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 0+, 0-, 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 robber 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 – every one 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 be 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 was 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 rip 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 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.