"I was born with a good nose but it's mostly learned. It's coming back."
"Maybe I should've changed my socks this week," Coates said.
"Another thing. This past couple of days I've been incapable of looking at a distant building or tree and not estimate its distance. Six hundred yards, eleven hundred yards, four hundred yards. My brain has been filled with an incessant flow of numbers. It took me a decade to stop doing yardage estimates, and the numbers are flooding back."
Coates sniffed his wrist, then pulled up his sleeve to smell his forearm. "It was tuna, but I can't smell it."
"And once again I've become acutely aware of motion at the periphery of my vision. I'm spinning to these vague movements to the right and left. These are little things, but they are changing me slowly and involuntarily as if I'm in the grip of some terrible potion."
"Why not just let NYPD SWAT team members handle it?"
"We know how good Nikolai Trusov is because we've seen him do his work. And the Russians confirm how talented he was in Afghanistan. So it has to be me." Gray took a long breath. "Pete, I've spent many years trying to forget that I'm a freak with a rifle. My talent is an aberration, a suspension of the rules of the physical world, like Michael Jordan with a basketball or Wayne Gretzky with a puck. I've known since I was seven years old that I could shoot the wings off a gnat at five hundred yards. Your swat team has damned good shooters, but on a range and in the field I'd chew them up, even after all this time."
Coates asked earnestly, "You've been sitting over there, fidgeting, licking your lip, staring at the wall. How's your mental health?"
Gray pressed two fingers against his temple. "What's worse for my mental health, knowing that anybody standing next to me may get an exploded head or me picking up a rifle again? I don't have a choice, Pete."
The detective leaned back, lifting the front legs of the chair off the floor. He tilted his head toward Gray as if he might hear his thoughts. "I don't know much about this because I was a desk jockey in the Marines, but have you ever thought that your role in Vietnam was no different than a bomber pilot's or an artilleryman's, just a little more personal? There was a war on. That was legal killing you did. You've been punishing yourself ever since for being a soldier, for doing your duty."
"You're right," Gray replied vehemently. "You don't know anything about it."
Coates asked cautiously, "Is there something about your Vietnam days — something more than your role as a sniper — that put you on the medication? There were quite a few American snipers in Vietnam. They didn't all end up as… as troubled as you."
Gray said nothing. He rose and walked down the hall toward the waiting Marine.
At ten o'clock that evening Sixth Avenue in Brooklyn was still radiating the day's heat. Bricks and concrete seemed to shimmer. Fireplugs and fire escapes and car hoods were still warm. Pink geraniums and purple petunias hung dispiritedly in their window planters. Not a whisper of wind touched the street, and air trapped between the buildings was heavy with the brown scents of auto exhaust, garlic, and sewage.
Sounds of the street seemed muffled under the blanket of heat. Two cats yowled at each other in the distance. Couples out for evening strolls chatted, but quietly, leaning toward each other as if the oppressive air made speaking loudly too much effort. A stereo playing heavy metal rock could be faintly heard, and the sounds of television sets came through open windows.
Bay Ridge's tidy apartments and fourplexes were a blend of Greek revival and federal and Italianate styles, most three and four stories high with subdued but distinctive ornamentation. The entrance to Owen Gray's building was guarded by two fluted columns supporting a porch roof above the top step. The small porch was enclosed on the sides by utilitarian iron pickets designed to meet the code. The door was ancient and pitted oak but was bright with red paint. The intercom panel to the right of the door had a button near each of four numbers. Names were not displayed.
Wood window frames on all four stories were painted black, and many windows were open this night. Gray's apartment was on the top floor. The large window facing the street was to the twins' bedroom. The sheer curtains were closed, but in the bright bedroom the shapes inside were visible — though surely nebulous — through the translucent cloth.
Gray's bathrobe was a Black Watch plaid that Mrs. Orlando had given him for Christmas. "Don't read too long tonight, girls."
The words were wasted. The bundles under the two beds were motionless. Above Julie's bed was a poster of Ken Griffey Jr. and above Carolyn's was a print of a woodcut of Frederic Chopin. The room was a mad scramble of tossed clothing, schoolbooks, old dolls, art equipment, and a collection of Breyer horses. A copy of Seventeen magazine was on Carolyn's desk. Mrs. Orlando insisted that the room be orderly each night before bedtime, but she had disappeared for the afternoon, and when that happened, the room's contents spread like a stain, with everything taken out of closets and off desks and from shelves but nothing put back. Gray would complain of having to high-step across their room like a fullback through the defensive line.
"You two must have had a big day. Adrian Wade wore you both out?" A soft chuckle. "She wears me out, too."
Each form in the beds received a kiss. "Good night, my girls. Sleep tight and don't let the bedbugs bite."
The bathrobe moved toward the door to the hallway.
If that instant could be expanded through some quirk of nature, if that second could be dilated so that the swift appeared slow and the slow seemed still, the first indication of order gone awry would be the dime-sized hole appearing as if by sleight of hand in the curtain. The bullet breached the room like a beam of light, crossing the effluvia of the girls' lives, then ripping into the form in Carolyn's bed, digging an appalling trench the length of the body to punch through the headboard and bury itself in the wall.
Two seconds later another trespassing bullet entered the room through the curtain, this one plunging through the form in Julie's bed.
At the door, wearing Owen Gray's bathrobe, Pete Coates put the two-way radio to his mouth. "Now. He's done it."
On the roof of the building, only his starlight binoculars and the crown of his head visible above the cornice, Sergeant Able barked, "I just saw the flash. Zone two, point three, E.D. four. They were right, that apartment roof."
With those few words, referring to zones and reference points and distances, Able put the shooter on the target.
Owen Gray nudged the M-40A1 Marine Corps sniper rifle and mounted starlight scope an inch left.
Able said unnecessarily, "Chink it down a couple clicks."
"I have him." Gray did not have the time to wonder at the tenor of his own voice, a flat, stainless steel tone he had not heard in twenty-five years. The utter dispassion would have frightened him under other circumstances.
Through the scope Gray saw the head, low behind a roof cornice on a building four blocks away. A rifle was next to the head, pointed at the air, perhaps coming down for another shot or perhaps in retreat.
Gray inhaled, let half of it out. He had learned early in his sniping career that it was not always necessary to search for the pulse in his neck or arms, but rather that his vision — everyone's vision — blurred ever so slightly with each pump of the heart. He waited a fraction of a second for his sight of the target to clear between heartbeats. Then he brought back the trigger. Two seconds had passed since Able had given him the co-ordinates.
The rifle spoke and jumped back against his shoulder. His view through the scope bounced to the sky.
Arlen Able cheered, "You got him. He blew down. I saw his rifle fall over, too." He patted Gray's shoulder. "Nice work. You won't see that on the shopping channel."