I, Sniper: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel

by Stephen Hunter

  “That’s good,” said Denny, “but we have to keep it in evidence. I’ve already risked chain of custody with it by removing it, but I want to get to the station, log it in to evidence in the minimum amount of time—since we logged out of Unclaimed Property at 11:04, I can get it logged in by midnight; I think that’ll stand up to any court scrutiny—then you can work on it at the police station in the duty room. There’s a computer terminal—”

  “I’m sure I can dig up the stock listings from that date somehow, even if I have to buy an old copy of a newspaper—”

  “Oh, I’m liking it.”

  “Then, if it’s something we can use, I can call Nick and we bring in the Bureau.”

  “And if you can’t reach Nick, tell you what. I’m friends with a real good county prosecutor. This is a Chicago homicide, after all. These are Chicago people they gunned down. We’ll run it by Jerry and maybe he’ll take on the case. It sounds like it could go big if it’s played right, and he’d know how to play it right.”

  Up ahead, Bob saw the brown mercury vapor light of the entrance to the Stevenson Expressway, a little Jetsons architecture here in the derelict section of Chicago, a construction built of concrete and machine corruption. A green sign pointed to Gary and Indianapolis, but Washington hummed ahead. The car slid under the overpass, then found itself in traffic, and came to another overhead, the ancient trusses and rivets of an el station. Rain had begun to fall lightly, scattering the light points ahead into glittery red-green stars.

  “Good thinking,” said Bob.

  “Oh, and one other thing,” said Washington, slowing as a light went suddenly to yellow and he knew he wouldn’t make it, while another car suddenly slid by on the left, also halting. “There’s also a possibility—”

  The first bullet, passing through windshield, smeared a quicksilver maze of fractures and hit Washington in the eye, destroying it, blowing his head backward and filling the air with arterial spray.

  26

  Tino was the driver, Rat the shooter. Both were good at their jobs. In their midtwenties, handsome, amply tattooed, muscular, scarred, well dressed, with beautiful teeth and glossy rolls of oiled black hair, they’d come up through the Almighty Latin Kings, South Lawndale division, at one time ruling the gang’s heaviest hitters, known as the Chi-town Two Fours for their locality, which was Twenty-fourth and Drake. But the two were ambitious, without scruple, cunning and hungry, a dangerous combination. Their reputations approaching legend in gang-related street violence, they knew that the gang universe had its limits; they made a contact with a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy in the outfit, and they segued into the occasional mob hit.

  It was quick, clean stuff. Tino tracked the vic, cut him off, and Rat put him down, car to car, usually a subgun, sometimes a shorty twelve. Tino was good with cars, had a genius-level reflex time, while Rat had that hand-eye thing in spades, which meant if he saw it, he put lead in it, fast. They didn’t make mistakes, they didn’t leave witnesses, and the payoffs were surprisingly generous. They hit debtors, they hit strong-arm boys, they hit witnesses, they hit Insane Maniac Disciples who’d crossed the line, they even hit a cop or two. They rapidly became known as the best in Windy, and were thinking about taking their talents nationwide, maybe flying around for guest-starring spots in wired towns like Miami, Cleveland, Detroit, even New York, though of course LA was the real center of the world as far as they were concerned, but they’d have to work out something with MS-13 before they went partying in that town. They knew you do not fuck around on MS-13 turf without MS-13 permission up front, or those crazy fucking Salvadorans will stick pliers up your anus and pull your entrails out through it an inch at a time for a very, very long weekend’s worth of dying.

  This one looked almost too easy. The vics were a cop and some out-of-town cowboy guy, whatever, and they didn’t have a thought in the world that today would be their last. They were just cruising without security or even much in the way of attention paying, and the very good intelligence came from Tino’s man Vito, who repped the outfit on the South Side and had go-betweened for Tino many a time. Vito was good, solid, dependable; he owned a restaurant and wasn’t no pimp or drug lord but just a courier from the shadowy higher organization that made the big decisions and set the big policies and negotiated the rules with the various players.

  Tino stole a car and picked Rat up and they met Vito behind Vito’s pizzeria at eleven that morning. Vito handed Rat a grocery bag, heavier for its size than it should have been, and Rat felt something dense and mechanical and tubular and awkward slipping around inside. It felt like something for a plumbing job. Were they going to fix a toilet?

  “Swedish K, they call ’em,” Vito said. “You can run a chopper, right?”

  “If it shoots, I can run it, Vito,” said Rat. “Remember, I am an artist with a Mac-10. I paint pictures with a Mac.”

  “Artist my ass. This fuckin’ thing is bigger than a Mac-10. Client provided, client insisted, to be returned to client. It’s got a silencer, which is why it’s so big. Untraceable. It’s some kind of spook shit. Let me tell you, do not fuck this one up, as these customers know their business and seem to have the kind of connections that turn your mouth dry and I don’t want to have to give them bad news.”

  “They scare you, Vito? They must be some heavy motherfuckers. Nothing rattles them.”

  “The heaviest.”

  He gave them the drill. They were to get out on the Eisenhower to Franklin Park, off Mannheim, to the Cook County unclaimed property warehouse.

  “I know it,” said Tino. “My mamacita bought me a bike at auction there.”

  “You ain’t looking for bikes,” said Vito. “It’s a cop Impala, gray-black, plate number K599121, you got that?”

  “Got it,” said Tino, who had a talent for numbers and could remember anything.

  “You follow them back into the city. It’s best to wait till they get to the South Side, which is where they’ll head. You drive careful, Tino. Stay far back, don’t rush or do anything stupid. I’m told these guys, or at least the cowboy, is tricky as hell. He’s done this kind of work, on both sides. You up for this?”

  “Man,” said Rat, who’d peeked into the bag and liked what he’d seen, “I am up for anything with this cockroach killer.”

  “Don’t force it. Be grown-up. You follow ’em from a long way off, you wait till they’re in traffic down here, ’cause the cop is a South Side precinct guy, and you set up next to them and you just go buzz with the buzz gun. Then you get out, you buzz each body. That gun shoots fast, watch that it don’t run out of ammo. It’s so quiet, it won’t scare the squares away. But it won’t draw cops to you either, that’s the point. You buzz each guy, put a few in the head to make sure. Then Tino uses all that magical driving power he is known for and makes you invisible in two seconds.”

  “What’s paydown?”

  “Oh, that’s the best part. You get ten long apiece.”

  “Ten!”

  Even on a cop, that was very nice.

  “I told ’em, you were the best. These guys are hard but fair. You don’t need to know nothing now, and I ain’t giving you no advance because you’ll spend it on whores and Ripple, but you do this job clean and you will make many friends and set yourselves up nicely.”

  “It sounds easy,” said Tino.

  * * *

  It was easy. They made the car in the lot and parked across Mannheim and down the block a bit. There was even a temptation to go in, hit them in the warehouse, the last place they’d be expecting it. But Tino argued no, because then what was his part in it?

  When the vics emerged it was after dark, so Tino and Rat got no good look at either. They were just shapes, blurs, targets. It was better that way.

  Tino watched as the Impala took Mannheim south after a daring cross-lane left turn from the lot, highly illegal but something a cop would think nothing of. That maneuver accomplished, the Impala built moderate speed, and Tino fell in two hundred yards b
ehind, no problemo. The traffic was light and he had no trouble maintaining the distance until the vics hit the Eisenhower and took it toward downtown, again through moderate traffic at reasonable speed. The Eisenhower could be a bitch at rush hour, jamming up for miles and miles so that the fabled skyline never seemed to advance at all and it was hard to predict the way the traffic would break and squirt in segments, so you could have some trouble keeping a tail. But that never happened and the cop held in the second right lane at fifty-five, never deviating, never jumping lanes, just droning along two hundred yards or so ahead.

  He even, so helpfully, signaled about a mile in advance of the turnoff at Pulaski; he signaled again when he turned left off Pulaski and then still again in another mile when he turned right down Kedzie, running through gang neighborhood after gang neighborhood, running through territory Tino and Rat knew well.

  “When he passes the Stevenson,” Rat said, “another three blocks there’s that el station overhead, it’s always a choke point. He’ll stay in the right lane, we’ll breeze by and drive him into the el supports, and I’ll put the heat to ’em. Then you left and right, hit Granada, and it’s just a shot back to the Stevenson. We’ll be home before eleven.”

  “It sounds good,” said Tino.

  Rat slid over the seat into the rear, arranging himself against the door behind Tino. He wanted maneuvering room. “When I say, you punch down the window. Try it.”

  Tino hit the button and the right back seat window hummed down, admitting a blast of fresh air. Then Tino raised it.

  “Good,” said Rat.

  He slipped the gun out of the grocery bag, beholding it for the first time. It looked like it felt, like some enterprise of plumbing, a joinery of pipes and tubes at right angles. It was, moreover, a kind of powdery green. A bolt riding a spring pronged from the righthand side of the main tube, just behind a cartridge ejection port; what made the thing look funny was that the tube didn’t diminish into a barrel, as on most guns, but continued, thick and long, for another full foot out, giving the whole apparatus a front-heavy look. Beyond the ejection port, that long run of tube, that was the “can,” as the silencer was called, Rat knew. This was a high-class, well-engineered professional tool, dedicated to exactly one purpose—the silent, fast extermination of the designated. He picked it up and realized that its wire stock was folded alongside. He peeled it backward by the leather-encased top strut through spring pressure, finally prying it loose, and it snapped into place, the stock fully extended. He reached back into the bag and came out with three mags, each dense for the size because each was loaded with thirty-odd 9mm cartridges, and at the top of each mag, a single cartridge was imprisoned and displayed in the lips of the magazine. Making certain it was oriented correctly, Rat eased a magazine into the housing, gently lifted it toward its destination, and felt it lock in place. He turned the gun sideways in his hand and drew back the bolt, feeling the slide of lubricated machined metal against lubricated machined metal and the increasing tension of the spring until a click signaled the bolt was set. He knew the gun was of an older type like a tommy called an “open bolt gun,” meaning you simply locked the bolt back to fire it, and when you fired, the bolt rocked in its groove, and when you let the trigger up, it collected itself at the end of the groove, ready to go again. He bent close to it, found no safety lever anywhere on the primitive firing mechanism of trigger and rear grip, and realized that a notch cut above the bolt groove, where the bolt could be lodged, was the safety. Man, they built ’em simple-simon in those days.

  The gun cradled in his arms, his right hand locked around the wooden panels of the pistol grip, his right thumb resting in the nexus between magazine housing and barrel, his trigger finger indexed along the receiver over the guard, Rat mentally rehearsed his moves. Tino pulls up by the still car in the right lane and cranks hard to the right, pinning it, at the same time hitting the down button on the right rear window. Rat scootches over, favoring the left half of the window to give him angle into the car. He never bothers with eye contact or target marking; not enough time, he’s too close, these guys are too good. He raises the piece and stitches the first burst right to left, driver to passenger, across the windshield. He tried to imagine the details so they wouldn’t be shocking to him and disorient him when they occured: the spitting of the spent brass, the chug-a-chug hydraulic sensation of the bolt reciprocating at killing speed in the receiver, the muzzle flash blowing holes in his night vision, the stitchwork of punctures as the burst ate its way across the windshield, turning the glass to lace and frags, all this at a time much faster in the happening than in the telling of it. Then quick out, put a burst into the driver’s head, then step aside to get an angle and put a burst into the passenger’s head. Then back into the car and Tino drives him off.

  His reverie was interrupted.

  “Okay,” Tino said, his lips dry, his tongue dry, his breath dry and shallow, “just passed under the Stevenson. I see the el tracks ahead, I’m accelerating to catch up, they seem to be slowing down in the traffic, the light is changing.”

  Expertly, he maneuvered the stolen vehicle through traffic, cutting a guy off, peeling through a gap, spurting into the oncoming lane, then back again, closing the distance on the unsuspecting Impala, which was itself slowing for the yellow-to-red light that impeded its progress.

  “They’ve stopped, don’t have to hit them,” said Tino.

  Rat held calm, felt good, had no trouble breathing, marveled at Tino’s grace behind the wheel, and the seconds rushed by. Suddenly they were even with the vehicle, then a little past it as Tino jammed to a halt just exactly where he should, and as Rat slithered forward on the seat, the window magically sank into the door, and he raised the gun to find a perfect angle on the driver and he thought, “Eat this, motherfuckers,” as he pulled the trigger.

  27

  Banjax reached Bill Fedders at nine, as Fedders had become his ex-officio counselor, his Deep Throat, if you will, but also his adviser, his mentor, his confessor, his priest. Banjax explained what was happening and sought Bill’s advice on whether to fish or cut bait. Go for it—Bill knew in a second—but he was smooth, he knew well enough to keep the greed out of his voice, and so he did a number on the young reporter, all wisdom and gravitas and admonitions to the ethical side of the equation, but in the end, he felt confident he’d made the sale, and he sent Banjax off on his mission with enthusiasm high.

  Then Fedders poured himself a stiff Knob Creek in a crystal highball glass, let the bite of the bourbon blur a little as the ice melted, yelled upstairs to his wife that he’d be up in a second, went to his Barcalounger in front of the fire, and placed a call to Tom Constable’s private number.

  “Can this wait?” said Tom, clearly in the midst of something energetic and interesting.

  Bill took great pleasure in responding. “No,” he said. “Not really. You’ll want to hear it.”

  “Okay,” said Tom, and the phone was set down at his end as various arrangements were made, until finally he returned.

  “This better be good. She was worth every penny of the thirty-five hundred dollars and I don’t know if I can get back to where I almost was.”

  “You will, Tom. Trust me. You might even surpass yourself.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “Well, it seems that brother Banjax, ace reporter that he is, has just gotten a very interesting tip. It could be the end of our problems with Special Agent in Charge Memphis.”

  “He has hung in there a long time.”

  “The director likes him. Everybody likes him. But not after this.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Fedders savored his drink, letting the mellow glow spread.

  “It seems that maybe Memphis isn’t the boy scout everybody thinks he is.”

  “Interesting,” said Tom.

  “He may be dirty.”

  “Very interesting,” said Tom.

  “Now the one thing the FBI needs is sniper rifles. They’re in the
lengthy proces of acquiring three hundred new ones. These rifles are traditionally built by the custom shop at Remington; they’re something called a Remington 700. A special barrel is mounted on them, a special scope, special ammo is used, all that stuff, and they’re guaranteed to shoot, hmm, I think it’s angle of minute—”

  “Minute of angle,” corrected Tom, the world-renowned hunter. “It means very accurate.”

  “Yeah, well, although the contract isn’t big in monetary terms—less than a million—within the gun industry it’s considered a big prestige thing. Remington has had it for years, and on account of the FBI’s belief in the product, they’ve become the preeminent sniper rifle supplier to police forces and military units the world over. That million-dollar contract is really worth twenty million annually; it also feeds civilian purchases, because so many of these gung ho gun guys want the rifle the FBI uses, for their hunting and targeting and whatever. Maybe to play sniper themselves, who knows.”

  “So?”