John Lutz: Fear the Night

He and a dozen others made their livings as sketch artists, working mostly in Times Square after the theater curtains dropped and people spilled out into the streets to walk to subway stops or their hotels or futilely wave for taxis. For twenty dollars Jim Lu or his fellow sketch artists would provide a charcoal likeness of any person who would pose for ten minutes. For an additional fifteen dollars they would provide a sturdy cardboard frame. This was illegal, of course, but when the police chased them they would simply open shop on some other busy corner, often just across the street. There was much for the police to tend to in the theater district when it was jammed with people, and simple sketch artists moved them only to cursory efforts.

This woman-Betty Ern was her name, and Jim Lu had elicited from her that she was from Iowa-was quite easy to capture in charcoal. She had thick black hair and dark eyes, and a receding chin that Jim Lu would give definition. He knew how to flatter his subjects, removing a few years here, adding cheekbone or eye width there, and still they would look like themselves.

He sat on his wooden folding chair before his easel, his back to the traffic, facing pedestrians streaming past beyond those who’d decided to pose or simply to observe. Jim Lu began with the left eye, as he always did, working carefully and slowly. Once he had Betty’s left eye perfectly, her brow and the side of her nose, he would work faster, enlarging, keying off the eye. Every living thing he drew, he began with its left eye. He thought sometimes that the soul must live there.

Betty Ern seemed a nice enough lady. Every twenty seconds or so she’d become embarrassed by his quick, appraising glances, and a smile would sneak onto her face. Her husband or boyfriend, a large man in a gray suit, stood off to the side and watched, trying not to seem too impatient to be going.

Jim Lu ignored the man, ignored the traffic teeming noisily behind him on Broadway, ignored the mass of humanity flowing along the sidewalk before him. Gray Suit edged toward the curb so he could see what Jim Lu was doing, then grinned at Betty.

“Not much there yet,” he said, “but what there is sure looks like you.”

Jim Lu smiled and nodded at the compliment he’d barely heard in his deep concentration.

Yet a part of his mind thought of Michelle, as it had more and more often lately. Michelle who so liked to give and receive oral sex. When he was finished here-

A pain erupted in his back, then in his chest and arms. His head must have jerked backward because he was staring up through the haze of light at faint stars that became fainter …

Betty Ern heard the loud, echoing crack! and thought at first something had fallen from a building. But the artist, the little man with the neat dark beard and mustache, had slumped from his chair and crashed to the sidewalk with his easel. Betty stared numbly down at him, at the sketch paper on the pavement, at her single left eye staring back at her. Only her eye, but she knew it was her own.

She noticed specks of blood on it, around it.

Someone or something slapped her hard, high in the chest, just beneath her throat. She heard another of the loud, reverberating cracks and was aware that she’d fallen backward, aware of people surrounding her, arms supporting her upper body, screams off in the distance. Where am I? What happened? She tried to inhale but couldn’t, and the pain and panic carried her to cold dark spaces. Her last coherent thought was of the loud, reverberating noise she’d heard, like the screen door slamming on the farm where she grew up. It was a sound she’d loved. As a girl she always slammed the door going out … coming home.

The next morning he read the front page of the New York Post and smiled. It hadn’t taken the media long to decide what to call him: “The Night Sniper.” That was fine. Nights were most convenient for him. And since the media were giving him the night, he accepted.

The Night Sniper. Crisp and descriptive.

It would make wonderful headlines.

Repetto sat staring at the Times in the Bonaire Diner when Carrie placed his eggs, toast, and coffee before him.

“Hell of a thing last night in Times Square,” she said. “Must be a nut, this Night Sniper. World’s full of nuts, don’t you think?”

“Except for thee and me,” Repetto said, moving the folded newspaper aside to make room for his plate.

“Two people shot to death, and three injured in a traffic accident when all the cars tried to get outta there, bunch of people damn near trampled to death when they realized they were being shot at.” She topped off his coffee. “Musta been bedlam.”

“New York,” Repetto said sadly.

“Whatza difference?”

“People in Bedlam are certified insane.”

As he began to eat, he stole glances at the paper. A sketch artist and a tourist from Iowa, both dead. A teenage girl in a limo killed when a cab collided with it near the shooting. More injuries from traffic accidents. A child almost trampled to death on the sidewalk.

Repetto felt an anger growing in him that supplanted his appetite.

It didn’t help when his cell phone chirped.

He dug the phone from the pocket of his jacket folded on the seat beside him. “Repetto,” he said, swallowing a bite of egg.

“It’s Lou Melbourne here.”

“It’s breakfast here.”

“I figured that’s where you’d be. Don’t you usually read the paper while you’re abusing your arteries?”

“I was doing just that. Front page. Times Square last night.”

“The Night Sniper phoned us last night after it happened, Vin. I gave him your answer. He didn’t like it.”

Repetto knew where Melbourne was going with the conversation. “It isn’t my fault those two people were shot last night. It’s entirely the fault of the asshole who squeezed the trigger.”

“Sure. But does he see it that way?”

“He’s insane,” Repetto pointed out. “We don’t know how he sees it, and it might not make sense to us if we did know.”

“You’re the expert with serial killers, Vin, but we both know they follow their own weird logic. It’s why they kill. It’s why they get caught.”

Repetto sipped coffee. “I’m not personally responsible for any of that.”

“We agree. But folks in the mayor’s office are in a tizzy. So’s the commissioner, and so’s the chief of department, my boss.”

“You don’t sound in a tizzy.”

“It’s my job not to, but I’m all tizzied up inside. Two people shot to death; then the killer called and said you had a few days to think over my offer-his offer, really-then he’d kill two more. He said for me to tell you their deaths would be on your conscience.”

“Anything else he tell you?”

“He said he had plenty of bullets.”

Repetto said nothing. He sipped his coffee. He didn’t like the way his heartbeat had picked up. The way his blood was racing. The cold rage in the core of him.

“I can hire you as an official consultant and give you two good detectives full-time until the Sniper is nailed,” Melbourne said. “You won’t be officially out of retirement, so you can still draw your pension and keep your promise to Lora.”

“Isn’t that a difference without a distinction?”

“That’s the kind of bullshit we hear every day in court, Vin, and it floats there but not here. You do this thing for us, for the city, and you won’t be bothered again. Travel, go to all the Broadway shows you want, eat well, drink well, rot the rest of your life away happy. That’s fine. But we both know before God, you’re the only one who can do this thing.”

“Lou-”

“Okay, the one who can do it best.”