"And the damned thing got stuck in your throat where it grabbed on with its little teeth. The leech started swelling with your blood, right there while it was in your throat. Your air was cut off and you started turning blue. Your spotter wasn't nearby, so he was no help."
"What's a spotter?" Carolyn asked.
"So you took out your service knife and punched a hole in your own throat, a big ragged hole. Then you cut off a short piece of bamboo and used it as a tube for air."
John moved quickly from his corner. "I'm going to ask Mrs. Orlando for Yoo Hoos."
"You got your color back but you couldn't dig out the leech. You were deep behind enemy lines and it took two days to get to an aid station and the leech was in your throat all that time getting fatter and happier."
The twins beamed.
Coates turned to the twins. "Girls, I don't know about you, but a leech stuck in my craw could take some of the luster off an otherwise fine day."
John marched back into the room carrying Yoo Hoos and straws. He handed a carton to the detective and lectured, "You open the flap and stick the straw in."
Coates did as told. He sipped on the chocolate drink. "It ain't a Guinness, but not bad. What'd you do to your hand, kid?"
John glanced at his clamp. "I don't remember." He expertly punched a hole into the carton with the tip of the clamp.
"What's a spotter?" Carolyn asked again.
"Your dad was with the 1st Battalion, Fourth Marines, in a sniper-scout platoon."
Gray quickly turned to his children. "Girls, John, I need to talk to Detective Coates privately. Go to your rooms, please."
They could tell he meant business. They disappeared into their rooms without dawdling or argument.
The detective emptied the carton with a loud gurgle. "You know, I'd be proud as hell if a rifle range down at Quantico was named after me."
Gray replied tonelessly, "I don't think you would, actually."
The detective persisted. "I made a phone call to a gunnery sergeant down there this afternoon. Sergeant Arlen Able, an old friend of yours, turns out. They still talk about you. The sergeant called you a legend."
Gray rubbed his chin. "Yeah, well, I've left all that behind."
"After talking to the sergeant, I was hoping to see the Wimbledon Cup on your mantel." The detective scanned the apartment. "But you don't have a mantel. Or even a decent table to put it on."
He looked back at Gray. "I asked the Marine sergeant over the phone, I says, 'Sergeant, you mean Wimbledon like in tennis?' And he laughs like I'm a pussy and says the Wimbledon Cup is the Thousand-Yard National High-Power Rifle Championship held at Camp Perry, Ohio, and that you won it three years running."
"I don't talk about it much."
"You know what my nickname was in the Marines?" Coates asked.
"I can only imagine."
"Pogey. That's what Marines working in an office are called. I was a typing instructor for the quartermaster at the Marine Corps Air Station at Cherry Point. Fifteen words a minute and they make me a typing teacher, for Christ sake. I should've had a name like White Star. The chicks loved that nickname, I'll bet?"
When Gray said nothing, the detective continued, "The sergeant at Quantico told me the Viet Cong and NVA called you White Star due to the little paper star you always left behind."
In fact, the name had come first, then the paper star. The enemy began calling Gray White Star early in Gray's tour because of the sniper's penchant for using twilight. All Marine snipers knew the sailors' rhyme, altered slightly: Red sky at night, sniper's delight. A lingering pink and red and purple dusk prompts the hunted to leave the safety of the trees or hedges too early. First darkness is an illusion where the near foreground seems darker to the target than it is to a marksman viewing from a distance. During a red twilight the hunted may not suspect he can still be seen in the shooter's crosshairs. Gray's name came from the first heavenly body visible in the sky at twilight, Venus, which westerners call the evening star but which Vietnamese know as the white star.
Then one day in Vietnam in his blind, waiting, it turned out, thirty-six hours for the shot, Gray had idly begun folding a small piece of paper torn from his sniper's log. He folded, unfolded, and refolded, experimenting with an intricate but random design. Eventually his spotter, Corporal Allen Berkowitz, said, "You've made a star, looks like. Just like your nickname." After the kill, Gray left the star behind. From then on, he left a paper star behind at every firing site or, if he could get there, on the corpse.
Many of history's snipers left a calling card of some sort, Gray discovered later. John Paudash, the Chippewa Indian who fought in the 21st Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in World War One and who was famous for working alone, left a bird feather at his kills. In the Civil War, Corporal Ben Burton of the 18th North Carolina Regiment was known as the Choirboy because he claimed the pitch of a bullet passing overhead could tell him the precise distance to the enemy rifleman. The Choirboy always left a squirrel's tail. The Viet Minh sniper Vo Li Giap, renowned for firing through airplane windscreens at French pilots trying to take off from the Dien Bien Phu airfield, left braided pieces of twine. One of history's first recorded snipers, Leonardo da Vinci, shot several enemy soldiers while standing on the walls of besieged Florence using a rifle he had designed himself. Whether Leonardo felt compelled to leave a calling card is unknown.
"And the Viet Cong had a reward for your head, the equivalent of five years' pay for a soldier." Coates gurgled the dregs of the Yoo Hoo again. "The VC blanketed Vietnam with a drawing of your face on a wanted poster. Where'd they get the drawing?"
Gray was becoming resigned to the conversation. "From a photo of me run in Sea Tiger, the III Marine Amphibious Force's weekly newspaper, is my guess."
"So how many of the enemy did you whack?"
Gray glanced at the wall over Coates's head. Several of John's crayon drawings had been taped there. He always painted the sky red. "A few."
"Christ, I'll say." Coates laughed, a peculiar clatter, like a stick dragged along a picket fence. "Ninety-six is quite a few. It's hard to believe, zotzing ninety-six people. More kills than any other sniper in American military history, the sergeant at Quantico told me. I asked the sergeant why you left the service, but he didn't know or more probably he wouldn't say, and your file wasn't too clear on the subject."
Gray replied, "Well, my tour was up—"
"Not quite," the detective cut in. "Your second tour was two months from being up when you flew back to San Diego on a medevac plane."
John's door opened and the boy walked out, straight for the detective. He had taken a liking to the brusque policeman.
The boy asked, "Want another Yoo Hoo?"
"Sure. And add a shot of vodka while you're at it."
"Yum. I love vodka." John grinned widely. He turned for the kitchen.
Gray rose from the chair to intercept his son. He gently grabbed the boy's shoulders and turned him. "You better tell me you've never tasted vodka once in your whole life."
"I put it in my Yoo Hoos all the time just like the detective does."
"Back to your room with you, you big fibber."
John laughed in his tinkling way. He hadn't expected his mission to be a success.
"Nice kid you got there. I see the family resemblance."
"Why are we honored with your visit tonight, Pete?" Gray asked.
"We need your expertise," Coates said, crumpling the carton. "De Sallo's killer was an ace with a rifle. And you know more about using a rifle than anyone else we can find. Maybe more than anybody else in history."
Gray knew it to be true.
Coates went on: "Carmine De Sallo was killed thirty hours ago and we have only one hard piece of evidence — the bullet that passed through his head and then through Boatman Garbanto's shoulder. And by the way, that puke Boatman will be all right, to my regret. We dug the slug out of the courthouse steps."