“Down here!” Juliette called, waving to me from the door of apartment 503. She grabbed my wrist and pulled me inside, bouncing with a sugar-high buzz. A cold breeze rippled through the empty apartment and ruffled the tarps. It came in from one of the windows, where her sister had cut out a ring of glass the size of a manhole cover.
“Hey, Danny.” Justine sauntered over with a military-grade range finder, twirling the olive plastic box on her finger by a lanyard strap. “Nicky says you want to play with our toys.”
Juliette’s hands closed over my shoulders from behind, nails digging in like ten black-painted needles. She leaned close and whispered, “Sure you wouldn’t rather be one?”
“Ladies,” I said.
“We’re just saying,” Justine added as she trailed a finger down my chest, “we could teach you some new games.”
“We’ve got games for days,” Juliette whispered. She blew a puff of hot breath across my earlobe.
“As…enticing as that invitation is,” I said, “I have work to do. Did you bring what I needed?”
“Ugh.” Juliette’s hands suddenly gave me a shove, pushing me deeper into the apartment. “Party pooper. You never want to have any fun.”
Her sister sighed and pointed with a melodramatic flourish.
“If you insist on being boring, fine. There you go.”
They’d gone above and beyond the call of duty. There was the ring of glass, sliced away with laser precision and opening up the night. Beside it, a three-legged stool and a long, low table set up with a folding tripod. And perched in delicate balance, with its elongated barrel aimed out across the city, a sniper rifle.
35.
I settled onto the stool and squeezed one eye shut, leaning into the rifle’s scope. The lens showed me distant visions, like a witch’s crystal ball; it honed in on the sodium lights of the parking garage’s upper deck, a span of concrete, and a few forlorn cars, scattered between the yellow lines.
“That’s called a scope,” Juliette said, hovering over my left shoulder. “It lets you murder people who are far away.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m aware. Thank you.”
On my right, Justine showed me her range finder. “We’ve already dialed you in. Do you know what that means, Danny?”
“I have fired a gun before.”
Both of the twins clasped their hands to their mouths in horror.
“He did not,” Juliette said.
“He did.” Justine gaped at me. “This is not a gun, Danny. This is a Barrett MRAD bolt-action sniper rifle. It is chambered for .300 Winchester Magnum rounds, it features a single-button length-of-pull adjustment and a polymer bolt guide that keeps dust from getting into the action. The magazine release is ambidextrous, the safety is reversible, and it has a twenty-four-inch barrel! It is a model of modern warfare, it’s been adapted by the armed forces of Israel, Norway, and New Zealand, and it is available in multiple colors, all of which are shades of black!”
“You apologize,” Juliette hissed in my ear. “You apologize to our rifle right now.”
I gave the stock a gentle, if awkward pat.
“I…apologize for besmirching your good name.”
“That’s better,” Justine said with a relieved sigh. “See? Now the four of us are friends again.”
“We don’t know why you want to take the shot yourself, though,” her sister said. “We’re so much better at shooting than you are. I mean, we’re better at everything than you are.”
“But mostly shooting,” Justine said.
I wasn’t sure how I could explain it to them. I wasn’t sure if I understood it myself, beyond some fumbling gut instinct. I had tried to reason with Harry Grimes. I had failed. And now, at his insistence, I was out of options: one of us was going to die tonight.
Letting the twins handle this was the smart play. I’d seen them in action; up close or at range, the only person I knew deadlier than Juliette and Justine was Caitlin herself. I’d even picked the site of Harry’s execution with them in mind. Back in the bad old days, Nicky had put a hit on one of his own men. I was standing next to the poor sap, on that very garage rooftop, when Juliette blew his head off from twelve hundred meters away. This perch was a lot closer. She wouldn’t miss.
All the same, I needed to do this.
I understood Harry Grimes. He’d been a scared, hurting kid in a bad place, and inside the walls of the Wellness House he made the same discovery I did: that monsters didn’t feel pain. Our lives had branched in different directions, but how much of that was simple luck? If Bentley and Corman hadn’t pulled me off the streets and taught me a better way—if they hadn’t taught me that the world had value, that I had value—I would have ended up just like him.
I didn’t create Harry Grimes, but I had a hand in what he’d become. And that made killing him my responsibility.
“I need you downstairs with the getaway car,” I told them. “Just in case the shot gets called in by some solid citizen and I have to leave in a hurry.”
It was a flimsy excuse, but they let it slide. Justine pointed to the rifle.
“This part is the trigger. You pull that when you want the rifle to go bang.”
“I’ll make a note,” I said.
“You can make it go bang five times,” her sister added. “After that point, until you load more bang-making devices, it will no longer go bang.”
“I should only need it to go bang once.”
Damn it, now I was doing it. They left arm in arm, finally, thankfully.
“So explain this again,” I heard Juliette ask in the hall. “Are we not having a threesome now? I’m so confused.”
“No, he just wants to use our rifle.”
“But…okay, no, still confused. He wants to use the rifle then the threesome? Hasn’t he heard of multitasking? Why does he have to make everything so difficult?”
Their voices faded as they reached the stairwell. Then there was nothing but me, the cold night wind streaming in through the circle of cut glass, and the sounds of the streets below. Distant horns, engine hums, the background noise of ordinary people living their ordinary lives.
Right now, while I prepared to commit a murder in cold blood, my brother was home with his wife and kid. I imagined them sitting around the dining table and sharing a meal, talking about their ordinary day. Washing dishes together, settling in on the couch with a bowl of popcorn to watch television.
Me, my brother, Harry. Some people like to think they’re the masters of their fate, but the bends of our lives are so much luck and chaos. One missed call, one change of heart, go left instead of right, and your future is transformed. A twist of fate, and Teddy could have been up here instead of me, watching the rooftops through a high-powered scope and waiting for a victim. I could have been in Harry’s shoes, a killer with no friends, no family, no future, confusing brutality and cruelty with strength.
I couldn’t control the tides of fate. I could only make the occasional tiny adjustment. That’s what the rifle was for.
Nothing to do now but watch, and wait, and shiver as I leaned into the scope and the cold. Harry still hadn’t shown, and we were twenty minutes past the two-hour mark. I wondered if he was on some other rooftop, with some other rifle, looking for me the same way. No. He was an up-close-and-personal kind of killer. He was addicted to the last words before the trigger pull, savoring the fear in his victims’ eyes. He’d need me to face him, to get some kind of acknowledgment that he’d bested me.
I heard the stairwell door clang and stifled a groan. Asking the twins to sit patiently for more than ten minutes at a stretch was like begging for a miracle. They’d probably driven around the block five times already, then gotten bored.
“Seriously,” I said, keeping my eye on the scope. “This won’t take long. Just watch the car, okay?”