The Boyfriend

by Thomas Perry

  Till glanced at the clock on the dashboard display. It was quarter to three. He wished he knew more about the Boyfriend’s past jobs. The Boyfriend always seemed to shoot his girls in the back of the head. Since there were quieter, safer ways for a young, strong man to kill a 120-pound girl, he was apparently most comfortable with a pistol. Till had to rely on the little he knew. In all of the killings that could be reliably ascribed to the Boyfriend, his weapon had been a semiautomatic pistol that fired a nine-by-nineteen-millimeter round.

  If the Boyfriend stayed true to the little that Till knew about him, he would be carrying the nine-millimeter pistol again today. He would have to be very close to the target to be sure of a kill. A Mexican prosecutor appearing on a public street would probably be wearing a bulletproof vest. That meant the Boyfriend had to try for a head shot. He would have to emerge from the crowd close to the prosecutor, shoot him in the head, and slip away.

  It was going to be difficult and complicated. There would be dignitaries: the mayor and city council, all of them in suits. There would be Mexican state secret servicemen to protect the prosecutor, and they would be dressed in suits too. So the Boyfriend would wear a suit, and move in close. He might even attach himself to one of the locally recognizable politicians—probably not the mayor, but the council president, even the police commissioner. He could shoot the prosecutor, probably from behind, since that was his favorite angle; grab his chosen dignitary; and drag him away from the supposed line of fire. Considering the number of cops likely to be there today and the likelihood of armed Mexican bodyguards, a line of fire was sure to develop or be perceived to develop. He could drag his dignitary all the way to safety inside City Hall, then abandon him and go out another door.

  Till knew so little that he clung to the few things he could surmise. There was no way even an experienced pistol shooter would want to be farther than twenty-five or thirty feet from his target, and if he was that close, the only way out would be to impersonate one of the good guys. Till now had a rough notion of what he would look for. He came to a public parking lot, swung his rental car into the lot, paid the fee in advance, then hurried toward the big redbrick cube that was City Hall.

  There were steps on one side of the building, but the redbrick plaza sloped up from the street. He could see there was a wooden lectern set up just beside the entrance to City Hall. On the street were two vans from local television stations with their transmission booms extended into the air. He could see a very slight Asian woman in a tan suit standing in front of the building with a microphone. She was looking at her cameraman, who rested a large video camera on his shoulder. She moved a little bit to put the lectern with the seal of the City of Boston on it into the background of her shot.

  There were sawhorse barricades to keep the entrance to the plaza clear, but so far only five police officers were visible on the plaza. Two were near the lectern and the entrance to City Hall, and the other three appeared to be wandering, but weren’t. Each had taken a side on the perimeter of the plaza. There were no crowds forming, and that looked like good news to Till: with no crowd, it would be harder for the killer to hide. A foreign prosecutor was hardly a celebrity in a big American city, so most people came and went without appearing to feel curiosity about the proceedings. Those who stared at all seemed to be curious only about the television vans. A couple of them stopped a few yards from the small woman in the tan suit and watched her doing sound checks.

  Then the doors to City Hall opened and a few men and women in suits walked out in small groups. A couple of stragglers stepped away from the building to make cell phone calls. Till decided they must be members of the city council.

  Till stopped, held up his own cell phone, took a picture of the building, then pivoted a few degrees and took another picture. He continued around the compass, gazing in each direction for a few seconds. He was giving himself a chance to see the Boyfriend coming. The Boyfriend would have to wait until there was a big enough group to hide him, but he must be nearby already.

  Till sensed that something was happening, that the event was coming together now. The men in dark suits and white shirts all seemed to make a small movement at the same time, an impulse like the one that made a flock of birds take off at once. The men looked at each other, then toward the building.

  They walked toward the steps of City Hall, the first ones stopping on the lowest step so they would be looking into the television camera. The others filled in on the steps above, then just stood there to preserve their spaces to the left of the lectern, where they hoped to be in the frame.

  A moment later the cops began to meet one another’s gaze. They were receiving a radio transmission. Till saw one of them speak into the microphone pinned to his left shoulder, and one other spoke into a small hand radio. Four more officers came out of City Hall and stood near the councilmen.

  Then electricity seemed to flow through the group again. The councilmen arranged themselves as though they were a choir standing on risers. The cops all lifted their heads at once, and the mayor emerged from the building, flanked by a couple of young aides.

  The traffic in the street changed its flow, moved one lane away by a pair of motorcycle cops who had stationed themselves at the beginning of the block. Till took another look at the councilmen, the cops, the small group of onlookers. Till moved closer. Which was the Boyfriend? Was he here?

  He heard a change in the traffic noise, and saw a police cruiser turn right and come up the incline onto the plaza. Right behind it was a second car, a black SUV with tinted windows. The two cars stopped forty feet from the steps. The doors of the black SUV opened, and four men in dark suits got out. They were of varying sizes and builds, but all were dark-haired and tan, with nearly opaque sunglasses and sport coats that were square-shaped from body armor and hidden weapons.

  Bodyguards were the same everywhere, Till thought. Two of the men spread out, their unseen eyes scanning the plaza, the street, the nearby buildings. The other two waited. When the second SUV arrived, one of them pulled open the back door and two of them stood on either side of it while a tall, dark-haired man in a gray suit got out and walked toward the waiting group of American politicians.

  The newspeople seemed to materialize in the plaza at once, the cameramen following Salazar’s progress without getting close enough to him to ruin a shot, and the reporters, uncharacteristically, hanging back to wait for their moment to ask questions.

  The mayor, who had been waiting near the lectern, smiled for the cameras and strode forward, his right hand extended in front of him when he was still ten feet away and Salazar could not possibly reach out and shake it.

  Till’s eyes strained to sort out the curious newcomers gathering in the plaza to see what was going on. They were arriving from inside City Hall, from the street, and from other parts of the civic center. He studied faces, watched hands and arms, sidestepped to see the ones who remained half hidden in the gaggle of moving people. There was a pattering as hands applauded, a sound too small and faint for this large a space. He only glanced at the two men at the center of it, who were shaking hands now: they weren’t the problem. The mayor headed for the lectern, drawing his guest with him.

  Till walked closer to the crowd of passersby who had noticed something was going on. They were close to the reporters, who seemed to be the most likely source of information, but they refrained from spilling out in front of the cameras. If this was going to be an occasion for speeches, most of them were prepared to move along. He saw nothing he was watching for on any of the faces—no eyes shifting to locate cops and bodyguards, no squinting at the Mexican visitor to judge range and angle, no moving to the side in the direction of the politicians.

  Suddenly the air changed, as though it had hardened. There was a disruption, like a whip crack, something faster than sound passing overhead. Till turned away from the crowd toward the mayor and his guest, both moving behind the
lectern together so the mayor could—Pow!

  The lectern exploded and sprayed splinters and fragments against the wall of City Hall. The mayor was knocked back or collapsed and fell on the pavement. The guest, Luis Salazar, seemed at first to have disappeared in the small explosion.

  The instant he’d heard the impact, Till’s legs had pushed him off in the direction of the lectern. He looked ahead, but saw nothing that would tell him what had happened. Was it a small—Bang! The noise seemed to come from off in the distance like thunder.

  He caught a glimpse of the two men lying prone just an instant before the police officers and a couple of dark suits converged on them and blocked his view. Their faces and white shirts seemed to be splashed with blood. People screamed, shouted, whirled around to see where this nightmare was coming from.

  Till felt the second whip crack and saw one of the men in dark gray who was kneeling in front of the prosecutor flop forward on top of him. Till stopped and looked around him.

  The sound had not been a bomb. It was a projectile breaking the sound barrier as it reached the plaza. Bang! The distant rifle’s report came to his ears. It had been at least three seconds after the bullet. The first one had slammed into the lectern, but it was hard to tell what had happened after that—splinters from the lectern, metal fragments, pieces of brick from the wall behind them, even a direct hit. The mayor was splattered with blood but he was getting up now, helped by the others, who were trying to drag him into the building.

  People were running, dashing in waves away from the place where the lectern had stood. Till was not sure whether they were moving in silence or the noise had temporarily deafened him. Till moved his eyes in a semicircle to try to detect where the shots had come from, but there was nothing. The buildings facing City Hall Plaza looked just as they had before, with the bright sun behind them at three on a summer afternoon.

  Then he saw it, a flash coming from the side of a building far away in the west. That can’t be, he thought. But then he heard the whip crack again, and saw an explosion of brick above the unmoving body of Luis Salazar. He counted: One one thousand two one thousand three one thousand Bang! It was. He had spotted the muzzle flash.

  Till began to move. He sidestepped, ducked, slipped into the crowd and through it. He didn’t break into a run until he was in the middle of the sidewalk, then dodged across the street and ran toward the parking lot.

  As he reached the parking lot, he called to the attendant, “Are the keys in my car?”

  “Yeah.”

  He got in, started the engine, and drove at a steady speed out of the lot into the still-moving traffic. If the Boyfriend had been watching him through the rifle scope, he would have little trouble taking Till’s car apart. It was maddening to have to turn right, going away from the shooter, then turn right again to head for the distant building indirectly. But he knew that anybody heading toward the shooter up the street the quick, direct way was probably not going to make it.

  As he drove, Till looked repeatedly at the distant building where he had seen the muzzle flash. He could see that the building was about fifteen stories high, and that it was situated on higher ground than City Hall. The street he was on had an incline to it, and he judged that the end of it was about a hundred feet higher than where he was. The shooter had been able to see over most of the buildings between his and City Hall, but he must have had to sight between a few of the tall buildings. Till turned on the car radio and spun the dial until he heard speech instead of music. The announcers were talking about the stock market. They didn’t know yet.

  Till had been wrong about the Boyfriend. He had thought the Boyfriend would be in close with a nine-millimeter pistol. Instead he was about a mile away with something very big, probably a .50-­caliber rifle. His accuracy at that distance was impressive. He had done every­thing right. He had chosen a high perch to the west of the target, where the afternoon sun would be behind him, lighting up his whole field of vision.

  The wind was very mild and from the west today, so he had little crosswind to deflect his bullet over the long trajectory. He had fired once to zero in his rifle. He had obviously intended to use the lectern as a highly visible and convenient point to aim at, and then adjust azimuth and elevation from there. He had hit the lectern dead-on while the mayor and Luis Salazar had been behind it. The second shot had gone right through Salazar, who had looked dead to Till already.

  The strategy of the bodyguards was to block a shot with their bodies and hope that they were making the victim invisible, and that their armor would help stop a bullet. The Boyfriend had made all their risks irrelevant. When the third bullet arrived it had passed through one of the bodyguards and into Salazar.

  He heard a siren whoop a block behind him, raised his eyes to the rearview mirror, and confirmed what he’d feared. There was a police car speeding up behind him, trying to get ahead, weaving in and out. Till did what the other drivers were doing—he pulled over to the curb, intending to let the police car pass.

  The bang this time was the sound of a .50-caliber bullet punching through the hood of the police car. The police car swerved to the curb and stopped. There was a haze of black smoke propelled upward by a jet of white steam, and the car remained motionless. The cop yelled something into his car radio mike, opened the door, and ran to take up a position beside a brick building. Then he realized his smoking police car was attracting the attention of pedestrians. He ran back to the street and began ushering the pedestrians into a detour behind the brick building, glancing now and then in the direction of the sniper.

  Till pulled out again ahead of the police car and drove west with the rest of the cars near him. As he watched them, he could tell that none of them knew they were heading directly toward a sniper. In another couple of minutes he and the cars near him reached the vicinity of the building where the flashes had come from. It was undergoing some kind of interior renovation, with a tall wooden frame up around much of its foundation and scaffolds over the sidewalk. He looked up and saw no open windows on the east side of the building, but he knew that this proved nothing.

  As he searched for a place to leave his car he dialed the police emergency number. When a woman answered he said, “My name is Jack Till, and I saw the building where the sniper was. It’s at the corner of Wilburton and Holbrooke. It’s got a sign that says it’s the Pettigrew Building. He was up high, maybe the tenth floor.”

  “Please stay on the line, sir.”

  He hung up, put his phone in his pocket, pulled his rental car around the side of the building, and left it in the alley behind a Dumpster.

  He looked up at the fire escape, but he couldn’t imagine climbing it quickly enough to do anything but get stranded. He trotted around to the front of the building and went inside, taking everything in. The elevators appeared to be operating because the lights were on and they had movers’ blankets attached to the inner walls to protect them from sharp loads. Hanging from the forty-foot foyer ceilings were three thick chains holding what seemed to be chandeliers wrapped in blue plastic. There was a stairwell. He opened the door, stepped into it, and listened, but he heard no footsteps.

  Till stepped into the nearest elevator, selected the ninth floor, and began to rise. He got out at the ninth floor and listened. There seemed to be nobody moving. There were two-by-fours piled neatly in the hall, a couple of large coils of electrical wire, and boxes he couldn’t identity. None of the rooms had doors, and the floors were dusty plywood. He stepped to the stairwell, closed the door, and climbed. He came out at the tenth floor. He walked along the hallway, and it looked different, as though it was nearly finished. On the tenth floor there were polished wooden doors on all of the offices. The only indication that some part of the floor wasn’t finished was a pile of carpet rolls at the end of a corridor. He walked along trying doorknobs, but they were all locked. He heard the sound of an elevator moving up the shaft to
the next floor.

  Till climbed to the eleventh floor, found that the elevator had not stopped, then went up to the twelfth. He opened the door, stepped out, and heard voices. He walked toward them. He found four men working in a large office at the end of the hallway. Two were up on stepladders, running electrical cable above the false ceiling. “Excuse me,” Till said. “Did you hear three or four really loud bangs a while ago?”

  One man looked down for a second. “You heard that too, eh?”

  “Yes. Could you tell if it was coming from this floor, above, or below?”

  “I don’t know. It sounded like something big got dropped.”

  Till didn’t see any point in going on. They obviously hadn’t seen anything. He moved on, looking in each open doorway and opening each door. When he reached the east side of the building he stepped into one of the empty offices and looked out the window. He could make out the plaza and City Hall from here, and he saw that the plaza looked like a parking lot for black-and-white police cars. He took special care in each of the eastern side offices, but he detected no sign that any one office was more likely than the others. He went down to the tenth floor.

  And then he found it. The office was partly furnished already, and a bit more completed than the others. The place had a desk and a couple of chairs, and a second room of some kind that was locked. The room smelled like burned propellant.

  He could see the place on top of the desk where the Boyfriend must have positioned the rifle. The bipod had been down, and when the rifle was fired it had scraped backward in the recoil. The Boyfriend had been sitting on a chair by the left side of the desk, then stood up when it was time to put his right shoulder to the weapon. He had raised the butt of it, letting it rest only on the bipod; aimed very carefully; and fired.