I KILL RICH PEOPLE 2

by Mike Bogin

  “Vince, with this wet weather I have to tent the whole thing, protect the ceiling below it when I cut out the wet plywood, and then get it good and dry before I come back and recoat it. Won’t get adhesion if it isn’t dry.”

  “When you coming out?” Vince wanted to know.

  “No promises, I can try for this afternoon late or at least by noon tomorrow.”

  “No problem either way. None of the residents go out on the deck in the rain except to let their dogs go, and that is against the rules anyhow so they can’t bitch about anything. Thursday I’m off, but I’ll put you on the list.”

  “Thanks, sarge.”

  Spencer then made a second call, this time dialing 9-1-1.

  “Emergency services. What are you reporting?”

  “There’s some black dude with a pitbull dog that he just set loose on this guy. Can you hear that? He’s chewing his arm off! “

  “What is your location?”

  “Outside the restaurant. The Italian place. East 71st Avenue near Park.”

  “What is your name sir?”

  “Whoa. I’m just calling. I’m not getting involved. Oh man, he’s bitten an artery or something.”

  Spencer hung up the phone and removed the sim card and battery. 11:43. At 11:46, a patrol car screeched to a stop on the curb directly below the camera. Three minutes. Spencer watched the ambulance follow at 11:50.

  Quality information, but he wasn’t convinced. It wasn’t going to work, not by itself. The sort of people living at Park Avenue won’t march to anyone else’s tune. They couldn’t be given a choice. The city had to be on edge. They had to be afraid, really afraid, before he could make them march out the doors.

  Spencer noted the response intervals, then pulled up the events calendar file he had been building and massaging.

  “Something easy, flashy.” He needed an easy target first, something to set the tone. Put the city on edge. “Then everyone at Park will run straight out those brass and glass front doors.”

  He turned back to the index cards. He still had the contact points and addresses in a file; all the television and radio stations and newspapers where he had sent out “I Kill Rich People.” He had tried seventeen different phrases, but none of them got across what he needed to say. The Captain would know the right words, but he couldn’t come up with anything.

  “Crap!” he shouted. The Barrett had to speak for him now.

  *****

  Past 10 p.m., the techs were still working. Stephen, Dale, Kip, and Dilip had six primary events and eleven bracketed venues. It should have felt like an incredible accomplishment, but Owen was at the point of trying to ask a Ouija Board.

  “Still way too many targets,” he complained.

  “This will help,” Stephen offered. “I have the system set to an automatic function. It constantly scans through more than a quarter-million frames. The second it picks up Spencer, you and I get texted with the time, the camera footage, the location.”

  Owen nodded, too tired to argue. So many empty pizza boxes and soda cans were scattered around the place that it looked like a fraternity house. “Ok,” he told the techs. “Back here 7:45 tomorrow morning. Get some sleep.”

  He had a room at the Super 8 in North Bergen. Tired as he was, he couldn’t sleep. He wanted to get into the car and drive straight out to Long Island, but just showing up would be worse than drunk-dialing and he’d already done more than his share of that.

  “Go when the job is done,” he told himself. “Then drive out there and get your family.”

  At least he had Miller agreeing to put all of the SWAT team on the clock immediately when they had another sighting. That was something, but they still hadn’t even considered commercial venues: the Stock Exchange, the Goldman Sachs Tower, or even one of the high-end restaurants catering to the city’s elites.

  The task was fucking impossible. The whole thing. He might have stayed up all night, every night, forever, and still done no better than guesswork.

  Miller, with his ten thousand dollar prizes, was staying at the Mandarin Oriental at Columbus Circle. Whatever Miller was doing all day was unclear. They must have been paying him hourly, Owen griped to himself, because Miller was on vacation again.

  Miller came on like the leader, but where was he when everyone else was doing the heavy lifting? Owen was the one who waded through hours upon hours of looking at sidewalks through webcams. Too much information to wade through and not enough eyeballs.

  Forty thousand law enforcement officers in the city and five people were doing this thing, him and four nerds looking inside rich people’s bathrooms.

  God help us, he thought. We need more people.

  *****

  Vince’s part-time replacement looked like Lawrence Taylor, big as a house and still looking able to put the hurt on any quarterback. He wasn’t looking to make new friends, either.

  “Mister, my handicapped placard is for loading and unloading cars for residents,” he informed Spencer. “Period.”

  Spencer tried to break through, tried to find some common ground, but no-go.

  “You call me ‘Walter,’” the doorman instructed him. “You don’t need another name.”

  Spencer was forced to haul the tent all the way around the building, that along with the six heavy sandbags he needed to hold the tent in place. Down long interior halls to the rear service elevator and then back again in the reverse order up on the seventh floor. By the time he made it to the service elevator he was fighting to stifle back the searing pain shooting from his legs and his back.

  One step forward, two steps back.

  It was the first time he had humped a load in over a year, he realized. His Barrett and ammunition weighed about the same as the tent and sandbags: fifty-five pounds. Two hundred yards had him aching; he used to handle bigger loads over mountainsides.

  Sixteen months ago he made double-time across five kilometers carrying the Barrett and a full field pack holding ten days’ rations and water.

  As the service elevator opened on the 7th floor, the realization hit hard; he wasn’t a Tower of Power. That was something he used to be. All over.

  The legs were improving, but they would never be there again. Once a Ranger, always a Ranger? Nope.

  Before, when it was just about having the one kidney, he could prove to the Physical Evaluation Board comprised of officers in his United States Army that they were wrong. Now, it really was over. Nothing in the world was going to give him the tools, not now, not ever again.

  Now, it was about Captain Sam. And XMercy and Mouse.

  “Finish it,” he told himself over every trudging step back. “Finish.”

  At the seventh floor rooftop doors he set down the load, closed his eyes, holding them closed until his mind had cleared the pain. He wiped tears out of the corners of his eyes and lifted.

  “Get your head straight,” he reminded himself. Limitations are load-factors; you don’t whine, you calculate for them. Get right. Mission mode.

  Thirty minutes later he had the full-height green tent tied off on one side against the railings along the southeast corner of the rooftop; on the interior side, he knotted the sandbags to the stake lines then added additional bags inside the tent to keep it in place. The flap doors opened to the rooftop.

  Spencer opened the zipper window at the back of the tent and set his feet in firing position, then stretched his empty arms before bringing them back into firing position; the fat of his thumb fit just below his right cheekbone. The webcam was three feet above him and ten inches forward; he had the scene imprinted into his memory.

  He sighted the invisible weapon at the side door of Park Avenue then rotated his shoulders ten degrees right in a compact movement that required no change to foot position. His left forefinger pointed straight at the bras
s-and-glass front door. Again and again he lifted and sighted the imaginary weapon. BRASS. Shift to the front door. BRASS. Every shot inside a twenty-degree lateral motion, three degrees rise and fall.

  Satisfied, Spencer unzipped the tent, emerged, and hung a laminated sign on the side of the tent facing toward the building. It read: Maintenance in Progress. Thank You for Your Cooperation. We Deeply Apologize for any Inconvenience.

  *****

  Owen was still putting the pieces together. West Virginia made sense to him. Spencer was laying low, recovering, and avoiding trouble. But now that the trouble had come to him, he wasn’t returning to Yonkers to fit into the crowd. “He knows his identity is out. He has no more cover,” he said. “He’s back because there is nowhere to hide. He’s back to finish what he started.”

  Owen watched the techs with their fingers flying over keyboards. Stephen had the wall projection set up with a separate corner window flashing the micro-analysis on Spencer’s face and alternately scrolling through the array of cameras scanning for convergent data points.

  Miller had seen Spencer in action. He explained Spencer’s meticulous approach. “He will scout his target, pick his location, know his exit strategy; he did it in Afghanistan, he had done it in every other attack. Master Sergeant Jonathan Spencer is always thorough.

  “Your partner stepped right into the middle of Spencer’s preparations,” Miller told Owen. “We’re going to take him down that same way.”

  He looked up, addressing their foe: “Only this time nobody is underestimating you, Spencer. You never hear the shot that kills you.”

  “We’ve got a hit!” Stephen yelled from the bullpen. Dale immediately shifted the live camera feed onto the big screen while Kip and Dilip applied mapping overlays for physical location, public transportation, events and fixed targets.

  Spencer was up on live video, covering the long wall. Dilip boxed a street map into the corner showing his location, direction, and the camera icons around him.

  “He’s on Madison,” Stephen called. He looked like any other New Yorker: a baseball cap hid his eyes and he had his collar was upturned, but the software gathered enough data from his jaw, cheekbones, and partial sections from Spencer’s nose to trigger a match-alert.

  “The Whitney,” Owen and Stephen shouted in unison.

  “Tomorrow night,” Stephen continued. His fingers raced along the keyboard, highlighting the event site at Madison and E. 75th.

  “Fundraiser for Whitney Museum of American Art,” Dilip read excitedly, cutting in on Nussbaum, who looked annoyed. “Live auction of Mid-Century Masters including notable works of Andrew Wyeth, Grant Wood, Edward Hopper, Man Ray.”

  “That’s it!” Miller shouted. “That’s five thousand dollars for each one of you!”

  Miller studied the satellite photo put up by Dale, one of the twenty-something techs. The Whitney was smack in the center. “Give me an attendance list and cross-reference it for Forbes 400 attendees,” he ordered. “I want daily calendars, maps, public transportation, and camera coverage. All right, Lieutenant. Now we call in the heavy artillery! I’m putting a blanket over the Whitney Museum. A dozen military-trained snipers are going to be waiting there to blow Spencer’s head off. Satisfied?”

  Miller watched Spencer’s steady pace as he maneuvered through the pedestrians around him.

  “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, Spencer,” he told the screen image.

  “You overreached, Jeffers, but I’m preserving your career,” he whispered under his breath. He moved stridently toward one of the private offices. “Get my next two-and-half-million dollars ready, Jeffers.”

  *****

  “I’m looking at your guest list,” Jeffers told Miller. “A Rothschild, a Rockefeller.”

  He read, scanning for associates. Not one APA member was on it. “Take him down afterward,” Jeffers instructed.

  “Say again,” Miller responded.

  “Let him get off some shots, then kill him,” Jeffers reiterated.

  “He kills anybody and that brings in every cop in Manhattan,” Miller argued. “I’m going to have twelve men with rifles on rooftops, in windows. How do you explain that away? Pretty far-fetched for a coincidence.”

  “That’s my piece. That can be handled. Nobody questions heroes,” Jeffers said. “Let him get off two shots, then take him down.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Miller slapped two bundles of bills against his palm. “Heads up,” he told Dale, before tossing them underhand.

  Dale’s arms shot out and missed the catch. He had the cash trapped against his stomach before it slipped out onto the floor. Dilip, Stephen, and Kip stared at it, frozen like dogs looking at a treat and not sure if they would get scolded for eating it.

  “Divide it between you,” Miller told them to their communal relief. “Great job.”

  Owen followed him back to the office and shook his head in disgust. “Sunset is 7:42,” he protested. “They start seating at 6. What if he attacks afterward? He’ll be shooting from darkness. Everyone he targets will be lit up like Christmas.”

  “We’ll handle that,” Miller countered calmly.

  “Cameras,” Owen grumbled. “Ok, what is near the Whitney? Get me every visual and every means of transportation. Taxis, ride-shares, subway. We need to cover every angle. He’ll have to carry a large satchel or duffle, something that conceals his weapon.”

  “And night vision,” Owen realized. “Tell the snipers.”

  “Chill,” Miller responded. “Cullen, this is your own plan. It’s an exact parallel to Citi-Field; we draw Spencer out and take him down.”

  “This is nothing like our plan,” Owen protested. “No way. We had Major Gonzalez, our sniper team leader, with a practiced team in place. At Citi-Field we had police officers behind bulletproof glass.

  “We had a controlled environment with acres of open buffer. We could hit a switch and light everything. Gonzalez spent days planning and training until they had every conceivable wrinkle worked out. He still killed Tremaine. Don’t tell me to ‘chill’!”

  Miller wasn’t deterred. “I have that piece under control. These men aren’t Bishop’s rejects. They don’t miss.”

  “We can’t dangle eight or nine hundred private citizens as bait. Don’t bullshit yourself. There’s traffic. Darkness. Things don’t go as planned!”

  “All right, fine,” Miller conceded. “I’ll ask for drone feeds along with the cameras. Let me contact the client.”

  “The client. Right! We know the client is the government!” Owen shouted back. “Why not say so? One look at these systems says it all. We were just watching The Donald in his bathroom, for God’s sake.”

  Miller leaned back then squared his intense focus straight back at Owen’s comical freckles. He was obviously enjoying peeling back the curtains from Owen’s eyes.

  “I listened to your position, detective. I made my call. Get this, loud and clear. We’re not giving up our best shot to bring in your precious NYPD. Spencer worked for me, remember? I know how he thinks, how he plans. You apply your standard police procedure and you get a lot of your officers killed.

  “Now, I have assets to put into place and building plans and response models to work through. Have Stephen set you up with a tablet and run you the live feeds. When the drones are online, we’ll jump them in, too,” Miller said. “Get in close to the Whitney. Keep running through the exterior camera feeds. The minute he’s spotted, our assets get the green light.”

  Miller turned back toward the techs, announcing, “I’m setting aside a hundred grand for the man who takes Spencer down.

  “You too, detective,” he told Owen. “A hundred-thousand-dollar bonus. That’s a long way from bankruptcy for ten days’ work.”

  Miller tossed his car keys at Owen, who sna
tched them out of the air. “Now get moving!”

  Owen looked down on Miller’s bald spot while Miller walked away. “Asshole,” Owen grumbled after him. “That bankruptcy had nothing to do with you. You weren’t there. You don’t know a fecking thing about that.”

  But a hundred thousand dollars. Owen was afraid to repeat it out loud, like he might jinx it and make it go away. A hundred thousand dollars would mean a fresh start.

  *****

  Spencer searched the websites for something simple and flashy, one quick, low-exposure strike where he could get in and get out safely, something with enough visibility to stir the pot, to get the city on edge. Unless the residents believed the bomb threat was real, Park Avenue wouldn’t succeed.

  He also knew that he had to be sure Vince was working the door at Terraza; the second “Walter” wouldn’t let him through without a search. He could sink the scope and magazines inside five gallons of roofing sealant. He needed the ladder to hide the rifle and the 4Runner to transport the ladder, but there was no foolproof means to conceal the five-foot-long Barrett rifle.

  “You’ll have to leave the Barrett behind afterward,” he told himself. That hurt.

  The 4Runner had to be abandoned, too. NYPD would box down the whole city after Park Avenue. Public transportation. Blend in.

  This is for you Captain Sam, and for XMercy and Mouse.