Work Done for Hire

  But he was not to die alone.

  6.

  You got a new bike?” She was trying to smile, but her expression had an element of wide-eyed incredulity. Two new bikes the same month?

  “Isn’t it a beauty?” I had rolled it up to her door, which she opened as I reached for the doorbell.

  “But where’s the old one? I mean the old new one?”

  “At a bike shop in Des Moines. I sort of traded it in—”

  “Sort of? What, it was two weeks old?”

  “This is sort of like a long test ride. I can take it back.”

  “A hundred miles?”

  I checked the cyclometer. “A hundred seven point two.”

  “It is pretty,” she admitted. Sleek and classic, deep red lacquer. “How much?”

  “A thousand dollars. Minus a penny.”

  “Well, that was generous. How much you get for the old one? The old new one.”

  “Three-fifty.” She pursed her lips and nodded. She probably thought that meant the total transaction had been $650; I didn’t elaborate. It was a thousand after the trade-in. A grand for a $1,350 bike was okay, even though a mathematical literalist, like Kit, might say it was actually $1,500, plus two weeks’ use of an increasingly clunky commuter bike. The Campy was like gliding on glass. I was still totally in love. But I hadn’t even had it long enough to add air to the tires.

  “Can I try it?”

  “Sure, go ahead.” She took it by the handlebars and looked down at the pedals and front chain ring, then the rear gear cluster.

  “There’s no computer,” I said.

  “Yeah, I see.” She frowned. “I had one like this when I was a kid, no computer.”

  “Don’t worry about shifting. No hills around here.” I lowered the seat about an inch.

  “Don’t you need magnetic shoes?”

  “Works without ’em.” She mounted the bike not too ungracefully and wobbled off. By the end of the block she seemed to be in control.

  She turned around the corner and was gone just long enough for me to start worrying. Then she came flying back around the same corner and stopped right in front of me with a little chirp of rubber, smiling.

  “When you make your first million, buy me one?”

  “Half million,” I said. “You approve?”

  “It’s hardly like a bike at all. But why no computer shift?”

  “Well, it adds weight, I guess a pound or so. One more thing to go wrong. It doesn’t take long to master the gears.”

  “Lots of levers,” she said doubtfully. Only five, really, and you didn’t use the “overdrive” one until you were going twenty-five or thirty miles per hour.

  “I’ll run you through them later. Tomorrow? I could use some air-conditioning.”

  “Your place or here?”

  “Airco’s off at mine, but . . .” I took out my phone and punched the home utility number and turned it on. “It’ll be cool in half an hour. Get some lunch at the Mill?”

  “Sure. You put the bike on the car and I’ll get my stuff. Spend the night?”

  “Twist my arm.”

  “That would be different.” She went halfway down the walk and turned. “I’m, um, a little indisposed?”

  Probably the yeast thing again. “That’s okay. I love you for your mind.”

  “Sure, you do. Head, anyway.”

  __________

  Actually, her mind was working well. After lunch we went back to my place and she read the most recent chapter.

  “So is he really an alien? From where?”

  “I’m glad you can’t tell yet.”

  “But, like, do you know?”

  I shook my head. “What do you think?”

  She topped off her tumbler of wine. “Well, I have an unfair advantage. I do know the author.”

  “I hear you’ve slept with him.”

  “Not that well. He snores.” She riffled through the pages, mumbling, “Alien, human, alien, human . . .”

  She set the manuscript down and tapped it three times. “I’m gonna take a chance and say ‘none of the above.’ Most of the rest of it, I’ve read several times, and this new part doesn’t change anything basic. He’s neither fish nor fowl. You can’t tell whether he’s a nut job who thinks he’s an alien or an alien who acts like a nut job. True?”

  I leaned back and smiled at her.

  “So are you a Cheshire cat or a Schrödinger one?”

  I tried not to react to the good guess, but think my eyebrows shot up.

  “It’s not that mysterious. I remember the conversation. But I wonder what you’re going to do with it. In real life, sooner or later you open the box, and the cat is either dead or alive.”

  “But a story isn’t real life,” I said. “I could leave the box closed.”

  “And the reader never finds out whether Hunter is an alien or not? I don’t think your average reader is going to like that.”

  I shrugged. “Why should the reader know more about the story than I do?”

  Gun in the Box

  1.

  Kit never needed an alarm to get up early. I came half awake when she quietly got out of bed and dressed in the dark. I mumbled something and she gave me a sleepy kiss and slipped out the front door. Her car door didn’t slam; I remembered she was letting me use the car for the day tomorrow.

  It could have been a minute later or an hour when the doorbell rang. Funny, I thought; she should have had a key.

  I put on some pants and was grabbing a T-shirt when a car door did slam. The car squealed away from the parking lot and then squealed again as it tore out onto Second.

  Not Kit. I opened the front door a crack and peered out, the car long gone.

  A brown cardboard box more than a yard long lay on the doormat. I picked it up—heavy—and turned it over. No address or postage. I took it inside and put it on the dining room table and turned on the overhead. Low light for romance; I clapped it up twice.

  The box was secured with a single piece of broad strapping tape. Too strong for my thumbnail, so I got a knife from the kitchen rack.

  Inside, packed in crumpled paper and inflated plastic bags, was a gleaming new M2010AW-9, exactly the same rifle I’d used in the desert, though I’d never seen a new one.

  I reached to pull it out but then stopped. What the hell was going on?

  Under the sink there was a box of throwaway plastic gloves some previous tenant had left. I stripped off a pair and put them on clumsily, feeling melodramatic. This thing was going straight to the police, and if there were fingerprints on it, they wouldn’t be mine.

  It had a good smell, gunmetal and walnut wood. I liked the wood stock, even though it was heavier than the more modern one, and some guys said it had harder recoil, without the spring. But it felt like a rifle.

  I took it out and set it on the table. There was also a box of twenty-five rounds of match-quality .300 Magnum ammunition, with a round battery taped to the top. That would be for the scope, night use. A threaded chrome cylinder that must be a silencer; at least that’s what they looked like in movies. A plastic bag with a dozen paper targets.

  It had a shorter magazine than we had used in combat. I thumbed the release and found that it held six rounds and a folded-up note. Plain bond paper, printed out in what appeared to be 20-point Courier:

  I will pay you $100,000 to do what you once did for privates pay. Youre target will be a bad man. You will agree that the World is a better place without him.

  Down payment in the butt stock.

  I will be in touch.

  Deficient in grammar, but intriguing. I got a small screwdriver and removed the butt plate. On top of the cleaning supplies, ten of the new $1,000 bills, neatly folded into thirds.

  That was military. Bedding, uniforms, ponchos, all folded in thirds. The friendly
sergeant we’d had in sniper school said by the time we got out of the army we’d be folded in thirds.

  For a person with pretty bad spelling and grammar, he certainly had lots of money. I creased the bills so they would lie flat, and brought the desk lamp and magnifier over to study them.

  Ten dead Kennedys. I’d never seen one before, except for pictures when they started circulating them a couple of years ago.

  They didn’t show any wear, but then not many people would crumple one up and stuff it in a pocket. Rumor had it that they were manufactured with nanocircuitry that broadcast the location of each bill. The government denied that with just the right degree of “Who, us?”

  If they were counterfeit, an amateur like me probably couldn’t tell. I took the magnifying glass and examined Kennedy’s right eye on each one, and they all looked the same. The paper had authentic-looking threads, but I’d seen how counterfeiters could bleach out a one-dollar bill and photoprint any denomination onto it.

  The e-mail hoax. A few months after I got back, I got a bunch of e-mails that tried to hire me to kill the president. But that was a kid, Timmy something. He’d never confessed, but went to juvenile court and got a suspended sentence.

  Could they be related? I ought to find out what became of young Timmy. Maybe he came into money.

  I picked up the phone. Don’t use 9-1-1 unless it’s an emergency. I clicked on the directory. Call the Iowa City cops or the state troopers? Or Coralville or the Kampus Kops, for that matter. Or go straight to the FBI or Homeland Security?

  Well, I didn’t especially like any of those organizations. Which one would cause me the least trouble?

  I wished I still smoked. This would be the time to stoke up a pipe and emulate Sherlock Holmes. But I didn’t even have any tobacco, just a little marijuana and some rolling papers stashed away. That would be a real good idea.

  Would I be breaking a law by inaction? I assumed so, but what would the law be?

  Technically, I was in possession of an unregistered military weapon, but the selector switch only said SAFE and SEMI. If it didn’t shoot full auto, I assumed it was legal.

  I could put the ten grand in the bank while I decided what to do. But no. At 3.5 percent it would earn less than a dollar a day. And it probably wouldn’t be in there a day, before the cops came knocking.

  Was I accessory to a crime? A conspiracy to kill some unidentified bad guy. That might be a crime once the bad guy was identified, but right now you could argue that I just had a legal gun and a hypothetical use for it.

  Plus ten dead Kennedys.

  It couldn’t be real. Somebody was setting me up. But for what, a joke? A blackmail deal? It would be an expensive joke, not very funny, and if they blackmailed me they could get a three-figure check and a comic-book collection, which I’d have to collect from Mother’s attic.

  I went to the computer and found that a new rifle like this, with a standard high-power scope, would run $2,600 out of the box. I ought to just take it down to Gun ’n’ Porn. But they probably wouldn’t take a weapon that didn’t have papers.

  Or I could wait and see who they wanted dead. There were a couple of people I’d gladly kill for free; maybe I’d be lucky.

  It occurred to me that that was a thing any guy might say casually. But it does mean something different if you once assassinated people for $1,300 a month and all the army chow you could eat.

  Presumably most of the people I’d killed as a sniper were guys like me, ordinary people snared by chance or circumstance and turned into killers by their own government. I told myself that I could feel sorry that they were dead, without feeling guilty for being an instrument in the chain of events that led to our unfortunate meeting. I was drafted, and most of them were forced into uniform by poverty and politics.

  This was completely different, except for the tool engaged. The target would probably not know he was a target, and presumably wouldn’t be shooting back.

  And the person shooting him would not be a just-following-orders soldier. He’d be a hired assassin.

  I should take the whole thing, money and all, down to the police station, and wash my hands of it. Any normal person would.

  Instead, I stared at it and thought.

  If I did have an immortal soul, it was already forfeit. So ponder the ponderable: first, could I do it and not get caught?

  With no wind deflection and a clear shot, working from a stable platform, I could put a bullet into “the head zone,” head or neck, from two thousand meters, call it a mile and some change. One or two follow-up rounds into the thorax. A little less accurate with a silencer, I assumed; I’d never used one.

  My first thought was that if it was a city situation, like Kennedy, King, or Semple, then no way. Of course those assassins hadn’t used silencers. Still, there would probably be witnesses and then a short chase.

  With a silencer, though? From a mile away? It could be done. But could it be done by me?

  I supposed it would depend on the target. If it was somebody I would kill for free, then sure, I’d do it for money. If it was some random stranger, then not. Maybe not.

  The phone rang.

  2.

  It wasn’t Kit; she always called the cell. And not before dawn. I let it ring four times and picked it up. “Well?” I said.

  A woman’s voice. “If it was the right person, would you do it?”

  I should have said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and hung up. Instead, I said, “I don’t know enough. Who are you?”

  “I can’t tell you that. I can tell you that we are not the government or enemies of the government; it’s not a political assassination.”

  “Why should that be a plus? Being a gun for hire, with no principles involved, isn’t appealing.”

  “You didn’t agree with the principles behind the war for which you killed sixteen people.”

  “Apples and oranges. I didn’t have a choice.”

  “You did, though. As you have said and written. If you had gone to jail for refusing the draft, it would have been less time out of your life. Less moral complication.”

  “Yeah, happy hindsight.” Any way I could trace this call? I took the cell phone out of my shirt pocket.

  “Put the cell down,” she said. “If you call anyone I’ll hang up.”

  The blinds were closed. “You have a bug in this room?”

  “There are other ways we can tell what you are doing. I need an answer.”

  “Why me? I need that answered.”

  “Expert marksman, unmarried, apolitical and agnostic, low-income disabled veteran against the war.”

  “Okay, that must narrow it down to a thousand. Why me?”

  “Because we can trust you to do the right thing. You wouldn’t want Kit to come down with a rare blood disease and die slowly. Would you?”

  “What? Blood disease?”

  “Timothy Unger. Google him. We’re serious.” The line went dead.

  That was Timmy’s name, the e-mail ammunition boy. I looked him up and found that he was born in Iowa City twenty years ago and died last year of a heart attack.

  Too young. There was an autopsy, the obit said, but no follow-up story except for funeral arrangements. But then I tried “rare blood disease” + “Iowa City” + “fatality” and his name came up, dead last year. It was supposedly myelofibrosis rapidly transformed into secondary acute myelogenous leukemia leading to massive cardiac failure. The doctors were “mystified” by the sudden onset of the disease.

  Maybe there was some mysterious poison that mimicked myelofibrosis, whatever that was. Or maybe they just put a nickel in the Google machine and asked it for the name of someone local who had died of a rare disease last year.

  No. That wouldn’t explain the e-mailings.

  Anyhow, this was way beyond the possibility of a hoax, for any re
ason. Too complicated and expensive and incriminating.

  I sat down by the rifle and rubbed its smooth stock. They’re giving me time to think this over, before they identify the victim. I have to kill X or they kill Kit. For what values of X would I refuse?

  How had they found me; why had they chosen me? My slight prominence as a writer? Well, I did write about war and about being a sniper. I should’ve chosen Gothic romance.

  The phone rang. I picked it up and got a recorded message—same female voice—that was repeated once: “Take the rifle and targets and ammunition right now and drive to the east end of the Coralville dump, where people go for shooting. When there’s enough light, sight in the rifle. Collect all your brass and your targets and leave. You will be watched.”

  It was just starting to get light in the east. I zapped a big mug of water and stirred in enough instant coffee and cocoa to wake up the dead, and took it out to the car, and came back for the weapon and targets and ammunition. It felt odd, carrying a rifle without a sling, just walking out to the car like any garden-variety nutcase out to shoot a president or a classroom full of innocents. I knew the bad guys were watching me, but who else? Was one of my nutty neighbors calling the cops, and would they listen? He always acts funny and keeps to himself, says he’s some kinda writer. I always knew there was somethin’ wrong with him.

  So if I zero in the rifle, am I complicit? Yes and no; I could still decide not to shoot or to miss the target.

  No car was following me as I drove out to the Coralville dump. If they really would be watching me, as they said, they were already there. Or in orbit, for all I knew.

  Tried to hatch a plan as I drove through the hazy dawn. There was one aspect I could control: I didn’t have to sight the rifle accurately. I could misalign the finderscope and send the bullet anywhere.

  Sighting in a rifle-and-scope combination is simple if the equipment is good. This was all solid and new, the same combination I used in the desert, a red-dot Insight MRD on the M2010 sniper rifle. To sight it in you put a “dot” target—a spot on a piece of paper—a measured distance away, and fire carefully from a stable platform. Once you’re comfortable with the rifle, you try to get three-shot groups within about a one-inch circle—smaller circle for a real pro. Then you click the rifle sight for windage (left and right) and drop (up and down) until that group consistently appears where the scope’s crosshairs intersect, on the printed spot.