I KILL RICH PEOPLE 2 (21 page)

Spencer looked down the length of the leg casts and raised his eyes to face Bishop. “You work for the government, right? How do you rationalize what you’re doing?”

“You killed twenty-three Americans,” Bishop replied. He rose slowly, dropped his cigarette and crushed out the butt and then turned and rapped hard on the door for Stocky and Slim to let him out.

He turned slowly back toward Spencer as the heavy door creaked open. “Am I the one who is rationalizing?” he asked.

*****

Pulse, breathe, minutes, hours, days, weeks… Spencer was left inside his head in the windowless concrete room. The war hadn’t been perfect; even Spencer got sick of the war sometimes, but he was perfect at it. In Afghanistan he spent lots of nights imagining how he could stay there after everybody else pulled out. He understood those men, their Pashtunwali—their code was elemental; it required no language. Killing them or if they killed him was circumstantial, no less, no more. A quirk of fate, a decision by far-away men neither of them was ever going to meet.

How could a billionaire understand Pashtunwali?

Spencer reviewed his evolution, starting like every other sniper, going out with sixes, six-man squads with a team leader, second team leader, security, the whole thing. Mostly drop and crash stuff, in and out of a building, sometimes to secure a drop zone, sometimes to take down a target, sometimes a snatch and grab to get a high-value prisoner. Back in those days he was a specialist, not a sergeant or even an ATL, much less a team leader taking orders and calling the shots on the ground that meant everything to mission success or failure. His job was handling C-4, setting donuts around door handles and pancakes on mud walls to open access for the entry squad while he had to wait outside on security.

He shifted to twos just before he circled the first time, before he was rotated stateside, then twos again when he deployed for the last tour. Twos are all about target elimination. Minimum profile, snake in the grass. You get your butt down and hold tight for hours, for days, until you get the one second to get the high-value shot. 800 to 1500 meters, mostly.

He pictured Mo Singleterry, the Specialist he had spotting for him. Good guy. Reliable. Kept it light, but always had his head on a swivel. Sharp. Six months together, then Singleterry got himself fucked up by an IED. Captain Sam was all wrong about explosives. Improvised explosive devices were indiscriminating sneak attacks. No honor, no commitment; chickenshit. Target precision was what it is all about. Not drones, not mortars, not bombs. Then boom. Singleterry was on an airlift out, leaving behind his right ham muscle and a kneecap. Gone. Spencer never saw him again. Never tracked him down afterward, either.

After they evacked Singleterry, then it was just Spencer. They moved him to fill in with weapons training for a couple Afghan police units coming out of Helmand. He was reassigned to Miller after that. Then the work picked up fast. His assignments came through Miller; CIA, he imagined, although that was never spelled out. Solos. Sneaking in and getting out intact. Fast. Nothing that needed a spotter. Nothing over eight hundred yards.

He was coming in after a lap around the airport when he heard the news, then turned around and ran a second lap, trying to perspire enough to purge the taint from what had just happened. Gunmen took all sixty recruits, men with wives and children, men who wanted to do good, to really do good. Two busloads of new graduates who had just finished the joint-training program, the same program he had helped in training, got stopped practically right there in Kabul, right by Park Khairkhana. They took them off the two buses, zip-tied them, had them kneel beside the road. They called them
kafir
and shot them in the head. That was right before his last mission. Before Manchester United. Almost all the snow was melted, with just a dusting left at the very tops of the mountains outside Bagram.

With his eyes shut, Spencer put himself right back there. He was running the perimeter and trying to get right, thinking about heading for the mobile shower structure and holding his head under cool water forever. But Miller helicoptered in with orders. Maybe that was better than the shower, he figured. He needed a mission to get his head straight. When that happens, when you are moving on emotion, you need to stand down. He didn’t.

A soccer kid in a bright-red jersey and his mom. If the buses hadn’t been stopped, if the recruits hadn’t been executed, would he have made it a game? Would he have used a single bullet to kill son and mother both? Would he have done it differently if his finger hadn’t been poked through by the damned thorn?

He knew now that if there was a hell, that one bullet was going to send him to it.

Miller had put his man, Afif, up to the stabbing. There was nothing random. It took Spencer weeks after the stabbing before he put the pieces together clearly. Miller’s tribesman didn’t have any reason to kill him. He had every reason not to do it. Then after Afif stabbed him, Miller’s man was caught and under control. But Miller shot him dead.

It was all Miller.

*****

Keeping up with the exercises felt futile. Day after day inside monotone gray. The blank, soundless fluorescent void; he could feel it taking him down like quicksand. The more he fought it, the deeper he sank. He thought about Captain Sam, too much, ruminating over the captain’s ideas in a continuous loop. Sometimes he loathed the captain even more than he despised Miller.

Now, stuck there endlessly in the monotony of the concrete box, Spencer’s brain was entangled again with the captain. He cried just like he cried after running out of the ward building toward the Harley. He thought as he rode that he had only ever listened to the captain because the captain needed someone there to listen to him. Somehow it had all stuck; somehow every word felt like it was carved inside his brain like words carved into a monument.
A government of the rich, for the rich, by the rich will perish from the earth.

Right at that second, if he had a roof to jump from, he would have offed himself, too. He had done enough.

When he could harness his drifting mind, he kept repeating every one of a dozen unanswered questions. There were no further clues. He couldn’t stop himself any more than he could stop the tinnitus ringing through his brain.

The same cop was at the river and at the stadium.
How?
And if law enforcement knew who he was, then why didn’t they issue it on the news? Why didn’t they enlist the public’s help? Had he succeeded? Did the public turn on the billionaires so they wouldn’t help to catch him? Was that what the police were afraid about? If he had the public and the police didn’t, then had his approach succeeded? Was that why they put him where he was and not into an American prison where he would have a lawyer and go to court? Was that it? Was he some kind of a hero? Where the fuck was this place? What comes next?

He had deconstructed every attack one by one.
Bullets for Billionaires.
Strange that it was Emerson Elliot there at Sands Point and then the same Emerson Elliot talking about him every day on the radio. The shooting element to the mission was easy. The rich protected their things; they seemed to think that everyone had to want to
be them,
not that anyone would want to
kill them
. At Sands Point, he could probably have taken down two or three of them without ever beaching the wave runner.

Ahead of the first mission, he never once gave any thought about all the targets being Jews. That was coincidental. It was their money, just the money. That’s why he sent the index cards, to clear that up.

Sag Harbor was a turkey shoot. Beneath him. Moving back into the trees to make his shots more challenging. Manchester United all over again. The soccer kid and his mom with the one shot. Was this place payback? A custom-tailored personal hell?

The hardest aspect to his target selection was knowing in advance where billionaires were going to be. But after he identified charity events, he found that these went on nearly every day and every night.

Central Park West had demanded skills. That hit home. That was in their homes. The auction was satisfying, too, cool and sophisticated. Even after they put up that whole barrier in front to keep all their rich bidders safe, shaded every window, he still attacked at will. They never considered protection for when the art was picked up. No security whatsoever.
Pretty smart putting a microphone into the flowers.

Eighty-five people on the planet with more money than three billion other people.
Imagine that.
Single individuals with more money than every person in whole countries. Just one person. That had never happened before, not in all of human history. Captain Sam was right, if you believed God could mean for that to be right, you could believe anything.

“They’re richer than Genghis Khan,” Captain Sam said. Richer than the Pharaohs. They buy people and laws just like buying things. “Rich people don’t go to prison. When they go too far, the government they purchased just bails them out.” How was it right that billionaires earn more during a night’s sleep than families make in a year?

Why didn’t law enforcement get the public involved? Why no APB after Mamaroneck? He left a bloody mess after laying down the Harley. So why no APB? Why no name and photo on TV or in the papers?

“Jesus! Think of something else! Anything!” He looked up at the camera. Was anyone even watching anymore? Was this it, two meals a day and these four walls? Spencer pushed off the wall to turn onto his stomach and slowly crept his left hand over the edge of the plywood pallet. After almost two months, he had a three-inch triangle two-ply thick ready to snap away. Sharp points at each corner. Sharp enough to cut through skin and artery.

*****

Bishop swiveled his Herman Miller chair to get a look. Below him on the football field at Bishop O’Connell High School, the Knights JV football team was running drills. He watched linemen hitting the blocking sled, but his mind was weighed down by $150,000. $150,000 goes a long way toward paying the bills. Writing a $3,800-a-month check for the executive office just to wait for the phone to ring was its own sort of torture for him, but as the weeks passed the $150K retainer chaffed a thousand times more. Did Jeffers own him? For $150K?

Spencer’s casts had to be coming off soon. Would Jeffers remember? Of course he would.
1000 milligrams thiopental sodium
. Less than a shot glass. Clear as water. A mistake during questioning.

“You kids will still have your football season. Birthdays and New Years and Easter will still go on. Just not for Jonathan Spencer,” he said to himself.

He wished he had taken his own advice. He should have headed someplace where the water was blue, the sand was white, and girls in every shade of brown wore their black hair long. But no, he needed to be inside the fold, so he kept his ass in the chair and waited for the goddamned phone!

Do you even
want
to be their go-to guy
?

“Jesus H. Christ,” he drawled. “Man the hell up.”

Spencer’s life wasn’t worth anything. “Ain’t right to wait for your meat to get slaughtered and dressed out and butchered into a Styrofoam container,” he reminded himself. “You gonna eat it, you ought to be ready to kill it, too. Your momma didn’t raise any hypocrite.”

Killing Spencer was probably a test; pass and he could be in their club. He wasn’t some one-trick pony. He would be useful. All he needed was the chance to prove that. And if he didn’t do it, somebody else would. If he could only get established, they’d see the quality and appreciate what he brought to the table.

1000 milligrams thiopental sodium.
Clear as water.

Tuition bills were already eating into the war chest he had just built up. Wasn’t he paying the property taxes and a mortgage to keep his ex and their daughters in a beautiful house with a great public school district?

“Why the hell do they need private schools and equestrian training?” he asked the air. She’d be real happy driving him into an early grave, he thought, until college bills started rolling in. Eighteenth birthdays weren’t that far away. The custodial order was enforceable through “age of majority.”

“Maybe, just maybe, this gravy train is going off the tracks. You expect more after that, you better plan on playing a sweeter tune.”

*****

Days and weeks. He knew the meals by heart, know meatloaf was coming and imagining the tart and sweet flavors within the thin ribbon of barbecue sauce. Fish sticks every seventh dinner. A slice of baked ham, grits, and squash the following day. Hours, endless, between.

He no longer gave a fuck about the camera; mashing his face into the meal tray, he licked at every curve and cranny then sucked at his growing beard for every last flavor. A portion that looked even a bite smaller than the week before could make self-discipline impossible. A short serving of mac and cheese left Spencer shaking for hours with homicidal rage.

The sharp-edged plywood triangle dangled beneath him, teasing him and never completely out of mind.

He was sick of repeating images, sick of Mercy’s hairy armpits and Jack’s face through the window in the white box van, sick of Miller’s bundles of cash, sick of every slide in the never-changing continuum inside his tinnitus-ringing skull inside the gray cell walls. He was sick of the casts, sick of his exercises, sick of everything. Manchester United was worst of all, pricking at him until he could have put a thousand more shots through the kid’s brain.

Spencer had to draw deep to gather the discipline that had always carried him. Through the most brutal training, when all he needed was to raise his arm to make it stop, he held on.
Soldier on!

He figured his sitting pulse rate at sixty; sixty times sixty counted to one hour, three-thousand-six-hundred beats. Eighty-six thousand-four-hundred beats per day. Six-hundred-four-thousand-eight-hundred equaling fourteen food trays.

Measures and milestones, targets; hour upon hour Spencer trained. He sharpened his attention on modulating his breathing, inhaling and exhaling once for every fifteen heartbeats then endlessly repeating the cycle until it became his natural rhythm; once every fifteen seconds, four times per minute.
3600 counts becomes 240. Easy. 5760 in the day.

Muscle tissues were repairing along his wounds, closing into an abstract of asymmetric jagged scars beneath the casts.
He could feel the musculature responding to the demands of his exercise routine. Quicker flex responses. Thickening densities. Power replacing pain.

But after counting fingers and toes up to eight hours at a time, he peaked and retrenched. The more he fell backward, sometimes back to five hours; the more he reached beneath the sleeping platform to tease his fingertip against the sharp points of the triangle below.

When he pressed his fingertips against his jugular vein to count out the hours, he imagined the pointed triangle, the easy exit.
Right there, right where you’re touching. You can pull it off and stop the clock.
Right now
.

A twisted whisper crept inside his mind.
You’ll never get away...

Food! The clang and the sound of the food tray scratching across the floor wiped away whatever thoughts that preceded.

You’re getting out of here, Ranger! Wherever the fuck this is, you’re getting out!