cast-iron skillet as he took in my embrace of Vanessa. Something like disapproval rippled beneath his gaze, then turned to horror as he took in Vanessa's bloody, gaping wound.
I saw recognition make its way across his face. Despair, then anger, and finally sadness played across his face in cinematically swift flashes as he recognized Vanessa. During all this, the ambulance attendants stayed close to their vehicle, looking to the giant cop for directions. Finally, he holstered the automatic and made his way slowly toward me. The paramedics came running behind; the contents of their kits rattled in the stillness. I thought to tell them they could take their time, but my words found no voice.
CHAPTER 9
Once across the Roebuck Lake bridge at the east end of Itta Bena, the motorcyclist settled into a breakneck pace that would have been suicide for a less experienced rider, especially when the blacktop ran out southeast of Runnymede and fed into a wide, rutted lane of still-frozen gravel, sand, and mud. She wore a black helmet and was androgynously clad entirely in the woodland camouflage favored by local deer hunters. With her rifle slung crosswise over her back she looked pretty much like most any other hunter that time of the year.
The warmth glowed in her belly. Relaxed. Satisfied. At peace. The tingles of the orgasmic release crackled about her skin and warmed her thighs and groin where she hugged the saddle. She liked killing when it was quick and cold, but loved it like this morning, when she could expel every bit of anger and frustration from her body with just the right shot. Head shots were the best.
Behind the helmet's visor, her face was a smooth postcoital mask that did not change as she blew quickly past groups of black people, walking along the road in twos and threes. She gave no thought to them or the groups of old black men with old cynical eyes sitting on the steps of cheap mobile homes, which had replaced the gray, weathered wood shacks in which they had grown up. Their old eyes had watched the world change from one of poverty, official segregation, and legal inequality to one of poverty, de facto segregation, and de facto inequality. This was progress as good as they expected in this life.
The unpaved road cut through a winter Delta sameness as flat and featureless as an empty table. The motorcyclist glanced frequently in the rearview mirrors. Ragged tatters of bolls left behind by mechanical pickers clung to the sepia-black skeletons of last year's cotton crop and raced past her on both sides. In every direction, the fields gave way only to rows of winter-bare trees bordering water and marshy areas too wet to farm. The land was flat as a still pond, owing to the Yazoo and Tallahatchie rivers, the Big Sunflower and the Little Sunflower and the Yalobusha and a score of other tributaries of the Mississippi, which had meandered across the Delta for thousands of years, leaving behind countless oxbow lakes like Roebuck and depositing layer after layer of rich, black soil that still made for the best cotton growing in the world. The Delta's fetidly omnipresent moist smells were absent on this day, frozen to sleep by the winter cold.
There were unseen and mostly unimagined hills beyond the cinched-down horizon. That much she knew: southeast of her at Yazoo City and east at Carroll County. But here, a lid of haze squatted atop the land, creating an artificially close horizon cutting off visions of what might exist a few miles beyond. The grinding flat sameness threw a blanket of myopia over Delta culture. Geography became destiny as the flat topographic conformity imposed its two-dimensional will on the people, rolling their ambitions as flat and thin as cheap grits.
Some found the Delta inspirational in its adversity, especially those who had found their way to the hills and beyond.
In moments, she had left behind the last of the mobile homes and pedestrians, then began to slow as she strained to discern the overgrown dirt ruts leading down to the lake where she had left her truck. She downshifted as the road made a gentle arc toward the gray-green canopies of the cypress trees she knew grew only submerged in the silty waters of the old Yazoo River oxbow.
She found the frozen mud ruts easily enough, but less than twenty yards off the main road, the first complication of the day arose. Calmly, she rolled to a stop, stretched her left leg, and killed the engine. Options ran through her head as she took in the rusting Chevy Monte Carlo with a missing rear bumper and cardboard taped over one rear passenger-side window. The fabric of the landau roof had almost finished peeling off; a coat hanger emerged from a broken antenna. The loud, clear tones of a black gospel station reverberated from the car's radio. Her older, tan Ford 150 pickup truck sat less than ten feet away.
She dismounted, rested the bike on its kickstand, and made her way down the path on foot, unslinging the M25 sniper rifle as she walked. The gospel music masked her steps as she made her way down a steep slope ending at the edge of the brown, still water where a stooped, gray-haired black woman stood patiently holding on to a long bamboo fishing pole, which had been patched with gray duct tape. In the water, a large red-and-white float bobbed with the faint movement of the water. Nearby, two small children, warmly bundled into roughly the same shape as two tan hush puppies, played with some sort of yellow, blue, and red plastic toy. Grandma and her daughter's kids, the motorcyclist assumed.
Nailed high on a tree right next to the grandmother, a brilliant white sign with bright red letters warned of pesticide runoff from the adjacent cotton fields. The sign prohibited commercial fishing and cautioned individuals not to eat more than two meals per month of carp, gar, catfish longer than twenty-two inches, and no buffalo fish at all.
The cyclist thought about this neutrally as she raised the M25 and squeezed off two quick rounds, neatly taking out the two mobile targets first. Grandma dropped her fishing pole and turned, her face wide with fear and confusion. Then the cyclist shot her too. The slug went neatly through the round O of the grandmother's surprised lips and showered fragments of her cervical vertebrae into the water. The woman staggered and fell backward into the lake.
With quick, precise moves, the cyclist went back to her bike and drove it down to where the slope began. Then she dismounted and with the aid of a little throttle, ran the bike down the slope and into the water. The bike slowed, sieved, sank. The cyclist nodded, satisfied when the last inch of handlebar sank beneath the brown water
Next, she took the time to administer confirmation rounds to each of her three targets, then hurled the rifle high over the lake. She felt a moment of regret as the rifle and its Leupold sight rotored lazily out over the brown water.
The M25 had been tuned by one of the world's best gunsmiths, a man who had been her spotter when they'd picked off Taliban ragheads in the Shah-e-Kot Valley in eastern Afghanistan. She remembered sitting up in a notch of rocks on the border and dropping those crazy fucks who thought they were safe once they hit the Pakistan side of things. She'd been loosely connected with the Army's 187th Rakkasan Brigade in March of 2002, part of the fierce combat of Operation Anaconda. She had a contest going with one of the Canadians and dropped her eighty-third confirmed kill at 2,420 meters, a record for a combat sniper until one of the Canadians dropped his target at 2,430 meters.
He got a medal and the next day she got an Al-Qaeda round right through her forehead and out the top of her scalp. Her medical discharge had left her in a deep depression until the medicine and the new opportunities arrived at her door unexpectedly just nine months ago. The thought brought a faint smile to her face. Unconsciously she touched the bottom of the nearly invisible scar the plastic surgeons had left and followed it to her hairline. There had been problems until she got the experimental drugs.
She cleared her mind and made her way calmly over to the pickup, opened the tailgate, pulled out the motorcycle ramp, and hurled it into the lake. Without watching it sink, she turned back and pulled a red, plastic, one-gallon gasoline container from the truck bed and set it on the ground about twenty feet from the truck. Blond hair cascaded onto her shoulders as she pulled off the crash helmet. She set it upside down on the ground, then stripped off all her outer clothes, leaving her in jeans, a Pendleton shirt, and the surgical gloves she always wore when she was working. She stuffed the helmet with her camouflage overalls.
Next, the motorcyclist unlaced her boots, purchased at the same Goodwill store in Jackson as the outerwear, and set them next to the helmet. Standing there now in thick ragg wool socks, she emptied the gasoline on the boots and helmet and set the container down next to them. Finally, she stripped off the rubber gloves, set them on top of the pile of camouflage, and set the entire ensemble afire with a wooden kitchen match.
Checking off the items in her head, she nodded to herself, then quickly made her way to the pickup's cab,
