Jonathon King - Eye of Vengeance

"A target? Well, I didn't really get that far," Hargrave said and Nick thought that was going to be it until he continued. "But I did get some intelligence that he left his house this morning in his truck at six."

"And where might this intelligence have come from?" Nick asked.

"I stopped him in his driveway," Hargrave said. "He is one ugly guy, by the way."

"Tell me something I don't know, Detective."

"I informed him that the Sheriff's Office had reason to believe that he may be in danger and told him maybe it wouldn't be such a good idea to go to work today."

"And?" Nick said, feeling the heat of anger crawl up his neck.

"He asked for an explanation and as soon as I got to the part that had to do with you, he told me to fuck off and move my car out of his way."

Nick stayed quiet.

"Frankly, I don't need that shit," Hargrave finally said. "Even if you're right about Redman wanting to kill this son-of-a-bitch, I don't need it."

Nick wanted to say he agreed and just walk away. But somewhere in the last few days the story had changed for him. It was now more about saving Redman from himself than it was about saving his targets.

"Well, Walker never showed up here."

"I know," Hargrave said. "I'm watching his truck from four cars back. We're stopped at a roadblock to warehouse row, they're checking all I.D.s of people entering because of some federal action at a Cuban nursing home that's supposed to go off at nine."

"I heard," Nick said.

"Oh, really? Fitzgerald told us it was supposed to be a need-to-know deal, highly secretive."

"Yeah, well, what good is a photo opportunity like that if you don't tell the press?" Nick said.

"Yeah, well, if that info is floating around, Fitzgerald's not going to be a happy man," Hargrave said.

"You talked to him?"

"Right after I hung up with you last night I called Lieutenant Canfield. Then he patched together a conference call with Fitzgerald. The guy sounded hinky. He was under the gun because they got some kind of intel that this sniper they're looking for is definitely a foreigner and has been in the country doing one of those sleeper things, laying low, for a year.

"But that obit of yours with the National Guardsman's dad blaming the secretary for his kid's death might have creeped him out. They actually ran some kind of itinerary on Redman's movements over there and he might have spent time with the dead kid's unit. You didn't know that too, did you, Mullins?"

"No," Nick said. "But doesn't that say something to you, Detective?"

"Like too many coincidences?" Hargrave answered. "Yeah, it talks to me. But I get the feeling Fitzgerald is sticking with the foreigner-on-our-soil theory."

"But what do you think? Who's Redman's next target?"

"I already told you. I'm on Walker's ass right now," Hargrave said. "But you must be close by if you know he's not at work yet, Nick. So where exactly are you calling from? And what the hell are you doing?"

Michael Redman lay with the hooded binoculars up to his face for forty-five minutes, but still his eyes were not tired. His eyes had never been tired. He could hold this position, prone on the roof, forever if he had to because if that's what had to be done, he would do it.

A week ago Redman had followed Mullins one morning and tracked him. He thought he might approach the reporter. Let him know what his stories had meant to him, how he'd planned this out for a year, how he was going to be the sword to Mullins's pen.

But he'd held off and tracked Mullins to this street and then watched as the reporter tucked his car in behind a trash Dumpster and then just sat there. Redman had been intrigued by the behavior. Maybe Mullins was working some investigative story. Maybe he was having a liaison with some woman. Redman had read about the accident that killed Mullins's wife and kid. It made sense that the guy wouldn't be shacking up with a new lady in front of his remaining daughter. Mullins was stand-up.

Redman had watched the reporter until a Ford F-150 showed and parked in front of a tool shop. The driver, dressed in a work shirt and six-pocket fatigue pants, got out and unlocked the shop. Redman scoped Mullins at the same time and could read the hardness in his face. This was who he'd been waiting for. But once the mark was inside, Mullins simply waited a few minutes and then drove away.

Intrigued, Redman stayed. He had no deadlines. His was a patient study of people and what they did or did not do. In an hour the street began to fill with traffic and working men and women and Redman was about to slip away when the man Mullins had been watching reappeared from the shop, got into his truck and left. Maybe it was the bush pants that caught his attention. Military? Ex-military like himself? Redman trailed the mark first to a coffee shop and then to a liquor store. When the man emerged from the store with a small brown paper sack Redman watched him climb back in his truck, unscrew the top of a pint to take a snort and then slide the bottle into the thigh pocket of his cargo pants before closing the car door and driving away. Nine-in-the-morning boozer, Redman thought. And a secret boozer, at that. He took down the license plate number to check. It was never a bad idea to know the players. It was only later, when Redman tracked the name of the plate owner, that he found another name to add to his target list.

This morning at seven he took the position he'd found that week and was now scanning the street below. Traffic was again building, but there was a difference in the pattern. He tilted his binoculars up to sweep farther down the sight line and saw that some kind of barricade had gone up three blocks south. Uniformed police officers were manning the orange-striped sawhorses, but he could see that they had their arms crossed and were talking out of the sides of their mouths to one another, the classic sign of guys who were doing a special detail job, not really giving a shit because it wasn't their beat. Inside the barricades there were some unusually expensive-looking cars parked in an area where they didn't fit in. Some dark-colored Ford LTDs that Redman knew from experience were the car of choice for the feds.

He swung the glasses back down when movement in the kill zone caught his attention and he saw Walker's truck turn onto the street and pull into the same place where he'd parked before. Redman set the binoculars aside and pulled the stock of his sniper rifle close to his shoulder and used the scope to zoom in. Walker got out of the truck. He was dressed the same way as before, uniform shirt, cargo pants. But today Redman could tell by his body movements that the target was agitated. Walker stepped out into the street instead of going straight into his building. He looked south toward the barricades for a moment and then swatted the air with his left hand as if to say, Fuck it, and then turned and went inside. Redman allowed it. That was not the shot he wanted. That was not the statement. He would wait. If he was the study of human behavior he thought he was, the guy would return and the plan would go down with perfection. Nick was scrambling, working the numbers. What the hell had Canfield said when Nick was doing the SWAT story? When Redman worked SWAT, six hundred yards was his optimal sniper range, the one he felt most comfortable with.

He left his car at the coffee shop and walked back into the area, taking the back alleys and parking areas, the ones tucked behind the warehouses and industrial shops and delivery bays. He thought about Hargrave, tailing Walker. The detective would be watching from ground level. But Redman would be up high, like any good sniper. And that's where Fitzgerald's boys would be looking too if they were worried about a legitimate assassination attempt. But would they come this far out from the nursing home? This was way too far, probably a thousand yards, for even a great sniper to take a shot at the secretary. Nick was working the numbers. He settled on the block that figured to be six hundred yards from Archie's front door, give or take. From behind the buildings he climbed up a utility ladder like the one he'd made his move on at the very first shooting site across from the jail. The top of the building seemed clear when he poked his head over the roofline. No man lying prone at the edge walls. No one dressed in black. He duck-walked to the front edge and took a bit of cover next to a metal container the size of a squared-off suitcase and snuck a look over to the street below. He could see Archie's green door across the way, but it seemed impossibly small. How the hell could anyone hit even the door from here, never mind put a bullet in someone's ear? He looked up the line, farther south, and started to retreat. But when he used the container to push himself up, the box gave way and tipped sideways, clunking over and making a racket. Nick again ducked down, softly cursing. He stayed silent and unmoving for a full two minutes and then carefully shifted around to look at the box. He had inadvertently knocked over the cover to a video camera that was wired onto the roof to record what was going on in the parking lot.