I, Sniper

by Stephen Hunter

“Send our two best assassins,”—he waited for the shock to register on Nick’s face—“no, no, Nick, a joke! No, I think it’s best to pay him his money and thank him for his brilliance and make him happy and send him home. He has rogue tendencies, and you don’t want him mucking things up, especially since we’re under so much time pressure.”

  “He wants to stay with it, I’d bet.”

  “He did a hell of a job, I have to say. Pointing our lab to the baked paint debris from the iSniper on the Hitchcock rifle. That’s genius-level stuff. You said he was smart and you were right. But he’s too hard to control. He did his sniper versus sniper undercover op and it worked brilliantly. We’ll get him a bonus and a commendation. But that’s it. He’s got to be farmed out now.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Meanwhile, back in the real world, do you need more investigators? Is that where this is going?”

  “I’m afraid so. We lost our loaner investigators from Chicago and the other towns, and getting dumped with ninety-two—ninety-six with the Irishmen—new persons of interest is taxing. The more experienced bodies I have, the faster we’ll get through this, the faster we’ll come to a conclusion, and the sooner we can all start keeping regular hours again.”

  “Okay, you’ve got ’em. Don’t know where I’m getting them from, but I’m going to give ’em to you somehow. Nick, get me something I can go to the papers on, will you? We are getting chewed to pieces on the old ‘inaction’ meme. Sluggish bureaucracy, gutless lifers, daily naptimes when we’re not screwing our secretaries. They think we’re up here twiddling our thumbs. I’ve got Chicago and Cleveland PDs beefing that we haven’t called it yet, and they’re being leaned on by their politicos because everybody wants the highest crime solution rate possible by end of year.”

  “Yes sir. Constable, is he still on you?”

  “His fine, dead hand may be involved in this, yes, wouldn’t surprise me a bit. Run into your new buddy Bill Fedders recently?”

  “No sir, but if he shows up in the men’s room, I won’t be surprised.”

  “Okay, Nick, good job, tough case, now bust it for me or put it to sleep, okay?”

  “My best, sir.”

  “Oh, and Nick, I’m told you owe Phil Price in PIO a callback.”

  “Just been busy, sir.”

  “Well, make an old fool like me happy and call him, will you?”

  17

  Now what?

  Now nothing.

  Now the rest of your life.

  You did everything for Carl Hitchcock, for the United States Marine Corps and its medieval notions of honor and duty, despite what you said to Chuck McKenzie. If you owed him and that ever-smaller membership of the generation of men who’d put scopes on things and killed them in the Land of Bad Things, you’ve paid that debt. You turned up significant new information, new leads, turned it over, and now the professionals will run it to ground. If it turned out Tom Constable had hired Anto Grogan of Graywolf to kill his wife because she’d slept with Johnny Carson or Warren Whateverthatguy’s name was, then that would come out. Or maybe Mitzi Reilly had hired Anto Grogan to kill her husband and Anto got carried away. Or maybe someone in South America hired Graywolf to kill Mitch Greene because they didn’t like his young adult books. Or maybe—

  Or maybe whatever.

  Swagger sat way out in the weird, isolated departure terminal at Dulles. It was a strange, glassed-in island of mall commerce in the middle of an airfield. Great aircraft rolled by out the windows, but in here was nothing but TGIFs and Benettons and Starbucks as far as the eye could see. His flight to Boise was in another hour, but he always got to these places early because the metal ball-and-socket joint meant rigamarole in security as often as not. Here it had not. So he sat at the gate area on a terrible plastic chair, waiting for the flight to be called, watching the place fill up, ignoring the persistent pain in the hip where the ball-and-socket construction had taken a full-power cut a few years back and the flesh never healed quite right, tried not to look too enviously at a bar down the way, with its rows and rows of ever-beckoning bottles, then ordered himself not to imagine the pleasure it offered, and waited for time to pass so that the old man could get back to his rocking chair and watch the weather chemistry manufacture clouds the size of castles and more complicated structures over the blue-green meadow that fell back for miles until it broke apart on a sawtooth snarl of mountains.

  I’ll count my money, see what to do with that nice bonus check. I’ll read a book or a gun magazine. I’ll think about building a tactical rifle in something weirdly off-center and interesting like .260 Remington, 6.5 Creedmoor, or Grendel or XC. I’ll hit the Dillon for a day and crank out a thousand .45 ACP 200-grainers. Then I’ll count my money again and be nice to my wife, whom I don’t deserve, and maybe help my younger daughter with her homework, though it’s rapidly reaching a level I don’t understand, because Miko has turned out to be sublimely smart and even at seven is attracting attention, not only for her unbelievable test scores but for her medal-winning riding ability. Then I’ll call my daughter Nikki and see how she likes that big paper where she now works.

  You couldn’t have a better life. Did anyone? Land, daughters, love, guns, a little money, a sense of having done what you could to bring boys home alive, settle old business, stand for something even when the lead or the blades were flying. That was okay, that was a life, it was the best but—

  But he couldn’t leave it alone.

  It wasn’t enough to wait for that big joker Ron Fields and that girl they called Starling and that Walter Jacobs and even Nick himself to figure it out and bring it off. It wasn’t that he was better than they were, or smarter, it was just . . . what? Vanity, craziness, old-guy bullshit, he just thought he should be there, doing what had to be done, contributing.

  Leave it alone.

  I can’t.

  Subversive thoughts kept churning up from his unconscious. There was a ramification, exiled almost purposefully from the FBI’s perspective. The FBI would not impose meanings; it would follow clues. They had new clues, new persons of interest, and they would methodically follow that course, letting meanings emerge. They had the resources for such an approach.

  He, Swagger, had no resources. Thus such a broad-front approach was ruled out. He had to rely on intuition and strike in terms of specific interpretations. He had to have a working theory and had therefore to examine, test, or abandon that working theory.

  Thus he was where he was, stuck with a buzz in his head that would not go away. And that was: if Carl Hitchcock’s irrational motive was not behind the killings, if Carl was in fact the setup with the phony motive, then the motive was rational. It meant to get something: money, revenge, threat elimination, satisfaction, something real. Therefore the killings were coldly plotted and executed by extremely high-end operators, based on a brilliant conception, brought off with near-perfection. No amateurs had been involved; it was elite-unit, state-level craft.

  If that were so, then there was but one starting point: the target could not have been Joan Flanders, movie star and radical and ex-wife to T. T. Constable. Joan’s point in the proceedings was to unleash, as a function of her complex and well-chronicled life, her litany of “interesting” husbands, a chafe of covering information. Her murder would automatically flood the investigation with possibility, too much possibility, too much attention, too much information, all of which would hopelessly bog, clot, and overwhelm any investigation while at the same time pressurizing it for fast solution.

  Therefore, sitting in the Dulles terminal in the middle of sunny Virginia, Swagger committed to his first principle: this is not about Joan Flanders. She is camouflage. This is about one of the others. It is about Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly or it is about Mitch Greene, and from what he knew, it was probably not about Mitch Greene, who was, after all, a comedian. So he committed to his second principle: it was about Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly.

  But even that was a daunting task. They too, thoug
h on a smaller scale, had lived extraordinary lives, much chronicled, much documented. Political lives, social lives, intellectual lives, professional lives, writing lives, teaching lives (endless students, twenty-five years’ worth of students alone!). How on earth could anyone investigate them—that is, anyone short of an FBI task force with its nearly unlimited manpower?

  He had to limit it. Limit it. How do you limit it? How do you find one thing to focus on, the right thing to focus on? What’s your principle of operation?

  His head ached. He really wanted that drink. And who did he think he was? The feds in time would get to Jack and Mitzi, and they’d do their usual thorough, patient, professional examination, and if there was something to be found, they would find it. Maybe not this week or this year or . . .

  What was different about Jack and Mitzi? Really, from a technical point of view, only one thing: Joan and Mitch had been killed in public. Their deaths became immediately the property of dozens of witnesses, then the law enforcement staffs, and then the maggots of the press. They were immediately public deaths.

  But Jack and Mitzi had been slain in an alley and lay undisturbed for almost an hour. Well, there were easy explanations: they were, in fact, vulnerable and accessible in that moment when they were pulling out of their garage and the shooting team, in that van in the next block with only a bit of door opening, was itself well protected and generally impervious to discovery. Hmm, on the other hand, Hyde Park was notoriously well policed by a more than capable University of Chicago police force, and the lack of street traffic, the lack of public hubbub, could itself turn quickly enough into a deficit; there’d be no crowd cover for the escape route. It was, or rather it could be seen as a somewhat fragile operation, a chancy enough thing, the greatest dare of the operation. That put it out of the modus operandi to a significant degree. So it was . . . provocative.

  What would be the meaning of that kind of kill? What did it permit? What advantages would it generate and to what ends, and why would those ends be worth what might easily become a risk?

  He sat crunched in concentration. He didn’t notice that they’d called the Boise flight. He didn’t even hear his name being called by the gate attendant. He was a lanky man in jeans, a polo shirt, an outdoorsy coat, and a Razorbacks baseball hat, sitting there, his scuffed Nocona boots announcing to the world he was a cowboy of sorts, but his face taut and distant.

  He missed the plane.

  He felt he had something, almost.

  He could feel it there, and even as he struggled to articulate it, it went away.

  And then he had it.

  Another problem: over the last years, he’d used the personnel department of the United States Marine Corps as his private intelligence agency. When he’d needed a contact or an expert, he’d called an old colleague and they’d dug up, quickly, a name for him that always fit a specific category. They got him in the game fast.

  But that was changing. His generation was all but gone; new men came and took things over and they had no living memory of Bob the Nailer and were not by nature inclined to help him. So he had to do some thinking and some calling before he was finally able to set up the right linkage: a retired NCO in Personnel who was friendly with a current NCO in Personnel who would do the favor for the friend of the friend.

  But finally, close to six, he got a name, a number, the sufficient in-between calls had been made, and he was talking to his man.

  “First Sergeant Jackson.”

  “First Sergeant, I’m Swagger, Gunnery Sergeant retired, I think Bill Martens may have—”

  “Sure, sure, Gunny. After I got Bill’s e-mail, I ran you, and you were some marine, I’ll say. You were the best. Before my time, but the best.”

  “Son, I was before everyone’s time.”

  First Sergeant Jackson laughed.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “It’s this. I’m looking into Carl Hitchcock’s last week and death—”

  “Gunny, this ain’t some crazy T. T. Constable did it thing like I’m seeing on the Internet, is it?”

  “No, and I don’t think aliens took over Carl’s brain neither. No, I’m just trying to get a grip on it.”

  “I’d love it if Carl turned out to be innocent. So would all of us. But I don’t see how.”

  “I don’t see how either, but I told some folks I’d give it my best shot. Semper Fi, gung ho, ding how, and all that good shit. So here’s where I am: I’m thinking a lot of our people go into law enforcement after they retire. It’s a natural progression. So I’m guessing there’s a guy for real like the one I’ve imagined in my head. He would be ex-marine, now working Chicago police, maybe even homicide. He was part of the team that investigated the Strong-Reilly shooting. He was there, he was noticing, he had ideas, he heard what the other cops said. All that before the FBI took over as lead agency and concluded Carl was the boy. Once that happens, it’s all different, because they’re all looking at it only in the way it links to Carl. I want to hear what this guy might have to say about what he noticed before the news on Carl arrived. Can you help find me such a guy, if he exists?”

  “I will make a big try. Can I reach you on this number?”

  “Roger.”

  “Okay, and I’m guessing time counts.”

  “Yes sir.”

  The call came at eleven, long after he’d checked into the motel in Alexandria, long after he’d had a chat with his wife, explaining that no, he wasn’t on his way home, he had a few things to check out first, that was all. Her silence expressed her mood. She believed he had a crusade pathology and was always looking for excuses to veer off on strange, violent adventures; she finally accepted it, but at the same time, her silence made it clear that she still hated it. But he repeated that this was nothing, this was just some low-level inquiries, and there was no danger whatsoever involved. Still, he told her, don’t tell anyone about this call. If anyone asks, I’m on my way home.

  When the call came, he picked up the cell and said, “Swagger.”

  “Gunnery Sergeant Swagger, retired, USMC sniper, all that, number two in Vietnam?”

  “Yes, that’s me. Except it was number three.”

  “Gunny, I got a call from my ex–battalion commander, who evidently got a bunch of calls, the long and the short of it being you wanted to talk to a Chicago detective who’d been on the Strong-Reilly crime scene.”

  “I’m very glad you called.”

  “My name’s Dennis Washington, I was an infantry officer, USMC, from ’88 through ’94, loved the Corps. Did the Gulf, got hurt a little, and had to give it up. Went to Illinois State Police, then came to Chicago. I’m a detective sergeant, Nineteenth Precinct, the Woodlawn area of Chicago. I do murder. It’s usually some gang boy popping another gang boy, sometimes a kid gets in the way, or it’s a Korean in a market, or a cabbie. It ain’t no CSI kind of thing. I’m not a master detective, if you think I am, Gunny, sorry to say. I’m a little reluctant here. I’ve never done nothing like this and I know I’m in violation of policy.”

  “This ain’t official, Sergeant Washington. But I know you want to hear this, so I’ll say it. I ain’t asking for no violation of ethics on your part; I sure ain’t part of the press; I ain’t a Net crazy who thinks Tom killed Joan because she slept with Warren or any shit like that. I ain’t publishing, I ain’t talking, I ain’t telling. If you ask around about me, you’ll see that most folks think I’m a stand-up guy. What this is about is my hope for Carl’s innocence, and since I know a guy in the FBI, I got to go through the Bureau’s case.”

  “It’s solid, I hear.”

  Bob didn’t feel like explaining.

  “Well, we’ll see about that. Maybe there’s a little thing or two off.”

  “I hate to see it come down on an old marine, especially a guy who gave as much as Hitchcock.”

  “Roger that.”

  “So, I’ll try to help you. I don’t have a lot. The FBI took over within a few hours, and although they made a
good attempt to keep us in the loop, once they got the call on lead agency it became totally their investigation. If you’ve seen their stuff, you may know more than I do.”

  “It’s not their findings I’m strictly interested in. I know enough to know that findings are usually what people want to find. That’s the nature of the damn animal. See, I’m looking for stuff that wasn’t in no findings, wasn’t in no report, something that you, an experienced homicide detective might have felt, even if you didn’t know you felt it at the time. You might call it hunch or buzz or vibe, some soft, unofficial word like that. I have a specific idea on this but I ain’t going to give it to you because it’ll tarnish your thinking. So I guess what I’m asking—sorry it ain’t more specific—is, did you get any funny feelings? Was anything wrong? Did anything unusual happen?”

  “I’d have to have an actual imagination to answer that, Gunny.”

  “Well, do your best.”

  “I went over my notebook, trying to recreate it carefully. No, there wasn’t much there, except a thing so tiny I’m kind of embarrassed to mention it. It ain’t the sort of thing that’s admissible in court. It ain’t evidence, it ain’t forensics, it ain’t factual. Like you say, a funny feeling.”

  “Detective, I am so ready to hear this.”

  “You know what a homicide dick is? I mean, really is? Forget all the CSI TV bullshit. From a practical point of view, he’s what you call a professional interrupter.”

  “I ain’t reading.”

  “Nobody ever plans on getting murdered. It’s the last thing on everybody’s mind. Even dope dealers with another gang out to get them, they don’t think today’s going to be their last day. They always live life like there’s going to be a lot of tomorrows.”

  “Okay, I’m with you.”

  “As that translates practically, I’m the guy who interrupts. I bust into their life on a day they never in a million years thought would be their last, and I see exactly how they lived, without scrubbing or cleaning or getting ready for company. And here’s what I’ve learned: everyone’s a secret pig.”