The Nature of the Beast

by GM Ford

  Craig was working out a line of fire, trying to visualize precisely where the shooter must have set up. He pointed down the mountain.

  “How would one get from down there to up here,” he asked.

  “One wouldn’t,” the sheriff said. “You wanna get up here this time of year, you get a snow mobile and you come around from the other side,” the sheriff said. “This road winds up one side and down the other. Comes out on the Flying Crow Ranch over in Diamond Valley. Better part of twenty miles by county road. That’s Stratton County over there. Whoever it was came in from over there. Twice, I’m told.”

  “How about from this side?” Craig wanted to know.

  “Just the gate we passed on our way up here,” Letzo said. “Kids used to paint the school’s initials up here every spring.” His expression spoke of nostalgia. “Few years back one of the Cummings kids took a fall and broke his back in a couple places. City attorneys say we’ve got to keep it locked up. Limit our liability.”

  “Which means what?” Craig asked. “Assuming this person isn’t a local, or doesn’t have a local on the payroll, the only other alternative I can think of is that the shooter managed to plan the whole thing using nothing but maps.”

  “Or he’d been up here more than we know. Maybe when there was no snow on the ground.”

  Craig nodded in agreement. “I’ll bet you’re right,” he said. “He’d been planning this for quite a while. He was ready.”

  “Quite a feat,” Letzo said.

  “He’s very well trained. Very flexible,” Craig said. “Lots of up front preparation. Uses whatever’s at hand. Makes the best of it.”

  “Hell of a shot too,” the sheriff offered. “We had deer hunters could shoot like that wouldn’t be a live deer in the whole damn state.”

  By way of a response, Craig pulled a small black device from his coat pocket. He sighted through the digital range finder, made several corrections and then pushed a button. He turned his back toward the sun, shading the screen with his body.

  “Just under seven hundred and ten yards,” he announced.

  The sheriff’s low whistle was sincere.

  “Good location choice,” Craig added. “Prevailing wind in your face. No cross drift.” He nodded in admiration. “Escape route that comes down in another jurisdiction…outside any conceivable law enforcement perimeter.” He pocketed the range finder and brought the binoculars to his eyes. “Rather professionally planned and executed,” he conceded. “But overly theatrical.”

  “Why theatrical?” The sheriff asked, sweeping his gaze over the town below.

  “You want to kill a man,” Craig began “…why do it in the middle of Main Street at high noon?” He waved a gloved hand. “He keeps a fairly regular schedule. His wife’s in the hospital. He’s living alone. Surely there must have been some more surreptitious way to kill the man than dragging a sniper’s rifle way up here for the purpose of shooting the man in front of half the town.”

  A sudden gust of wind swirled the snow, filling the air with ice pellets. They waited for the snow to settle.

  “That’s a darn good question, now isn’t it,” the sheriff said.

  __

  “He’s toying with us,” Jackson Craig said as he stepped forward and dropped the Chicago Tribune article on Bobby Duggan’s desk.

  Bobby studied the page for several minutes, ran a hand over his hair and finally looked up at Jackson Craig. “Why would he want to do that?” he asked.

  “Publicity?”

  “In a roundabout way, I suppose,” Craig said.

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “He wanted to make certain Special Agent Wald’s death would make the newspapers, rather than how shall we say being ‘swept under the rug’, so to speak.”

  “In the manner of Harry Joyce’s death.”

  Craig nodded. “What bothers me most is that it’s all just so damned inconsistent.” He pointed down at Bobby’s desk. “On one hand it’s like we’re dealing with a school child here.” Bobby looked annoyed. “All the little X’s through the faces. Drawn with a ruler, like he’s in middle school.”

  “And on the other?”

  “On the other hand…” Craig took in a deep breath. “On the other hand, the Wyoming scene was extremely well-planned and executed. Nothing in the least to suggest the work of an amateur. From the set-up position, your average deer hunter could barely have hit the damn building. The shooter’s been professionally trained.” His tone left little room for argument.

  Bobby looked dubious. “How can you be certain of something like that?”

  “Either that or he just got lucky… and believe me, a shot like that has too many variables for all of them to fall into place at the same instant. Tactics, Marksmanship and Fieldcraft,” he continued. “Those are the forces a sniper has to master. What the shooter schools call ‘the tripod.’ This was seven hundred yards, downhill, sun behind, wind directly in the shooters face, with a cold barrel.” He shrugged and then added, “All of it worked out to perfection.” He caught and held Bobby’s gaze. “One shot. One kill. Professional work.”

  “I’m sending you back to Europe,” he said.

  “I’m not going.” Craig said flatly. “I’ve got to find this guy. I’ve got to find Gil and the family before he does. This Harry Joyce thing has to be put to rest once and for all.”

  “There is absolutely no way…” Bobby insisted.

  “I’m the only person remotely qualified for the job, Bobby. Anybody else… you’d have to get them security clearance and then bring them up to speed. We don’t have that kind of time here. Gil and the family don’t have that kind of time.”

  Bobby looked pained. “My sainted mother, bless her soul, always used guilt in precisely that manner,” he commented with a razor thin smile.

  Jackson Craig said nothing.

  “Okay,” Bobby said with a theatrical sigh. “I’ll take the heat on this one. Go find Gilbert.” He reached for the phone. “I’ll be assigning you a partner for the duration of the investigation.”

  Craig was shaking his head before the sentence was completed. “I’ve gotten used to working alone,” he said.

  “Not this time,” Bobby said.

  “I’m sure he’s a hell of an agent but…”

  Duggan cut him off. “She,” he corrected. Before Craig could protest again, he asked, “When are you seeing your father?”

  “Tomorrow,” Jackson Craig said.

  Bobby wished him good luck and brought the phone to his ear.

  12

  It was hot. He cursed himself again for not thinking about the difference in climates. The pimply girl at the Fed Ex store had commented on how hot and bothered he looked as she handed over the square cardboard box containing the disassembled Ingram MAC10.

  “You’re not from around here are ya?” she said grinning at the winter jacket wedged under his arm. His mind’s eye imagined puncturing her throat. The sudden sense of relief when the tip passes through the skin and goes into free fall. He felt his cheek quiver from the strain of pretending as he lifted the box from the counter and walked out into the California sunshine.

  He heaved an inward sigh as he sauntered up the sidewalk, coat under one arm, package under the other. See! See! Overnighting the weapon to himself had worked. It gave him a momentary boost of confidence that something he’d dreamed up on short notice had worked so seamlessly. He could do this. Just like before. And then it would be over. Whatever over was.

  Once back in the rental Subaru, he checked the surrounding area twice. Waited for a trio of elderly Mexican women to disappear around the corner and then checked the area again. Satisfied the streets were deserted, he assembled and loaded the weapon in just under a minute. He snapped a round into the chamber, wrapped the automatic in his jacket and set it carefully on the passenger seat. He consulted the GPS in the dashboard. Then nervously checked the time. They weren’t meeting until eleven o’clock and the screen said the site was only t
hree miles away. He could do it. He could. By the numbers now.

  __

  Jackson Craig stood on the flagstone walkway and looked around. Secret Service surveillance had forsaken the obligatory black SUV in favor of a blue Chrysler convertible, parked along the curb, two houses to the west on the opposite side of the street. A woman wearing a blue flowered dress leaned against the side of the car studying a brochure of some sort. “Very Southern California,” Craig mused.

  Turning away from the street, he took a moment to compose himself. Charlie Craig hadn’t been a bad father. He wasn’t abusive or anything like that. He made an okay living. Pleasant enough guy to be around unless he was hammered, which tended to make him all sentimental and touchy-feely.

  For a long time, Jackson Craig had blamed himself for the rift. He’d assumed that their relationship was due to some failing on his part. That he wasn’t interesting enough, or smart enough or athletic enough to hold his father’s attention and was therefore to be held responsible for the lack of intimacy. As time and circumstance repeatedly disproved that notion, Jackson Craig long ago decided to let it go at that.

  A familiar voice rescued him from further ruminations.

  “Jackie?” It was a question as much as a greeting.

  She’d come alone. He liked her husband Dale but pleasantries would have been a chore and Craig was grateful not to be forced to bother.

  Jackson stepped into Karen’s open arms and lifted her from the sidewalk.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said when he set her down.

  “How’s the family?” he inquired.

  “Ronnie’s off to U.C.L.A. in the fall,” she said like the proud mother of two boys.

  “One down, one to go,” he joked.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do when they’re both gone,” she admitted. She shrugged, “Have to take up a hobby or something.”

  “Scrapbooking perhaps,” he suggested.

  She smiled and bopped him on the arm. “Just the ticket,” she said.

  They walked through the front doors arm in arm, crossing a tile floor into a tropical motif more akin to a Mazatlan resort than an assisted living facility, all greens and browns and yellows, lots of palms and succulents, drawing the eye here and there, anywhere but to the specter of death lounging in the corner.

  The other half of the company security team was pretending to sweep the floor in a little seating alcove across from Charlie Craig’s room.

  Still locked together, Jackson and Karen stepped inside the room.

  Blood pounded in his ears; his breathing became shallow. He walked to the edge of the hospital bed and looked down at his father. He’d steeled himself for this moment but somehow was still not ready for the sight of his father, shriveled, shrunken, spotted like a fawn with mouth full of chiseled yellow teeth, the tubes and the bags and the army of machines blinking like an arcade.

  Karen rescued him. “His mind just stopped working,” she said sadly, as if feeling the need to justify her decision.

  “What do his doctors say?”

  “They don’t come right out and say it, but between the lines… they think we should pull the plug, not leave him like this.” Her eyes swept his face like searchlights.

  Jackson Craig nodded.

  “You’ll know what’s right. I know you will,” Karen said.

  He looked his sister in the eye. “I hope so,” he said.

  “He’s running out of money,” she said. Anticipating her brother’s outrage, she explained, “He spent it. The house, the insurance, Medicare, Social Security.” She rolled her eyes. “Whatever, “ she said. “Either way, it’s just about gone. Another couple of months and it’s on us.”

  Jackson Craig rested a hand in the middle of her back and looked around, as if for the first time. Again she read his mind. “Six grand and change a month,” she said.

  He whistled. “Quite a bite.”

  She nodded gravely. “No kidding,” she said.

  __

  The Craig guy. The Craig guy. Just like the newspaper. There he was.

  The man with the jacket under his arm stepped behind a prickly bush with big red flowers and waited for the final act to play out, but Craig and his sister wouldn’t act their parts. They just stood off to one side of the front door, arm in arm, gabbing at one another for the longest time. Yadda yadda yadda yadda.

  Patience. Patience. Gotta get close. Allow for velocity reduction from the silencer. Gotta wait for them to come out into the street. Take them there. Wait, wait. Forty yards. Gotta be forty yards.

  The front door of the place wavered in the harsh glare and then began to open in an erratic series of fits and starts. With one arm Craig pulled his sister deeper into their alcove, allowing an elderly couple to shoulder their way out of the building and totter toward a green and white taxi waiting in the circular driveway.

  Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait.

  And then finally Craig and the sister woman were coming. Still yakking. Yaka yaka. They stopped, walked out onto the grass and talked some more.

  He reached inside the rolled up coat, snapped off the safety and slipped his finger inside the trigger guard. Sweat rolled in streams down over his forehead, threatening to get in his eyes. He wiped it away with his free hand and started hustling up the sidewalk. Forty yards. Forty yards.

  Half a block away when the fat bitch in the flowered dress stepped out of the parked car. She held one hand behind her back as she circled the front of the convertible and strolled directly into his path. “Excuse me, sir,” she said.

  He didn’t hesitate. He shot her twice. The dull sound of the report was swallowed by the silencer. He stepped over her twitching body and then angled sharply across the street. Craig and his sister were touchy touchy on the lawn. Soon it would be over. Forty yards. Forty yards.

  13

  Gilbert was perfecting his delivery, aiming for a spot somewhere between the insipid sincerity of Mr. Rogers and the Nerd Boy zeal of Bill Nye the Science Guy, trying to be up-beat and informative while doing everything he could to keep his building anxiety from leaking out onto his children.

  “It’s a natural artesian spring.” He said the words as if he’d been waiting all his life to show them a genuine artesian spring. “Feel how cool the floor is.”

  “It’s a freakin cave,” Becky said.

  “A thousand feet below us this big underground stream runs into a stone wall. It forces itself upward through the rock until it makes its own hard rock tube. That’s how you get a spring way up here instead of down on the valley floor where it would normally run. Makes the cabin totally self-contained. Everything we need is…”

  “This is sooooo bogus,” Becky whined. She stood in the middle of the small dug-out, making certain no part of what Gilbert like to call her ‘alienation suit’ touched any part of this black pit of death her father had dragged her a half mile uphill to see.

  “The Piaute Indians found it ,” Gilbert said. “They used it for water and to store supplies for their annual migration south in the Fall.”

  “Let’s migrate the hell...”

  “Language,” Gilbert snapped.

  “Heck…I was going to say ‘heck,’ “Becky claimed.

  As happened so often these days, Gilbert found himself being challenged by his daughter. Her eyes dared him to claim she meant something else. Gilbert didn’t rise to the bait. He kept an enthusiastic smile plastered on his face and picked up the large blue duffle bag. “Let’s get these wildlife cameras up,” Gilbert said.

  “Take a picture of a grizzly bear,” Michael shouted.

  “This is sooooooo dumb,” Becky said.

  14

  Without warning, the lawn sprouted sprinklers. A hissing mist began to soak their shoes, forcing them to tiptoe back up onto the flagstone walkway, where they brushed at the tiny beads of the water, taking their time, as if neither of them wanted to say goodbye.

  “Where’d you park,” Jackson Craig asked finally.


  Karen straightened up, swiveled her head and then pointed east. “Coupla blocks that way. Over on Eldorado.”

  He stepped around her and took her by the arm. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll walk you back to your car.”

  Karen shook her head. “You don’t have to…” she began.

  Suddenly, the unmistakable slap of shoes on pavement rose above the sound of the hissing water. Craig stiffened. Movement in his peripheral vision pulled his attention toward the nearest intersection, where a young woman was dodging cars and sprinting in their direction, crossing the four way stop at full gallop, reaching for something as she ran. Pointing. Shouting something he couldn’t make out. Instinctively, Jackson Craig reached for his weapon as the woman hurdled a curbside flower bed and rocketed in their direction.

  He moved quickly, stepping between Karen and the sprinting woman, pushing his sister to the ground with one hand while bringing his weapon to bear with the other. As he thumbed the safety off, her voice tore the air like a chainsaw.

  “Craaaaaaiiiig,” the woman running screamed. Pointing again.

  Craig snapped a look in that direction. Just in time to see what appeared to be a homeless guy drop something thick and red onto the sidewalk. In time to see the wicked looking Ingram dangling from the end of his arm.

  His blood began to eddy in his veins as he threw himself to the ground, covering his sister’s body with his own. Karen began to scream. The running woman got off a shot in the gunman’s direction before diving for the lawn in the half second before the Ingram filled the air with buzzing chunks of molten metal.

  The young woman did a barrel-roll across the carefully tended lawn, finding shelter behind a raised flower bed. Hardly a second passed before she propped herself into the prone position and began firing at the guy with the MAC10. Craig raised his own automatic just as a burst from the Ingram exploded the plate glass front of the Pasadena Oaks Care Center. He ducked his head, covering his cowering sister as it rained glass. Bells began to ring. Glass continued to cascade. In and around the building, three separate alarms were sounding simultaneously. Shouts of fear and panic could be heard above the clanging mechanical melee. Beneath him, Karen was shaking uncontrollably. “Easy. Easy,” he whispered.