Брайан Гарфилд - Death Sentence

“You can smell it. If anybody’d got in his way he’d have killed them without a second thought.”

“Is that your answer?”

“If my actions have prevented a single innocent person from being killed by these animals, then I’m justified. That’s my answer.”

“There’s something else, though.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s not just something you do out of a feeling of duty.”

“No. I do it because they scare me. I’m afraid of them and that makes me hate them. Hate — it’s an honest feeling.”

It went around in circles and he never found its ending.

¶ Chicago, Dec. 30th— A violent double-homicide late last night in the Ford City shopping center may have provided Chicago police with their first important clue to the identity of the vigilante.

The killings took place at 11:20 p.m. when two hold-up men entered the Pizza Heaven counter restaurant, held five people at gunpoint while they cleaned out the cash register, and left the restaurant only to be cut down in a hail of bullets by a man in a car, firing a pistol from his open car window.

The assailant then drove away, but not before the people in the restaurant had seen his face.

Both holdup men were pronounced dead by a police surgeon who arrived only minutes later with an ambulance summoned by two motorized patrol officers who reached the scene only moments after the pizza chef, Henry Fino, telephoned the police.

A stolen car found parked within thirty feet of the restaurant is assumed to be the holdup men’s intended getaway car; its engine was still running when police arrived.

Several Chicago reporters reached the scene quickly, alerted by code calls on police-band radios; they were in time to see Captain Victor Mastro arrive. Captain Mastro, chief of the Homicide Division’s detectives, has been placed in charge of the special detail designated to investigate the vigilante cases.

Reporters were not permitted to interview the four patrons who had been at the counter in the restaurant at the time of the killings. Their identities were withheld by police, and the four witnesses were secluded immediately. The pizza chef, Mr. Fino, talked with reporters but his position in the restaurant during the shootings had been near the cash register at the rear and he had not seen either the vigilante or the car.

Mr. Fino said, however, that at least two of the four people at the counter had “seen the whole thing.”

Captain Mastro told reporters that according to his preliminary reconstruction of the events, “It looks likely the vigilante was following them, tailing their car.”

Asked why he felt that was the case, Captain Mastro explained, “Because otherwise it’s too coincidental, his showing up just at the time they were backing out of the restaurant with the loot. We assume he either knew who the two men were, or had some reason to suspect their intentions. He must have tailed them into the shopping center parking lot, and arrived in front of the restaurant just as they finished emptying the till. He switched off his headlights until the two men left the restaurant. Then he turned the lights on, pinning the two men in the headlight beams, and fired four times before they had time to know what hit them.”

The two deceased holdup men have not yet been identified. Their fingerprints have been forwarded to Washington in the hope that FBI files will assist in identifying them. “They weren’t Chicagoans,” Captain Mastro said. “Probably a couple of drifters, passing through.”

The two holdup men were armed with cheap “Saturday night special” handguns, neither of which had been fired recently.

Captain Mastro said, “When the assailant backed his car out and turned it around to drive away from the restaurant, his face was seen by at least two of the people in the restaurant. We have a description of him from these witnesses, and we’re pressing the investigation vigorously on that basis.”

The captain declined to state any particulars about the description obtained from the witnesses. Mr. Fino, however, said that to the best of his knowledge, the customers at the counter had not gotten too good a look at the man in the car. He said one of the witnesses had told him, “It looked like a white man with light hair — grey or blond or white hair. But that was about all she could see.” That judgment would seem to be borne out by a cursory survey of the arrangement of lights in the shopping center parking lot; the face of a man sitting inside a car thirty feet from the front of the restaurant would be vaguely identifiable at best, according to experiments performed by reporters on the scene; and visibility was hampered by steam and smoke stains on the plate-glass front windows of the pizza restaurant, through which the witnesses are said to have seen the vigilante.

Police admitted that none of the witnesses was able to provide either the license number or even a usable description of the vigilante’s automobile.

Fragments of four bullets removed from the two deceased hold-up men appear to have been fired by the same .45 caliber automatic pistol used in several previous killings attributed to the vigilante; according to the police.

“The ammunition, both in the thirty-eight cases and in the forty-five cases, has been expanding hollow-point ammunition,” Captain Mastro said. “These dum-dum bullets tend to explode on contact, shattering into little fragments like shrapnel. Naturally this process makes it considerably more difficult to recover significant bullet sections and to subject them to identification analysis in the laboratory. I’m not trying to say it can’t be done. It can be done, and we are doing it, but it takes longer and the results sometimes are not as conclusive as we’d like them to be. For example, in two cases involving these .45 bullets, we can’t absolutely prove they were fired by the same weapon that fired all the others, although the circumstantial evidence suggests they were. We simply didn’t recover enough lead that hadn’t been smashed beyond recognition.”

Captain Mastro revealed, additionally, that none of the expired empty cartridge cases have been recovered by police at the scenes of any of the killings. “In the case of the revolver that’s not surprising, of course, since revolvers don’t automatically eject their empty cartridge cases,” Captain Mastro said. “But the .45 automatic ejects its brass each time it fires, and this means our man has been careful to stop and pick up his empties before leaving the scenes of his killings. Either that or he’s done his shooting from inside his car, so that the empties are ejected into the car where he can collect them at his leisure.”

Progress has been made in identifying the type and manufacture of the vigilante weapons, according to Captain Mastro. “We’ve found out in the laboratory what the make and model of the two handguns are. We’re withholding that information for the moment, but we do have it.”

“You’re in a good mood, Paul.”

“It’s New Year’s Eve. It comes with the territory.” He gave her a friendly swat on a firm bouncy buttock.

Irene carried her drink to the window. The blinds were open; frost rimmed the edges of the plate glass. “It’s a marvelous view from here. You’re very lucky.”

He moved to her; he felt her spine beneath his fingers. “Think of all the frantic parties tonight.”

“I never go to those. A quiet evening for me. My God, kazoos and noisemakers and funny hats.”

“And Auld Lang Syne and kissing everybody in the room.”

“I’ll go for that part,” she said; she gave him a sideways look, up from under; she was laughing and he pulled her forward and kissed her, felt her mouth push out, relax and open.