“So perhaps we might return bullets for his words, as you suggested.”
“Hey, don’t turn it around on me, man. I don’t know you. I don’t know what you want to make my words do.”
“I’ll be honest with you, Weldon. I was sent here to give Mr. Drury a bullet.”
“Oh, wow!”
“I need assistance.”
“From me?”
“Yes.”
“You’re going to shoot him from here. From the window. Wow. Listen, I don’t really know that this is my kind of thing. I don’t know that I’m ready for it, if you follow me!’
“You can see the political value.”
“Radicalize more people. Create confrontation. Cut out the phony liberal alternative. It’s obvious. I’m not an idiot.”
“And you approve?’
“I don’t know. I guess so.”
“And you’ll help?”
“How?’
“Have a car ready for me in back. I would do my own driving, but you could get the car in position for me. Then, when the time comes, you could create a diversion. A minor disruption, some egg throwing, perhaps. Something to confuse them for a moment so they would be less quick to pinpoint the source of the gunfire.”
“Oh, wow!”
“You could never be connected with me.”
“Even so. I could see about the car, maybe. No. No, look you leveled with me. I’ll level with you.”
“Yes?”
“I wouldn’t do anything to get in your way. I can see what you’re doing and I can dig it, but I can’t participate. Do you understand?”
“Of course.”
“I suppose it’s a cop out on my part, but I would have to do that, to cop out. I wouldn’t get in your way.”
“You’d feel no moral imperative to inform anyone in authority?”
“Are you serious? Man, I would never fink. I’m not going to kill Drury, maybe that’s my own personal hang-up, but I wouldn’t run out and save his life, either.”
“That’s interesting.” Dorn said. “You are not part of the solution.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Oh?”
Dorn jabbed at the boy’s solar plexus, fingers extended and rigid. He drew his hand back and chopped gently at the side of the boy’s neck. Gently. He did not kill him.
“You must be part of the problem,” he said.
“It’s going to be a bad summer,” she said. “Not so much because of Drury. You know, that’s the thing about something like this. This assassination. It gets all the attention, and everybody takes a set on it, but there are so many other things going on. Did you hear about what happened in Portland?”
“No.”
“In Oregon. Not in Maine. God, isn’t that weird? There’s violence in Portland and you can’t even guess which Portland. It happened yesterday. The pigs just broke into a Panther hangout and everybody started blasting away. Three cops killed and five Panthers.”
“This was yesterday?”
“Yes. It’s just obvious, isn’t it? Somebody sent the order down, get the Panthers. And all the cops in the country figure it’s open season. It has to be a conspiracy. The Establishment decided to get rid of the Panthers and that’s how they’re doing it.”
He looked at her thoughtfully. “It might be less clear-cut,” he suggested.
“How do you figure that?”
“Well, just as a hypothesis. Suppose one man acting by himself called the Portland police. Anonymously. To give them some sort of tip. That there was a cache of heroin at a certain address. That there were armed burglars inside. Anything. And suppose the man then called the Panther house and said the police were on their way with orders to shoot everyone dead. Enter police with guns drawn into room filled with armed Panthers. Result — instant bloodshed.”
“My God.”
“You’re probably right that there is a police conspiracy, but even in the absence of one—”
“I never thought of it that way.” Wide blue eyes. “Oh, Miles, that’s scary!”
“It’s the sort of thing that could happen.”
“And I thought I was paranoid before. I don’t know about this summer, I really don’t. My father wants me to go home to Connecticut. I could hang around here. There are always empty beds in the dormitories during summer session. I can’t even concentrate on the choices because of everything that keeps happening. I think about leaving the country. That’s what we all talk about. Just getting out of here. This country is on a death trip and I just want to get off.”
The speakers’ platform was 80 yards from the window of the chemistry lab. There was no wind to speak of. The lab was on the third floor of the building, the top floor, and the slight downward angle was easily allowed for.
There was not much in the way of security. A half-dozen state troopers with high-powered rifles. A handful of obvious plain-clothesmen. Enough for his purposes.
(“The White Hope. A lot of people say that someone like that does more harm than good.”)
When it was time, he moved quickly. He propped the inert Burton Weldon on a chair in front of the window. He had previously opened the window a foot and a half. Now he drew the shade. He crouched behind Weldon, leaned the boy forward a little, put his arms around the slender body, and settled the barrel of the deer rifle on the window ledge.
(“... and so the third night he goes to bed in the White House and when he wakes up in the morning he’s not J. Lowell Drury anymore, he’s Hubert Humphrey.”)
A four-power scope. Sighting easily, the cross hairs finding their target.
(“I like Drury. I see him on television and I like him.”) Rugged New England features seen through the scope. Face animated, beaming, self-confident.
(“But you wonder if the country would be any worse off without him?” “Right. And I can’t see how it would.”)
He gave the trigger an easy squeeze, popped Drury’s skull half an inch above the bridge of his nose. He fired off the rest of the clip, his fingers agile through the sheer gloves, working the bolt between shots, aiming over the crowd, hitting no one. The clip was empty before anyone began returning his fire. He fastened Weldon’s hands on the gun, leaned him further forward, and scurried back toward the door. The gunfire began before he was out of the room and was still going on when he cleared the last flight of stairs.
In the bus terminal in Albany a man wanted to talk about Drury. Veins showed on his cheekbones. He wore green work-clothes and carried a glossy black lunch bucket.
“About time someone got that sonofabitch. For my money he was asking for it. He was a Commie, you know.” “I didn’t know that.”
“It wasn’t generally known. But I take an interest in these things, see. I’m at the Vets’ Post and we get speakers who give you the inside story. Card carrying Commie. Take my word for it.”
“We were talking about Drury again last night, Miles. It’s just fantastic the way the same people who said the worst things about him are turning him into a saint.”