Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

“Everybody has tells, from eye rolls to breathing patterns to body posture. Everybody’s his own landscape. And I will say this, if I have a skill it’s at reading landscape. So let me look over the landscape and we’ll see what I-”

They had emerged from the elevator, made it down the hall, and turned into the suite of working rooms that Task Force Zarzi occupied, and there to greet them was Starling, looking shaken.

“What’s up?”

“There’s been a huge shoot-out in Baltimore,” she said. “World War Three at a car wash. And it involves somebody you put an APB out on, somebody called Crackers the Clown.”

HOWARD AND 25TH

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

1215 HOURS TO 1656.38 HOURS

The glasses were the key.

Check the glasses, he always told himself. Once every five minutes, check the glasses.

Cruz had fallen into that rhythm. Here, he worked anonymously, one of twenty or so invisibles who scurried for tips by drying, sweeping, polishing the drippy wet vehicles that emerged from the tunnel of spray wax, steam, jetting soapy water, and rubber strips like jungle fronds that hung from a mechanically contrived tube structure and somehow magically undulated the road grime off the cars. It saved him from brooding, it brought in money, it kept him active. Nobody asked questions, nobody took roll, nobody made friends outside their ethnic groups; the pay, usually about $50 a day, was in change and small bills. He was faceless in this crowd of hustling shiners and polishers, and he was the only one who looked at the shape of the sunglasses, for a teardrop that spoke not of Jackie O and her husband Ari, but of the sandbox, the ’Stan, the global war on terrorism.

He saw them while the fellow was still in the glass building laying out his $15 for the super wash.

Tear shaped, dark, held in place not by two arms but by a stout elasticized strap as insurance against vigorous action, with insectoid, convex lenses under polyurethane frames, the curvature of the lenses extreme so that the polarized plastic, strong enough to stop buckshot, also protected the wearer’s peripheral vision, just the thing to pick up the approach of a fast-moving assaulter from three or nine o’clock. They were Wiley X’s, of the style called AirRage 697s, big in Tommy Tactical contractor culture.

Ray slipped low, between cars, not panicking, but breathing hard. Then he had a spurt of rage. How did the motherfuckers find me again? There had to be a leak somewhere, goddamnit, and he swore that if he got out of this, he would brace up old man Swagger so hard he shook his dentures out. Every fucking time Swagger showed, these goddamn bastards were right behind him.

But he got his war mind back fast. He pretended to polish a wheel cover of an already shining BMW convertible, and slipped a quick recon glance at the dude just as he emerged from the building and sat under an umbrella on a kind of patio where the owners waited and watched as the towel boys worked over their cars.

Guy was wearing a black baseball cap without insignia and some kind of bulky raincoat as if it was cold out and of course it wasn’t. You could hide a lot under that coat. Cruz continued to steal seconds of examination, noting next that the Tommy Tactical made an obvious show of disinterest in the cars before him, not hunting for any particular one, not noticing his own car-it must have been that Dodge Charger, just coming out of the steam, its wet skin glinting in the sunlight-but adapting a quick posture of lassitude and sloth as he flopped casually in a plastic chair and began to examine his nails.

Cruz shot a glance at the man’s shoes: Danner assault boots, though unbloused, the crumple of the sloppy hems denoting that they had been smartly tucked commando style until just a few minutes ago.

“Hey, guy, are you trying to win the Nobel Prize for that tire or what?” someone said, and it was the car’s owner, impatiently leaning across the trunk to hurry the pitiful illegal onward.

Ray smiled obsequiously and backed off, waving the man onward.

As he turned to work on another vehicle, he let himself look down the one-way course of Howard Street and saw another guy whose face, though far off, appeared obscured by the tactical shape of the ultracool combat shades and that guy was coming along, and would be here in a minute or two.

Run? He could pretend to mosey backward, hit and roll over the wall, and head down the alley to-but he didn’t know what was down the alley and cursed himself for the operator’s most basic mistake: he hadn’t had the energy to learn all the back streets, all the fast exits, the fallbacks, the shortcuts, the near invisible secret passages.

Besides, the guy on the street was drawing closer, ever closer, and now it was too late to make a sudden break. He saw how it had to go; they would wait a few more seconds, until the walker got right up to the courtyard, then he and the sitter would go to guns fast with whatever big mean black toys their coats concealed, and converge, catching him between fire from two angles, with nowhere to go but down.

He had a Glock 19 concealed in a Galco horizontal shoulder rig under his beat-to-hell Harvard hoodie and long-sleeved T-shirt, and two extra fifteen-rounders on the off-side, giving him forty-five rounds of 147-grain Federal hollow point. He turned his O’s cap backward on his head, so its bill wouldn’t protrude into the top zone of his sight picture. He reached inside the outerwear, unsnapped the Galco, felt the small, heavy automatic pistol slide into his hand and, under these circumstances, he took joy from its touch. It was found money, getting laid on the first date, all black on the range, a nice word from the colonel.

Okay, motherfuckers, he told himself with another deep, calming breath, going hard into his war mind, you want me, you come and get me .

Taking care not to directly confront or track his target, Mick Bogier eased into one of the plastic chairs sloppily, arms and legs all over the place, and tried to be a guy with no particular place to go getting it cleaned up real nice while sitting in the sun. As he oriented himself, he could see Crackers moving down the street, not rushing, not tactical, but-Crackers had a lot of combat and a lot of ops behind him-totally selling the pic of another innocent stroller shuffling along, maybe to the liquor store for a six of Bud and a lottery ticket, maybe to the library for a new thriller, maybe to the Mickey D’s down the street for a Big Mac with fries and a Diet Coke. Crackers just walked along.

A plug ran from Mick’s ear to a throat mike dangling just alongside his chin before the cord disappeared inside his jacket and linked to his cell.

“You got him?” he asked, trying not to speak loudly or even look like he was speaking.

“I saw him duck. Yellow baseball cap, maroon sweatshirt, he’s behind that brown Galaxy, working the tires. Seems to be a tire guy, that’s his specialty.”

“How’s he moving? I’m too close to look directly.”

“Like any shine boy. A little monkey. He hasn’t made us yet, he’s trying to get the shine on that Galaxy wheel.”

“When you get to the entrance, you slide into the lot and index on me. At that point, I’ll head out there like I’m reclaiming the car, swing behind the Galaxy, yank the five and give him a mag. When I fire, you dump a mag high into the glass of that building. That should scatter the fuckin’ ducks. Then we roll the wall and Z picks us up. You got that, Z?”

“Am pulling into street now,” said Z, from his spot a block away.

“I am watching you, you are watching him, any movement?”

“No, now that I’m close I can see him really scrubbing on that-oh, now he’s moved to the front tire, other side from you. Still ain’t made us, snoozing the day away. This is going to be easy.”