17

Joey Moreland awoke in his hotel bed in Boston at a few minutes before noon. He had slept deeply, partly because he had been exhausted by the time he’d gotten to bed, but also because he’d taken care of some of the things that had been worrying him. He had received Kelly’s text message when he was on his way to her apartment. He had told her exactly what to do. As soon as she heard his car approaching the apartment building, she should run for it.

When he had pulled to the curb in front of the apartment she was already in the lobby starting her dash toward the front door. He could see her through the glass. Then she was in the car and he was making a rapid series of turns to end up on Interstate 95 and head south. It had taken him a few minutes to get Kelly to explain what had happened on her date. She kept crying, and that made her gasp whenever she talked. It was like the voice of a person falling downstairs—“Ah, ah, ah, ah”—until finally he could hardly stand to listen to it.

The man who had come to see her had terrified her, but not because he was some kind of pervert. The man had been telling her about every girl Joey Moreland had been with in about three years, and how he had needed to leave each girl behind after a job. Who was this guy? If he had traced Moreland in three states and across the country, he could be the FBI.

Moreland couldn’t have that. He couldn’t have Kelly, five feet ten, with fiery red hair two feet long, suddenly realize that the man couldn’t have pictures of all those dead girls unless they were real. All she’d have to do was start a loud argument and he was a dead man. She could change her mind and turn him in just by shouting for the cops. And he had to hang around Boston long enough to kill Salazar, or the people who had paid for Salazar’s life would take his instead.

So, in the end, after he had thought about it, and thought about Kelly, he’d had to kill her. He’d driven along the highway south of the city listening to her telling him the outrageous lies the stranger had told her, and then he had stopped at the edge of a field near the harbor. He told her he had stopped on the way to pick up an emergency kit he had hidden in the field, so they could leave town together. He had expected to get her to rush ahead of him to get through the hole in the chain-link fence. She would feel that she was accomplishing something, that on the other side of this dark place there would be light and warmth and safety—a whole future full of it.

But she hadn’t been stupid enough. She had started to cry harder, a little wail that elongated the words. “Please” was one of them. He’d had to shoot her, whether she was fooled and looking away, or on her knees begging. So she was dead.

He would have liked to leave Boston now that Kelly was dead. Her death had deprived him of a place to live where nobody knew him and where there was no record of his presence. Now that he had checked into a hotel, this advantage was gone. He had used a false name and credit card, but he had not been able to stay completely invisible.

He had to stay in Boston and finish his job, and he couldn’t rush things by even a minute. Salazar was going to arrive in town today, check into his hotel, and then appear at City Hall at three o’clock. He wasn’t going to stick his head out sooner just because Joey Moreland wanted him to.

Joey was anxious. There was a kind of cop or private detective hunting for him now, and that was a big worry. He had always been careful never to draw the attention of cops and people like them. He had thought of staying with the girls as leaving no trail, but apparently the girls were his trail.

He wished he could leave now, but if he didn’t kill Salazar here, he would have to go and get him in Mexico, and that was probably impossible. He spoke no Spanish and looked like an American. He would have to transport his own weapons across a border where the authorities were always looking for guns.

Moreland had to go through with his original plan. He would reassure himself by spending the rest of his time planning everything about the killing and the aftermath that he had not already planned and rehearsed. He turned on his laptop computer and checked for news of Salazar’s visit to Boston. The news blackout was still in effect.

He repacked everything he had taken from his suitcase, checked out of his hotel, and began to attend to the details. He stopped at a gas station and filled his tank. In the little store at the station he bought water, candy bars, nuts, soft drinks, and pretzels. If he should have to end the day driving hard and trying to stay on the road, the snacks would help. If he didn’t stop anywhere, then he was just another set of headlights approaching on the interstate and a pair of taillights disappearing around the next bend.

He drove to his office building and parked his car in the underground lot two floors down, even though the ground floor was nearly empty. During the remodeling there were very few tenants, so it didn’t matter to the building owners where he parked, and going lower kept people from driving past his car. He got into the elevator and rode it up to the tenth floor. The construction workers doing the remodeling were on other floors today. They always worked early in the day and left before the late afternoon rush, but they must still be somewhere in the building.

Joey Moreland listened for the construction noises, but up here the air was just a steady hum of engines far below in the street. Then, as he walked along the hallway, stepping around piles of two-by-fours and leaning sheets of plywood and drywall, he heard the thuds of nail guns on the floor above, and far below him, a jackhammer. He went into his office and locked the door.

He had to do this right, and he had no control over timing. There was no way to delay or hurry the action a mile away to suit his plan. As soon as Salazar’s car arrived at City Hall and Salazar got out, it was going to be time to pull the trigger. Moreland climbed onto the desk, moved an acoustic tile, and brought down the case where his M107A1 was stored.

He opened the case and set the heavy rifle on the desk. Just the gun and its scope weighed almost twenty-nine pounds. It was five feet long from the butt to the muzzle brake. He opened the legs of the bipod, then gazed along the top of the receiver, ignoring the scope while he turned the screw below the butt to raise it to the general level it would need to be. He loaded ten rounds into the box magazine. They were .50-caliber machine-gun rounds with a 660-grain bullet. They had a maximum range of 6,800 meters, but he would be nowhere near testing that figure. He pushed the heavy magazine up under the receiver until it clicked. He had a second magazine, so he loaded ten more rounds into it and set it to the right of the weapon on the desk where it would be out of his way. He supposed that if he needed the second magazine he would be fighting for his life, not completing a hit.

Firing a shot would be like starting a timer. He would have about two or three minutes to zero in on the target. The police would take a minute or two to realize what was happening. The first round would come roaring at them at 2,800 feet per second from a mile away, so it would hit about two seconds after the muzzle flash, and three more seconds would pass before the sound of the shot reached their ears. Even then they wouldn’t know where the shot had come from. It might take five shots before one of them happened to see a flash a mile away.

Then they’d have to pick themselves up, organize a response, and begin to move. Returning fire would be impossible: he was out of range of their best rifles, and they couldn’t just fire at a window in an office building. They’d realize they had to get into their cars and head toward the rifle. For a time Joey would be too far away for them to do anything, and he would still be able to reach out and hit whatever he could see. After his second three minutes were up, he would have to begin getting out of the building, because there would be cops heading toward it from all sides.

He went to the gun case and took out his ear protectors. They looked like a good set of earphones for a sound system. Like everything in his kit, they were of the highest quality, but they would succeed only in reducing the 180-decibel roar of the rifle to a loud noise. Because the M107A1 was based on a military weapon, the rifle’s daylight scope had a hinged cap on each end to protect it from dirt and rain. He opened both caps and sighted the rifle on the steps of City Hall on the plaza side. He turned the ring on the elevation adjustment so it was set at two thousand meters, then aimed at the American flag on the high pole on the City Hall plaza. The fabric was moving a bit in a wind he judged to be about seven miles an hour. He turned the windage adjustment to compensate. A crosswind like that could move his shot a few feet to the left at this distance. He closed both lens caps.

He went to the case again, took out a thick foam pad, fitted it to the place where his right shoulder met his torso, and fastened it there with a strip of duct tape. The instant when he pulled that trigger, 11,500 foot-pounds of energy would punch that bullet into the distance and kick the rifle backward into him. There was a recoil pad, but there was no sense in getting pounded worse than he had to be.

Moreland stepped close to the open window and looked down at the street ten stories below him. The traffic in front of the building was steady but smooth in both directions. A police car passed. He could see the black “85” on its white roof. He didn’t like staying in Boston after Kelly was dead. He liked to be long gone before a girlfriend was found. Maybe she wouldn’t be found right away, but he wasn’t going to count on it. Down below, people walked along the sidewalk, some of them having to swerve into a narrow remnant of the space by the curb to avoid the construction fence around the building. On the side where the crews were still working and might drop tools or materials, the pedestrians walked under a low scaffold with boards on top. Cars waited at intersections for the signals to turn; then other cars waited. It was a typical noisy, busy day here.

He looked up again. He was two thousand meters west of City Hall. He had a perfect view above the city and along the narrow corridor of the backs of buildings, all the way to City Hall. His building was on high ground near Beacon Hill, which was ninety-two feet above sea level. City Hall was only about fifteen feet above sea level. He sat down, closed his eyes, and mentally rehearsed everything he was going to do. Nothing would happen until Salazar’s limo arrived.