individual bricks as well. The broken pattern suits Carter, presenting an advantage compounded by the deep shadows on the roof. Forty feet away, a small air conditioning unit casts an even deeper shadow between itself and the wall. Carter’s nylon ski mask is soaked with sweat. It clings to his face like a suction cup, but he’s glad for it now. In the darkness, with only the top of his head exposed, he’ll be a shadow within a shadow, for all intents invisible.
Carter takes the last few yards on his knees and his elbows. He’s not unmindful of the need for haste. Gunshots tend to attract attention. Nevertheless, he remains calm as he lifts his head a few inches above the ledge and surveys the field of battle. At the other end of the block, Bobby Ditto’s standing behind the Explorer. He’s holding Angel tight against his chest and he’s pointing a gun at her head. Just behind Bobby, the unmoving legs of a man Carter assumes to be the Blade project on to the sidewalk.
Carter doesn’t drop the M89’s folding bipod. The ledge is too irregular, and he settles for laying the rifle’s stock on a patch of smooth brick. He finds himself admiring Angel, at least on one level. She definitely has pluck. But her leaving the van was a bad mistake and she’s compromised the operation. Carter’s able to recall a time when war was personal. He was a gung-ho soldier boy on his way to Afghanistan, prepared to do his bit, proud to serve his country. But Carter doesn’t have enemies now. He has competitors. Like Roberto Benedetti, who needs to be removed, post haste, from the game.
In the military, Carter almost always operated with a spotter. The spotter calculated distance, elevation and windage, matching each to ambient temperature, barometric pressure and angle of aim, upward or downward. Carter’s on his own here, but he’s far from handicapped. Mounted on the M89’s telescopic sight, a BORS optical ranging system does, in less than a second and with far greater accuracy, what took his spotter minutes to accomplish.
After allowing for all the variables, the effective distance between himself and the top of Bobby Ditto’s skull, according to the BORS unit, is 127 yards. Carter turns the elevation dial on the scope until it reaches the 127 yard mark and that’s it. The system has compensated for every other factor, including the downward angle. All he need do is train the scope on his target, squeeze the trigger and put a bullet in a two-inch circle. Without flinching, of course.
Eliminate the brain and the body stops. No message from the brain to the finger and Bobby will never pull that trigger. There’s even room for error. Bobby’s head is about four inches across. An inch either way won’t matter, not given the energy of a 7.62 mm hollow-point round. Bobby Ditto’s brain will literally explode.
Two inches off, on the other hand, and Angel Tamanaka wakes up on the wrong side of the grass.
Carter lays the butt of the rifle in the hollow of his shoulder, lays his cheek against the carbon fiber stock. He’s at home now, at rest in the safest place he’s ever known, his weapon cradled in his arms, his child, his baby. He dials up the magnification, peers through the sight, lays the cross-hairs dead-center on the top of Bobby’s head. Then he slips his finger through the trigger guard to caress the trigger, an old habit that’s become ritual. Still unhurried, he brings the trigger to the point of release and holds steady while he centers himself, breathing in, breathing out, seeking the quiet space between rest and action, between life and death. Only when he finds that emptiness inside himself does he squeeze the trigger.
THIRTY
The goodbye sex is great, but it’s still goodbye. Angel’s had enough. Something about watching the top and back of Bobby Ditto’s skull fly off while his face remained in front of her, eyes open, mouth fixed, has taken the wind out of her adventuring sails. She’s not psychologically qualified to live in Carter’s outlaw world, simple as that.
Angel saw and heard nothing before the bullet found its mark. There was no jet of flame, no crack of the rifle. One minute she was standing there, waiting for ... Angel doesn’t know what she was waiting for, only that one minute she was helpless, the next she was sprayed with ...
And that’s the problem. A part of her mind shies away from the moment when Bobby’s head exploded, coating her hair, her face, her shoulders with gore. Another part returns, again and again, to the instant of impact, after which she’d fallen to the sidewalk, limp as the dishrag in the bottom of her purse. If Carter hadn’t dragged her to the van and shoved her inside, she might still be there.
Meanwhile, Carter was all business, and maybe that was the scariest part. He stripped her when they got back to his apartment, stripped her as you’d strip a child, and pushed her into the shower. Then he collected everything they’d worn or used and packed it into four garbage bags, the .32, all of their clothing, including their shoes, the Glock, the rope, the grappling hook and all the tools, the spent cartridge from the M89, which he crushed with a tack hammer. Everything except the M89 itself.
Finished, he returned to the bathroom, dried her off and put her to bed. ‘Don’t move, Angel,’ he said as he drew the covers up to her neck. ‘I’ll be back in a couple of hours.’
Carter didn’t tell her where he was going and Angel didn’t ask. But later she learned that he’d carried the bags to an eighty-unit apartment building in Queens where he once lived. Using a key he’d never surrendered to get inside, he’d ridden an empty elevator to the ninth floor, then dumped the bags into a chute leading to the trash collection room in the basement.
‘The room’s actually a compactor,’ he explained when he returned. ‘On whatever day the garbage is picked up, all the trash in that room will be compacted, wrapped in heavy plastic and carried to the curb. The city will do the rest.’
Angel listened to his explanation with one ear, unmoved even by the sight of all that money, piles and piles of money, a waterfall of money dropping from the interior of the suitcase to the comforter on the bed. But then Carter slipped out of his vest and his shirt, revealing a smoky-red bruise that virtually covered his ribs on the left side.
‘Close call. A few inches lower and it would have come through under my vest. In which case ...’ He winced as he probed the center of the wound.
‘You want to go to the hospital?’
‘The rib’s not displaced. There’s nothing a doctor can do. What’s that they say? Grin and bear it? No harm, no foul?’
Angel shakes her head. ‘Joke if you want, Carter, but you came within a few inches of dying in that basement. You’re what? Twenty-nine years old?’ She picks up a packet of hundred dollar bills and lays it on top of the slug in his hand. ‘Was it worth it?’ she demands.
A week later, Lieutenant Solly Epstein met them in Central Park. He’d come to collect his share of the loot, but his message was encouraging. The Organized Crime Control Bureau, his unit, had pronounced the incident drug related, which it definitely was, and they were looking at the usual mob suspects. Meanwhile, the media had taken OCCB’s theme a step further. The Red Hook Massacre was big time news, yet at no point, in the hundreds of articles and hours of airtime, did anyone suggest that the massacre was the work of a single individual. There were, on the other hand, several pieces linking Mexican drug cartels, in style and psychology, to the carnage.
‘Al Zeffri’s not talkin’,’ Epstein explained. ‘He claims he doesn’t remember anything about that night, which could be true because he didn’t regain consciousness until late the next day. You must have hit him pretty hard.’
‘I had to make sure he didn’t come up behind me.’
Epstein glanced at Angel and winked. ‘I woulda thought blowin’ his knee apart was enough guarantee. Anyway, you got nothin’ to worry about. Not only hasn’t your name been mentioned, it doesn’t appear in our database. As far as the NYPD’s concerned, you don’t exist. You’re still a ghost.’
Angel spells it out a week later, as she and Carter lie in bed. They’re going at it twice a day by now, the sex hard and fast and as necessary as breathing. Angel can’t get enough, and can’t wait to get away. Never has she been more attracted to a man, never more repelled. Carter’s death on two legs and she’s drawn to him like a junkie to a fix.
‘I’m leaving,’ she tells him.
‘When?’
‘As soon as you set up my account.’ The account in question will be established in a Cayman Islands bank. There’s a cost, ten percent of the principal, but Angel’s happy to pay. ‘You were right,’ she adds. ‘Eventually, you’ll be caught or killed. I don’t think you care all that much.’
