Jack Ryan 1 - Without Remorse (42 page)

The Navy called it CPA, Closest Point of Approach, the nearest distance that a straight course took you to another ship or point of land. CPA here was three feet. When he was half a step away, Kelly's right hand pulled the bang stick from under his jacket. Then he pivoted on his left foot and drove off the right while his right arm extended almost as though to deliver a punch, all one hundred ninety-five pounds of his body mass behind the maneuver. The swollen rip of the bang stick struck the pusher just under the sternum, aimed sharply upward. When it did, the combined push of Kelly's arm and the inertial mass of the body pushed the chamber backwards, jamming the primer on the fixed firing pin, and the shotgun shell went off, its crimped green-plastic face actually in contact with Junior's shirt.

The sound was like that of dropping a cardboard box on a wooden floor. Whump. Nothing more than that, certainly not like a shot at all, because all the expanding gas from the powder followed the shot column into Junior's body. The light trap load - a low-brass shell with #8 birdshot, like that used for competition shooting, or perhaps an early-season dove hunt - would have only injured a man at more than fifteen yards, but in contact with his chest, it might as easily have been an elephant gun. The brutal power of the shot drove the air from his lungs in a surprisingly loud whoosh, forcing Junior's mouth open in a way that surprise might have done. And truly he was surprised. His eyes looked into Kelly's, and Junior was still alive, though his heart was already as destroyed as a toy balloon, and the bottom of his lungs torn to bits. Gratifyingly, there was no exit wound. The upward angle of the strike left all the energy and shot inside the chest, and the power of the explosion served to keep his body erect for a second - no more than that, but for Junior and Kelly it seemed a moment that lasted for hours. Then the body just fell, straight down, like a collapsing building. There was an odd, deep sigh, from air and gun-gases forced out of the entrance wound by the fall, a foul odor of acrid smoke and blood and other things that stained the air, not unlike the ended life it represented. Junior's eyes were still open, still looking at Kelly, still focusing on his face and trying to say something, his mouth open and quivering until all movement stopped with the question un-asked and -answered. Kelly took the roll from Junior's still-firm hand and kept moving up the street, his eyes and ears searching for danger, and finding none. At the corner he angled to the gutter and swished the tip of the bang stick in some water to remove whatever blood might be there. Then he turned, heading west to his car, still moving slowly and unevenly. Forty minutes later he was home, richer by eight hundred forty dollars and poorer by one shotgun shell.

'And who's this one?' Ryan asked.

'Would you believe, Bandanna?' the uniformed officer answered. He was an experienced patrol officer, white, thirty-two years old. 'Deals smack. Well, not anymore.'

The eyes were still open, which was not terribly common in murder victims, but this one's death had been a surprise, and a very traumatic one at that, despite which the body was amazingly tidy. There was a three-quarter-inch entrance wound with a jet-black ring around it like a donut, perhaps an eighth of an inch in thickness. That was from powder, and the diameter of the hole was unmistakably that of a 12-gauge shotgun. Beyond the skin was just a hole, like into an empty box. All of the internal organs had either been immolated or simply pulled down by gravity. It was the first time in his life that Emmet Ryan had ever looked into a dead body this way, as though it were not a body at all, but a mannequin.

'Cause of death,' the coroner observed with early-morning irony, 'is the total vaporization of his heart. The only way we'll even be able to identify heart tissue is under a microscope. Steak tartare,' the man added, shaking his head.

'An obvious contact wound. The guy must have jammed the muzzle right into him, then triggered it off.'

'Jesus, he didn't even cough up any blood,' Douglas said. The lack of an exit wound left no blood at all on the sidewalk, and from a distance Bandanna actually looked as though he were asleep - except for the wide and lifeless eyes.

'No diaphragm,' the ME explained, pointing to the entrance hole. 'That's between here and the heart. We'll probably find that the whole respiratory system is wiped out, too. You know, I've never seen anything this clean in my life.' And the man had been working this job for sixteen years. 'We need lots of pictures. This one will find its way into a textbook.'

'How experienced was he?' Ryan asked the uniformed officer.

'Long enough to know better.'

The detective lieutenant bent down, feeling around the left hip. 'Still has a gun here.'

'Somebody he knew?' Douglas wondered. 'Somebody he let get real close, that's for damned sure.'

'A shotgun's kinda hard to conceal. Hell, even a sawed-off is bulky. No warning at all?' Ryan stepped back for the ME to do his work.

'Hands are clean, no signs of a struggle. Whoever did this got real close without alarming our friend at all.' Douglas paused. 'Goddamn it, a shotgun's noisy. Nobody heard anything?'

'Time of death, call it two or three for now,' the medical examiner estimated, for again there was no rigor.

'Streets are quiet then,' Douglas went on. 'And a shotgun makes a shitload of noise.'

Ryan looked at the pants pockets. No bulge of a money roll, again. He looked around. There were perhaps fifteen people watching from behind the police line. Street entertainment was where you found it, and the interest on their faces was no less clinical and no more involved than that of the medical examiner.

'The Duo maybe?' Ryan asked nobody in particular.

'No, it wasn't,' the ME said at once. 'This was a single-barrel weapon. A double would have made a mark left or right of the entrance wound, and the powder distribution would have been different. Shotgun, this close, you only need one. Anyway, a single-barrel weapon.' '

'Amen,' Douglas agreed. 'Someone is doing the Lord's work. Three pushers down in a couple of days. Might put Mark Charon out of business if this keeps up.'

'Tom,' Ryan said, 'not today.' One more folder, he thought. Another drug-pusher ripoff, done very efficiently - but not the same guy who'd taken Ju-Ju down. Different ??.

Another shower, another shave, another jog in Chinquapin Park during which he could think. Now he had a place and a face to go along with the car. The mission was on profile, Kelly thought, turning right on Belvedere Avenue to cross the stream before jogging back the other way and completing his third lap. It was a pleasant park. Not much in the way of playground equipment, but that allowed kids to run and play free-form, which a number of them were doing, some under the semiwatchful eyes of a few neighborhood mothers, many with books to go along with the sleeping infants who would soon grow to enjoy the grass and open spaces. There was an undermanned pickup game of baseball. The ball evaded the glove of a nine-year-old and came close to his jogging path. Kelly bent down without breaking stride and tossed the ball to the kid, who caught it this time and yelled a thank-you. A younger child was playing with a Frisbee, not too well, and wandered in Kelly's way, causing a quick avoidance maneuver that occasioned an embarrassed look from her mother, to which Kelly responded with a friendly wave and smile.

This is how it's supposed to be, he told himself. Not very different from his own youth in Indianapolis. Dad's at work. Mom's with the kids because it was hard to be a good mom and have a job, especially when they were little; or at least, those mothers who had to work or chose to work could leave the kids with a trusted friend, sure that the little ones would be safe to play and enjoy their summer vacation in a green and open place, learning to play ball. And yet society had learned to accept the fact that it wasn't this way for many. This area was so different from his area of operations, and the privileges these kids enjoyed ought not to be privileges at all, for how could a child grow to proper adulthood without an environment like this?

Those were dangerous thoughts, Kelly told himself. The logical conclusion was to try to change the whole world, and that was beyond his capacity, he thought, finishing his three-mile run with the usual sweaty and good-tired feel, walking it off to cool down before he drove back to the apartment. The sounds drifted over of laughing children, the squeals, the angry shouts of cheater! for some perceived violation of rules not fully understood by either player, and disagreements over who was out or who was 'it' in some other game. He got into his car, leaving the sounds and thought behind, because he was cheating, too, wasn't he? He was breaking the rules, important rules that he did fully understand, but doing so in pursuit of justice, or what he called justice in his own mind.

Vengeance? Kelly asked himself, crossing a street. Vigilante was the next word that came unbidden into his mind. That was a better word, Kelly thought. It came from vigiles, a Roman term for those who kept the watch, the vigilia, during the night in the city streets, mainly watchmen for fire, if he remembered correctly from the Latin classes at St Ignatius High School, but being Romans they'd probably carried swords, too. He wondered if the streets of Rome had been safe, safer than the streets of this city. Perhaps so - probably so. Roman justice had been ... stern. Crucifixion would not have been a pleasant way to die, and for some crimes, like the murder of one's father, the penalty prescribed by law was to be bound in a cloth sack along with a dog and a rooster, and some other animal, then to be tossed in the Tiber - not to drown, but to be torn apart while drowning by animals crazed to get out of the sack. Perhaps he was the linear descendant of such times, of a vigile, Kelly told himself, keeping watch at night. It made him feel better than to believe that he was breaking the law. And 'vigilantes' in American history books were very different from those portrayed in the press. Before the organization of real police departments, private citizens had patrolled the streets and kept the peace in a rough-and-ready way. As he was doing?

Well, no, not really, Kelly admitted to himself, parking the car. So what if it was vengeance? Ten minutes later another garbage bag filled with another set of discarded clothes found its way to the Dumpster, and Kelly enjoyed another shower before making a telephone call.

'Nurses' station, O'Toole.'

'Sandy? It's John. Still getting out at three?'

'You do have good timing,' she said, allowing herself a private smile at her stand-up desk. 'The damn car is broke again.' And taxicabs cost too much.

'Want me to look at it?' Kelly asked.

'I wish somebody could fix it.'

'I make no promises,' she heard him say. 'But I come cheap.'

'How cheap?' Sandy asked, knowing what the reply would be.

'Permit me to buy you dinner? You can pick the place, even.'

'Yes, okay ... but...'

'But it's still too soon for both of us. Yes, ma'am, I know that. Your virtue is not endangered - honest.'

She had to laugh. It was just so incongruous that this big man could be so self-effacing. And yet she knew that she could trust him, and she was weary of cooking dinner for one, and being alone and alone and alone. Too soon or not, she needed company sometimes.

'Three-fifteen,' she told him, 'at the main entrance.'

'I'll even wear my patient bracelet.'

'Okay.' Another laugh, surprising another nurse who passed by the station with a trayful of medications. 'Okay, I said yes, didn't I?'

'Yes, ma'am. See you then,' Kelly said with a chuckle, hanging up.

Some human contact would be nice, he told himself, heading out the door. First Kelly headed to a shoe store, where he purchased a pair of black high-tops, size eleven. Then he found four more shoe stores, where he did the same, trying not to get the same brand, but he ended up with one duplicate pair even so. The same problem attended the purchase of bush jackets. He could find only two brand names for that type of garment, and ended up getting a pair of duplicates, then to discover that they were exactly the same, different only in the name tag inside the neck. Planned diversity in disguise, he found, was harder than he'd expected it to be, but that didn't lessen the necessity of sticking to his plan. On getting back to his apartment - he was, perversely, thinking of it as 'home' though he knew better - he stripped everything of tags and headed for the laundry room, where all the clothes went into the machine on a hot-hot cycle with plenty of Clorox bleach, along with the remaining dark-color clothes he'd picked up at yard sales. He was down to three clothing sets now, and realized he'd have to shop for more.

The thought evoked a frown. More yard sales, which he found tedious, especially now that he'd developed an operational routine. Like most men Kelly hated shopping, now all the more since his adventures were of necessity repetitive. His routine was also tiring him out, both from lack of sleep and the unremitting tension of his activity. None of it was routine, really. Everything was dangerous. Even though he was becoming accustomed to his mission, he would not become inured to the dangers, and the stress was there. That was partly good news in that he wasn't taking anything lightly, but stress could also wear at any man in little, hard-to-perceive ways such as the increased heart rate and blood pressure that resulted in fatigue. He was controlling it with exercise, Kelly thought, though sleep was becoming a problem. ?ll in all it was not unlike working the weeds in 3rd SOG, but he was older now, and the lack of backup, the absence of companions to share the stress and ease the strain in the off-hours, was taking its toll. Sleep, he told himself, checking his watch. Kelly switched on the TV set in the bedroom, catching a noon news show.

'Another drug dealer was found dead in west Baltimore today,' the reporter announced.

'I know,' Kelly said back, fading out for his nap.

'Here's the story,' a Marine colonel said at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, while another was doing much the same thing at exactly the same time at Camp Pendleton, California. 'We have a special job. We're selecting volunteers exclusively from Force Recon. We need fifteen people. It's dangerous. It's important. It's something you'll be proud of doing after it's over. The job will last two to three months. That's all I can say.'