John Lutz - Fear the Night

Wearing his sunglasses, he elevatored to the lobby and left the hotel. He walked the three blocks to the blank brick wall he’d just shot. Standing nearby with his arms crossed, his sunglasses hooked over the neck of his T-shirt, he glanced around and above like a tourist taking in the city. It was easier than he’d anticipated to see where the soft bullet he’d fired from so far away had chipped the brick surface, six inches from the building corner it must barely clear. The rifle was shooting true, as he knew it would.

He returned to the hotel, then patiently, patiently, repeated this process three more times. Each time he removed the inflexible frame with vise-attached rifle from the roof brackets and concealed it in the closet, walked the three blocks to the corner, and observed the results of his shots. Each time he calculated trajectory, angle, and windage. The wind, of course, would be the only variable, but the weather report for tomorrow night was a virtual repeat of this evening’s. Fate was cooperating.

His last shot had struck the wall less than an inch from the building’s corner. When he returned to the hotel, the slightest adjustment of the precision scope, the precision rifle, its frame secure in its roof brackets, was all that was needed, and he could be sure.

Precision.

He felt a warmth spread in him, and a confidence. He’d figured out how to make this seemingly impossible shot. He’d make it by not making it.

Well, not exactly.

In a sense, he’d already made the shot, or at least set it up, though it had taken him four tries. Next time he wouldn’t have to sight in and aim, because that had already been done.

When he squeezed the trigger tomorrow night, he wouldn’t have to rely on the bullet going to the mayor, because the mayor would have gone to where the bullet would be.

The Night Sniper would stay with the firmly mounted and aimed rifle now; it needed only have its supporting frame affixed to the metal roof brackets to duplicate today’s shot. Until the time of the mayor’s death arrived, the Sniper would remain behind the DONOTDISTURB sign, wearing surgical gloves even while eating crustless sandwiches and drinking Evian.

While he was confident about the shot he’d make tomorrow night, it bothered him that the subway stops were being watched. It was something he hadn’t planned on. He’d been counting on his frequent manner of traveling underground and avoiding attention and capture after a shooting; his homeless clothes and backpack were in the Louis Vuitton bag. The cloth bag itself would fold and fit neatly into his backpack, along with his rifle, when he left the hotel via a side door.

He shrugged inwardly, knowing nothing other than vengeance was writ in stone. Perhaps the tight subway security necessitated a change of tactics. He had some ideas in that regard.

Placing his water bottle on the carpet, he walked to the window and looked out at the descending night and the array of lights that lay before him like a kingdom he’d sworn to destroy. His was a life unwasted. A life that meant something grand. Pride stirred deeper emotion. For a moment a yearning for his dead mother and his wronged and lost fathers rose like fire in him and he thought he might cry.

Instead he smiled, liking the way his plans were shaping up, admiring his own nimble adaptation to his opponent’s every move.

Murder was so much like chess.

He went down to the lobby for only a few minutes to use a public phone.

By 7:30 PM, the area around Rockefeller Plaza was teeming with over twenty thousand people. Various speakers found their way to the podium: various rights advocates, councilmen, and other city officials spoke briefly to demonstrate their confidence and courage, some of them unconsciously slouching as if to make themselves smaller targets. One of them, a councilman from Brooklyn, actually dived to the plank floor when a nearby balloon popped; then he managed to rise and toe the floor as if he’d slipped on a protruding nail or a wrinkle in the green outdoor carpet. Not a few in the crowd had reacted the same way, so he was greeted with only sporadic boos or laughter.

The speakers appeared not only live but on four large digital TV screens raised and angled so everyone could see who was at the massed microphones. News channel trucks, local and national, were parked as near as possible to the podium, some of them with their large tower antennae raised high above the masses. Now and then someone emerged from the crowd to invade the small area roped off for the trucks, cameras, and crews, then mug or go into a wave-and-smile routine.

“They’re acting like it’s a St. Patrick’s Day rally,” Meg said to Repetto. They were standing on Forty-ninth Street with a view of the Plaza.

“They know there’s only one true target,” Repetto said. “I wonder how many of them are here hoping the mayor is shot.”

“Plenty,” Meg said. “It’s the way people’s minds work.”

“Some people, anyway.”

“You sound less cynical than I am,” Meg said.

“I am, Meg. Haven’t you noticed?” He smiled at her. “On the other hand, you seem more. . contented lately.”

She stared at him. What the hell did Repetto mean by that, with a kind of smirk she’d seen on men before?

By the time she’d decided to ask him, he was speaking into his cell phone and had moved away into the crowd.

At 8:30 one of the mayor’s aides began to introduce him. The crowd’s mood changed. Those farthest back pressed forward. Those nearest the podium massed closer to it.

The aide, a pol Repetto knew as one of those who gave the NYPD the most heat from City Hall, made a grand gesture and raised his hands high to lead the applause. The crowd roared, some riding the shoulders of others and obscuring Meg’s view. She focused on one of the wall-sized screens and saw a small, gray-haired figure in an immaculately tailored dark blue suit stride toward the podium. The crowd noise became deafening.

The mayor grinned wide and raised a hand high with his fingers in the victory sign, then made a damping, downward motion with both hands so the noise might subside enough for him to begin his speech.

It took several minutes for the crowd to become orderly enough that he might be heard.

Almost three blocks away, on the setback roof of the Marimont Hotel, the Night Sniper crouched behind the rifle set by vises in its rigid aluminum frame. The frame was mounted firmly and immovably to the blacktop and gravel roofing material and the planking beneath it. The frame, the rifle with its night scope and flash suppresser, composed a virtual one-piece unit that was as steady as the building itself.

The Sniper, peering intently through the telescopic sight, saw and heard nothing other than the figure of the mayor at the lectern and the distant roar of the crowd. He hadn’t counted on the oversize TV screens, but fortunately they didn’t block his incredibly narrow field of fire.

Motionless as the lethal creation he’d attached to the roof, he waited for the moment he knew would be his. He wanted to read the mayor’s body language, to feel, to know, that the mayor wouldn’t move suddenly and avoid his fate.

Even from this distance he could feel it; he was inside the mayor’s mind. Hunter and prey were one, and the bullet would travel the arc of connection between them as surely as if it were on tracks.

The metal frame and vises held the rifle firmly. His eye was less than an inch from the scope. The only part of the rifle he touched, ever so lightly, was the trigger.

Elated by the turnout and crowd enthusiasm, the mayor raised both hands high and then lowered them palms-out. There was something like silence from the boisterous crowd.