Bledsoe ducked his head as if a flock of photographers had descended on him. Then he braved a look. He appeared only slightly relieved to see his attorney. His hands were cuffed and secured to a chain belt around his waist. Bledsoe had stopped shaving at his arrest and now wore a dark shadow across his face. His hair was tossed and oily.
"What'm I going to do, Phil?" The prisoner's voice was fogged with self-pity.
Hampton put a hand on his client's shoulder. "We don't know yet."
Bledsoe glanced at Owen Gray, then back at his lawyer. "What'd this guy say, Phil? You cut a deal?"
Hampton stepped toward the door, moving his client along with him. The marshal had one of Bledsoe's elbows.
Two steps from the door, the marshal said, "Goddamn rain. Goddamn New York weather."
There was not a cloud in the sky. Holding Donald Bledsoe by the arm, the deputy was abruptly pulled off balance as the paper passer collapsed to the concrete. The deputy had been dappled with Bledsoe's blood and brains, not rainwater. The side of Bledsoe's head was a mash of gray and red pulp.
Owen Gray ducked behind the van, pulling the defense attorney after him. The marshal lunged for the protection of the courthouse door, drawing his pistol.
"What in hell happened?" the deputy yelled around his toothpick. He was breathing stertorously as if someone had yanked his tie tight. "You see anybody?"
A still moment passed. The distant babel of traffic reached them.
"Son of a bitch," the deputy cried, brushing the pith of Bledsoe's head from his jacket. "Look at my new suit."
Holding the van's door handle, Gray rose unsteadily. He levered his head left and right. The streets on both ends of the alley were artificially bright in contrast to the shaded alley. Delivery trucks and taxis passed at the ends of the alley. The chirp of an auto alarm sounded from somewhere. He stepped into the alley and pushed Bledsoe's shoulder with his foot to roll him over. A hole had been punched into an ear.
The deputy made a show of calmly squaring his coat. "He looks a little late for CPR, don't you think, Counselor?"
Gray was silent, so the deputy added, "Who'd want to gun down a zero like Donald Bledsoe?" The marshal spat out his toothpick and pulled another from his coat pocket. "Stupid errand boy was all he was."
Phil Hampton had crawled under the front axle and showed no inclination to reappear. Bledsoe's blood snaked across the cement toward the defense attorney. Hampton's briefcase was lying in a pile of unidentifiable brown sludge at the edge of the alley.
The deputy said, "Man, the paperwork on this is going to kill me."
Gray rubbed his temple, staring down the alley. There would be a window in a building — a sniper's hide — in the deep distance amid many other buildings and among the countless windows, but the day was too brilliant and the window too far to guess where. Gray's hand on his head was trembling and he lowered it quickly. He had to work to swallow.
He whispered to that distant window, to whoever might be peering back through a scope, "Tell me who you are."
CHAPTER FIVE
From any distance the shooter resembled a clump of dried weeds, nothing but a mound of dusty vegetation wilting in the Virginia heat, attended only by two dragonflies who flashed iridescence as they darted among the leaves. But from the weeds protruded a rifle barrel, its unyielding horizontal plane at odds with the wafting thistle and burr and crabgrass from which the barrel seemed to have grown. A gust of wind tossed the weeds, rolling them flat in a wave. Then the breeze stilled.
The rifle barked, a flat crack that dissipated quickly across the terrain. A handkerchief-sized piece of canvas on the ground below the muzzle prevented a dust signature. A smoking brass casing was ejected.
"It's a flyer." The voice came from another cluster of weeds, this one nudged up against a tripod-mounted spotting scope.
"Missed entirely?" the shooter asked. "Goddamnit. You swagging me?" Swag was short for a scientific wild-ass guess.
"This time I picked up the course of the bullet in my scope. No chance you hit target."
"My problem is I can't get my pulse rhythm," the shooter complained.
"Yeah, right." The spotter laughed. "Your problem is that your finger twitches like an old man's. You got to squeeze the trigger like you would a woman's nipple."
"As if you know anything about a woman's nipple, Bobby."
The spotter leered. "Ask your sister what I know about nipples."
"No talking about nipples on the firing line, goddamnit," bayed Gunnery Sergeant Arlen Able from his position behind the sniper team. "How many times I got to tell you? You get a hard pecker, you won't be able to feel your pulse in your arms and neck, and you'll be shooting on the beat rather than between it."
Down-range a circular disc on a pole waved for five seconds, indicating the bullet had missed the target. The pole was held by a Marine in the concrete butt below ground level.
The marksman and his spotter were dressed in Ghilli suits, an invention of ancient Scottish gamekeepers that had been adopted by Britain's Royal Marines during World War One. Long strips of tan, olive, and brown burlap were attached to the team's uniforms and field hats. The Ghillis broke up the Marines' outlines. With their shifting, variegated suits and faces painted olive and brown, the shooter and spotter resembled earthen berms.
Sergeant Able called from behind the line, "I can see your problem from here, Paley." He spoke with an East Texas piney woods accent.
The sergeant walked to the two weed clumps, then bent to a knee. He tapped the shooter's hand and said, "Part of your trigger finger is touching the side of the stock as you pull back, causing side pressure, rather than getting a straight front-to-rear movement. You're going to bust a flyer every time."
"Okay, Gunnery Sergeant."
"You're at a thousand yards. The smallest finger juke is going to be exaggerated by the distance."
"Okay, Gunnery Sergeant."
Calling Arlen Able just "Sergeant" would have sufficed, but the students always tacked on "Gunnery" as a mark of respect for their instructor, a compliment each time they addressed him. They knew Abie's record. Sergeant Abie's face was tanned dirt brown and was lined like a cracked window. His eyes were canted as if always amused. He was a small man and graveyard thin, with abrupt movements that broadcast an enormous energy, a terrier of a man. He was wearing field khaki with a whistle around his neck and a two-way radio on his belt.
"Trigger control is the hardest shooting skill to master, Paley. You got a ways to go and I want you to keep at it."
The shooter nodded, wiggling the camouflage tassels hanging from his field cap. In his scope a thousand yards down-range was a twenty-inch ring target made watery by heat waves. On three poles — at the firing line, halfway down the range, and near the target butt — were red streamers, always displayed during live-fire daylight exercises.
Behind the firing line was a control tower, a glass and panel miniature replica of one at an airport. The range master in the tower had binoculars at his eyes. He wore a microphone mounted on a headset. He could speak over loudspeakers at the firing line or the four target butts, at four hundred, seven hundred, a thousand, and fifteen hundred yards. On this range — the Sergeant Owen Gray Range at the Marine Corps Scout Sniper School near Quantico, Virginia — no targets were ever placed at less than four hundred yards, because each painstakingly screened, highly trained Marine allowed into the advanced training unit could already hit perfect scores at anything under four hundred, and because snipers were taught here never to fire at less than four hundred yards because of the risk of detection.