Michael Redman was at his makeshift table, breaking down the rifle he had used most of his adult life to kill dangerous human beings who did not deserve to walk this earth. "Break down," though, was perhaps the wrong term for Redman. He could no more "break down" his weapon than he could break down his right arm. He handled the bolt from the H amp;K PSG-1 with just the tips of his fingers, feeling the weight and shape and the touch of finely crafted metal against his own skin. The smell of the Shooter's Choice cleaner was as fond to him as perfume; a certain signaling sifted like smoke through his head when he used it to clean the rifle after a kill. It signaled an end. The final act of taking care of business. It made him relax, often for the first time in weeks.
He had taken the door off the adjoining bedroom and laid the heavy plank across two nightstands, creating a wide bench on which to work. The only light was from the street lamp outside, seeping in through the window he faced. He liked the dark. You didn't have to see so much in the dark. And you could feel more-the breeze across a sheen of sweat, the soft vacuum of silence that cupped your ears in the quiet, the weight of a careful footstep on a hallway floor. Michael Redman liked those sensations. Many times they had kept him alive.
Redman caressed the bolt like a lover's hand, wiped it down and set it next to the silencer he had removed from the barrel. He knew he would have to rezero the H amp;K before he used the suppressor again, but it had done its job this morning. Hell, the few reporter shitbirds that had gathered for Ferris's perp walk hadn't even flinched when his round fired. No one heard a thing except for the splat the bullet had made when it entered the edge of Ferris's sideburn and burrowed through his head. The only sound was that of his lifeless body crumpling to the staircase steps, dead at the second of impact, an unavoidable blessing for someone who had deserved worse. Sometimes justice was swift but not always compensative, Redman thought. But that was not the gunman's choice. He did only what he was trained to do, maybe born to do.
Redman attached a rod guide into the breech of the weapon and then with the folding rod ran a brush up and back once through the barrel. One push through for each shot fired. And there had only been one. In the dark, he let his mind drift back to Falluja and Ramadi. He had been a law enforcement sniper for ten years, six before that in the Marine Corps. He had told friends that the only reason he'd joined the National Guard was to take advantage of the access to military gun ranges when he was traveling. He never expected to get called up to another war at age forty-six. But they said they needed his talent, his training. They attached him to a forward Marine infiltration squad. Let him pick his own high ground, always in a building, rarely one that seemed stable after the early bombing the cities had taken. The spotter they'd partnered him with was active duty and had rank. Their squad was good at close-quarter tactics and always cleared the building before they set up. High ground was a precious commodity over there. Enemy snipers coveted them. On occasion, Redman would hear the quiet spit of the clearing team's silenced handguns or a muffled grunt, the sound of something heavy and soft and lifeless being dragged on the floor above. But when the spotter called him up, he never saw a body, just the drag marks leading to another room or behind a partial wall. Redman would set up with an optimum view of the streets below. By daybreak, the Marine units would begin to move into the city. The spotter would use his binoculars to sweep both streets and buildings. Their orders were to safeguard the advancing troops. When the spotter called out a target, be it a man in a window, a shawled figure moving carefully in the street or some thin-limbed kid struggling to carry the weight of an AK-47, it was Redman's job to kill.
"Take the shot."
He didn't ask questions. After the first four months, he stopped adding the number of times he slid the brush through his weapon's barrel. He was very good at his job. But unlike his police work, he never knew the dead, whether they were innocent or evil, dangerous or just unlucky. After the brush, Redman squeezed some Shooter's Choice on a soft swab and ran it through the barrel and asked himself, Would Collie have done what I have done?
His SWAT friend, his only true friend, Collie always had a way of working the bugs out of Redman's head after a shoot, sitting in a bar washing the vision of blood down your throat. He'd grab Redman by the neck with those Vise-Grip fingers of his and say, "Moral courage, man. We do the job that no one else will do. We make the hard choices. And don't you think any different, Mikey It ain't the lieutenant. It ain't the sheriff. It ain't the range master. When your finger is on the trigger, buddy, you are ultimately the man. It's your moral courage that lets you pull it."
Would Collie have pulled those triggers in Iraq? Redman couldn't find the answer and it ate at him. But he'd sworn it would be different when he got home, and today he had known his target, he knew the man was deserving, knew he'd exacted a moral vengeance for two little girls whose innocence had been stolen. Collie would have pulled this trigger.
Redman closed his eyes while he worked, his fingers moving with the precision of motor memory in the dark. He wondered what the newspaper story would say in the morning. He wondered if Nick Mullins would get the assignment, if the only journalist he trusted would get it right, would understand.