Blood types O+, 0-, and AB-, he remembered from the pathology report. The semen left inside Pam had been matched to those blood types, and he wondered what blood type Billy’s was, as he sat there, fifty yards away from the house. The traffic moved on the street. People walked back and forth. Perhaps three people had given him a look, but nothing more than that as he feigned sleep, watching the house from the corner of his eye and listening to every sound for possible danger as the hours passed. A pusher was working the sidewalk perhaps twenty yards or so behind him, and he listened to the man’s voice, for the first time hearing how he described his product and negotiated the price, listening also to the different voices of the customers. Kelly had always possessed unusually good hearing—it had saved his life more than once—and this, too, was valuable intelligence information for his mind to catalog and analyze as the hours passed. A stray dog came up to him, sniffing in a curious, friendly way, and Kelly didn’t shoo it away. That would have been out of character—had it been a rat things might have been different, he thought—and maintaining his disguise was important.
What sort of neighborhood had this been? Kelly wondered. On his side the dwellings were fairly ordinary brick row-houses. The other side was a little different, the more substantial brownstones perhaps fifty percent wider. Maybe this street had been the border between ordinary working people and the more substantial members of the turn-of-the-century middle class. Maybe that brownstone had been the upscale home of a merchant or a sea captain. Maybe it had resonated to the sound of a piano on the weekends, from a daughter who’d studied at the Peabody Conservatory. But they’d all moved on to places where there was grass, and this house, too, was now vacant, a brown, three-story ghost of a different time. He was surprised at how wide the streets were, perhaps because when they’d been laid out the principal mode of transport had been horse-powered wagons. Kelly shook the thought off. It was not relevant, and his mind had to concentrate on what was.
Four hours, finally, had passed when the three came out again, the men in the lead, the girl following. Shorter than Pam, stockier. Kelly risked himself slightly by lifting his head to watch. He needed to get a good look at Billy, who he assumed to be the driver. Not a very impressive figure, really, perhaps five-nine, slim at one-fifty or so, something shiny at his wrist, a watch or bracelet; he moved with brisk economy—and arrogance. The other was taller and more substantial, but a subordinate, Kelly thought, from the way he moved and the way he followed. The girl, he saw, followed more docilely still, her head down. Her blouse, if that’s what it was, wasn’t fully buttoned, and she got into the car without raising her head to look around or do anything else that might proclaim interest in the world around her. The girl’s movements were slow and uneven, probably from drugs, but that wasn’t all of it. There was something else, something Kelly didn’t quite catch about her that was disturbing nonetheless ... a slackness, perhaps. Not laziness in her movement but something else. Kelly blinked hard when he remembered where he’d seen it before. At the ville, during PLASTIC FLOWER, the way the villagers had moved to assemble when they’d been summoned. Resigned, automatic motion, like living robots under the control of that major and his troops. They would have moved the same way to their deaths. And so she moved. And so would she.
So it was all true, then, Kelly thought. They really did use girls as couriers ... among other things. The car started as he watched, and Billy’s manner with the car matched the name to the driver. The car jerked a few feet to the corner, then turned left, accelerating with the squeal of tires across the intersection and out of Kelly’s sight. Billy, five-nine, slim, watch or bracelet, arrogant. The positive identification was set in Kelly’s brain, along with the face and the hair. He wouldn’t forget it. The other male form was recorded as well, the one without a name—just a destiny far more immediate than its owner knew.
Kelly checked the watch in his pocket. One-forty. What had they been doing in there? Then he remembered other things that Pam had said. A little party, probably. That girl, whoever she was, probably also had O+, O-, or AB- fluid in her. But Kelly couldn’t save the whole world, and the best way to save her had nothing at all to do with freeing her directly. He relaxed himself, just a little, waiting, because he didn’t want his movement to appear to be linked with anything in case someone might have seen him, even be watching him now. There were lights in some of these houses, and so he lingered in his spot for another thirty minutes, enduring his thirst and some minor cramps before rising and shambling off to the corner. He’d been very careful tonight, very careful and very effective, and it was time for the second phase of the night’s work. Time to continue his efforts at making a diversion.
Mainly he stuck to alleys, moving slowly, allowing his gait to wander left and right for several blocks in the undulating path of a snake—he smiled—before he went back to the streets, only pausing briefly to put on the pair of rubber surgical gloves. He passed a number of pushers and their lieutenants as time passed, looking for the right one. His path was what is called a quartering search, a series of ninety-degree turns centered actually on where his Volkswagen was parked. He had to be careful, as always, but he was the unknown hunter, and the prey animals had no idea what they were, deeming themselves to be predators themselves. They were entitled to their illusions.
It was almost three when Kelly selected him. A loner, as Kelly had taken to calling them. This one had no lieutenant, perhaps was a new one in this business, just learning the ropes. He wasn’t that old, or didn’t appear so from forty yards away, as he counted through his roll after the night’s enterprise. There was a lump at his right hip, undoubtedly a handgun, but his head was down. He was somewhat alert. On hearing Kelly’s approach the head came up and turned, giving him a quick once-over, but the head went back to its task, dismissing the approaching shape and counting the money as the distance closed.
Kelly had troubled himself to go to his boat earlier in the day, using the Scout because he didn’t want anyone at the yard to know that he had a different car, and retrieving something. As he approached Junior—everyone had to have an assigned name, however briefly—Kelly shifted the wine bottle from his right hand to his left. The right hand then pulled the cotter pin from the tip of the bang stick that was inside his new bush jacket, held in cloth loops on the left side on the now unbuttoned garment. It was a simple metal rod, eighteen inches long, with a screw-on cylinder at the tip, and the cotter pin dangled from a short length of light chain. Kelly’s right hand removed it from the loops, still holding it in place as he closed on Junior.
The pusher’s head turned again in annoyance. Probably he had trouble counting, and now he was arranging the bills by denomination. Maybe Kelly’s approach had disturbed his concentration, or maybe he was just dumb, which seemed the more likely explanation.
Kelly stumbled, falling to the sidewalk, his head lowered, making himself look all the more harmless. His eyes looked backwards as he rose. He saw no other pedestrians within more than a hundred yards, and the only automobile lights he noted were red, not white, all pointed or heading away. As his head came up, there was no one at all in his view except for Junior, who was finishing up the night’s work, ready to go wherever home was for a nightcap or something else.
Ten feet now, and the pusher was ignoring him as he might ignore a stray dog, and Kelly knew the exhilaration that came the moment before it happened, that last moment of excited satisfaction when you just knew it was going to work, the enemy in the kill zone, unsuspecting that his time had come. The moment in which you could feel the blood in your veins, when you alone knew the silence was about to be violated, the wonderful satisfaction of knowing. Kelly’s right hand came out a little as he took another step, still not headed all that close to the target, clearly walking past him, not towards him, and the criminal’s eyes looked up again, just for a moment to make sure, no fear in his eyes, hardly even annoyance; not moving, of course, because people walked around him, not the reverse. Kelly wa
s just an object to him, one of the things that occupied the street, of no more interest than an oil stain on the blacktop.
The Navy called it CPA, Closest Point of Approach, the nearest distance that a straight course took you to another ship or point of land. CPA here was three feet. When he was half a step away, Kelly’s right hand pulled the bang stick from under his jacket. Then he pivoted on his left foot and drove off the right while his right arm extended almost as though to deliver a punch, all one hundred ninety-five pounds of his body mass behind the maneuver. The swollen tip of the bang stick struck the pusher just under the sternum, aimed sharply upward. When it did, the combined push of Kelly’s arm and the inertial mass of the body pushed the chamber backwards, jamming the primer on the fixed firing pin, and the shotgun shell went off, its crimped green-plastic face actually in contact with Junior’s shirt.
The sound was like that of dropping a cardboard box on a wooden floor. Whump. Nothing more than that, certainly not like a shot at all, because all the expanding gas from the powder followed the shot column into Junior’s body. The light trap load—a low-brass shell with #8 birdshot, like that used for competition shooting, or perhaps an early-season dove hunt—would have only injured a man at more than fifteen yards, but in contact with his chest, it might as easily have been an elephant gun. The brutal power of the shot drove the air from his lungs in a surprisingly loud whoosh, forcing Junior’s mouth open in a way that surprise might have done. And truly he was surprised. His eyes looked into Kelly’s, and Junior was still alive, though his heart was already as destroyed as a toy balloon, and the bottom of his lungs torn to bits. Gratifyingly, there was no exit wound. The upward angle of the strike left all of the energy and shot inside the chest, and the power of the explosion served to keep his body erect for a second—no more than that, but for Junior and Kelly it seemed a moment that lasted for hours. Then the body just fell, straight down, like a collapsing building. There was an odd, deep sigh, from air and gun-gases forced out of the entrance wound by the fall, a foul odor of acrid smoke and blood and other things that stained the air, not unlike the ended life it represented. Junior’s eyes were still open, still looking at Kelly, still focusing on his face and trying to say something, his mouth open and quivering until all movement stopped with the question un-asked and -answered. Kelly took the roll from Junior’s still-firm hand and kept moving up the street, his eyes and ears searching for danger, and finding none. At the corner he angled to the gutter and swished the tip of the bang stick in some water to remove whatever blood might be there. Then he turned, heading west to his car, still moving slowly and unevenly. Forty minutes later he was home, richer by eight hundred forty dollars and poorer by one shotgun shell.
“And who’s this one?” Ryan asked.
“Would you believe, Bandanna?” the uniformed officer answered. He was an experienced patrol officer, white, thirty-two years old. “Deals smack. Well, not anymore.”
The eyes were still open, which was not terribly common in murder victims, but this one’s death had been a surprise, and a very traumatic one at that, despite which the body was amazingly tidy. There was a three-quarter-inch entrance wound with a jet-black ring around it like a donut, perhaps an eighth of an inch in thickness. That was from powder, and the diameter of the hole was unmistakably that of a 12-gauge shotgun. Beyond the skin was just a hole, like into an empty box. All of the internal organs had either been immolated or simply pulled down by gravity. It was the first time in his life that Emmet Ryan had ever looked into a dead body this way, as though it were not a body at all, but a mannequin.
“Cause of death,” the coroner observed with early-morning irony, “is the total vaporization of his heart. The only way we’ll even be able to identify heart tissue is under a microscope. Steak tartare,” the man added, shaking his head.
“An obvious contact wound. The guy must have jammed the muzzle right into him, then triggered it off.”
“Jesus, he didn’t even cough up any blood,” Douglas said. The lack of an exit wound left no blood at all on the sidewalk, and from a distance Bandanna actually looked as though he were asleep-except for the wide and lifeless eyes.
“No diaphragm,” the ME explained, pointing to the entrance hole. “That’s between here and the heart. We’ll probably find that the whole respiratory system is wiped out, too. You know, I’ve never seen anything this clean in my life.” And the man had been working this job for sixteen years. “We need lots of pictures. This one will find its way into a textbook.”
“How experienced was he?” Ryan asked the uniformed officer.
“Long enough to know better.”
The detective lieutenant bent down, feeling around the left hip. “Still has a gun here.”
“Somebody he knew?” Douglas wondered. “Somebody he let get real close, that’s for damned sure.”
“A shotgun’s kinda hard to conceal. Hell, even a sawed-off is bulky. No warning at all?” Ryan stepped back for the ME to do his work.
“Hands are clean, no signs of a struggle. Whoever did this got real close without alarming our friend at all.” Douglas paused. “Goddamn it, a shotgun’s noisy. Nobody heard anything?”
“Time of death, call it two or three for now,” the medical examiner estimated, for again there was no rigor.
“Streets are quiet then,” Douglas went on. “And a shotgun makes a shitload of noise.”
Ryan looked at the pants pockets. No bulge of a money roll, again. He looked around. There were perhaps fifteen people watching from behind the police line. Street entertainment was where you found it, and the interest on their faces was no less clinical and no more involved than that of the medical examiner.
“The Duo maybe?” Ryan asked nobody in particular.
“No, it wasn’t,” the ME said at once. “This was a single-barrel weapon. A double would have made a mark left or right of the entrance wound, and the powder distribution would have been different. Shotgun, this close, you only need one. Anyway, a single-barrel weapon.”
“Amen,” Douglas agreed. “Someone is doing the Lord’s work. Three pushers down in a couple of days. Might put Mark Charon out of business if this keeps up.”
“Tom,” Ryan said, “not today.” One more folder, he thought. Another drug-pusher ripoff, done very efficiently —but not the same guy who’d taken Ju-Ju down. Different MO.
Another shower, another shave, another jog in Chinquapin Park during which he could think. Now he had a place and a face to go along with the car. The mission was on profile, Kelly thought, turning right on Belvedere Avenue to cross the stream before jogging back the other way and completing his third lap. It was a pleasant park. Not much in the way of playground equipment, but that allowed kids to run and play free-form, which a number of them were doing, some under the semiwatchful eyes of a few neighborhood mothers, many with books to go along with the sleeping infants who would soon grow to enjoy the grass and open spaces. There was an undermanned pickup game of baseball. The ball evaded the glove of a nine-year-old and came close to his jogging path. Kelly bent down without breaking stride and tossed the ball to the kid, who caught it this time and yelled a thank-you. A younger child was playing with a Frisbee, not too well, and wandered in Kelly’s way, causing a quick avoidance maneuver that occasioned an embarrassed look from her mother, to which Kelly responded with a friendly wave and smile.
This is how it’s supposed to be, he told himself. Not very different from his own youth in Indianapolis. Dad’s at work. Mom’s with the kids because it was hard to be a good mom and have a job, especially when they were little; or at least, those mothers who had to work or chose to work could leave the kids with a trusted friend, sure that the little ones would be safe to play and enjoy their summer vacation in a green and open place, learning to play ball. And yet society had learned to accept the fact that it wasn’t this way for many. This area was so different from his area of operations, and the privileges these kids enjoyed ought not to be privileges at all,
for how could a child grow to proper adulthood without an environment like this?
Those were dangerous thoughts, Kelly told himself. The logical conclusion was to try to change the whole world, and that was beyond his capacity, he thought, finishing his three-mile run with the usual sweaty and good-tired feel, walking it off to cool down before he drove back to the apartment. The sounds drifted over of laughing children, the squeals, the angry shouts of cheater! for some perceived violation of rules not fully understood by either player, and disagreements over who was out or who was “it” in some other game. He got into his car, leaving the sounds and thought behind, because he was cheating, too, wasn’t he? He was breaking the rules, important rules that he did fully understand, but doing so in pursuit of justice, or what he called justice in his own mind.
Vengeance? Kelly asked himself, crossing a street. Vigilante was the next word that came unbidden into his mind. That was a better word, Kelly thought. It came from vigiles, a Roman term for those who kept the watch, the vigilia during the night in the city streets, mainly watchmen for fire, if he remembered correctly from the Latin classes at St. Ignatius High School, but being Romans they’d probably carried swords, too. He wondered if the streets of Rome had been safe, safer than the streets of this city. Perhaps so—probably so. Roman justice had been ... stern. Crucifixion would not have been a pleasant way to die, and for some crimes, like the murder of one’s father, the penalty prescribed by law was to be bound in a cloth sack along with a dog and a rooster, and some other animal, then to be tossed in the Tiber—not to drown, but to be torn apart while drowning by animals crazed to get out of the sack. Perhaps he was the linear descendant of such times, of a vigile, Kelly told himself, keeping watch at night. It made him feel better than to believe that he was breaking the law. And “vigilantes” in American history books were very different from those portrayed in the press. Before the organization of real police departments, private citizens had patrolled the streets and kept the peace in a rough-and-ready way. As he was doing?