Fuzzy Navel (4 page)

M
UNCHEL GRUNTS in satisfaction after the CD shatters, and then he moves the scope ever so slightly to watch the split-tail. He’s ready for her to fire back. Hell, he
wants
her to fire back. That’s why he didn’t kill her when she went for the rifle, even though he had a bead on it. Confirmed kills are great, but real snipers must also contend with return fire. The cops in the street, they’re all too far away, their guns not powerful enough to reach him. There’s no threat or danger.

He wants a little danger. And the ultimate danger is when you go up against another sniper. An anti-sniper.

Munchel doesn’t expect her to come close to him. Her rifle is a toy compared to his, and she doesn’t even have a scope. But this will be a much better story to tell Swanson and Pessolano if the cops send a few rounds his way.

“Show me what you got, baby,” Munchel says, baring his yellow teeth in a grin.

When her first bullet connects with the concrete planter he’s resting his gun on, Munchel jerks like he’s had acid thrown in his face. He drops the TPG-1 and ducks down.

How the hell did she make that shot?

“Lucky,” he says aloud, his voice cracking.

As the word leaves his lips, another shot blasts into the planter, tossing up stone chips, burrowing a hole into it.

Munchel backs the hell away. He checks his clothing. Why isn’t the camouflage working? Is she using night vision?

A bullet zips over his head, its wind practically parting his hair before burying itself into the building behind him. He hunkers down even lower, thinking he should be returning fire,
knowing
he should, but too scared to move.

One more shot, and the planter shatters, large chunks falling to the ground, a puff of dirt forming a cloud that settles in his eyes and on his lips.

Munchel holds his breath, waiting. His bladder feels like a water balloon being squeezed in a vise. Sweat pops out of his body in places he didn’t even know he had pores. He doesn’t dare move, convinced that she can see him.

A full minute passes.

He wonders if she’s out of bullets, or simply toying with him. Maybe she has the shot, has him all lined up, and is enjoying watching him squirm.

Sirens, in the distance. Munchel knows that must be SWAT. He needs to break camp, get the hell out of here. His heart is thumping. His mouth is dry. His palms feel like he just soaked them in water. He’s more scared than he’s ever been in his life.

But he’s also exhilarated.

This is what combat is like,
he thinks.

The feeling is intoxicating.

Munchel knows the news cameras are rolling, knows that the split-tail can see him, knows that what he has in mind might be suicidal. But he decides to go for it anyway.

No one expects a pinned down man to charge. So Munchel charges.

The suitcase in one hand, the TPG- 1 in the other, he sprints across the sidewalk, across the street, daring the woman cop to shoot him. He knows to zigzag, to make himself a harder target. He maybe even yells a little, an animalistic war cry, the sound of a hero facing certain death.

No bullets hit him. No one even shoots at him. Munchel pauses behind a car to catch his breath, marveling at his own bravery. It’s dark, and the streetlight he shot out earlier helps him hide in the shadows. But if the cop has some sort of optical enhancer, it’s possible she can still see him.

The sirens are getting closer. He needs some kind of distraction, something that will confuse the night-vision goggles the woman cop must be using.

He unzips the suitcase, removes one of two whiskey bottles. Inside is kerosene mixed with laundry detergent. Poor man’s napalm. Munchel would have preferred real napalm, or a grenade, but he couldn’t get those. He tried to order some, on the Internet, and the prick took his money and didn’t send him shit. Hopefully the homemade stuff will be good enough.

Munchel unscrews the bottle cap and shoves in a braided wick from a camping lantern. He uses a Zippo to light the wick and then shouts, “Semper fi!” as he throws the flaming bottle at a parked SUV. It bounces off the hood and shatters on the sidewalk, soaking someone’s lawn with liquid fire.

He doesn’t stop to acknowledge his handiwork. He’s on the move again, tugging the suitcase behind him in a crouch, changing direction several times, making it to the Chevy Nova parked in the center of the street.

The split-tail’s car. He considers using his second Molotov cocktail to set it ablaze, to teach her a lesson, but changes his mind and reaches for something else instead. Something electronic, that Pessolano let him borrow.

This woman is a worthy opponent. It isn’t enough just to destroy her car. Munchel wants to best her. To beat her. And he’s already formulating a plan on how to do just that.

He turns on the device and attaches it to the underside of her rear bumper. Then he lights the second bottle of napalm, yells “Recon!” and chucks it at a patrol car.

Munchel runs back the way he came, slipping between houses, making it to his car a block away. It had taken him almost forty minutes of circling to find that parking space, and even though he was clearly the required twenty feet away from the fire hydrant, he still got a ticket. Assholes.

Rather than dwell on it, Munchel throws the suitcase and the rifle into the backseat, hops behind the wheel, and beelines for the rendezvous point, imagining Pessolano and Swanson watching his heroics on CNN and cheering him on.

J
ACK’S BOYFRIEND LATHAM is kind of cute. Red hair, a strong chin, broad chest. He doesn’t cry out when I crack him in the nose with the butt of my revolver, and doesn’t beg for his life when I stick the business end under his chin.

“On the sofa, next to the old lady.”

He complies, but takes his time, fixing me with what he probably thinks is a cold stare. He’s about as menacing as a teddy bear. If he wanted to learn cold stares, he should have grown up in my family.

“When’s your girlfriend getting home?” I ask.

He reaches out, holds the woman’s hand. Doesn’t answer. Which pisses me off.

I’ve lost track of how many people I’ve killed, but I know I’ve killed men for annoying me less than Latham is doing right now. But I don’t want to do anything permanent until Jack gets home and is able to watch. So I settle for smacking him with the gun again.

I hit him pretty good, opening up a cut on his cheek, and he refuses to meet my eyes. So much for the tough guy act.

“I don’t like repeating myself,” I say.

“She told me nine.” His voice is soft, dull. “She’s on a case.”

I check my new watch. Heathrow didn’t allow watches. Or jewelry. Or makeup. Or bras. Or shoes. We had our unisex cotton pants and top, and slippers with flimsy rubber soles. I could understand them keeping security tight. A few of the women in there were crazy. But my minders confused
insane
with
feeble-minded.
Big mistake.

My watch tells me I have about two hours left before Jack arrives. I’m hungry. Maybe I can get Mom to serve me some of that stew she’s making. I also haven’t gotten fucked in forever. The last time was with my so-called husband, and he was as in effective in bed as he was at everything else. I eye Latham’s broad shoulders, trim waist, then move my eyes lower, to his crotch. I wonder if he is up for the job. I know from experience that a man sometimes has problems getting it up when a gun is jammed in his mouth.

But when they can manage, the sex is mind-blowing.

Later, I decide. One more thing that Jack can watch.

“Who else is hungry?” I ask.

I smile, not the easiest thing to do when you’ve lost most of the nerves and muscles in half of your face. Mom grimaces. Latham stares at the floor.

“Both of you, stand up. Slow and easy. If you move too fast, or if I get the feeling you aren’t going to behave, I’ll shoot your knees.”

They stand, and hero boyfriend puts his arm around Mom’s shoulders. It’s touching, the warmth. Really. When the time comes, I don’t know which one I’ll kill first.

No need to think about that now. We have all night. And what a night it will be. These aren’t the only guests I’m inviting to this party. With some duct tape to keep everyone manageable, and some delivery pizza, we could keep this going for a few days.

First things first, Mom can serve some dinner. And I can warm loverboy up for our floor show later on. He looks to be the loyal type. Tough to break.

But I’ll break him. When I was growing up, Father used the stove for more than just cooking. He used it for punishment. Showed me up close and personal all the ways a stove can make a person scream.

And I’m more than happy to share the knowledge.

W
HILE I FIRE at the sniper the cops in the house clear out, carrying their injured team member. Herb comes up behind me, and we watch through the window as they make their way down the street. They join the others who were lucky enough to have gotten away, to the end of the block where the ambulances are.

We also watch our perp run around in jerky patterns, dragging a suitcase behind him and holding a huge sniper rifle, occasionally yelling something incoherent. He stops twice to throw homemade bombs at cars. Each one bounces off and causes a small fire on the sidewalk.

“This might very well be the world’s stupidest criminal,” Herb says.

I’m out of rifle ammo. Herb and I pull our ser vice pistols, keeping the perp in our sights. Though he keeps zigzagging and ducking down, he would have been a cinch to shoot if he came within our range. We could even have nailed him without looking, because he kept whooping like a drunken sports fan, giving away his location. Unfortunately, he stays at least fifty yards away the entire time, and eventually disappears between two houses, running off into the night.

Herb and I meet the Special Response Team in front, and I send them in the direction the sniper had gone. By that time the small fires have almost extinguished themselves, and the cops who’ve been in hiding come out and attend to the dead.

The sniper might have been an idiot, or a lunatic, or both. But he still managed to kill ten of my men. I maintain a brave face for the TV cameras, but each time I see a body bag being loaded into an ambulance my throat closes up.

My boss, Captain Bains, arrives in a patrol car. He has his dress blues on, ready to make a statement for the press. Deputy Chief Crouch, the superintendent’s right hand, is also present, setting up interviews with everyone involved. I’m first in line.

I’m bone tired, but I know I’ll be debriefed over and over again for the next few hours, and there’s no way to postpone it. I go back into the house and use the bathroom, doing a mediocre job washing off the blood. Then I call home, get the answering machine. Leave Mom a message that I won’t make dinner to night. I also call my long-suffering fiancé to let him know he’s welcome to stay the night, and I’ll make it up to him by cooking breakfast in the morning. I get his voice mail. Perhaps he and Mom are in a heated match of rummy.

Internal Affairs shows up – a bystander had been nicked by police crossfire. It wasn’t by me, but they take my gun anyway; standard operating procedure so ballistics can rule out my bullets as the lethal ones. I’m too numb to argue. My phone rings, and I excuse myself for a minute.

“Jack, it’s an emergency.” Mom sounds frazzled. “You need to come home.”

“Mom? Are you okay? What’s going on?”

I’m talking to a dead line. I call back. Get the machine. Call again, get the same results. Try Latham once more, go directly to voice mail.

What the hell?

“I need to check on my partner,” I tell the IA guys. Then I catch up with Herb as two paramedics assist him into the ambulance. The assistance involves a lot of lifting and grunting.

“I need a favor, Herb.”

“No problem. I’ll make a copy for you.” He taps his jacket pocket, which held the Kingston Trio CD. “And yes, it’s got ‘Tom Dooley’ on it.”

I lean closer. “I need you to cover for me, for a few hours. The deputy chief wants answers. The Feds are coming, probably to compare this to every other sniper incident in the past seven hundred years. Plus I’m going to have to tell the same story again for IA.”

“Are you going to tell them I stole folk rock?”

“No. I’m going to tell them to talk to you first. I just got a weird call from my mother, and something’s not right. I have to run home. And as you’re well aware…”

Herb finishes for me. “You live in the suburbs, even though you’d be fired if they found out, and even though there were many perfectly nice single-family homes in my neighborhood.”

“I’ll be two and a half hours, tops. Just make sure they don’t go to my old apartment.”

Because then they’ll know I don’t live in the city anymore.

“Take three hours,” Herb says. “I use a lot of adjectives when I tell stories.”

I pat his shoulder. “Thanks, Herb. Good luck with those stitches.”

“If my wife asks, I didn’t get shot. Tell her I was bitten by a monkey.”

“Sure. She’ll buy that.”

“She’s terrified of monkeys.”

“Wouldn’t a dog be more realistic?”

“She loves dogs. If it’s a monkey, I’ll get sympathy sex.”

I speak to the deputy chief and inform him I have a family emergency, but he can debrief my partner at the hospital. I promise I’ll be back within an hour. Which is an outright lie, because I live an hour away.

During the ride to the suburbs I obsess about my mother. If something happened to her, why hasn’t Latham called? Or perhaps the emergency has to do with Latham, and Mom is too shocked to go into details.

I’m overwhelmed by mental snapshots of death: car accidents, strokes, heart attacks, earthquakes, floods. Are they en route to the ER? Is that why they couldn’t pick up the phone? It can’t be a fire, because the answering machine keeps going on – a fire would destroy the line.

Is it something to do with my father? Mom never forgave Dad for leaving us, and while I’ve been trying to rebuild a relationship with him, she refuses to acknowledge his existence. Maybe Dad had shown up at my house, which would cause Mom to go supernova.

Or is this something more insidious?

I look at my cell, find the call from the Heathrow Facility. The caller ID indeed reads
HEATHROW
, but maybe that can be faked. I dial 411, get the same number, and let them patch me through. I speak to three different people, all of whom confirm that Alexandra Kork is dead as dead can be.

Okay. I’m being paranoid. Even if Alex were alive – and she isn’t – she still didn’t know where I live.

Maybe Mom saw the sniper shootings on television and is simply worried about me. Not picking up the phone is a guarantee I’ll rush home.

Or maybe Latham has some sort of surprise planned. I think of the mariachi band he hired when he proposed, and a smile breaks through my mask of worry. He truly is a sweetheart.

I get off the expressway on Route 20, heading for York Road. What ever the emergency is, I’ll find out soon enough.

My thoughts momentarily shift to the shooter. Finding sex offenders is a snap – thanks to Megan’s Law, anyone can log onto the Internet and access the National Sex Offender Registry and get their names and addresses. But if this is some sort of warped vigilante group, why kill cops? Did the sniper simply get carried away? Or is he really out of his mind? And are his two partners just as unbalanced?

I turn left down my twisty road, heading home. I hear the dead leaves crackling under my tires, see glimpses of the moon through the canopy of trees, and wonder what Mom loves about this neighborhood so much. Can it even be called a neighborhood? We’ve never met our nearest neighbor, who lives a quarter of a mile away. Come Halloween, I wonder if parents drive their children house to house for trick-or-treating. If I had kids, I’d drive them – to the city.

Thinking of children makes me think of Latham, and I get sort of gooey inside. I pull into the driveway and park next to his car, convinced that this
emergency
probably has to do with Mom fudging points in their card game, or burning the apple pie. I do a quick mirror check, finger comb my hair, and hop out of my Nova.

The front door is locked, and the front room is dark. I notice a light in the kitchen through the bay window. I unlock the door and go in.

“Mom? Latham?”

I smell food. Stew, and some sort of baked goods. Maybe I’m right about the pie after all.

Mom is in the kitchen, sitting at the table. It takes me a second to realize she has duct tape over her mouth and around her arms, and then something appears in my peripheral vision, something blindingly fast.

I duck, but not quickly enough, and get knocked to the floor, my vision all lopsided and swirly.

“Welcome home, Jack.”

I can’t focus, but I recognize the voice.

Alex is alive.

And that means we’re all going to die.