Mark Costello - Big If

The man seemed quite calm. Vi pushed her way toward him; the strange thing was that his head was sitting unexploded on his shoulders. She hit him half-running, cross-checking him, and he felt soft and yielding for a moment, but then he dipped a shoulder and threw out an arm, knocking Vi off-balance, and people, running now, hit her from two sides, and she fell to the street, and was kicked in the ribs and the face and the knee by running shoes. The man with the black pistol was standing over Vi, his gun arm out, but he wasn’t aiming or even looking at the VP. He was looking up, watching the balloons rise and disperse.

Vi was at the man’s feet when the shots hit. The first shot hit him in the back.

The second hit him in the head.

The agents ran the VP to the vansand evacuated Market Square. For the first few blocks, it was total pandemonium, sirens, squealing tires, aides and agents screaming, and every gun was drawn. Vi was bloody, face and blouse — was she hit? Was the VP hit? How many shooters was it? Did they get all of them, or both of them, or was there only one? The designated fallback for the rally was the parking lot of the public safety building on Hanover Street. They went there to regroup and assess the situation.

The VP wasn’t hit. He said he wasn’t hit and a careful check by EMTs found no wounds, no injuries of any kind except the cuts and bruises suffered when the agents had manhandled him to safety.

Vi was checked next. Gretchen found her sprawled out on the front bench of van two, shaking, pale, and groggy, splashed with blood and bits of bone, one shoe missing, her head in Bobbie’s lap. The EMTs came up, but Bobbie, fierce-eyed and protective, wouldn’t let go. Gretchen and Tashmo finally had to pull her off to give the EMTs some room.

Vi wasn’t hit. The mess on her clothes had been the splatter of the head shot when the snipers neutralized the gunman in the square. The EMTs gave Vi a blue cold pack for her jaw.

Gretchen turned away, hailing Boone Saxon, who was with the gunman’s body in the square. Boone said the scene was calm, the crowd dispersing quietly to the strains of bluegrass. He said it looked like two hits on the gunman, the head shot and a round through the chest.

Gretchen copied back. “You guys find a shoe? Lady’s, blue. Vi’s missing one.”

The snipers joined the team a few minutes later, bringing a few souvenir balloons, and Vi’s battered, flattened shoe, which Boone had found under a parked car.

The motorcade got rolling after that. The mood in the vans was oddly jubilant, Tashmo, Bobbie, and the others gabbing wildly, like a football team coming home from a big win, conducting a kind of group review of what they had been through, what each of them had done, or seen, or thought, or felt, at each unfolding moment in the square. Tashmo told the others how he saw the postal guy come out with the handgun, how he shouted Gun gun , which had started the alarm. The snipers picked the story up from there, how they heard Gun gun, waited for a break in the balloons, and took the shooter out. Bobbie told the others how she heard the warning, threw her body on the VP, helped run him toward choke gold, and so it went for twenty minutes in the van, stories and euphoria, and everyone took part, except for Gretchen, riding shotgun, and Vi, who held the cold pack to her cheek.

Behind the jubilation was relief and spent adrenaline, Gretchen knew. She thought it was best to let them play with the balloons and gabble on, and get it all out of their systems before the next ropeline. Gretchen thought they had a right to feel a little pride. After months of drilling, training, planning, and thousands of hours of gnawing, inconclusive tension on the ropes, they had finally met their Hinckley and defeated him. Gretchen knew her detail had never been especially close-knit, never had the semi-family feeling of some teams, no little pizza parties, no bring-the-kids-and-spouse cookouts at the chief-of-detail’s house. Part of this was Gretchen’s style, hard-nosed and remote. Part of it was Hinman, the great failure in the flood. After Hinman, the agents had gone their separate ways, or broken into cliques, as every losing team begins to fall apart. Gretchen listened to the snipers brag about their hits, and Bobbie laughing, and Tashmo bragging to O’Teen. She thought, well, here it is — we’re all together now, Market Square undid whatever Hinman did to us. She watched them work the next event, a quickie rope-line on a village green. They worked it well, fluidly and jitter-free, and it was good to see her people moving as a unit.

They were closing this event and fanning toward the vans when Boone hailed Gretchen from the square.

“Shooter’s name is Naubek, first name Vaughn,” reported Boone. “Resident of Portsmouth, single, lives alone, no link, repeat no link, to the U.S. Postal Service. He’s a computer programmer, laid off yesterday.”

Gretchen saw her people pausing on the green, listening to Boone. Herc was nodding at O’Teen. Tashmo, one foot on the runner of the van, was nodding to himself. Boone was confirming something of importance to the agents. They recognized Vaughn Naubek as your classic shooter type, a loser with job trouble, a Hinckley or an Oswald, a shithead misfit who is pissed that history is leaving town without him. The Service existed to keep this type outside the margins of the story.

“We have his gun,” Boone said. “Smith nine, no clip. Chamber’s empty too. It makes no sense.”

Gretchen wished that Boone had called her on the cell, rather than the comm, so that the detail would not have heard this. But it was too late now.

She shouted down the line of idling vans, “Move it, Herc. You too, Bobbie, get your rear in gear.”

“Another thing,” said Boone. “Naubek had a note in the pocket of his shirt. Snipers put a round through it when they blew his chest out, so what we’ve got is fragments here, I’m not even sure I’ve got the order right.”

Boone read what he had—

To Whom It May Concern…

…no choice but to…

…test against…

…so that my message could be…

…I am not a “crazy”…

…shuttle…

…O-ring…

…engineer…

…my mother and my sister Ruth…

Remember me.

Vaughn Naubek

The aides and campaign handlers kept up their bright banter on the village green, but the agents in their midst were frozen, blank-faced, listening. The meaning of the empty gun was plain enough: in service of some muddled protest, Vaughn Naubek had summoned his community, and the VP and his press crew, to watch and film a public suicide.

The vans got on the road and the bodyguards were silent for a time.

“I don’t buy it,” Tashmo finally said.

Everyone agreed and the talking started up again, the round-robin storytelling, how Tashmo saw the gun and put it on the comm, how Bobbie covered the VP, how O’Teen cleared the route back through choke gold. It was a righteous shooting, clean, proficient, necessary. It was their will against Naubek’s in the crowd. He had come to kill the VP; they had turned his will aside. The notion of the shooting as a suicide-by-Dome implied the opposite: Naubek had controlled them in the square.

“Probably the wrong gun,” Tashmo said.

“Or they lost the clip,” said Herc.

“That’s what happened,” said O’Teen. “The clip ejects when Naubek’s struggling with Vi. It gets kicks around in the confusion and now it’s down a storm drain and they’ll never find it.”

Gretchen said, “Forget about the clip. You did good work today.”

“I saw a clip,” said Bobbie. “Now that I think about it, yes.”