“Alex forced me, Harry. I tried to warn you.”
“No biggie. Who needs balls anyway? They make your pants fit funny.”
“It’s bad?” I ask.
Harry pulls out his waistband and peeks inside.
“I don’t think they’re supposed to swell up this big.”
“You need to see a doctor.”
“I need to see Mr. Ripley.”
“Mr. Ripley?”
“The Believe It or Not guy. I should make a plaster mold for his museum.”
I toss him the frozen peas. He stuffs them down his pants.
“COLD!” Harry yells. “SO COLD!”
I stare at him, hopping from foot to foot, and then I look at the freezer door of the stainless steel refrigerator. It’s pockmarked with bullet holes, each in the center of a huge dent. Strange. Full-metal jacketed slugs should have punched right through without denting it. I crawl up to Harry to get a closer look.
“So what shitstorm did I wander into?” McGlade asks. He drains the beer, tosses the bottle at Alex’s head, misses, then reaches for another.
“Three snipers. They kill sex offenders. Call themselves TUHC.”
Harry belches and says, “The Urban Hunting Club.”
I appraise him. “You’ve heard of them?”
“No. But there’s a producer of DVD adult entertainment called TUBC. The Urban Booty Club. Lots of college girls taking off their tops and eating Popsicles, stuff like that. The first DVD is only nine ninety-nine, but that’s how they sucker you in, because they send you two new DVDs every month for twenty-nine ninety-nine each. And they’re only forty-five minutes long, which is a real rip-off.” Harry scratches his nose. “So I’ve heard.”
The Urban Hunting Club sounds right. That’s something a group of disgruntled blue-collar Grabowskis would call themselves.
“They killed three rapists to night, then gunned down ten cops,” I say. “Looks like they followed me home.”
“You think?”
I open the fridge, can’t find where the bullets have gone through on the inside. The door seems to have stopped them. I shake it, and hear some slugs rattling inside. I use a spoon to pry back the plastic molding, and a gray bullet drops out. It resembles a mushroom. The snipers have switched from jacketed rounds to soft points. A soft point has more stopping power, expanding on impact, but not the penetrating power of a full-metal jacket slug, which didn’t deform as much.
“You know, Jackie…” Harry stares down at me, “the top of your head is really sexy.”
“This is the only time you’ll ever see it, McGlade.”
He takes out his cell phone and snaps a picture.
“Hot,” Harry says. “I especially dig the gray roots coming in. I like a woman with de cades of experience.”
I ignore him, something I’m particularly good at. “We need to turn off the lights. We’ve got two in the kitchen, three in the living room, the hallway, the bedroom, and the garage. Then, when it’s dark, I can grab the gun bag in the bedroom, pop outside, and sneak up on these bastards.”
“You can kill all the lights at once,” Harry says. “Got a circuit breaker?”
“End of the hallway, in the laundry room.”
“I’ll wait here.” Harry shakes his prosthetic for effect.
“Actually, Harry, I’m thinking we use this refrigerator for cover.”
“You want to push this heavy thing all the way across a carpeted hallway? Good luck.”
“We’re going to push it.”
“And give the psycho kitty another chance to use Acorn Andy as a scratch post? No thanks.”
I reach into the refrigerator, take out the squirt gun we keep in there for when Mr. Friskers disagrees with guests.
“Just spray him if he gets close.”
“Like this?”
Harry squirts me in the face. Big surprise there. Then he sprays me in the chest a few times, squinting to see through the material. I take the gun away from him.
“Grow up, Harry.” I yell over my shoulder, “Mom! Latham! We’re going to shut off the electricity!” I face Harry again. “Let’s do this.”
Harry grins, then adjusts his peas. “All right, but I’m warning you – if it’s really heavy, I’m going to make you check me later on for a hernia.”
“I can’t wait,” I deadpan. Then I unplug the fridge and we begin to push.
9:21 P.M.
PESSOLANO
PAUL PESSOLANO PEERS THROUGH the yellow lenses of his aviator sunglasses, trying to find his backpack in the darkness. He can’t see shit. Pessolano feels around in the grass where he’s sitting, and locates one of the straps. He pulls the bag closer, lifts up his glasses so he can see inside, and removes a magazine filled with five Lapua.338 Mags. He pops the old magazine out of the TPG-1 and clicks the new one in place. Then he gives it a slap, like he’s seen in a thousand war movies.
Even though he told the others differently, Pessolano was never in the armed forces. The closest he ever got to the sands of Kuwait was Miami Beach. Six months ago he worked in a chain video store in Tampa. Then his elderly mother died. He quit his job, sold her house, and used the money to buy some top-of-the-line sniper rifles and surveillance equipment. His plan was to become a mercenary. Or a hit man. Or a wandering gun for hire, like George Peppard on The A-Team.
Work wasn’t easy to find. He tried reading the police blotter and calling up the parents of juveniles involved in illegal activities, asking if they wanted to hire him to make their lives easier. He never got any takers, and after cops showed up at his apartment (he hid inside and didn’t let them in) he fled the state.
Swanson’s ad in Soldier of Fortune, asking for “civic-minded mercs who wanted to make things right,” is the first freelance job Pessolano has actually been on. It doesn’t pay anything, but that’s okay. This is all about getting some experience. Once he turns this corner, he’s sure he’ll find other jobs. Because Pessolano is now, officially, a killer.
It was easy, killing the pervert. Pessolano had been worried about it, afraid he wouldn’t have the guts to pull the trigger when the clock struck five. But he pulled that trigger. And he shot that pervert in the back of the head. Baptized by fire, a culmination of the greatest few weeks of his life.
All the preparation, all the practice up to this point, didn’t seem real. Pessolano felt like he was living someone else’s life. He liked the feeling, but didn’t fully believe it. But he believes it now. He’s not a pretender. He’s the real deal. And he’s got the dead body to prove it, and good friends to share it with. Though Swanson seems a little soft, and Munchel a little crazy, they are his friends. That’s why he doesn’t mind them using his guns and equipment.
And now the thing Pessolano wants to do most is impress his friends. He knows they look up to him. If he can kill all five of the targets by himself, they’ll revere him even more. That’s why he’s using the better bullets. The Lapuas, which can shoot through a brick wall. These are the last of the full-metal jacket rounds. He gave Swanson and Munchel cheaper bullets – soft points. They work fine, but they aren’t as deadly as the Lapuas.
He pulls back the bolt. The brass flies out. He chambers a round and spends a minute tracking down the ejected cartridge and pocketing it. Then he presses his cheek against the pad and sights his target: the hallway. He can see all the way down to the laundry room. If he switches position, he can see into the bedroom where the two women were fighting over the black bag.