“No, no,” Kennedy said. “We’ll just sit on the stairs.”
“No, please . . .”
But, for the moment at least, Kennedy retained some social autonomy, even if he had no fiscal, and he waved off Lanier and the aide. He sat down beside Claire on the top step, dropping his jacket on the wood for her to sit on. C. P. Ardell seemed dense but he was apparently sensitive enough to know what kind of embarrassment the mayor would be feeling at the presence of a federal agent so the big man sat a few feet away from the mayor and his wife, didn’t hover over them.
“Used to come here when I was a kid,” the agent said to the mayor. “Every Sunday.”
This surprised Kennedy. Most FBI agents were transplants to the area. “You grew up here?”
“Sure did. Wouldn’t live in Maryland or Virginia for a million dollars.”
“Where’s your home, Agent Ardell?” Claire asked him.
“Near the zoo. Just off the parkway.”
Kennedy laughed faintly. At least if he had to be under detention he was glad his turnkey was a loyal citizen.
Feeling warm from the champagne, he moved closer
to Claire and took her hand. They looked out over the Mall. Gazed at the hundreds of thousands of people milling about. Kennedy was pleased to see that there was no microphone on the reviewing stand. He didn’t want to hear any speeches. Didn’t want anybody to offer the mike to him for impromptu remarks—Lord, what on earth could he say? All he wanted was to sit with his wife and watch the fireworks blossom over his city. And forget the agony of this day. In his radio plea to the Digger he’d referred to this as the last day of the year. But it was, apparently, the end of many things: his chance to help the city, the lives of many of his residents, so horribly killed.
The end of his tenure in office too; Lanier and the others in Congress who wanted to snatch the District away from its people would probably be able to leverage the Digger incident into something impeachable—maybe interference with a police investigation, something like that. Add in the Board of Education scandal and Kennedy could be out of office within a few months. Wendell Jefferies and all the other aides would be swept out with him. And that would be the end of Project 2000.
The end of all his hopes for the District. His poor city would be set back another ten years. Maybe the next mayor—
But then Kennedy noticed something odd. That the spectators seemed to be moving east purposefully, as if they were being herded. Why? he wondered. The view was perfect from here.
He turned to Claire, started to mention this but suddenly she tensed.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“What?”
“Gunshots,” she said. “I hear gunshots.”
Kennedy looked into the air, wondering if the sound perhaps was the fireworks, starting early. But, no. All he saw was the dark, cloudy sky, pierced by the white shaft of the Washington Monument.
Then they heard the screaming.
* * *
Czisman’s shots did what he’d intended.
When he’d realized that nobody had seen the Digger—and that he himself had no clean shot at the killer—he’d fired twice into the air, to scatter the people and clear a line of fire.
The explosions sent the crowd into a panic. Howling, screaming, everyone scattered, knocking the Digger to his knees. In seconds the area immediately in front of the Vietnam Memorial was virtually empty.
Czisman saw Kincaid too, flinging himself to the ground and pulling a small automatic out of his pocket. The man hadn’t seen the Digger—a thick stand of evergreens separated them.
That was fine with Czisman.
He
wanted the killer.
The Digger was rising slowly. The machine gun had fallen from his coat and he looked around for it. He caught sight of Czisman and froze, gazing at him with the strangest eyes Czisman had ever seen.
In those eyes was less feeling than in an animal’s. Whoever the mastermind behind the killings had been—the one lying on the slab in the morgue—that man wasn’t pure evil. He would’ve had emotions and thoughts and desires. He
might
have reformed,
might
have developed the nub of a conscience that was possibly within him.
But the Digger? No. There was no redemption for this machine. There was only death.
The killer with a man’s mind and the devil’s heart . . .
The Digger glanced at the gun in Czisman’s hand. Then his eyes rose again and he stared at the journalist’s face.
Kincaid was rising to his feet, shouting at Czisman, “Drop the weapon, drop the weapon!”
Czisman ignored him and lifted the gun toward the Digger. With a shaking voice he began to say, “You—”
But there was a soft explosion at the Digger’s side. A tuft of the man’s overcoat popped outward. Czisman felt the hard fist in his chest, dropped to his knees. He fired his own gun but the shot went wide.
The Digger removed his hand from his pocket, holding a small pistol. He aimed at Czisman’s chest once more, fired twice.
Czisman flew backward under the impact of the rounds.
As he tumbled to the cold earth, seeing distant lights reflected in the wall of the Vietnam Memorial, he muttered, “You . . .”
Czisman tried to get his gun . . . But where was it? It had fallen from his hand.
Where, where? . . .
Kincaid was running for cover, looking around, confused. Czisman saw the Digger walk slowly toward his machine gun, pick it up and fire a burst toward Kincaid, who dove behind a tree. The Digger trotted away, crouching, through the bushes toward the fleeing crowds.
Czisman groped for his gun. “You . . . you . . . you . . .” But his hand fell to the ground like a rock and then there was only blackness.
* * *
A few people . . .
Click, click . . .
Funny . . .
A few people were nearby, huddled on the ground, looking around. Frightened. The Digger could easily have shot them but then the police would see him.
“The last time kill as many as you can,” said the man who tells him things.
But how many is as many as you can?
One, two, three, four, five . . .
The Digger doesn’t think he meant only a half dozen.
The last minute of the last hour of the . . .
So he’s hurrying after them, doing the things he ought to do, looking scared, running the way the crowd does, hunching over. Things like that.
You’re . . . you’re . . . you’re the best.
Who was that man back there? he wonders. He wasn’t a policeman. Why was he trying to shoot me?
The Digger has hidden the . . .
click, click
. . . the Uzi under his overcoat, the overcoat that he loves because Pamela gave it to him.
There are shouts nearby but they don’t seem to be directed at him so he doesn’t pay any attention. Nobody notices him. He’s moving through the grass, near the bushes and trees, along that wide street—Constitution Avenue. There are buses and cars and thousands and thousands of people. If he can get to them he can kill hundreds.
He sees museums, like the one where they have the picture of the entrance to hell. Museums are fun, he thinks. Tye would like museums. Maybe when they’re in California they can go to a museum together.
More shouting. People are running. There are men and women and children all over the place. Police and agents. They have Uzis or Mac-10s or,
click,
pistols like the Digger’s pistols and like the pistol of the fat man who just tried to shoot him. But these men and women aren’t shooting because they don’t know who to shoot at. The Digger is just one of the crowd.
Click, click.
How far does he have to go to get to more people?
A few hundred feet, he guesses.
He’s trotting toward them. But his path is taking him away from Tye—from the car parked on Twenty-second Street. He doesn’t like that thought. He wants to get the shooting over with and get back to the boy. When he gets to the crowd he’ll spin like a whirligig, watch the people fall like leaves in a Connecticut forest then go back to the boy.
When I travel on the road,
I love you all the more.
Spin, spin, spin . . .
They’ll fall like Pamela fell with the rose on her chest and the yellow flashing flower in her hand.
Fall, fall, fall . . .
More people with guns are running over the grass.
Suddenly, nearby, he hears explosions, cracks and bangs and pops.
Are people shooting at him?
No, no . . . Ah, look!
Above him flowers are blossoming in the air. There’s smoke and brilliant flowers, red and yellow. Also blue and white.
Fireworks.
His watch beeps.
It’s midnight.
Time to shoot.
But the Digger can’t shoot just yet. There aren’t enough people.
The Digger keeps moving toward the crowd. He can shoot
some,
but not enough to make the man who tells him things happy.
Crack . . .
A bullet streaks past him.
Now someone
is
shooting at him.
Shouting.
Two men in FBI jackets in the middle of the field to the Digger’s right have seen him. They’re standing in front of a wooden platform, decorated with beautiful red and blue and white banners, like the ones the fat New Year’s babies wear.
He turns toward them and fires the Uzi through his coat. He doesn’t want to do this—to put more holes in the beautiful black or blue coat Pamela gave him but he has to. He can’t let anyone see the gun.
The men clutch at their faces and necks as if bees are stinging them and fall down.
The Digger turns and continues moving after the crowds.
Nobody has seen him shoot the men.
He only has to walk a couple of hundred feet further and he’ll be surrounded by lots of people, looking around like everybody else, looking for the killer, looking for salvation. And then he can shoot and shoot and shoot.
Spinning like a whirligig in a Connecticut forest.
When the first bullets
crashed into the wood around him Jerry Kennedy shoved Claire off the platform and onto the cold ground.
He jumped after her and lay on his side, shielding her from the bullets. “Claire!” Kennedy shouted.
“I’m all right!” Her voice was edgy with panic. “What’s going on?”
“Somebody’s shooting. It must be him! The killer—he must be here!”
They lay side by side, huddling, smelling dirt and grass and spilled beer.
One person on the platform had been hit—the young aide, who’d been shot in the arm as Congressman Lanier leapt behind him for cover. But no one else seemed to be injured. Most of the shots had been wild. The killer had been aiming at the two agents in front of the viewing stand, not at anyone on the platform.
Kennedy could see the agents were dead.
The mayor glanced up and saw C. P. Ardell, holding
his black pistol in front of him, looking over the field. He stood tall, wasn’t even crouching.
“Agent Ardell!” Kennedy shouted. “There he is! There!”
But the agent didn’t shoot. Kennedy climbed halfway up the stairs, tugged at the man’s cuff, pointing. “He’s getting away. Shoot!”
The huge agent held his automatic out in front of him like a sharpshooter.
“Ardell!”
“Ahnnnn,” the agent was saying.
“What’re you waiting for?” Kennedy cried.
But C. P. Ardell just kept saying, “Ahnnnnn, ahnnnn,” gazing out over the field.
Then Ardell started to turn, slowly revolving, looking north, then east, then south . . . Looking toward the wall of the Vietnam Memorial, then at the trees, then at the Washington Monument, then at the flag that decorated the backdrop of the viewing platform.
“Ahnnnn.”
The agent turned once more, a complete circle, and fell onto his back, staring up at the sky with glazed eyes. Kennedy saw the top of his head was missing.
“Oh, Jesus!”
Claire gave a gasp as a stream of the man’s blood cascaded down the stairs and pooled inches from her face.
The agent said “Ahnnnnnn” once more, blew a slick bubble from his mouth. Kennedy took the man’s hand. It quivered slightly. Then it was still.
Kennedy stood up. He looked past the podium, which Lanier, his aide and another congressman were hiding behind. The Mall was dim—there were no lights on because of the fireworks—but in the headlights from the
emergency vehicles Kennedy had a view of the chaos. He was looking for the silhouette of the Digger.
“What the hell’re you doing in my city?” he whispered. Then his voice rose to a shout, “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Jerry, get down!” Claire pleaded.
But he stayed where he was, scanned the field, trying to find the dark form of the killer once more.
Where was he? Where?
Then he saw a man in the shadows, walking fast along a row of cherry trees not far from Constitution Avenue.
He was making for the crowds farther east on the Mall.
Kennedy stood and pried the pistol from the dead agent’s hand.
“Oh, Jerry, no,” Claire said. “No! Call on your phone.”
“There’s no time.”
“No . . .” She was crying softly.
He paused, turned to her. Touched her cheek with his left hand and kissed her forehead the way he always did before they shut the light out and went to sleep. Then he leapt over the huddling lumps of a young politico couple and sprinted over the grass.
He thought: I’m going to have a fucking heart attack, I’m going to have a heart attack and die . . . But he didn’t slow down.
The familiar sights of the city were around him: The white Washington Monument, the stark cherry trees, the tower of the Smithsonian, the gray neo-Gothic buildings of the museums, the tourist buses . . .
Kennedy gasped and ran, gasped and ran.
The Digger was a hundred feet away from him. Then ninety feet . . .
Eighty feet.
Kennedy watched the killer move closer to the crowd. He pulled a black machine gun from under his coat.
There was a shot from the trees to Kennedy’s left. Then another and two more.
Yes! Kennedy thought. They’ve seen him!