Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

“You follow them back into the city. It’s best to wait till they get to the South Side, which is where they’ll head. You drive careful, Tino. Stay far back, don’t rush or do anything stupid. I’m told these guys, or at least the cowboy, is tricky as hell. He’s done this kind of work, on both sides. You up for this?”

“Man,” said Rat, who’d peeked into the bag and liked what he’d seen, “I am up for anything with this cockroach killer.”

“Don’t force it. Be grown-up. You follow ’em from a long way off, you wait till they’re in traffic down here, ’cause the cop is a South Side precinct guy, and you set up next to them and you just go buzz with the buzz gun. Then you get out, you buzz each body. That gun shoots fast, watch that it don’t run out of ammo. It’s so quiet, it won’t scare the squares away. But it won’t draw cops to you either, that’s the point. You buzz each guy, put a few in the head to make sure. Then Tino uses all that magical driving power he is known for and makes you invisible in two seconds.”

“What’s paydown?”

“Oh, that’s the best part. You get ten long apiece.”

“Ten!”

Even on a cop, that was very nice.

“I told ’em, you were the best. These guys are hard but fair. You don’t need to know nothing now, and I ain’t giving you no advance because you’ll spend it on whores and Ripple, but you do this job clean and you will make many friends and set yourselves up nicely.”

“It sounds easy,” said Tino.

It was easy. They made the car in the lot and parked across Mannheim and down the block a bit. There was even a temptation to go in, hit them in the warehouse, the last place they’d be expecting it. But Tino argued no, because then what was his part in it?

When the vics emerged it was after dark, so Tino and Rat got no good look at either. They were just shapes, blurs, targets. It was better that way.

Tino watched as the Impala took Mannheim south after a daring cross-lane left turn from the lot, highly illegal but something a cop would think nothing of. That maneuver accomplished, the Impala built moderate speed, and Tino fell in two hundred yards behind, no problemo. The traffic was light and he had no trouble maintaining the distance until the vics hit the Eisenhower and took it toward downtown, again through moderate traffic at reasonable speed. The Eisenhower could be a bitch at rush hour, jamming up for miles and miles so that the fabled skyline never seemed to advance at all and it was hard to predict the way the traffic would break and squirt in segments, so you could have some trouble keeping a tail. But that never happened and the cop held in the second right lane at fifty-five, never deviating, never jumping lanes, just droning along two hundred yards or so ahead.

He even, so helpfully, signaled about a mile in advance of the turnoff at Pulaski; he signaled again when he turned left off Pulaski and then still again in another mile when he turned right down Kedzie, running through gang neighborhood after gang neighborhood, running through territory Tino and Rat knew well.

“When he passes the Stevenson,” Rat said, “another three blocks there’s that el station overhead, it’s always a choke point. He’ll stay in the right lane, we’ll breeze by and drive him into the el supports, and I’ll put the heat to ’em. Then you left and right, hit Granada, and it’s just a shot back to the Stevenson. We’ll be home before eleven.”

“It sounds good,” said Tino.

Rat slid over the seat into the rear, arranging himself against the door behind Tino. He wanted maneuvering room. “When I say, you punch down the window. Try it.”

Tino hit the button and the right back seat window hummed down, admitting a blast of fresh air. Then Tino raised it.

“Good,” said Rat.

He slipped the gun out of the grocery bag, beholding it for the first time. It looked like it felt, like some enterprise of plumbing, a joinery of pipes and tubes at right angles. It was, moreover, a kind of powdery green. A bolt riding a spring pronged from the righthand side of the main tube, just behind a cartridge ejection port; what made the thing look funny was that the tube didn’t diminish into a barrel, as on most guns, but continued, thick and long, for another full foot out, giving the whole apparatus a front-heavy look. Beyond the ejection port, that long run of tube, that was the “can,” as the silencer was called, Rat knew. This was a high-class, well-engineered professional tool, dedicated to exactly one purpose-the silent, fast extermination of the designated. He picked it up and realized that its wire stock was folded alongside. He peeled it backward by the leather-encased top strut through spring pressure, finally prying it loose, and it snapped into place, the stock fully extended. He reached back into the bag and came out with three mags, each dense for the size because each was loaded with thirty-odd 9mm cartridges, and at the top of each mag, a single cartridge was imprisoned and displayed in the lips of the magazine. Making certain it was oriented correctly, Rat eased a magazine into the housing, gently lifted it toward its destination, and felt it lock in place. He turned the gun sideways in his hand and drew back the bolt, feeling the slide of lubricated machined metal against lubricated machined metal and the increasing tension of the spring until a click signaled the bolt was set. He knew the gun was of an older type like a tommy called an “open bolt gun,” meaning you simply locked the bolt back to fire it, and when you fired, the bolt rocked in its groove, and when you let the trigger up, it collected itself at the end of the groove, ready to go again. He bent close to it, found no safety lever anywhere on the primitive firing mechanism of trigger and rear grip, and realized that a notch cut above the bolt groove, where the bolt could be lodged, was the safety. Man, they built ’em simple-simon in those days.

The gun cradled in his arms, his right hand locked around the wooden panels of the pistol grip, his right thumb resting in the nexus between magazine housing and barrel, his trigger finger indexed along the receiver over the guard, Rat mentally rehearsed his moves. Tino pulls up by the still car in the right lane and cranks hard to the right, pinning it, at the same time hitting the down button on the right rear window. Rat scootches over, favoring the left half of the window to give him angle into the car. He never bothers with eye contact or target marking; not enough time, he’s too close, these guys are too good. He raises the piece and stitches the first burst right to left, driver to passenger, across the windshield. He tried to imagine the details so they wouldn’t be shocking to him and disorient him when they occured: the spitting of the spent brass, the chug-a-chug hydraulic sensation of the bolt reciprocating at killing speed in the receiver, the muzzle flash blowing holes in his night vision, the stitchwork of punctures as the burst ate its way across the windshield, turning the glass to lace and frags, all this at a time much faster in the happening than in the telling of it. Then quick out, put a burst into the driver’s head, then step aside to get an angle and put a burst into the passenger’s head. Then back into the car and Tino drives him off.

His reverie was interrupted.

“Okay,” Tino said, his lips dry, his tongue dry, his breath dry and shallow, “just passed under the Stevenson. I see the el tracks ahead, I’m accelerating to catch up, they seem to be slowing down in the traffic, the light is changing.”

Expertly, he maneuvered the stolen vehicle through traffic, cutting a guy off, peeling through a gap, spurting into the oncoming lane, then back again, closing the distance on the unsuspecting Impala, which was itself slowing for the yellow-to-red light that impeded its progress.