Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

Through the thin walls, I hear him moving around. I can sympathize: as Raptor, I have many bad nights. But then, at midnight, he leaves again. What is he up to, driving off into the dark emptiness?

He returns to the dunes. I park my car up near the highway and follow on foot. Halfway up a dune I find him, sleeping like a baby. Death Valley’s stark beauty seems to have given him profound tranquillity: I shall take it back.

My RAPTOR note still in my pocket, a safety pin in the compact first-aid/notion kit I always carry in the field, I think myself into my coyote-trickster mode for stalking game. He will not sense me. I approach, tie his shoelaces, pin the note.

I return to the ranch. Stagnaro returns at 4:16. He paces, paces, leaves again at first light. I follow. We both see Gounaris off. Perfect-our appointment will be at another Samarra, later. Stagnaro joins Abramson at the breakfast table; a man of honor indeed, I know how he hates all mobsters’ guts.

In a flash I see my method of execution. I call Abramson on the phone, tell him I am scheduled to kill him next, admit I fear for my own life and will make a deal with him. I say a nasty thing about his mother, to enrage him and thus keep him from thinking clearly; emotion always clouds reason. I offer him a meet. He leaps at the chance.

The rest is mere execution. The site is admirably chosen, I have the necessary rifle and scope in the trunk of my car-I have been a hunter, a shooter, all my life. It is manufactured the year I am born-a Winchester center-fire Model 70 in. 270, bolt action, which I can work in a blur because I have fired thousands of rounds through it. My scope is a Leupold 10X, my ammunition is Lake City Match M852s. I have come to shoot.

I am about to squeeze off the killing round when Abramson enters the toilet stall. To equate his death with his ultimate evacuation is too delightful to pass up. I lay down a barrage, take him out decisively, slip away when Stagnaro shows up.

Abramson’s is the first killing I have actually enjoyed. Am I getting callous? Losing my soul? Or is it because this is longdistance rifle shooting, the kind of shooting I have been doing at targets and game most of my life? You are no longer man and rifle, it is no longer scope and target, it is spot-weld of cheek to stock, it is nonverbal, it is…

Or is it just that the colossal hypocrisy of Gideon Abramson’s life makes his death-the sixth in the series-the most satisfying?

“The sixth day of creation,” said Will. “Tomorrow, the God of Genesis rests. Today… well, today is a long day indeed for Him. Tough to cram all that creating into twenty-four hours. In science’s terms an even longer day, stretching from the late Paleozoic a bit over 300 million years ago to this evening’s mighty reckoning in this little room.”

Another hint, thought Dante, that Will had returned knowing Raptor was going to be waiting for him.

“Genesis: ‘And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.’

“That’s it, folks. Shazam! Cattle, creepings things, beasts of the earth. Everything except His final creation, man, made and then instructed during the balance of the sixth day.

“But we need the fossil time frame, not a few minutes of a single twenty-four-hour day, to explain what went before to shape us with all our terrible and glorious complexities and contradictions.

“As vertebrates we had gained a bony skeleton, a jointed spine, muscle and nerve systems that oxygenated and circulated the blood. As amphibians we became tetrapods: air-breathers with no more than five digits on each of our paired limbs.

“The amphibians were most successful for their day, some getting to be a few feet long and shaped like a silly-looking crocodile drawn by a five-year-old. In less than 100 million years they developed into the earliest reptile, proto-reptile, what we could call the base reptile, so successful that the amphibians today have been reduced to barely enough frogs and newts, as William Howells notes, ‘to keep a witch in brew.’

“By changing to proto-reptile, what did we gain over the amphibian ancestors we so closely resembled? We became amniotes. Only mammals, reptiles, and birds-which wouldn’t appear for sure until the flying feathered dinosaur, archaeopteryx, in the late Jurassic 170 million years ago-are amniotes.

“Amniotes have their fetal development either in an egg or in a womb. The amnion, and other protective membranes, supply the fetus with food and oxygen.

“Successively more advanced models followed that base reptile of 300 million years ago. They became the first of four ‘Megadynasties’ that Robert Bakker, a maverick dinosaur guru who has stood paleontology on its ear a score of times, suggests have existed during the history of life on land.

“Megadynasty One, the proto-reptiles, had great staying power-these early reptiles ruled for 20 million years with two types of beasts. Big quick predators, dimetrodons-popularly, ‘sail lizards’ because of tall webbed spines on their backs-and big slow vegetarians.

“Near the very end of the Paleozoic era, maybe 260 m.y. ago, one line of these sluggish and decidedly cold-blooded proto-reptiles split into two basic new vertebrate life-forms. One, called thecondonts, became the modern reptiles, the dinosaurs, and their descendants, the birds.

“The other became mammal-like reptiles called therapsids-some call them synapsids, although I doubt they had very many synapses to help them along-that formed the second of Bakker’s Megadynasties. They dominated the thecodonts from the late Permian through the Triassic, ranging from early bone-headed proto-mammals to, at the end of their reign, very advanced dog-faced cynodonts just a knife blade away from true mammals.

“They had become warm-blooded-mammal-like bony palates separating the mouth and nose cavities in some of them suggest this-but the mass extinction 249 m.y. ago at the Paleozoic/Mesozoic boundary finished them. They already had spawned the true mammals, however, tiny mouse-like things that had to wait their turn because the reptiles moved first, evolved faster, to grab all major Mesozoic ecological niches.

“These Archosauria-true reptiles-the most successful early model being the so-called crimson crocodiles, were soon weighing in at a half-ton or so, and the third Megadynasty, the Age of Reptiles, was under way. Through the Jurassic and Cretaceous right up to the end of the Mesozoic 65 m.y. ago, dinosaurs and other reptiles reigned supreme. Their story is not our story, but they were a tremendous success.

“They ruled the earth as tyrannosaurs, as stegosaurs, as ceratopsians, as massive sauropods like diplodocus and brontosaurus who reached eighty tons in weight and a hundred feet in length. Truly thunder lizards. They reentered the sea as plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and mosasaurs. Soared the skies as pterodons, pterosaurs, and pterodactyls, in sizes ranging from a robin to a jet fighter.

“Archosauria seemed destined to control the world forever. Why didn’t it? Because of the infamous mass extinction at the K/T (Cretaceous-Tertiary) boundary 65 m.y. ago, often called the Great Dying. The dinosaurs went extinct not through bad genes, but through bad luck. Environmental catastrophe overtook them. Three-fourths of all living species on the earth, in the sea, in the sky, were abruptly terminated.

“The current Megadynasty Four, the Age of Mammals, was about to begin. At first it didn’t look like much. During the dinosaurs’ reign the mammals essentially were limited to two major sorts of what Bakker called little furballs: the rodent and the shrew. These little guys played out their tiny, apparently insignificant destinies down around the dinosaurs’ toenails, but they bore the marks of the mammal-live birth, warm blood, flexible skeleton.