Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

“Okay, Gunny. You tell me now what to do. We’ll get this thing figured out and between the two of us, we’ll run these fucks to earth, I swear. I’m on your team from here on in.”

“You’re a good man, Denny. Few enough of you guys left, sad to say. Nick’s another and they’re trying to ruin him. Anyhow, here’s what I see. This letter,”-still untouched by anything except fingers clothed in rubber gloves, now bagged and marked as Chicago Police evidence exhibit no. 114 and riding inside Bob’s pocket-“is a coded message. It’s an instruction from a Soviet agent, Ward Bonson, to Ozzie Harris, who was either a subagent or some kind of sympathetic freelancer or agent of influence under Bonson’s area of responsibility. I guess they got to know each other in Washington in the late sixties, when both were involved heavily in the antiwar movement, though from different sides. But it turned out they were on the same team. So somehow in 1972, Bonson sends Ozzie this letter, possibly in response to a letter from Harris. I’m guessing it’s the book code, which means it’s indexed to something easy to come by but impossible to penetrate if you don’t have the key. It has to be the New York Stock Exchange results for the date of the letter. They ran in every newspaper in America, and Harris would have no trouble getting them. So we have to find them, and run each of Bonson’s recommended stocks down. Maybe it’s as simple as first letter, maybe it’s a progression of letters, maybe it’s last letter; anyway, it has to be fairly simple. So we decode it. Maybe it refers to this thing, maybe it refers to someone like Jack and Mitzi. Then we’ll see where we are.”

“That’s good,” said Denny, “but we have to keep it in evidence. I’ve already risked chain of custody with it by removing it, but I want to get to the station, log it in to evidence in the minimum amount of time-since we logged out of Unclaimed Property at 11:04, I can get it logged in by midnight; I think that’ll stand up to any court scrutiny-then you can work on it at the police station in the duty room. There’s a computer terminal-”

“I’m sure I can dig up the stock listings from that date somehow, even if I have to buy an old copy of a newspaper-”

“Oh, I’m liking it.”

“Then, if it’s something we can use, I can call Nick and we bring in the Bureau.”

“And if you can’t reach Nick, tell you what. I’m friends with a real good county prosecutor. This is a Chicago homicide, after all. These are Chicago people they gunned down. We’ll run it by Jerry and maybe he’ll take on the case. It sounds like it could go big if it’s played right, and he’d know how to play it right.”

Up ahead, Bob saw the brown mercury vapor light of the entrance to the Stevenson Expressway, a little Jetsons architecture here in the derelict section of Chicago, a construction built of concrete and machine corruption. A green sign pointed to Gary and Indianapolis, but Washington hummed ahead. The car slid under the overpass, then found itself in traffic, and came to another overhead, the ancient trusses and rivets of an el station. Rain had begun to fall lightly, scattering the light points ahead into glittery red-green stars.

“Good thinking,” said Bob.

“Oh, and one other thing,” said Washington, slowing as a light went suddenly to yellow and he knew he wouldn’t make it, while another car suddenly slid by on the left, also halting. “There’s also a possibility-”

The first bullet, passing through windshield, smeared a quicksilver maze of fractures and hit Washington in the eye, destroying it, blowing his head backward and filling the air with arterial spray.

Tino was the driver, Rat the shooter. Both were good at their jobs. In their midtwenties, handsome, amply tattooed, muscular, scarred, well dressed, with beautiful teeth and glossy rolls of oiled black hair, they’d come up through the Almighty Latin Kings, South Lawndale division, at one time ruling the gang’s heaviest hitters, known as the Chi-town Two Fours for their locality, which was Twenty-fourth and Drake. But the two were ambitious, without scruple, cunning and hungry, a dangerous combination. Their reputations approaching legend in gang-related street violence, they knew that the gang universe had its limits; they made a contact with a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy in the outfit, and they segued into the occasional mob hit.

It was quick, clean stuff. Tino tracked the vic, cut him off, and Rat put him down, car to car, usually a subgun, sometimes a shorty twelve. Tino was good with cars, had a genius-level reflex time, while Rat had that hand-eye thing in spades, which meant if he saw it, he put lead in it, fast. They didn’t make mistakes, they didn’t leave witnesses, and the payoffs were surprisingly generous. They hit debtors, they hit strong-arm boys, they hit witnesses, they hit Insane Maniac Disciples who’d crossed the line, they even hit a cop or two. They rapidly became known as the best in Windy, and were thinking about taking their talents nationwide, maybe flying around for guest-starring spots in wired towns like Miami, Cleveland, Detroit, even New York, though of course LA was the real center of the world as far as they were concerned, but they’d have to work out something with MS-13 before they went partying in that town. They knew you do not fuck around on MS-13 turf without MS-13 permission up front, or those crazy fucking Salvadorans will stick pliers up your anus and pull your entrails out through it an inch at a time for a very, very long weekend’s worth of dying.

This one looked almost too easy. The vics were a cop and some out-of-town cowboy guy, whatever, and they didn’t have a thought in the world that today would be their last. They were just cruising without security or even much in the way of attention paying, and the very good intelligence came from Tino’s man Vito, who repped the outfit on the South Side and had go-betweened for Tino many a time. Vito was good, solid, dependable; he owned a restaurant and wasn’t no pimp or drug lord but just a courier from the shadowy higher organization that made the big decisions and set the big policies and negotiated the rules with the various players.

Tino stole a car and picked Rat up and they met Vito behind Vito’s pizzeria at eleven that morning. Vito handed Rat a grocery bag, heavier for its size than it should have been, and Rat felt something dense and mechanical and tubular and awkward slipping around inside. It felt like something for a plumbing job. Were they going to fix a toilet?

“Swedish K, they call ’em,” Vito said. “You can run a chopper, right?”

“If it shoots, I can run it, Vito,” said Rat. “Remember, I am an artist with a Mac-10. I paint pictures with a Mac.”

“Artist my ass. This fuckin’ thing is bigger than a Mac-10. Client provided, client insisted, to be returned to client. It’s got a silencer, which is why it’s so big. Untraceable. It’s some kind of spook shit. Let me tell you, do not fuck this one up, as these customers know their business and seem to have the kind of connections that turn your mouth dry and I don’t want to have to give them bad news.”

“They scare you, Vito? They must be some heavy motherfuckers. Nothing rattles them.”

“The heaviest.”

He gave them the drill. They were to get out on the Eisenhower to Franklin Park, off Mannheim, to the Cook County unclaimed property warehouse.

“I know it,” said Tino. “My mamacita bought me a bike at auction there.”

“You ain’t looking for bikes,” said Vito. “It’s a cop Impala, gray-black, plate number K599121, you got that?”

“Got it,” said Tino, who had a talent for numbers and could remember anything.