Eye of Vengeance (26 page)

Chapter 33

M
ichael Redman lay with the hooded binoculars up to his face for forty-five minutes, but still his eyes were not tired. His eyes had never been tired. He could hold this position, prone on the roof, forever if he had to because if that’s what had to be done, he would do it.

A week ago Redman had followed Mullins one morning and tracked him. He thought he might approach the reporter. Let him know what his stories had meant to him, how he’d planned this out for a year, how he was going to be the sword to Mullins’s pen.

But he’d held off and tracked Mullins to this street and then watched as the reporter tucked his car in behind a trash Dumpster and then just sat there. Redman had been intrigued by the behavior. Maybe Mullins was working some investigative story. Maybe he was having a liaison with some woman. Redman had read about the accident that killed Mullins’s wife and kid. It made sense that the guy wouldn’t be shacking up with a new lady in front of his remaining daughter. Mullins was stand-up.

Redman had watched the reporter until a Ford F-150 showed and parked in front of a tool shop. The driver, dressed in a work shirt and six-pocket fatigue pants, got out and unlocked the shop. Redman scoped Mullins at the same time and could read the hardness in his face. This was who he’d been waiting for. But once the mark was inside, Mullins simply waited a few minutes and then drove away.

Intrigued, Redman stayed. He had no deadlines. His was a patient study of people and what they did or did not do. In an hour the street began to fill with traffic and working men and women and Redman was about to slip away when the man Mullins had been watching reappeared from the shop, got into his truck and left. Maybe it was the bush pants that caught his attention. Military? Ex-military like himself? Redman trailed the mark first to a coffee shop and then to a liquor store. When the man emerged from the store with a small brown paper sack Redman watched him climb back in his truck, unscrew the top of a pint to take a snort and then slide the bottle into the thigh pocket of his cargo pants before closing the car door and driving away. Nine-in-the-morning boozer, Redman thought. And a secret boozer, at that. He took down the license plate number to check. It was never a bad idea to know the players. It was only later, when Redman tracked the name of the plate owner, that he found another name to add to his target list.

This morning at seven he took the position he’d found that week and was now scanning the street below. Traffic was again building, but there was a difference in the pattern. He tilted his binoculars up to sweep farther down the sight line and saw that some kind of barricade had gone up three blocks south. Uniformed police officers were manning the orange-striped sawhorses, but he could see that they had their arms crossed and were talking out of the sides of their mouths to one another, the classic sign of guys who were doing a special detail job, not really giving a shit because it wasn’t their beat. Inside the barricades there were some unusually expensive-looking cars parked in an area where they didn’t fit in. Some dark-colored Ford LTDs that Redman knew from experience were the car of choice for the feds.

He swung the glasses back down when movement in the kill zone caught his attention and he saw Walker’s truck turn onto the street and pull into the same place where he’d parked before. Redman set the binoculars aside and pulled the stock of his sniper rifle close to his shoulder and used the scope to zoom in. Walker got out of the truck. He was dressed the same way as before, uniform shirt, cargo pants. But today Redman could tell by his body movements that the target was agitated. Walker stepped out into the street instead of going straight into his building. He looked south toward the barricades for a moment and then swatted the air with his left hand as if to say,
Fuck it,
and then turned and went inside. Redman allowed it. That was not the shot he wanted. That was not the statement. He would wait. If he was the study of human behavior he thought he was, the guy would return and the plan would go down with perfection.

Nick was scrambling, working the numbers. What the hell had Canfield said when Nick was doing the SWAT story? When Redman worked SWAT, six hundred yards was his optimal sniper range, the one he felt most comfortable with.

He left his car at the coffee shop and walked back into the area, taking the back alleys and parking areas, the ones tucked behind the warehouses and industrial shops and delivery bays. He thought about Hargrave, tailing Walker. The detective would be watching from ground level. But Redman would be up high, like any good sniper. And that’s where Fitzgerald’s boys would be looking too if they were worried about a legitimate assassination attempt. But would they come this far out from the nursing home? This was way too far, probably a thousand yards, for even a great sniper to take a shot at the secretary. Nick was working the numbers. He settled on the block that figured to be six hundred yards from Archie’s front door, give or take. From behind the buildings he climbed up a utility ladder like the one he’d made his move on at the very first shooting site across from the jail. The top of the building seemed clear when he poked his head over the roofline. No man lying prone at the edge walls. No one dressed in black. He duck-walked to the front edge and took a bit of cover next to a metal container the size of a squared-off suitcase and snuck a look over to the street below. He could see Archie’s green door across the way, but it seemed impossibly small. How the hell could anyone hit even the door from here, never mind put a bullet in someone’s ear? He looked up the line, farther south, and started to retreat. But when he used the container to push himself up, the box gave way and tipped sideways, clunking over and making a racket. Nick again ducked down, softly cursing. He stayed silent and unmoving for a full two minutes and then carefully shifted around to look at the box. He had inadvertently knocked over the cover to a video camera that was wired onto the roof to record what was going on in the parking lot.

“Shit. A lot of good that does if a guy with a gun is walking around up here and the camera is looking out below,” Nick said out loud. “Yeah, like anyone would be worried about that but you.” He moved to the back roofline and found the utility ladder and made his way down to the last four feet and jumped to the ground, landing awkwardly with a sick twist of the ankle.

“What the hell are you doing, Nick?” he again said out loud.

He was on one knee, rubbing at the ankle with both hands. He wasn’t sure why, but Nick found himself thinking about Ms. Cotton and her letters. “Forgiveness,” she had said. “What’s in them isn’t for retribution. It’s for your forgiveness.”

Nick looked down at the hand on his ankle and flexed it and then shut his eyes against the memory:

He and Julie, up late. Two days before Christmas. She had joined him at the patio table, the aqua light softening their hard faces but not their voices. They’d been at it for half an hour.

“No, I don’t understand, Nick! Why does your job always have to be more important than our family?”

He had stood up, angry that his obsession had started this all again, the late night on a story, the booze on his breath, the vision of another body swimming in his head. He’d meant to walk away, end it by saying nothing. But Julie’s words stopped him.

“Why for Christ’s sake do you care more about dead people than you care about your own family?”

The sting went through him. Truth? Did she really think that? Did he? When he looked up, his mouth started to open, but Julie’s lips had already formed a hard line. Without a word, she turned and walked into the house and closed herself in their bedroom. The question she asked would be the last words she ever spoke to him. Two days later, she and Lindsay were dead.

Nick got up off his knee and tested his ankle. He blinked the tears out of his eyes and walked south. At the back of the building he’d selected, he climbed atop a stack of metal barrels and then to a fire escape, a rusty contraption that you rarely saw in Florida. Halfway up, he started doubting the possibility that Redman had come this way. The rungs were cracked and weathered by the heat and salt air. The metal had oxidized and Nick’s hands were soon stained a reddish brown from the rust. But he made the top and as at the other buildings he was greeted by an empty expanse of tar and gravel interrupted only by whirring air-conditioning units and no Redman. He again moved low to the street edge of the roof. Nothing. Archie’s green door was closer but untouched, and when he looked south the three-story building next to him was blocking the nursing home building. He scanned the other rooflines. Nothing. No protruding muzzles. No spun-around baseball caps. Nick turned away from the roof edge and reassessed. Think like a sniper. Think like a countersniper. Think like Fitzgerald.

Redman saw the movement out of his peripheral vision just as Walker stepped out of Archie’s Tool. The man had only been at work for thirty minutes, but it was past his regular time and he needed that taste. So predictable.

Redman swung the scope over and watched Walker move to his truck, climb in and drive north. He took a right just as he had the last time. If he went to the same liquor store, he’d return in twenty minutes, Redman thought. When he gets back. When he steps out of the truck. When he stops to open the door to the tool shop and becomes stationary, that’s the shot. It will be just like when Michaels had opened the probation office door. He’ll be a still target for one special second.

Redman was running the scene through his head, rehearsing like he always did, when his ear picked up the
whumping
sound. He took his eye away from the scope and looked to the south. Helicopter. Whatever the gig that was going down inside the barricades was warming up and Redman took up his binoculars and checked the helo. It was a small two-man craft and did not carry the logo of any news channels that the media shitbirds always carried.

There was the possibility that it belonged to the feds who were parked below. Who else used spotter helicopters? Redman’s head was clicking. He knew that the Secretary of State was in town. He’d read the newspaper’s front page. But that was supposed to be at the convention center, well south, down near the port. There was no way they would expand a circle of security this far. He knew the federal protocols wouldn’t even spread a sniper sweep more than eight hundred yards. He shifted his mind to other scenarios and came up with the only possibility: a political field trip.

The goddamn publicity machine, he thought, is taking the secretary on some baby-kissing visit and it’s going down near my goddamn kill zone.

“I know that, Lieutenant,” Hargrave said, keeping his voice in check. “But if nobody’s seen Redman, and none of his SWAT friends have heard from him, it’s impossible to put a motive on this guy so we
can
predict what he’s going to do next.”

Hargrave had badged his way past the police cordon and followed Walker’s F-150 into a neighborhood of industrial businesses. When Walker pulled up in front of a corrugated steel warehouse and went inside someplace called Archie’s, Hargrave parked across the street. First he tried to get Mullins on the reporter’s cell. He was immediately forwarded to some message service. Then he called Canfield and for the next thirty minutes found himself trying to explain why he was following Walker around. Who the hell even cared?

“Wait a second,” Hargrave said into the cell. “He’s leaving again.” The detective watched as Walker came out of the shop, looked around and then got back into his truck and drove north, away from where Hargrave now knew there was an “official visit” going down at a nursing home only a few blocks away.

“Look, Mo. Like I said, you do what you think needs to be done with this asshole Walker. To tell you the truth, nobody here in command— and not Fitzgerald either—gives a damn about yours and Mullins’s theory. The priority has shifted to the Secretary of State and not on solving the deaths of a few cons that probably deserved to die in the first place,” Canfield said when the detective came back. “I know how that goes against your ethic, but like I said, you’re hanging your own ass out there.”

“I appreciate the help, Lieutenant.”

Hargrave pushed the end button and stared out his windshield as Walker’s truck disappeared around a corner.

“I might add,” he said to no one.

The detective opened his car door and stepped out. His inclination was to go back to the office and again try to track hotel and motel registries for Redman’s name even though he knew that was fruitless. Instead he locked his door and started walking south toward the cordon that was set up a couple of blocks away. Maybe he’d shoot the bull with the uniform guys doing duty. Ask if the feds were any more antsy than usual. Try to spot Fitzgerald somewhere.

Nick made it down again, thinking like a sniper. He’d always heard the SWAT guys talking about taking higher ground and the philosophy moved him to the three-story building next door. He crossed the alley that ran straight south, looking for some kind of box or board to get within reach of the first ladder rung, and settled on an old shipping pallet with the nailed crosspieces and leaned one end up against the wall and used it as a makeshift stepladder. He had to stretch to get a grip on the first rung and hauled himself up. Again, the metal had not been touched, probably in years.

But he climbed. Thirty feet up he slowly came over the roof edge. Again, there was nothing to see but tar and air-conditioning vents, though over to his left a square bunkerlike access room protruded up. From his angle he could see two sides of the structure. One side had a door.

Great, he thought, I should have just walked in, flashed my press credentials and walked up the damn stairs. His cynicism was back, along with his doubts that he had any idea what the hell he was doing up here. But he still moved low along the roofline to get a look around the third side of the access room.

He was circling when he saw, or heard, the beat of a helicopter and raised his eyes to the sky. It was a small craft, not the big Channel 7 chopper shooting pictures of his ass again. But as he watched the aircraft slide to his left, his line of sight crossed the top of the access room and from this new vantage point he noticed a stepladder leaning against it, and then an odd platform on top. It looked as if someone had mounted a sheet of corrugated metal across two sawhorses. Nick looked behind himself for space and then stepped backward, forgetting to stay low and going up on his toes to gain a few more inches of view. Between the open legs of the sawhorses he could now make out the dark curve of a man’s head, bent, absolutely still, over the top of a black rifle barrel.