David Healey - Winter Sniper

Kit Henderson sat in an easy chair reading the Washington Star and drinking a cup of coffee. He put down the paper and bent close to inspect the gash that the doctor had sewn up on Ty’s cheekbone. To Ty’s annoyance, Kit looked amused by his own condition.

“You look like shit,” Henderson informed him with a note of amusement.

“Go to hell,” Ty rasped. “But get me that aspirin first.”

Kit laughed, got up to rummage in the bathroom, then returned to pop two tablets from a flat tin into Ty’s palm. He poured Ty a hefty shot of Maker’s Mark from the bottle on the coffee table. The smell of bourbon made Ty’s stomach roil.

He shook his head, but Kit pressed it on him. “Hair of the dog that bit you. Best thing there is.”

Ty had never thought much about that phrase, but it seemed aptly put as he washed down the tablets. The bourbon did, in fact, taste and feel like a scratchy handful of dog’s hair going down — a particularly mangy dog.

“Ugh. Anything happen that I should know about?”

“No sign of the sniper. Maybe if we could turn the city upside down — but all we’ve been able to do is put out a quiet word to be on the lookout for him.”

“How is Ike taking it?”

Henderson shrugged. “You know Ike. He won’t let something like this change his plans. Full steam ahead. He was out the door first thing this morning, going to meetings.”

“Someone on the other side knew,” Ty said, the realization coming to him through his foggy brain. “They knew in advance that Ike would be here, where he would be staying —”

“Of course they knew,” Henderson said, looking amused all over again at Ty’s apparent surprise. “They have their spies, same as we do. It doesn’t help that headquarters leaks like a sieve.”

“But why the Russians?” Ty wondered. He was thinking of the shell casing from the Mosin-Nagant rifle that they had found at the boarding house. The sniper hadn’t had a chance to clean up after himself.

“If you’re Joe Stalin, and the map is wiped clean of those pesky Germans, you see opportunity to grab as much land as you can. Poland, maybe even Germany itself. Who is going to stop you? The English? No, it’s the Americans who stand in your way. You’d want to weaken them somehow.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Stalin doesn’t believe in Jesus, remember? But he knows the Americans are led by one General Dwight D. Eisenhower.”

Ty thought about that. The aspirin tablets — and maybe the bourbon too — were starting to work and he was beginning to feel better. He was even starting a feel a righteous anger build at the thought that a bunch of goddamn Godless communists thought they could get away with trying to shoot Ike. He shoved himself up off the couch. Dizzy, he reached for the back of Kit’s chair to steady himself.

“What time does the train leave?”

“In an hour. You’re not seriously coming with us?”

“The hell I’m not,” Ty said. He really did feel awful, like he’d been hit by a truck — or a rifle butt, he reminded himself — but he tried to hide it from Henderson, who was watching him skeptically.

“I don’t know, Ty.”

“I’ll be on that train. If that sniper knew Ike was going to be in Washington, he’ll know about White Sulphur Springs.”

Zumwald was on an adventure. He was hitch-hiking to the land of cowboys and Indians and horses — or what was left of the Old West he had read about in his Western novels. He tugged at his coat, wishing he had worn another sweater under it. It had grown colder during the night and the wind had a bite this morning that found its way inside his collar. Despite the cold, he did not regret his decision to hitch rides rather than take the bus, although he had enough money for a ticket to California — and then some. Zumwald wanted to see the country up close.

He had found that Americans were a friendly bunch, more than willing to give a ride to a young man they assumed was a soldier home on leave. Zumwald’s English was good enough that no one suspected the truth. If anyone noticed his accent and asked about it, they seemed satisfied when Zumwald told them he was Pennsylvania Dutch. Nobody seemed to hate the Germans — it was Hitler and the Third Reich they didn’t like. He could almost forget that he had ever been one of the Reich’s soldiers. He had noticed that Americans weren’t so easy on the Japs — they were still sneaky bastards in most eyes.

By noontime he had followed Georgia Avenue out of the city to a Maryland crossroads town called Cooksville, according to the sign above the post office. It wasn’t much — just a collection of clapboard buildings that included the post office, a petrol station and a combination bar and lunch counter. He caught a whiff of frying meat and onions — certainly a hamburger, Americans were crazy about them. His stomach growled. He noted the sign above the door that stated “Whites Only,” and then eyed the old cars and pickup trucks parked out front with some misgiving. They were rusty and beat-up — country vehicles. In his experience, country people were suspicious of strangers. His stomach rumbled again and he pushed his concerns aside. A couple of hamburgers — he was suddenly ravenous — a Coca-Cola, and he would be on his way again.

Zumwald stepped through the door and immediately regretted his decision. The air inside the dark bar was thick with cigarette smoke. Half a dozen men in flannel shirts and blue jeans sat at the bar. One or two had plates in front of them, but the others appeared to be drinking their lunches. They all looked up at Zumwald’s arrival.

“Yeah?” said a woman behind the bar. She might have been anywhere from thirty to fifty. She smoked a cigarette, holding her elbow with her free hand, arm across her belly.

“Two burgers with onions and a Coca Cola,” he said. “Please.”

Zumwald realized his mistake when one of the men at the bar snickered. “Soda pop, huh? No wonder we’re losin’ this goddamn war if the soldiers order soda pop.”

“Leave him alone, Bill,” the woman said, starting to cook a burger on a griddle one-handed. The other hand still held the cigarette. She flicked ash into a tine can on the counter.

“It ain’t me he’s got to worry about,” Bill said. “It’s the Japs and the Krauts. Ain’t that right?” Too late, Zumwald realized the question was addressed to him. “What, you think you’re too good to talk to me? Is that it?”

“No, I just —”

“All that soda pop done rot his brain,” said another man. He was younger than the first, with a lumpy forehead and scars under his eyes. The man reminded Zumwald of the instructor he’d had in basic training. A brutal man, a brawler. The man tried to project a relaxed air, as if he didn’t have a care in the world, but he was staring intently at Zumwald, who noticed that the man’s eyes were too close together. “What you’re left with is a walkin’, talkin’ idjut. He ain’t no soldier. Where you serve, boy?”

Zumwald glanced at the griddle, willing the burger to cook faster. The woman had just dumped a handful of sliced onions into the bubbling grease.

“I’m a clerk,” he said. “Mostly I type reports. I’m on leave for a few days.”

He had known it would only be natural to be asked about his military service, so before leaving Washington he had decided to tell people he had been an office clerk at the War Department. It seemed a safe-enough cover story. Nobody pressed an office clerk for tales of war and adventure. But he could see at once it was the wrong thing to say to these men. Now he had the attention even of the other four men who had been keeping out of it. Zumwald sensed that the mood had shifted. The men were now like a pack of dogs that had a whiff of blood. It was so quiet he could hear the meat and onions sizzling on the griddle.