The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (92 page)

“I can’t read a word of this,” Janet said when the menu was handed to her. “I thought they always had the food listed in English, too, like movie subtitles.”

“Some places don’t,” said Jimmie quietly. “I’ll order for us both. You’ll be pleased. The sole is excellent here.”

“Oh, I love fish,” she said. “I could eat a ton of fish.”

He pressed her hand. “That’s nice.”

“My head is swimming. I shouldn’t have had that Scotch on an empty stomach,” she said. “Are we having wine with dinner?”

“Of course,” said Jimmie.

“I don’t know anything about wine,” she told him, “but I love champagne. That’s wine, isn’t it?”

He smiled with a faint upcurve of his thin lips.

“Trust me,” he said. “You’ll enjoy what I select.”

“I’m sure I will.”

The food was ordered and served – and Jimmie was pleased to see that his tastes had, once again, proven sound. The meal was superb, the wine was bracing and the girl was sexually stimulating. Essentially brainless, but that really didn’t matter to Jimmie. She was what he wanted.

Then she began to talk about the sniper killings.

“Forty people in just a year and two months,” she said. “And all gunned down by the same madman. Aren’t they
ever
going to catch him?”

“The actual target figure is forty-one,” he corrected her. “And what makes you so sure the sniper is a male. Could be a woman.”

She shook her head. “Whoever heard of a woman sniper?”

“There have been many,” said Jimmie. “In Russia today there are several hundred trained female snipers. Some European governments have traditionally utilized females in this capacity.”

“I don’t mean women
soldiers
,” she said. “I mean your nutso shoot-’em-in-the-street sniper. Always guys. Every time. Like that kid in Texas that shot all the people from the tower.”

“Apparently you’ve never heard of Francine Stearn.”

“Nope. Who was she?”

“Probably the most famous female sniper. Killed a dozen schoolchildren in Pittsburg one weekend in late July, 1970. One shot each. To the head. She was a very accurate shootist.”

“Never heard of her.”

“After she was captured,
Esquire
did a rather probing psychological profile on her.”

“Well, I really don’t read a lot,” she admitted. “Except Gothic romances. I just can’t get
enough
of those.” She giggled. “Guess you could say I’m addicted.”

“I’m not familiar with the genre.”

“Anyway,” she continued. “I know this sniper is a guy.”

“
How
do you know?”

“Female intuition. I trust it. It never fails me. And it tells me that the Phantom Sniper is a man.”

He was amused. “What else does it tell you?”

“That he’s probably messed up in the head. Maybe beaten as a kid. Something like that. He’s
got
to be a nutcase.”

“You could be wrong there, too,” Jimmie told her. “Not all lawbreakers are mentally unbalanced.”

“This ‘Deathmaster’ guy is, and I’m convinced of it.”

“You’re a strongly opinionated young woman.”

“Mom always said that.” She sipped her wine, nodded. “Yeah, I guess I am.” She frowned, turning the glass slowly in her long-fingered hand. “Do you think they’ll ever catch him?”

“I somehow doubt it,” Jimmie declared. “No one seems to have a clear description of him. And he always seems to elude the police. Leaves no clues. Apparently selects his subjects at random. No motive to tie him to. No consistent MO.”

“What’s that?”

“Method of operation. Most criminals tend to repeat the same basic pattern in their crimes. But not this fellow. He keeps surprising people. Never know where he’ll pop up next, or who his target will be. Tough to catch a man like that.”

“You call them ‘subjects’ and ‘targets’ – but they’re
people!
Innocent men and women and children. You make them sound like . . . like cutouts at a shooting gallery!”

“Perhaps I do,” he admitted, smiling. “It’s simply that we have different modes of expression.”

“I say they’ll get him eventually. He can’t go on just butchering innocent people forever.”

“No one goes on forever,” said Jimmie Prescott.

She put down her wine glass, leaned toward him. “Know what bothers me most about the sniper?”

“What.”

“The fact that his kind of act attracts copycats. Other sickos with a screw loose who read about him and want to imitate him. Arson is like that. One big fire in the papers and suddenly all the other wacko firebugs start their
own
fires. It gets ’em going. The sniper is like that.”

“If some mentally disturbed individual is motivated to kill stupidly and without thought or preparation by something he or she reads in a newspaper then the sniper himself cannot be blamed for such abnormal behavior.”

“You call what
he
does normal?”

“I . . . uh . . . didn’t say that. I was simply refuting your theory.”

She frowned. “Then who
is
to blame? I think that guy should be caught and—”

“And what?” Jimmie fixed his cool gray eyes on her. “What would you do if you suddenly discovered who he was . . . where to find him?”

“Call the police, naturally. Like anybody.”

“Wouldn’t you be curious about him, about the kind of person he is? Wouldn’t you
question
him first, try to understand him?”

“You don’t question an animal who kills! Which is what he is. I’d like to see him gassed or hanged . . . You don’t
talk
to a twisted creep like that!”

She had made him angry. His lips tightened. He was no longer amused with this conversation; the word game had turned sour. This girl was gross and stupid and insensitive. Take her to bed and be done with it. Use her body – but no words. No more words. He’d had quite enough of those from her.

“Check, please,” he said to the waiter.

It was at his motel, after sex, that Jimmie decided to kill her. Her insulting tirade echoed and re-echoed in his mind. She must be punished for it.

In this special case he felt justified in breaking one of his rules: never pre-select a target. She told him that she had a job in Hollywood, that she worked the afternoon shift at a clothing store on Vine. And he knew where she lived, a few blocks from work. She walked to the store each afternoon.

He would take her home and return the next day. When she left her apartment building he would dispatch her from a roof across the street. Once this plan had settled into place in the mind of Jimmie Prescott he relaxed, allowing the tension of the evening to drain away.

By tomorrow night he’d be in Tucson, and Janet Lakeley would be dead.

Warm sun.

A summer afternoon.

The sniper emerged from the roof door, walking easily, carrying a custom-leather guncase.

Opened the case.

Assembled the weapon.

Loaded it.

Sighted the street below.

Adjusted the focus.

Waited.

Target now exiting.

Walking along street toward corner.

Adjust sight focus.

Finger on trigger.

Cheek against stock.

Eye to scope.

Crosshairs direct on target.

Fire!

Jimmie felt something like a fist strike his stomach. A sudden, shocking blow. Winded, he looked down in amazement at the blood pulsing steadily from his shirtfront.

I’m hit! Someone has actually
—

Another blow – but this one stopped all thought, taking his head apart. No more shock. No more amazement.

No more Jimmie.

She put away the weapon, annoyed at herself.
Two
shots! The Phantom Sniper, whoever he was, never fired more than once. But
he
was exceptional. She got goosebumps, just thinking about him.

Well, maybe next time she could drop her target in one. Anybody can miscalculate a shot. Nobody’s perfect.

She left the roof area, walking calmly, took the elevator down to the garage, stowed her guncase in the trunk of the stolen Mustang and drove away from the motel.

Poor Jimmie, she thought. It was just his bad luck to meet
me
. But that’s the way it goes.

Janet Lakeley had a rule, and she never broke it: when you bed down a guy in a new town you always target him the next day. She sighed. Usually it didn’t bother her. Most of them were bastards. But not Jimmie. She’d enjoyed talking to him, playing her word games with him . . . bedding him. Too bad he had to die.

He seemed like a real nice guy.

From where he stood in the shadow of a split-bole Douglas fir, Deighan had a clear view of the cabin down below. Big harvest moon tonight, and only a few streaky clouds scudding past now and then to dim its hard yellow shine. The hard yellow glistened off the surface of Lake Tahoe beyond, softened into a long silverish stripe out toward the middle. The rest of the water shone like polished black metal. All of it was empty as far as he could see, except for the red-and-green running lights of a boat well away to the south, pointed toward the neon shimmer that marked the South Shore gambling casinos.

The cabin was big, made of cut pine logs and redwood shakes. It had a railed redwood deck that overlooked the lake, mostly invisible from where Deighan was. A flat concrete pier jutted out into the moonstruck water, a pair of short wooden floats making a T at its outer end. The boat tied up there was a thirty-foot Chris-Craft with sleeping accommodations for four. Nothing but the finer things for the Shooter.

Deighan watched the cabin. He’d been watching it for three hours now, from this same vantage point. His legs bothered him a little, standing around like this, and his eyes hurt from squinting. Time was, he’d had the night vision of an owl. Not anymore. What he had now, that he hadn’t had when he was younger, was patience. He’d learned that in the last three years, along with a lot of other things – patience most of all.

On all sides the cabin was dark, but that was because they’d put the blackout curtains up. The six of them had been inside for better than two hours now, the same five-man nucleus as on every Thursday night except during the winter months, plus the one newcomer. The Shooter went to Hawaii when it started to snow. Or Florida or the Bahamas – someplace warm. Mannlicher and Brandt stayed home in the winter. Deighan didn’t know what the others did, and he didn’t care.

A match flared in the darkness between the carport, where the Shooter’s Caddy Eldorado was slotted, and the parking area back among the trees. That was the lookout – Mannlicher’s boy. Some lookout: he smoked a cigarette every five minutes, like clockwork, so you always knew where he was. Deighan watched him smoke this one. When he was done, he threw the butt away in a shower of sparks, and then seemed to remember that he was surrounded by dry timber and went after it and stamped it out with his shoe.
Some
lookout.

Deighan held his watch up close to his eyes, pushed the little button that lighted its dial. Ten nineteen. Just about time. The lookout was moving again, down toward the lake. Pretty soon he would walk out on the pier and smoke another cigarette and admire the view for a few minutes. He apparently did that at least twice every Thursday night – that had been his pattern on each of the last two – and he hadn’t gone through the ritual yet tonight. He was bored, that was the thing. He’d been at his job a long time and it was always the same; there wasn’t anything for him to do except walk around and smoke cigarettes and look at three hundred square miles of lake. Nothing ever happened. In three years nothing had ever happened.

Tonight something was going to happen.

Deighan took the gun out of the clamshell holster at his belt. It was a Smith & Wesson .38, lightweight, compact – a good piece, one of the best he’d ever owned. He held it in his hand, watching as the lookout performed as if on cue – walked to the pier, stopped, then moved out along its flat surface. When the guy had gone halfway, Deighan came out of the shadows and went down the slope at an angle across the driveway, to the rear of the cabin. His shoes made little sliding sounds on the needled ground, but they weren’t sounds that carried.

He’d been over this ground three times before, dry runs the last two Thursday nights and once during the day when nobody was around; he knew just where and how to go. The lookout was lighting up again, his back to the cabin, when Deighan reached the rear wall. He eased along it to the spare-bedroom window. The sash went up easily, noiselessly. He could hear them then, in the rec room – voices, ice against glass, the click and rattle of the chips. He got the ski mask from his jacket pocket, slipped it over his head, snugged it down. Then he climbed through the window, put his penlight on just long enough to orient himself, went straight across to the door that led into the rec room.

It didn’t make a sound, either, when he opened it. He went in with the revolver extended, elbow locked. Sturgess saw him first. He said, “Jesus Christ!” and his body went as stiff as if he were suffering a stroke. The others turned in their chairs, gawking. The Shooter started up out of his.

Deighan said, fast and hard, “Sit still if you don’t want to die. Hands on the table where I can see them – all of you. Do it!”

They weren’t stupid; they did what they were told. Deighan watched them through a thin haze of tobacco smoke. Six men around the hexagonal poker table, hands flat on its green baize, heads lifted or twisted to stare at him. He knew five of them. Mannlicher, the fat owner of the Nevornia Club; he had Family ties, even though he was a Prussian, because he’d once done some favors for an east-coast
capo
. Brandt, Mannlicher’s cousin and private enforcer, who doubled as the Nevornia’s floor boss. Bellah, the quasi-legitimate real-estate developer and high roller. Sturgess, the bankroll behind the Jackpot Lounge up at North Shore. And the Shooter – hired muscle, hired gun, part-time coke runner, whose real name was Dennis D’Allesandro. The sixth man was the pigeon they’d lured in for this particular game, a lean guy in his fifties with Texas oil money written all over him and his fancy clothes – Donley or Donavan, something like that.