‘Goodbye, Janie,’ he whispers. ‘Goodbye, goodbye.’
Carter’s up and out of the apartment by six thirty, heading west over the George Washington Bridge and across New Jersey, to an outdoor gun range near the Delaware River in Pennsylvania. As he proceeds inland, from the warmer coast to the Watchung Mountains of western New Jersey, the season reverses. The grass on this end of the state is still winter-brown and the leaves on the trees barely formed. The day is warm, however. Even at this early hour, the temperature approaches sixty degrees and the sun, rising in his rear-view mirror, seems playful and determined. This is especially true as Carter crosses a bridge spanning the Delaware. The river’s running high and the angled sunlight dances in the spray. Fishermen stand on the banks of the river, casting out, while a flotilla of blue, red and green canoes braves the rapids in the main channel.
Carter reaches his destination, a shooting range tucked into the hardwood forest that covers most of north- eastern Pennsylvania, at eight o’clock. He’s driven all this way for two reasons. First, the Liberty Shooting Range has a training facility designed for handgun combat, a skill Carter’s determined to acquire. Second, Carl Maverton, the range’s owner, is an NRA nutcase obsessed with the constitutional right of high school students to carry weapons.
‘I’ll say this,’ he told Carter just two weeks before. ‘If every kid in Columbine was packing heat, a lotta lives would’ve been saved.’
Carter’s beliefs run in the opposite direction. He’d be happiest if the entire population was disarmed. Except for him, of course. He also finds Carl’s lectures as tedious as they are repetitive. But there’s good news, too. Carter’s weapons are illegal and Carl doesn’t give a shit.
Carl’s sitting behind a battered metal desk when Carter walks into his office, the first customer of the day. There are two American eagles on the desk. One augments an ashtray filled with cigar butts, the other carries the flag in its talons. A Gadsden rattlesnake flag – ‘DON’T TREAD ON ME’ – decorates the wall to Carl’s right. A framed poster of Gentleman Jerry Miculek hangs to his left.
Gentleman Jerry wears a blue and white shirt with the name of his corporate sponsor, Smith & Wesson, emblazoned across the chest. A competition speed-shooter, he holds a world record unlikely to be broken any time soon. On September 11, 1999, Miculek fired twelve rounds, hitting a target with each shot, in 2.9 seconds. That wouldn’t be impressive if he’d used an automatic with a capacious magazine, but Miculek accomplished this feat with a revolver, which meant he had to reload in the middle. Without the reload, Gentleman Jerry’s able to draw and empty a revolver (a Smith & Wesson, naturally) in less than a second, the shots coming so fast they sound like rolling thunder.
Training is what Carter’s life is mostly about. Contracts come to him once a month, on average, and are usually filled within a week. The rest of his time is devoted to staying sharp, an orientation developed in the military. Delta Force specialized in covert ops and was only sporadically deployed. Their assignments were invariably dangerous and filled with a tension that could only be overcome by training. The more you prepared, the greater the chance you’d survive. Carter harbors no illusions about the chance part. In the world of war, there are no certainties. At any given moment, the bullet might already be in the air. As, even now, the police might be knocking on his door.
Carter exercises three afternoons a week at a mixed martial arts gym in Manhattan, working alongside ranked cage fighters. Whenever possible, he spends his mornings and evenings at a locksmith shop, which he owns. Carter doesn’t install locks, or drill out locks for citizens who’ve lost their keys. He has an employee for that. Carter spends the hours opening locks with various tools, including picks and drills, and memorizing the wiring schemes for home alarm systems. As an assassin, he much prefers the privacy of a target’s house or apartment to the street.
‘So, how’s the big bad city?’ Maverton leads Carter to a yard enclosed by an earthen berm lined with bales of hay. There are eight targets in the yard, stationed at distances ranging up to thirty feet.
‘Still big, still bad,’ Carter responds.
A large man with broad shoulders and a swelling gut, Carl Maverton fancies himself a tough guy, a self-image Carter never challenges. New York might be the safest big city in the country, but Carl believes it to be the center of all that’s evil, a cauldron of mixed-race liberalism committed to the destruction of America.
‘Time to get out, old buddy.’ Carl winks and grins. ‘Because it’s comin’.’
Carter doesn’t inquire into the ‘it’ part. That’s because he knows Carl will launch into a rant about taking back his country – by any means necessary – that won’t end before sundown. The very idea seems pitiful to Carter, a bunch of jerks marching around in the forest with semi-automatic assault rifles as they prepare to battle the United States military. Carter was in Falluja, working as a merc, when the Marines stormed the city. He was at Tora Bora, watching American jets slam missiles into cave openings six feet wide. Should Maverton and his survivalist buddies ever become a serious threat, they’ll be eliminated forthwith.
For the next hour, Carter devotes himself to his training. He uses a Smith & Wesson revolver and a Glock semi-automatic, working with single and multiple targets from various positions. The pinnacle of the exercise occurs halfway through, when he rolls from a squat on to his left side and notches a tight, six-round pattern into a target twenty feet away.
Carter fires off more than a hundred rounds with each weapon, until his wrist aches and he can’t fight the recoil. Then he puts his weapons away, satisfied with his overall progress. The military hadn’t placed much emphasis on handgun training, but his speed and accuracy have both improved since his return to the States. He’s not as fast as Gentleman Jerry Miculek, of course, not even close, but he’s not really competing. For one thing, Miculek’s weapons are heavily customized, while Carter’s, for good reason, are not. Carter discards his weapons (as he discarded the .22 used to dispatch Ricky Ditto, along with the stolen license plates on the van and the clothing he’d worn) after a single use. There doesn’t seem to be much point in customizing them beforehand. No one misses from six feet away, not if he’s got a hand as steady as Carter’s.
As Carter hikes across the yard to the rifle range, he wonders about Miculek’s heart. How would he react if bullets were coming back at him from all directions, accompanied by the occasional RPG and mortar round? Unless Miculek’s been to war, he can’t know.
Carter was far more skilled with a rifle than a handgun, when he left the military. In the field, he’d consistently buried his first round into living targets eight hundred yards away. But eight hundred yards is nearly a half-mile, a distance covering ten New York City blocks, and there are very few ten-block sightlines in New York, or even in the surrounding suburbs. Thus Carter practices out to a distance of three hundred yards, a bit more than three city blocks, calculating distance with a fairly low-tech rangefinder purchased second hand at a gun show.
At these distances, Carter is deadly from any position, standing to prone, and he doesn’t prolong what amounts to a boring practice session designed only to maintain his skills. He’s on the road by eleven o’clock, stopping for an outdoor lunch in Stroudsburg on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River. He attracts no attention while he eats, blending into the scenery, virtually invisible. Back in his van, he stays five miles above the speed limit, just another weary traveler heading home. But not to Janie’s apartment in Woodhaven. Janie’s name and address appear on Carter’s service record and he’s already been tracked to her apartment by a man out to kill him. Now he lives, for the most part, in a condo he sublets on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The arrangement is private, with the utilities remaining in the name of the condo’s owner. Carter’s locksmith shop is down here as well, Gung-Ho Locksmiths on Avenue A near Tenth Street. He’ll spend the next few hours in the shop, examining various ways to open magnetic locks. Then he’ll go for a run along the East River, only a few blocks away.
Carter’s thoughts turn to Angel Tamanaka as he crosses the George Washington Bridge. He’d been standing in the dining room when he first heard her voice, and he’d assumed she was Ricky’s wife, returned unexpectedly. Killing a man in front of his family isn’t Carter’s style, but there was no going back and he’d pulled the trigger without regret the minute his target presented itself. Then he’d stepped into the kitchen to find this doll of a woman, eyes wide as saucers.
I’m horny, Carter thinks. I’m a victim of the itch that must be scratched. All those stories, the fantasies Angel described, have finally done their work.
Carter likes goals, perhaps because he has so few of them in his life. He doesn’t really care about money, doesn’t dream of limos or mansions or watches big enough to substitute for wrist weights, doesn’t fancy ocean- going yachts or bespoke suits. That leaves only the necessities with which to fill his days: food, drink, shelter and the itch.
Carter maps out a weekend of bar hopping. His mission will be to find a woman equally determined to scratch that same itch. A woman who’ll head back to her workaday life on Monday morning, a woman whose imaginings of
