Stephen Hunter: I, Sniper

The sixth book in the Bob Lee Swagger series, 2009

The time has long passed in America when one can say of a sixty-eight-year-old woman that she is “still” beautiful, the snarky little modifier, all buzzy with irony, signifying some kind of miracle that one so elderly could be so attractive. Thus everyone agreed, without modification, that Joan Flanders was beautiful in the absolute-fully beautiful, extremely beautiful, totally beautiful, but never “still” beautiful. Botox? Possibly. Other work? Only Joan and her doctors knew. The best in dental work, an aggressive workout regimen, the most gifted cosmeticians and hairdressers available to the select? That much certainly was true.

But even without the high-end maintenance, she would have been beautiful, with pale smooth skin, a lioness’s mane of thick reddish blond hair, piercing blue eyes set behind prominent cheekbones, a slender stalk of neck and a mere slip of body, unfettered by excess ounces, much less pounds. She was dressed in tweeds and white cashmere, expertly tailored, and wore immense sunglasses that looked as if flying saucers of prescription glass had landed on the planet of her face. She took tea with a great deal of grace and wit, with her Hollywood agent, a famous name but with a dull generic quality to him no one would recognize, and her gay personal assistant. The group sat on the patio of the Lemon Tree in downtown East Hampton, New York, on a bright fall day with just a brush of chill in the air as well as salt tang from the nearby Atlantic. There were two other stars on the patio, of the young, overmoussed generation, one female, one indeterminate, as well as a couple of agents with their best-selling writers, the wives of a couple of Fortune 500 CEOs, and least three mistresses of other Fortune 500 CEOs, as well as the odd tourist couple and discreet celeb watchers, enjoying an unusually rich harvest of faces.

Joan and Phil were discussing-the market recovery? Paramount’s new vice president of production? The lousy scripts that were being sent her after the failure of her comeback picture Sally Tells All? Ex-hubby Tom’s strange new obsession with the kiddie shoot-’em-ups of his past? It doesn’t matter. What matters is only that Joan was twice royalty: her father, Jack, had been one of the major stars bridging the pre- and postwar era and she had gotten his piercing eyes and bed-knob cheekbones. She was pure Hollywood blueblood, second generation. But as well, her second husband had been a prominent antiwar leader in the raging if far-off sixties, and her picture, aboard the gunner’s chair on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft battery, had made her instantly beloved and loathed by equal portions of her generation. That made her political royalty, a part of the hallowed crusade to end a futile war; or it made her a commie bitch traitor, but still royalty. The rest was detail, albeit interesting. She had won an Oscar. She had been married to the billionaire mogul T. T. Constable, in one of the most documented relationships in history. She had made one of her several fortunes as an exercise guru and still worked out three hours a day and was as fit as any thirty-five-year-old. All who saw her that day felt her charisma, her history, her beauty, her royal presence, including the tourists, the other stars, the wives and mistresses, and her executioner.

He spared her and America the disturbing phenomenon of a head shot. Instead, he fired from about 340 yards out and sent a 168-grain Sierra hollow point boat tail MatchKing on a slight downward angle at 2,300 feet per second to pierce her between her fourth and fifth ribs on the left-hand side, just outside the armpit; the missile flew unerringly through viscera without the slightest deviation and had only lost a few dozen pounds of energy when it hit her in the absolute center of the heart, exactly where all four chambers came together in a nexus of muscle. That organ was pulped in a fraction of a second. Death was instantaneous, a kind of mercy, one supposes, as Ms. Flanders quite literally could not have noticed her own extinction.

As in all cases of public violence, a moment of disbelief occurred when she toppled forward, accidentally broke her fall on the table for a second, but then torqued to the right and her body lost purchase and completed its journey with a graceless thud to the brick of the patio. Nearly everyone thought “She’s fainted,” because the rifle report was so far away and suppressed that no identifier with the information “gun” was associated with the star’s fall to earth. It took a second more for the exit wound to begin copious blood outflow, and that product spread in a dark sheen from her body, at which point the human fear of blood-quite natural, after all-asserted itself and screams and panic and running around and jumping up and down and diving for cover commenced.

It wasn’t long before the police arrived and set up crime scene operations, and not long at all after that when the first of what would become more than three hundred reporters and photographers arrived on scene and the whole two blocks of downtown East Hampton took on an aspect that resembled none of Joan Flanders’s twenty-eight films but vividly recalled those made by an Italian gentleman named Federico Fellini. In all that, no one noticed a blue Ford van pulling out of an alley 340 yards away to begin a trip to another destination and another date with history.

The shooter did not spare his audience the theatrics of gore for his next two victims. He went for the head, hit it perfectly, and blew each one all over the insides of the Volvo in which they were just beginning their daily commute. The range this time was shorter, 230 yards, but the ordnance was identical and the accuracy just as superb. He hit the first target one inch below the crown of the skull, dead center. There had been no deviation through the rear window glass of the heavy Swedish car. Unlike in the Flanders hit, there was no immediate hubbub. Jack Strong merely slumped forward until his shattered skull hit the steering wheel and rested. His wife, Mitzi Reilly, pivoted her head at the ruckus, had a second’s worth of abject horror-police found urine in her panties, a fact not publicized, thankfully-before the second bullet hit her above and a little forward of the left ear. In both cases the hollow point target bullet blossomed in its puncture of skull bone and spun sideways, whimsically, as it plowed through brain matter, then exited in a horrendous gusher of blood, gray stuff, and bone frags, above an eye in one case, below the other eye in the other, cracking the face bone like a pie plate.