“You don’t trust us?”
Wilton shakes his head. “You can’t learn this stuff from books.”
“And you’ve learned it through experience.”
“That’s right.”
“So when we have the experience we’ll be as good as you.”
Wilton shifts his eyes to look at Kelly. He says, “You can’t have a late start.”
Armor-piercing or KTW rounds can puncture steel doors and pass through bulletproof vests. Their drawback is that they make neat, surgical wounds.
Full-metal-jacketed rounds also have a better penetration value than standard loads, but they are less streamlined than the armor piercers and cause more tissue damage.
Hollowpoints carry low penetration values but expand on impact. This is also true for dum-dums.
You can create a hollowpoint effect by cutting cross-shaped grooves into the tips of your cartridges. On impact, the round will flatten out along the grooves, disintegrating muscle and bone. (Note: Handmade loads may tend to jam an automatic.)
I am kneeling by an open window on the ninth floor of the Ritz, looking past the Public Garden at Beacon Street, and Wilton says, “Blue suit with the grocery bag.”
“Got it,” says Kelly.
“Why him?” I say.
“I don’t know,” Wilton says. “Easily identifiable.”
Kelly says, “It doesn’t pay to stand out.”
They are on their feet next to me, binoculars held to their faces. I open and close my hands against the rifle and blink my eyes and watch through the scope as the man scratches his neck, magnified ten times.
“I don’t know if I can,” I say.
Wilton sighs. “This is what you said you wanted.”
“I know. I just wasn’t expecting him to be so alive.”
Kelly says, “I’ll do it.”
“Wait your turn,” Wilton says.
The man stops walking and checks his watch.
I say, “Won’t they be able to tell where the shots came from?”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“I don’t know. Somebody.”
“Unlikely. The flash isn’t too apparent in daylight.”
“What about the sound?”
“It’ll echo off the buildings. It’ll seem to come from everywhere.”
“What if somebody sees us?”
“The chances of that increase with every second you don’t take the shot.”
The man is whistling now. I steady the crosshairs on the top button of his suit jacket. I close my eyes and imagine the way his face will look when the bullet hits him and the noises he’ll make and the way his body will come apart. I wonder whether he will drop the groceries. I open my eyes.
Wilton says, “Deep breaths. Squeeze, don’t pull.”
The man smiles suddenly and switches his grocery bag to the other arm. A young girl with blond hair runs into the sight picture. The man bends down and scoops her up with his free hand and spins her around in a circle. She kisses him on the cheek.
I draw back from the scope and lay the rifle on the windowsill and stand up. I shake my head. “Not in front of his daughter.”
Kelly looks at me. “The fuck you care?”
“She’ll never recover.”
“Nobody recovers from anything. Your experiences shape who you are. You have a chance to be the defining influence in this girl’s life.”
I don’t say anything.
“If you’re so worried about it,” he says, “maybe we should do her too.”
“No,” I say. “I won’t do that.”
He groans. “Have Wilton do it.”
“The girl can’t die.”
“She can and she will. The only question is when.”
“Not today.”
“What difference does it make? Today, tomorrow, eighty years from now. She won’t be in a position to care.”
“But in eighty years, when she feels it coming, she’ll be able to look at all the things she did. Now she could only think of what she didn’t do.”
“So what if this girl has an unpleasant last few minutes in which she imagines the life she didn’t live? It’ll probably be better when she imagines it than it would have been to live it. It’ll be better than remembering all the things she could never quite do. Besides, it’s only a few minutes at the end. And if you hit her right, she won’t even have that. Like flipping off a light switch.”
Wilton turns to look at him. “I don’t wash anybody for free.”
“We’ll pay you,” Kelly says.
On the street below us, the man has put the girl down and is holding her hand. Holding the girl’s other hand is a pretty blond woman in a blue cardigan.
Wilton turns back to the window. The family is moving away from us. They round the corner onto Charles Street.
I say, “They’ll go home tonight like they do every night and they’ll never know that they just lived through the most important moments of their lives. They don’t even know we exist.”
Kelly says, “Goldfish have thirty-second memories. Everything that happened more than thirty seconds ago is erased to make room for the new things. That means that at the very end, when they look back, they’ve been dying their whole lives.”
Wilton grunts. When Kelly shoots him, his body clenches and he half turns from the waist, head rigid, pupils crammed to the sides of his eyes, trying to look at Kelly behind him. Then he sags against the glass, blood spraying from the big exit wound in his chest. The sound of the handgun is much softer than I am expecting. It is the dry crack of a twig snapping over and over.
“Sorry about that,” Kelly tells me.
“You’re crazy,” I say quietly.
He smiles. “I doubt it. It’s just that I’ve developed a more complete understanding of our situation.”
“Do you understand that Dexter’s other boys will be looking loins now? Along with God-knows-who-else.”
He shrugs. “I hope you see why it was necessary.”
I stare at him.
He stands very close to Wilton, who is gurgling. “It’s all perfectly natural. Today we’re selecting for people who draw their guns on time.” He smiles. “We’re selecting against surly tarbabies who don’t know how to watch their mouths.”
We are sitting on long sofas in the dark-maple locker room at the Harvard Club and my boss is saying, “If poor people were as smart as rich people, they’d be rich by now.”
The man next to him is soft everywhere and colors his hair red-brown. He netted eleven million dollars last year. He chuckles.
My boss says, “Every generation of a family has a chance to hit it big. If they keep missing, after a while you have to assume that something’s wrong with the genes.”
The carpet is blood-colored. The walls of the locker room are covered with lacquered plaques that show vertical columns of men’s names. Kelly and I have our legs stuck out in front of us and crossed at the ankles. We are wearing white Izod shirts and gray shorts. We have long-handled rackets laid across our laps.
The television that hangs from the ceiling of the locker room shows a pretty blond woman with straight teeth and a gray-haired man, also with straight teeth, sitting at a curved desk in front of Corinthian columns and windows that show false sky. At the bottom of the screen, stock prices churn by in a blue strip.
Kelly whispers, “Ancient chieftains developed efficient methods of agriculture so that they could throw banquets to show their power.”
“What?” I say.
“It wasn’t to better provide for their people. For that, the old methods were sufficient.”
I stare at him.
“Technology develops not to advance the species but to consolidate the power of individuals.”
“Listen,” I say, “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about the death of emotion and the sublimation of desire.”
“I thought the death of emotion was what we wanted. I thought you said we were walking the path to emotional detachment.”
He nods. “Yes. I’ve come to reexamine our position. At the beginning I thought we were working to evolve into things capable of murder. I thought we were trying to divorce mind from body. I thought we were trying to resist going cerebral.” He sighs. “I realized recently that our problem is that we had already gone cerebral. We had already separated mind and body. We’ve been denying our instincts. For human beings to be able to kill, they don’t need to evolve, they need to regress. All these computer-geek faggots live in the world of the cerebral and they’ve probably never been in a fight. They can’t fight, they can’t luck, they have no physical presence. You and I have been trying to regain our instinctive behaviors. We’re trying to get back to basics.”