Ejected the shell. Reloaded slowly. Hell, he could do this all day. What a fucking rush! "The objective lens, which is adjustable by manipulating the Adjustment Ring until scope is focused, is adjusted only when parallax is present." Big son of a bitch about Chaingang's size. Let's see what he looks like when you lay them crosshairs on that big belly and do This! Lordy! What a mess.
Shooter pulled his face away from the scope. Took his darlin' down and put her away, jogging back to the car. He put her in the back seat and got in. It was hot inside. He hated these wheels, even with the top down. To Price it was just another disposable ride. He looked into the rearview mirror and was surprised to see that one of his eyes had a dark ring around it. His best girl had done up and given him a shiner.
That night, Chaingang was working, trying to run down his missing biker buddies from Steel Vengeance. Doing the kind of tracing that keeps you on the telephone as you sort trails and patterns. Price got antsy watching TV and took his lady out for some night air.
He saw a guy walking down the street. Watched him through the Laco without attaching it to the weapon. The guy walked funny. He definitely needed to die.
"To focus the scope continuously watch the target point through the sniperscope, with the eye centered directly in the eyepiece lens, keeping the crosshairs on the bull's-eye, and moving your head slightly to the left. If the bull's-eye remains centered repeat the procedure, moving your head slightly to the right. If, when the head is moved slightly in either direction, the bull's-eye appears to move out of center or change position in any way, parallax is present."
He nailed the center of the sighting hairs on the walking man's head. "Parallax is the apparent displacement or movement of an object seen from two different points not on a straight line with the object." Squeeze! Oooh.
Lieutenant John J. Llewelyn, of the Kansas City Metro Homicide Squad, skidded to a stop, killed the engine of his unmarked car, and got out of the vehicle leaving the door open.
There was tremendous glare from the flashing lights of other cop cars and an ambulance at the crime scene, and he shielded his eyes, a man always careful about protecting his vision, making mental notes of the salient aspects of what confronted him.
"Over here, John," Detective Sergeant Marlin Morris said.
"Who's got the handle on this?"
"Leo and T.J."
"Witnesses?" The Lieutenant and Sergeant went under a bright DO NOT CROSS tape.
"Lady over there." Morris gestured in the direction of a woman in animated conversation with two of his men. "Said she was coming out of this building over here, okay, and the guy blows up. Her words. 'He just blew up. It was awful. I thought something fell on him or hit him or something.' She said he was just somebody walking down the street."
"I.D. on the body?"
"Louis Sheves. Lives in Foley Park. Trying to reach a relative or neighbor, so far no luck."
They reached the body, which was surrounded by people. There was a crime photographer and another evidence tech doing pictures and measurements. The people from Kay Cee Memorial were obviously waiting for the police to finish. There was certainly no hurry. The victim was long gone. Literally. The lieutenant pulled back the cover from the remains.
"Holy Mother!" he said.
"Jesus!" Llewelyn heard another cop murmur. There was nothing left of the head. It had been almost completely torn from the body of the victim by whatever killed him. The force that had exploded the head had ripped it from the neck leaving only a hideous mess of ragged, bloody skin, bone, gristle, torn veins, and arteries, and a bit of spine stalk.
"Where's the man's head?" Llewelyn asked. Nobody answered. They were standing in some of it. Dark blood had stained the filthy street all around the body. Llewelyn could imagine the witness screaming as this lifeless corpse pumped blood from the neck.
Blackened, oily blood was everywhere. On a nearby parked truck. On the splattered coat of the luckless woman who had experienced the bad fortune to be in Louis Sheves's proximity when he blew up, but had the good fortune to be missed by whatever hellish force had struck him. It was the sort of crime scene where you didn't want to think about the soles of your shoes.
"Lieutenant," one of Llewelyn's guys said.
"Leo. Where's the head?"
"We found some skull fragment and hair 'n' that, but"—be shrugged—"the rest of him's all over the street."
"M.E. done?"
"He said they can't tell us anything till they do an autopsy."
"What a surprise," the lieutenant said dryly.
"Witness see anybody? Vehicles? Anything?"
The detective was looking at his notebook, shaking his head. "She works in the building over there. She was coming out and he was walking down the street. 'There was kind of a noise like a baseball bat or something hitting and this man blew up. He just blew up. It was awful. I thought something fell on him or hit him, you know, like that. But I didn't see anything. He just exploded and I screamed and tried to cover myself. His body kind of went up in the air and came back down in the street.'"
"If the evidence techs are done I guess they can take him."
The homicide team moved aside as they covered what was left of the man and the people from Kay Cee Memorial began loading the remains on a gurney. "I want to talk to her," Llewelyn told his men, stepping over to the sidewalk.
"Yes, sir. We're trying to locate anybody else who might have seen it happen."
"Good." Llewelyn watched the emergency team roll what was left of the dead body over to the waiting ambulance, open the doors, and expertly slide the gurney in. The legs folded up under it as it went in the ambulance with its grisly load. That's the way he felt sometimes, as if his legs would fold up under his weight if he moved the wrong way.
Llewelyn was a prematurely balding, bedraggled-looking, thirty-seven-year-old career cop who suddenly felt one hundred and thirty-seven, and not without good cause. He had solid instincts, proven in combat and in the dicier halls of both military and civilian strivers. He could see his captaincy puddling and running down the nearest storm drain before his eyes if this thing got away from him. Oh, he thought, with an exhausted sigh, there was going to be a world of shit on this one. Twelve of the fucking hits—and the thirteen gang kids, which also smelled pro.
He ran a small "elite" unit that people fought to get on. One of his best investigators, Hilliard, pulled up and parked. They exchanged nods and she checked the scene over, speaking with T. J. Kass, the other one of the female dicks on his squad, then came over to where he was making notes.
"You talk to the witness yet, El Tee?" she asked him.
"Uh-uh." He shook his head. "Let's go." They went over to where the woman was beginning her tale of horror for the third or fourth time, telling them what she'd seen, what she thought she'd seen; telling them nothing.
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12
Fort Meade, Maryland
The man reading a memorandum from his immediate superior in the Special Action section of SAUCOG's hierarchy shared something with the man whom he was about to call, the legendary Dr. Norman at Marion Federal Penitentiary. Neither of them knew the identity of M. R. Sieh, Jr., yet the conversation they would now have was a result of a memo he had received, subsequent to the latest datafax from NCIC, VI-CAP, and other data-gathering centers feeding their computers. When one of their field men had gone rogue, which in this instance meant he had escaped from prison, in 1987, a detective had followed a trail that led to the Special Action Unit's doorstep. No one had been amused.