spencer. But Olviera had seen no motorcycle and no car, either. Spencer had come and gone, even at night, on foot.

  “Crazy,” Olviera commented. “A white man walking here at night alone.”

  * * * * *

  For Spencer to have been an E8 in 2007, he would have to have been at least twenty-eight years old then, the major explained. Gonzalez had never heard of any soldier getting to MSG before ten years of service, so he’d h
ave had to be at least twenty-eight in ’07 if he had entered the service straight out of high school. On the other end, it was conceivable that he may have been as old as fifty-five in ’07, taking his DOB potentially as far back as 1951. He could now be any age between thirty-three and sixty.

  Owen called in motor vehicle records on Jonathan Spencer. One-hundred-sixteen in the state. Ninety born between 1951 and 1979. They were coming into Lower Manhattan by the time he had all the files downloaded to his smart phone, and then it was impossible to read them on a three-inch screen in a moving car. Owen tried to focus on racial information in order to delete the black and Asian drivers and bring the possibilities down to more manageable numbers. He ended up deleting the entire file.

  Inside The Bunker, in quick order, Owen and Tremaine reviewed the listings on twenty-two-inch monitors, dropped the black drivers, the drivers with handicapped status, and drivers with heights and weights that didn’t fit. That still left forty-one possible matches.

  * * * * *

  Al took the name and ran it through data-retrieval in the Bureau’s systems. He added John, Jon, and Jonathan Spencers from across the country. DMV records indicated more than nineteen thousand names. A Google search showed three million results. Bigfoot had better be a New Yorker. Al called in help from his data team at the Bureau to cull motor vehicle records. The numbers had to be narrowed.

  “I’ll do a work-up on every possible connection and send ID photos if you think Olviera will cooperate to ID them and give us his current description,” Al told Tremaine.

  “His front door is destroyed,” Tremaine responded. “If we can pony up $200 for a new door, that would help. Get me that and I’ll go see him with a laptop.”

  It took Tremaine almost an hour to get back to E 144th, carrying with him the donated funds, and cold bottles of tamarind soda, too.

  “That is to help you out with a new door,” he told Olviera. The old door was working, but even with the black paint Olviera had put on the fitted block and the two-by-sixes, there was no way to make it look good.

  “This is from the guys working the investigation. We wanted to help out,” Tremaine said.

  “Why?” Olviera wasn’t used to be handed money for nothing.

  “Because I told them we need your help.” Tremaine explained that he had a laptop in the car with lots of photos of men named Jonathan Spencer. He hoped that Olviera would be willing to look them over and point out the Jonathan Spencer from the apartment upstairs if his photo came up. Olviera agreed to do it as long as his family thought that Tremaine was there about the door. Tremaine came back into the building with the laptop and the sweating bottles of cold tamarindo, using his pocket knife to open both.

  The blinds were left down inside Olviera’s apartment to keep the air cool. Olviera had replaced the incandescent bulbs with fluorescents, which also helped. A foot-tall crucifix hung on the wall of the front room above a glass-faced cabinet holding plates and cups. The ceilings were twelve feet tall, with ornate crown moldings that were cracked and gaping in the corners from settling. A sofa and love seat were to the left, both covered in clear plastic, along with an older projection-screen television. Every shelf held framed pictures of family. At the far right, beyond the small dining table, a strikingly beautiful dark-haired woman and her equally beautiful teenage daughter were talking at the stove. Tremaine stared at them before Olviera directed him to a chair.

  “We’re going to look at some new doors,” Olviera told the women.

  His four-year-old appeared around a door, raced in their direction, and was headed for his father’s lap before Olviera and Tremaine had taken seats on the abutting corners of the sofa and love seat.

  “I want to look!”

  “La miel, por favor, mira nuestro hijo.”

  The little guy’s face fell. His feet flopped, dragging along the rug, as he slowly made his way to his mother and sister. The girl came out and yanked her brother into the kitchen, then accepted two empty glasses and two napkins from her mother and brought these out to her father and his guest. She would not make eye contact with Tremaine.

  Olviera moved through the photos quickly as the faces changed. Even for Tremaine, some of the faces on the laptop screen were a blur, yet Olviera seemed sure of himself. “In my country I have an uncle who had a photo studio. I would help him sometimes, picking the best photos for making up albums. Weddings, quinceañeras, any big parties,” Olviera explained, speaking softly as he continued clicking through.

  They were nearly through the entire set when Olviera stopped scrolling. When he tapped his thick forefinger at the screen, Tremaine knew there was no mistake. Tremaine took an extra moment to finish the sour-sweet drink, and then thanked Olviera warmly before leaving. Olviera never asked what Jonathan Spencer might have done or why it was so important that he be identified. He seemed to have no curiosity at all.

  * * * * *

  Tremaine held off calling it in until he was two blocks away from Olviera’s neighborhood. Pulling off Willis Avenue well before the bridge back to Harlem and the whole of Manhattan, he was able to read off the data and wait until Owen had it up on his screen to verify. Jonathan Spencer, DOB 12/25/77. Cooperstown. Owen looked at the birth date, thinking that the shooter was just two years older than himself. Spencer had been entering the army while Owen was going into his senior year in high school.

  Owen dialed twice, but Al didn’t answer.

  “Come on!” Owen shouted. Then he remembered. The old guy just lost him mother.

  “Oh crap! Cullen!” he scolded himself. He had to get the car to pick up Callie and get to the lawyer’s office.

  * * * * *

  21:30 hours at the base in Afghanistan. Gonzalez got lucky. 10:00 hours at Lewis-McChord in Washington State. His contact was the Unit Commander-Tactical Operations, 75th Ranger Regiment, 2nd Rangers. He was an 04 now, a major. The Unit Commander had still been a captain during his last tour. The Unit Commander had been rotated seven weeks earlier, after ten straight months of sleep-and-weep along the Tribal Line that separated Afghanistan from Pakistan. Gonzalez had caught up with him during readiness assessments ahead of the next deployment.

  For a half hour, Gonzalez listened while an oak leaf officer took time to tell him about Master Sergeant Jonathan Spencer. He had an overloaded eighteen-hour duty sheet, but he willingly used that valuable time because this was Jonathan Spencer, no ordinary solider.

  MSJS—Master Sergeant Jonathan Spencer—was a triple threat. A “Tower of Power:” Spencer completed the Special Forces pipeline, Ranger School, and Airborne School.

  Major Gonzalez drew in his breath, instantly recognizing the meaning behind the ribbons and badges that Sergeant Spencer was entitled to wear. Sergeant Spencer was a bona fide badass. Only three out of a hundred army personnel ever get into any one of these elite corps. The army could count triple-threats on fingers and toes. There was no way to get those designations without earning every one.

  Gonzalez knew that NSA might have a name, but that was a world away from taking Spencer down.

  Always had that Barrett with him. Even in the rear. Did security without orders when he could have been sacked out. The Unit-Commander related how MSJS had spotted a rag ranger setting up to fire an RPG at their mess hall and lit him up. Before breakfast.

  Spencer didn’t like sixes. Six-man sniper teams were too slow. Taking a stationary position and coordinating recon wasn’t his thing. He lived for running with threes. Always moving, always TL, Team Leader.

  After one gnarly mission that got his spotter shot up, Spencer had gone off the reservation. He tracked down the Taliban fighters who did it. Followed them out to some remote mud hamlet and never asked which side of the border he was on. Spencer took out all six of them. Got inside, at speed, used his side arm first and then one of their AKs. Couldn’t use his M82 from distance,
not without alerting every beard-boy for miles. Took their radio set, pinged Kandahar Sat Comm, and fueled up on their food to get himself OK. After that he humped it a dozen miles over 3000 meter elevations to a secondary extraction point on the Afghan side. Even went back for the Barrett and lugged its forty pounds along with him.

  “I would have put him in for a silver, except it was MSJS, not a chest-puffer,” the Unit Commander explained. “He didn’t need medals to confirm who he was.”

  Every qualified sniper would have given his left nut to be in a three under MSJS. Multiple tours. The man possessed knowledge and instincts that were never taught at Harmony Church. Field methods to lower misfire counts that were killing fellow rangers; living inside the enemy’s head so he could pick up ambushes and even IEDs like he had set them up himself.

  “Sometimes it seemed like he was more one of them than one of us. No doubt about his loyalty, but even at Bagram, MSJS wouldn’t ever step into TGIF or any other American-feeling place to get a break. If the enemy didn’t switch it off, neither would he.”

  Spencer had a big-picture conception. He was a warrior. Not even clear that he thought we could win, but that probably never entered the picture. The guy was just different, the soldier everyone wanted to be except when it came to actually doing it. Nobody else could cut it. Food to this guy was strictly body-fuel. Sleeping was about charging his battery. The enemy? Spencer had wished he had their pedigree, that he had come from a line of warriors who had beaten back Alexander the Great, annihilated the forces of the British Empire, and shattered the Soviet Union.