What you might call a sniper’s nest.
I have never moved more slowly. More cautiously. More silently. I was glad to be wearing Hush Puppies with their rubber soles, though socks might have been better. If a foot chase developed, though, particularly on this wood floor, a slip in socks could put you on your ass.
So I eased down past the half-dozen mouths of aisles in IPP’s paper city, until I had neared the three-walled makeshift room surrounding the corner windows. Space on both sides of the stacked-carton fortress had been left to allow entry and exit.
I did not hear any movement from another human being. I did not hear heavy breathing or a cough or a rustle of clothing, much less someone loading a weapon.
Had this sniper’s nest been prepared earlier, and the shooter not yet taken his position?
That possibility seemed very real.
When I swung around into the open space, however, there he sat, Indian-style, his arms folded, as he watched out that window. Waiting patiently. A rifle with a scope was propped on a little stand, an M-1 like Vallee’s.
But this wasn’t Vallee.
Perched there maybe six feet away from me was the white soldier boy who somewhat resembled Vallee, in a white T-shirt and plaid shirt with its sleeves rolled up and blue jeans and sneakers. He had a blond butch and he was chewing a toothpick and he was wearing Ray-Bans.
White trash in blue jeans and green sunglasses.
“On your feet,” I said. “Hands up. Nice and easy, son.…”
He just looked up at me. Bland as toast. As unconcerned as a lion regarding a cricket.
Finally he nodded, started to slowly rise, then lurched for the rifle, and damn he was fast, because that long barrel was staring right up at me when I cracked a Ray-Ban lens by putting a bullet through it.
It stood him up straight, that eyeglass lens cracking like an eggshell, weeping a single red tear, and it was damn near comical, like he was coming to attention and preparing to salute when instead he just flopped facedown at my feet and showed me the nasty wet hole where the nine-mil slug had made its exit.
I removed the M-1 from his limp grasp, then yanked him by an arm and dragged him out of the nest.
There would be at least two shooters. Why hadn’t this guy been Vallee? This was Vallee’s building. Or had the mentally disturbed ex-Marine been some sort of decoy? In which case, with the Cubans in custody, one other white-boy shooter was out there.
Just one.
I knelt in the window and looked around at the buildings of the intersection. My eyes searched windows and rooftops.
Then just across Des Plaines, on the five-story building across from me, I saw him.
Again, not Vallee.
It was the white boy with the black butch and he was emerging from a rooftop doorway, staying low, scoped rifle in hand, heading to the roof’s edge.
Should I go over there?
Should I call it in?
The President wasn’t due for a while yet. But what if the rooftop shooter didn’t get a scheduled signal from his now-dead cohort, and decided to light out, or find some alternate position? A lot could happen by the time I left the eighth floor of IPP and got across Des Plaines and made my way to that rooftop.
I waited till he was in position near the building’s edge, where the lip came up and gave him a resting place for his weapon, and I lined him up in the M-1’s cross hairs.
When I fired, the report of the rifle was just a minor whip crack in the morning, probably dismissed by one and all as a festive firecracker or maybe a car backfiring or some other unidentified city sound, even the indistinct blare of a sound truck down the street, making some announcement or other, possibly for a new pizza place or perhaps Stop the World, I Want to Get Off at the Shubert.
That is, dismissed as such by everyone but the sniper who the M-1 round had caught in the neck. I hadn’t handled a rifle since the Pacific, and been trying for his head and came close. I hadn’t intended for him to die that way, rolling around unable to scream with his hands clutching his throat as he strangled in his own blood.
But it served the purpose.
I was on my feet, wondering what to do next, when I could finally make out the sound truck’s blare: “The President’s appearance has been canceled! We are sorry to announce, President Kennedy’s Chicago trip has been canceled! A parade featuring other dignitaries will go on as scheduled. The President’s appearance has been…”
Might have told me before I went to all this trouble.
CHAPTER 19
Near the freight elevators was a little office area where I used a wall phone. No police sirens cut the air-just those sound trucks, which a glance out a window told me were actually police cars with uniformed cops hanging out rider’s windows with bullhorns to announce the President’s cancelation.
As for the cancelation of those two snipers, no sign that anyone had noticed any part of that episode presented itself. The warehouse area on West Jackson was really just a bunch of empty buildings-IPP working on Saturdays was the exception not the rule around here-and anybody normally in those buildings had probably been down lining the sidewalks waiting for the motorcade. As far as I could tell, no other buildings or even the expressway had a view of that rooftop, where the body of the black-butch sniper was just a vague shape near a rooftop edge, anyway.
I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to considering just digging out that nine-millimeter slug from the wooden floor, where it had deposited itself after traveling through the blond assassin’s Ray-Bans and brain, and wiping down the M-1 I’d borrowed to eliminate the other assassin, and fuck it, walk away. Wasn’t like that janitor was liable to provide much of a description of me.
But I was law enforcement today, not the free agent I usually was, and I had a responsibility to Bobby Kennedy and even these great United States. Besides, it was odds on that this would be covered up-that neither the Justice Department nor the Secret Service would want word getting out that two assassins were killed while lying in wait for a Presidential parade. Not good press. Not good press at all.
So what to do?
I called the Cook County sheriff’s office and asked for Dick Cain, knowing he’d be out in the field, maybe Soldier Field, still caught up in this presidential trip that wasn’t happening.
“Patch me through,” I said. “Tell him it’s Nate Heller and that it’s important.”
Getting Cain took five minutes that only felt like five hours. The small solace was that in the meantime nobody came running up the stairs with guns to arrest me or kill me or anything. Two dead, and even the janitor hadn’t noticed, which was no surprise.
“Nate,” Dick said, outdoors apparently, maybe using the radio mike in his car, “what is it?”
I told him what had happened.
“First,” he said, “change your story. What went down with the first sniper, don’t change a thing. That’s heroic stuff, my friend. But the second guy? Best say that you looked through the sniper scope, saw that other sniper aiming back at you, and fired in self-defense.”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding to myself. I probably would have come up with that myself on the walk back to the Federal Building, but I thanked Dick for the advice and pledged I’d take it.
“Second,” he said, “why the hell are you calling me? I’m with the Cook County Sheriff, in case you forgot.”
“I need these shooting scenes secured before I go back and tell Martineau how I saved the President from getting shot on the trip he didn’t take.”