I, Sniper

by Stephen Hunter

  “I know I am. And my daughters! Wow!”

  “Mine too. Those damned girls couldn’t pick up sock one if their mom didn’t yell at them. Anyhow, what this means is you go into a lot of messy homes. Mr. Brown got popped, so you go to the Brown home, and it’s the way it was exactly at the moment Mrs. Brown heard Mr. Brown checked out. She’s in shock. It’s like the house is frozen in Jell-O. Newspapers on the floor, socks on the floor, garbage cans full to overflow, the litter in the cat’s box ain’t been changed, a coupla glasses from last night’s cocktail hour are still out, maybe there’s some plates in the sink, or someone forgot to put the cereal away. You know, that’s how life is lived. To do stuff you have to take stuff out; then you have to put it away. But between the taking out and the putting back, sometimes a lot of time passes, and after having gone into a thousand houses in the past ten years with the worst possible news to deliver and then asking the worst possible questions, I’m here to tell you that most lives are lived, minute by minute and hour by hour and day by day, at some weird place between taking stuff out and putting stuff back. Stuff is everywhere. Daily life is about stuff. You follow me?”

  “Sure do. You’re saying—”

  “If it had been tossed hard and fast, it would have been a mess. You ever see what IRS does to a house when they toss it? Looks like a cyclone hit it. Our guys ain’t much better, and I don’t bet the Bureau’s are much better than that.”

  “Got it. So the Strong house didn’t appear to have been searched.”

  “That’s what you might think. But I’m concentrating here on his office, and what I saw was a room that had been searched and then overcorrected. Do you get what I’m saying? It’s subtle. All the stacks were neat. People don’t stack neat. They just throw things on top of each other. The computer monitor had been dusted, even on that pedestal and on the casing in back of the screen. Nobody dusts the pedestal, but this pedestal was dusted. The books were all neatly shelved, the stacks of—I don’t know, he was a professor, right?—articles, books, whatever research stuff a professor would have, it was all neat on the big table and it was centered on the table. It didn’t have the spontaneity of real life. It looked like a museum display. I noted it, maybe didn’t think much of it, but it was especially weird in retrospect because I went out to his office in the Circle Campus the next day with one of the Bureau’s people, and his office, well, it wasn’t a mess, but it was an office. It was kind of messy, not wildly messy, not a shit hole, no, but it had the usual human mess in it. The rest of their house: usual human mess. Glasses in the sink, unmade beds, laundry on the floor, not in the basket. No pigsty, but just the random crap of life. But that one room, it had the look of having been freshly tidied, as if a) he knew he’d be murdered in his alley and wanted his investigators to think, ‘My, what a tidy fellow this man was,’ or b) someone tossed it, but tossed it very carefully, and tidied it up so that no one could tell it had been searched. They just overtidied by a tiny degree, and only a guy like me, Mr. Interrupter with Bad News, would pick up on it.”

  “Does the time line work out that someone could have been in the house between the killing and the arrival of the first units? You seem to be implying someone tossed the house, then straightened it out. Was there time enough?”

  “Yeah. I checked, and that’s maybe why I’m glad to hear from you, because my thoughts on this were kind of subversive to the general thrust and momentum of the investigation. But of course once our lab people arrived, the FBI people arrived, the media, that sort of condition of his office was destroyed. I didn’t think to have crime scene photo work it, because it wasn’t the crime scene, the car was the crime scene. My bad. But yeah, in terms of time, it was about ninety minutes as far as we can say.”

  Bob thought, that’s why he took them in the alley. To give the team time to penetrate, search, tidy, and disappear. No one would notice the search team, because of course it wasn’t a crime scene yet, charged with that special energy of such a place, that charisma. He kills them, the team enters and finds and—

  Or maybe it doesn’t find.

  Or maybe it finds but it leaves traces of what it found.

  “Is this of any help?”

  “It’s a great help, Detective Washington. Listen, I see now I’m going to have to come to Chicago. Can I call you? Can you help me?”

  “When will you get here?”

  “I’m already late.”

  18

  Nick groaned. “What’s the policy on this?”

  “You can meet him or not meet him. It’s up to you. I should be there to ride herd.”

  “You’re sure it’s necessary?”

  “You tell me. He said one word. He said if I said the one word to you,” Phil Price continued, “you would want to meet with him.”

  “And the one word was ‘Tulsa’?”

  “Yeah. I checked the records. I know what it means.”

  Nick sat in Price’s office, nicely appointed, on the third floor. Price was Special Agent in Charge of Public Information, but unlike most “public information” hacks in fancy offices all through DC, Price was more agent than reporter suck-up. He’d done street time in New York, LA, and San Francisco, had taken a round in his hip on a raid (a friendly round, no less, from a poorly trained SWAT moron), and now finished out his time in Public Information, cordially hating the reporters who bedeviled him even as they cordially hated him. The subject was a proposed meeting with a New York Times reporter named David Banjax, who was the Times’s man on the still-hot sniper story.

  “I hate these guys,” said Nick.

  “I hate ’em too,” said Price. “But that’s neither here nor there. What’s here and now is this guy is levering for a meet, off the record. He’s angling for a scoop, and the Times always feels entitled to scoops, so he wants his so he can get sent to the London Bureau or something.”

  “Agh,” Nick said again, his gorge full of bile.

  “Nick, in case you’re wondering, let me tell you he didn’t get this out of Public Information. We do not release background on special agents, not ever, certainly not in the age of terror. So I don’t know how he got it.”

  “I do,” said Nick. “It seems I’ve displeased Joan Flanders’s big-foot ex-hubbo Tom Constable, that is, ‘T. T.’ Constable. His guy tried to nudge me in a certain direction, and I wouldn’t play. So this is their first move, and this guy, this David Banjax, he’s just a rube, a pawn, being run by a guy named Bill Fedders. Banjax doesn’t know how he’s being used.”

  “Don’t tell him that. He’s Harvard, Harvard Law; he thinks he’s important.”

  “Ugh,” Nick said. “Now I really hate him.”

  “But they do hold cards, Nick. I can’t tell him to fuck off. I’d love to, then raid his crib for the ’ludes and pot he probably has stored in a waterproof baggie in the toilet, convict him, and send him to some hard ugly federal hotel where he and his new fiancé LeRoy could live happily ever after in anal cowboy bliss, guess who’s the gal? But I can’t do that. I have to play nice. And you can see how it might look. It could look bad or at least questionable. It could reflect poorly on the Bureau. And that’s what they pay me to watch.”

  Nick shook his head. “Tulsa,” he said again.

  He remembered being in an office window in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1992, his second year on the street. He was crouched behind and held securely a then state-of-the-art Remington 700 sniper rifle in .308, on a Harris bipod. He watched reality through a ten-power Leupold scope as a crackhead skank bank robber named Nathan Bowie rode down an empty street in the back seat of a convertible. Unfortunately, surrounding him were three women, cashiers in the Tulsa State Bank and Trust Morgan Avenue branch, while the bank manager drove slowly. Nathan was tripping wilder and wilder, waving his pistol around, addressing God, the whole evil white race, the Martians who spoke to him through his dental fillings, the various bitches who’d left him before he was done kicking the shit out of them. He was going to go firecracker at any se
cond and it was Nick’s duty to put a 168-grainer into his cranial vault before that happened.

  But Nick also had an FBI agent in charge in his earphones, a guy, now long gone, named Howard Utey, and Howard was one of the worst combinations: he wanted you to do exactly what he told you, except he didn’t know what that was, and if he told you one thing, he could very easily change his mind, and it was your fault you didn’t quite get that he hadn’t meant “Shoot” when he screamed “Shoot,” he’d really meant “Don’t shoot.” Any idiot would know that.

  Howard was as flippy as Nathan Bowie, as the tapes later revealed, not that it mattered, because Howard had contacts on the Seventh Floor and was supposedly headed up there.

  “Are you ready, are you ready, get ready, Nick, I can’t hear you, tell me are you ready are you ready, do you have him, do you have him, wait till he stops moving, now no not now, no, no the one on the left she moved, she’s crying, why the hell won’t she shut up, what is—”

  Nick should have thrown the earphones with their little microphone on the pedestal, all cool SWAT TV-like, across the room and just buckled down, cinched in, made the fucking shot. But he didn’t; that wasn’t Nick. Howard was authority, and Nick had been drawn to, had respected and believed in the church of authority. Howard was boss, he was agent in charge, he was day-to-day a very decent guy, if a little moody when he thought he wasn’t moving fast enough, but he got good results out of his people and he was well liked, if thought a bit callow and overambitious. But he was—and this was well known—absolutely no good in an action situation.

  “Do you have him, I can see him, Nick, acknowledge please, I have to—”

  “Howard, the girl on the left, she’s—”

  “Take him down, take him down!”

  “No shot, Howard, goddamn, it’s not clear.”

  It had to be clear. No other SWAT people were on call, the state police team couldn’t get set up in time, the city people were in their usual sullen fit about being overruled (by Howard) in their own town, so it was a mess, and behind him, nobody was quiet, there was a lot of moving around and chatting.

  “You have to shoot!” Howard screamed.

  But Nick couldn’t. There wasn’t gap enough between the two girls, one of whom kept leaning over, as if she was losing bodily control, so great was her fear, and her head kept swimming into Nick’s sight picture and the car would be turning in a second and he knew, he knew he had to shoot.

  “Shoot, shoot, don’t shoot, don’t shoot, shoo—”

  Nick thought he had it. The crosshair quadrasected Nathan’s head just behind the ear and it was clear. His finger did what it had been trained to do. He fired, the buck of the rifle, the largeness of the shot, it felt good, and when the scope came down—

  “Oh God oh God you missed oh God he’s shooting stop him!”

  —Nick saw one of the girls twisted left, blood on her back, her body in a heartbreakingly broken posture. Nathan Bowie shot the girl on the right, then shot the girl in the front, then put the gun in his mouth and blew the roof of his head off.

  That was it. Med techs and cops with guns drawn raced to the vehicle, and from his perch Nick watched as the med team worked the fallen. He wanted to puke. He felt a surge of depression melt the strength out of his bones and fill his brain with self-loathing and remorse. Howard was there yelling, “Nick, Nick, my God, why did you shoot, didn’t you hear me? I told you not to shoot, God, it’s such a tragedy.”

  God, what a fuck-up. What a total disaster. Nick had thought he’d be the guy with the strength and the coolness and the good decision. But no. He had to play the goat, the mistake, Quantico’s shame.

  Poor Myra. He’d hit her in the spine, the bullet actually passing through her arm first, bouncing laterally off the metal of the car and clipping her spine. It paralyzed her in an instant. She never walked again and spent the next few years in her motorized wheelchair. She had deserved so much better than Nick and the FBI had given her that day, and he tried to give it to her, to somehow make amends, by marrying her. He discovered her to be a wonderful person, bright, funny, without a shred of self-pity. Once her father had gotten drunk and accused Nick.

  “Why? Why did you do that to my baby girl? Oh, Nick, why, she didn’t—”

  “Daddy, you stop that. I’ve said many a time that if the only way I could have met Nick Memphis was to get shot by him and lose my mobility, I’d take it even with that foreknowledge, because Nick is the best man I’ve ever met, kind and generous and gentle and honest and moral. You cannot blame Nick. You blame Nathan Bowie or the man who sold him the crack, but do not blame Nick. He was only doing his duty.”

  Of the other two girls, one died, the other recovered and moved away. The bank manager recovered but died the next year, early, of a heart attack. Really, what had it proved? You take the shot and the shot goes off. It’s so amazing how much pain can be released into the world by the little six-ounce press of the trigger, how it changes everything, totally and forever.

  Nick sat back.

  “You can see how it would play,” said Price. “ ‘Sniper investigator had bad sniper shooting in background,’ that’s how it’ll read, and the implication is that maybe someone who had been a sniper, who’d had bad luck—”

  “—Who’d fucked up.”

  “—who’d fucked up, maybe he shouldn’t be in charge of an investigation involving a sniper. Maybe his judgment was clouded, maybe he was prejudiced. Maybe that’s why the investigation, which was going so well, has now bounced off in a strange new direction.”

  “So is he threatening me, is that it?”

  “They don’t work like that. He wants to meet you, develop a relationship. Tulsa will come up, sure. But just give him the idea of working with him, play him a little, buy us some time. That’s what the Bureau needs. Meet him for lunch. It’s just lunch.”

  “Arggggh,” said Nick.

  19

  It was in the middle of the block on Fifty-third off Blackstone, what was called a row house from an earlier century, strange to the eyes of a man who thought of houses as being miles apart from each other. But it was still magnificent, with a broad stairway leading to a broad porch and vast oak door, its windows wide and deep, its gables peaked. It had the look of castle, something from Olde England, built with refined money in a neighborhood full of refined money, where everything old had been made new again, with the best in modern design, plumbing, lighting fixtures, and the best in burnished old wood and brick. Hyde Park, in southeast Chicago, in the shadow of the Museum of Science and Industry, all that remained of a White City where a hundred-odd years ago they had celebrated science, industry, and progress. A steady wind rushed in off the cold lake, throwing torrents of fallen leaves about.

  “What do you expect to find?” Detective Washington asked Bob, who sat in the front seat of Washington’s unmarked Impala a couple of doors down from the Strong-Reilly house, now darkened in the falling light.

  “I don’t know,” said Bob. “Evidence of penetration, I suppose.”

  Washington, in his forties, 240, exceptionally black and full of unconscious tough-guy mannerisms with a sheen of graying hair that looked like gunmetal, said, “You sure you want to do this? You could get yourself in a peck of trouble, me too, and for something you ain’t even sure exists. Don’t sound like a good play to me. You could do it official and save us both time in jail.”

  “I’m just looking at options,” said Bob. “If we go the route the law requires, I have to talk your department or the FBI into doing something nobody’s ready to do. Time passes. Then even if they say yeah, they got to get warrants, assemble a team, dot the i’s and cross the t’s, and that’s more time. Time is not on our side. My position is the guys we’re investigating right now—”

  “If they exist.”

  “Yeah, if they exist, they would have been the ones to toss the house that you picked up on, so at some level you think they exist. The point is now, they think they got away clean. The
y’re not taking any precautions, they think they’re so smart; this is when we have to go aggressively against them. If they sniff our interest, they’ll go into a much harder defensive position, double-check, begin to erase clues or witnesses, move against us. This is the sneaking-up part snipers are famous for.”

  Washington shook his immense, wise head. “Gunny, okay, but answer me this one, then. Say, for example, you’re right. These guys had to get something, something physical, out of that house. So why do they need to go to the trouble of killing not only Strong and Reilly but also Joan Flanders and Mitch Greene? If they’re professional enough to put something like that together, they’d certainly be professional enough to hire some burglar who could take the house down, locate, and remove whatever it was.”

  “Well,” said Bob, “he wants them dead. But in a certain way. If they sell everybody on the idea that crazed sniper Carl Hitchcock, fucked up from Vietnam, killed these four people, and all of that seems to add up, then that’s as far as you go, right? You got it all there—motive, opportunity, means, time frame. It’s so tempting. Everyone wants this thing solved, and there’s the solution, plain as the nose on your face. What you don’t do then is look into the lives of the victims. You don’t see what they were up to, what they had going on, who they were, what connections they had, what moves they were making. All that stuff’s off the board. So I’m putting it back on the board. My read is that something Strong and Reilly did or were planning to do got them whacked hard. The other two went down as smokescreen. Strong and Reilly were the target. If whoever he is kills just them, he knows their lives will be investigated, and such an investigation would lead to him. He needs a way to kill them in which their deaths are seen as unimportant, marginal, an afterthought, while all the focus goes on Joan. So if there’s an answer, it’s somewhere in Jack and Mitzi’s lives in the last few weeks, so I’m going to take a look-see. I’m going to shake the tree and see what falls out.”