"I'm a sensitive type." Gray smiled thinly. "I don't like talk about the loony bin."
CHAPTER FOUR
Faces flashed in the circle quickly, one after another like cards dealt onto a pile. Children's faces, laughing and whooping at the end of the school day, a cascade of faces as boys and girls walked down the school building's steps, faces falling into the ring, then out again, each face just a fleeting glimpse, inside the circle an instant, then out. To the top of the site post, then down and away.
Red Army sniper scopes use a pointed aiming post rather than crosshairs. As the children descended the steps, one face after another slid down the aiming post, beaming smiles, gap-tooth grins, ponytails and ribbons, innocent eyes, shirts and pants and skirts of wild colors, all in animation, spilling into and out of the circular frame, all flowing down the aiming post.
Hazel flecks on a green iris surrounding a flat black pupil. Frozen and unchanging, neither blinking nor altering distance to the front lens, the eye behind the telescope might have been part of the scope's optics. Even the pupil was still, neither expanding nor contracting. The eye was locked in position as firmly as the scope was fixed to the rifle. Colors and smiles flickered before it.
Then a long swath of gray rippled down the circle. A pant leg belonging to an adult. Owen Gray's face dropped into the circle. And now the scope moved fractionally, keeping Gray's face atop the aiming post. Owen Gray. White Star. Only then did the eye blink, and only once. Tight black curls, a few lines around the eyes, pale skin, a wise smile, then lips moving soundlessly, Gray's face turned to speak to someone, the aiming post just under his nose, following him smoothly. White Star. Once more the eye blinked.
The circle slowed, and Owen Gray slid out of the ring. Next came a kaleidoscope of colors — green and red and yellow and blue, an exotic scarf wrapped around a woman's head. The aiming post came to rest below her nose. Her skin was brown and burnished. Her eyes were narrowed as she laughed. Bits of metal — a necklace — danced in the sunlight, tossing back shards of light. The circle lingered on her a moment, an image of whirling colors and glittering light. Then the ring found the boy with one arm accompanying Gray and the black woman as they moved east along the sidewalk.
The aiming post returned to Gray, his head in profile as he walked east. Owen Gray.
The circle went to black when the eyelid behind the scope slowly lowered and stayed closed. White Star.
Gray met Pete Coates at the Columbus Park Gym at the edge of Chinatown. They had begun their workout skipping rope and had moved to a heavy bag. Gray wore lead-lined bag gloves. The detective held the bag from behind while Gray jabbed and crossed.
Coates asked, "What's Frank Luca got you working on?"
"He wasted little time," Gray answered from behind his fists. He was breathing heavily. "On returning to work Monday, he handed me sixteen files, all of them thin. A Mann Act, an interstate flight, an illegal pen-register, and the like."
The bag bounced against Coates as he said, "Real piddlers."
"The De Sallo prosecution took forty file cabinets and eight hundred megabytes of our mainframe. All my new cases wouldn't take a single cabinet drawer and a hand-held calculator."
Early in the De Sallo investigation the detective had suggested that Gray join him at his gym for a workout. Gray had never heard of the place, and had expected the usual Nautilus equipment, stationary bicycles, Precor step machines, tiny chrome dumbbells, and all those unnaturally happy, muscled, spotless youths paid to urge him on.
The Columbus Park Gym was over the Three Musketeers pawn-shop, up a narrow, squeaking flight of stairs to an ill-lit space that at the turn of the century had been a shirtwaist plant. A boxing ring filled most of the room. Everlast speed bags and heavy bags hung from frames on one wall and an assortment of Olympic free weights were along another.
The gym was owned by Sam Owl, who was in his seventies. Owl opened and closed the gym every day and spent the entire time in between teaching boxing. He referred to himself as a fistic scientist. Owl had trained welterweight champion Marco Genaro and the lightweight champ Kid Raynes, and the old man knew more about boxing than any man in New York.
The gym was last painted when Eisenhower was president. Paint chips and plaster regularly fell to the hardwood floor. All the equipment, from the bags to the ring ropes, was faded and frayed. The only bright spot was one wall decorated with a reproduction of Lord Byron's screen depicting battles for the English championship between Tom Johnson and Big Ben Brain in 1791, between Johnson and Daniel Mendoza in 1788, and many others. The floor-to-ceiling reproduction was painted by an artist in exchange for membership in the gym.
Most of Sam Owl's clientele were club fighters with ring talents far superior to Gray or Coates's. That first day in the gym Gray had been ensnared by the rhythms of the workouts — the loud tattoos from the speed bags and jumping ropes, the scuffing of black shoes on the ring mats, and Sam Owl's incessant jabber at the boxers. Gray grew to love the scents of leather and sweat and the body ache after a workout with ropes and bags, followed by a three-round match. Gray began appearing at the club almost every noon with Coates. The prosecutor and the detective had invariably briefed each other on the De Sallo investigation during their workouts, talking through their mouthguards.
Coates released the heavy bag and stepped up to a speed bag. Both men wore running trunks but no shirts. Coates's white terrycloth band on his forehead was dark with perspiration.
Gray followed him to a nearby bag.
The detective nodded at Gray's fists. "New gloves?"
Gray's gloves were bright red Surefits rather than the brown Everlasts he usually wore. "Borrowed them from Sam. I misplaced mine. Or John took them to school. So tell me about the lab report."
"You've got to admit," the detective said over the pounding of the bag, "there're some mighty interesting things in your personnel files. Coming to New York City after being raised in Nowhere, Idaho, for one." He pronounced it "Eye-Day-Ho."
"Actually it was Hobart, Idaho." Gray's pattern on the bag included fists and elbows, all moving in a circular whir.
"How'd you end up out here?"
"After the service I got into NYU law school and met my wife there. She was from New York and loathed everywhere else, so I stayed. What about the lab report on the cartridges?"
"You said a sniper has to have hunting or tracking experience." Coates's voice boomed over the staccato of the speed bags. "Where'd you pick up yours?"
"My father owned a lodge north of Ketchum, a hunting lodge. He'd take hunters into the mountains to find deer and goats and, in the early days, cougars. I learned from him."
"You a good tracker?"
Gray paused in his workout to wipe his forehead with a towel that hung from the waistband of his shorts. "I was leading four-man parties into the mountains when I was thirteen years old. I'd be out there for a week, and we'd usually come back with game strapped to our mules. So you could say I was pretty good."
"You had a tough couple of years after you got out of the Marines."
Nearby old Sam Owl barked at a black middleweight who repeatedly threw left crosses at a heavy bag. Sam Owl's bifocals rested high on his head, and every time the fighter brought back his hook Owl tapped his elbow, reminding the fighter to keep his arm tight to protect his ribs.
Gray began a new pattern on the bag, using fists and backhands. "I'm not the only person in history to have a little clinical depression. Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, for example."
"But they both died, so maybe you're in worse shape than you thought." Coates chuckled, but Gray wouldn't join in. "The doctors didn't jolt you with electricity, did they?"