If they did bring in dogs, he’d be easy to track. Another reason to find a car. Then he wouldn’t have to worry about dogs. ’Course, he wasn’t real sure about that. A special ops guy he met in Kuwait in ’91 told him trained bloodhounds could even track someone driving away in a car. Something about the car’s vent system exhausting the interior air out through the back and carrying the smell of the passenger with it. Sounded like bullshit. Probably was bullshit. How the fuck could a dog smell something like that, anyway? Fuck it. He put it out of his mind. Anyhow, they wouldn’t have time to organize any fucking dogs. With another six hours of darkness, he’d be to hell and gone before they got anything going.
Just a little hike through the countryside. He was only pissed because he’d missed the bitch’s heart. Hadn’t accomplished the damned mission. Then that cop unloaded on him with a fucking shotgun. Bastard. Anyway, calm down, be cool, he told himself. Be cool or be dead.
Still, it bothered him that he missed. He shouldn’t have missed. Shit, he never missed. It was just because of the fucking cigarettes the bitch kept sucking on, moving around, tossing them out the window. Jesus. Didn’t she care what they were doing to her lungs? Didn’t she have any fucking respect for her body? And that hairball cop letting her do it. Didn’t he know how bad secondhand smoke could be for you? Him a father and everything. Well, he’d give them both something better than butts to suck on. Be cool, he warned himself again. Calm down. Don’t let the rage take over.
He walked silently along a line of trees at the edge of a meadow. He didn’t know how bad the woman was hurt. The green image through the night-vision scope made things pretty blurry. Specially when they were moving around like she was. He was pretty sure he hit her arm. Couldn’t tell how bad the wound was. Might have hit a bone or an artery or maybe both. They would’ve taken her to the hospital. There were two hospitals in Portland. He’d head for the bigger one.
He held the M24 sniper rifle in the crook of his left arm. Good weapon. Accurate. He stroked it with his free hand. Shooting someone always got the juices going, and he was getting a hard-on. In fact, he’d had it for a while and it wasn’t going away. If you had a hard-on for more than four hours you had to go see a doctor. That’s what the TV ad for that limp-dick medicine said. Well, he guessed he’d see a few doctors tonight. He came to a dirt road. Looking both ways he couldn’t see much of anything. He was trying to figure out which way to go and thinking about how to get himself a vehicle when he saw a pair of headlights approaching him at a good clip about a half klick away. He squatted down in some scrub. Unlikely to be a cop, but you couldn’t be sure. As it drew closer he picked out the shape of a pickup truck. Not a cop. He set the M24 down in the grass by the side of the road and walked into the middle, real cool and casual like, and waved the truck down as it approached. It slowed to a stop. The driver was a kid, seventeen or eighteen years old.
‘What’s the problem, mister? Car break down?’ He was a good-looking boy. Long blond hair. A cute little soul patch growing under his lip. He had broad shoulders and what looked to be a nice body. The shooter nodded and flashed him his best smile.
‘Yeah. That’s right. My car broke down. ’Bout a mile from here.’
‘Don’t ya have a cell?’ the boy asked.
‘Nah. It ran out of juice.’
‘Well, here, you can borrow mine. You belong to Triple-A?’ The kid held his cell phone out the open window. The shooter moved closer, as if to take the phone, then, in a single motion, pulled open the door of the truck with his left hand, grabbed the back of the kid’s head with his right, and slammed it hard against the steering wheel. Then he slammed it again. Blood spurted out of the kid’s nose. The boy was screaming, ‘You broke my fucking nose. You broke my fucking nose.’ Still holding the boy’s neck, the shooter unhooked his seat belt with his left hand and pulled him hard out of the truck. He threw him onto the road. ‘You broke my fucking nose,’ the kid cried again.
‘Shut the fuck up!’ said the shooter. He kicked the boy hard in the face. ‘Just shut the fuck up.’ Then he kicked him again for good measure, this time in the gut. The boy squeezed into a fetal position. He was sobbing and gasping for air, but, shit, that was no reason not to have a little fun.
The shooter knelt down and unbuttoned the kid’s jeans and pulled them down. His pink boxers were decorated with little rows of red hearts, which made the shooter smile. Cute, he thought. Maybe he’d get himself a pair like that.
The shooter went back to the truck, turned off the engine, and extinguished the headlights. In the distance he could hear a siren. More than one, in fact, and they were getting closer. Fuck it. He better haul ass. He walked over to where the rifle was hidden. He picked it up. The boy was lying on his side, sobbing quietly. Too bad wasting such a good-looking kid, but he’d seen the shooter’s face, and the area was crawlin’ with cops. The shooter placed the barrel of the rifle about an inch above the boy’s ear. He pulled the trigger.
32
Wednesday. 2:00 A.M.