The rifle’s crosshairs intersected squarely in the middle of Dr. Charles Smith’s head as he exited the passenger side of the sedan. Diener parked the car and walked around the rear of the vehicle to open the door for the doctor, but Smith was out of the car before his bodyguard could carry out his duty.
Tall and slender, in his mid-fifties, Smith wore no overcoat over his wool Brooks Brothers blazer, even though the temperature was expected to stay submerged below zero all day. He strode up the ice-patched sidewalk to the rear of the Milwaukee Women’s Health Clinic. The squat white one-story building looked unimpressive, but Smith was proud of the services he and his team offered here, and the compassionate way they provided them. More than two thousand women from across the state came to his clinic each year, facing an intensely personal and sometimes painful decision regarding terminating their pregnancies. Smith and his staff offered counseling, lab, and ultrasound testing, and abortions that ranged from pill form to surgery for more advanced pregnancies. Smith didn’t agree with Wisconsin’s current law that prohibited abortions after twenty-one weeks of pregnancy, but he abided by it.
The shooter tried to hold on Smith as he moved up the walkway across the street, trailed by his bodyguard. Wisps of snow swirled in the wind, dancing in front of his crosshairs like cigarette smoke. Smith’s long silver hair was swept back and tied neatly, and the shooter’s aim swayed from the doctor’s nose to his ponytail as Smith hurried to get inside.
When the doctor stopped to insert his key in the door’s deadbolt lock, the shooter pulled the trigger 1/32nd of an inch and the 30 caliber, 170-grain soft pointed slug was on its way. It struck Dr. Smith above his right temple, flattened out on impact, and kept boring ahead through bone and soft brain tissue. It exited his left temple and smacked into the clinic’s cinder block wall, lodging in a dime-sized crater.
Smith stumbled sideways with the blast and fell backward over a hip-high snowbank. All but one of the files flew out of his hand, and they lay scattered in the snow and on the walk. His keys dangled in the door and the bodyguard froze, his eyes transfixed on the doctor’s eyes. Smith blinked once, twice, trying to comprehend what had happened with a brain that no longer functioned. Or maybe it was the last flicker of a connection before the light in his eyes was extinguished forever. Drops of blood sprayed the snow all around Smith, peppering some of the files. As he lay on the fresh white blanket of powder, the snow around his shattered head melted and turned crimson, like syrup being poured to make a black cherry snow cone.
The shooter ejected the spent shell and levered another round into the chamber. The report of the first shot had been deafening, amplified by the concrete all around him. He brought the rifle back into a solid firing position and viewed the scene through the scope. The doctor was down and the bodyguard still. The shooter didn’t bother looking for his spent shell casing. Instead, he fished around inside his right jacket pocket. He pulled out a small metal crucifix and dropped it on the icy rooftop. Next, he reached inside his left jacket pocket and brought out a generic red catsup bottle, the kind you’d find at most diners or burger joints, sitting next to a bright yellow bottle of mustard. He flipped the cap off with his thumb and sprayed the crucifix and the rooftop near it with a thick red liquid. The bottle made a slurping sound when it was empty and the shooter pocketed it. Then he set the gun down and moved to the door that led from the roof. At the bottom of the stairwell, he cracked open the heavy steel door that exited onto an alley and waited while a bakery truck rumbled past. He walked two blocks with his head down and slid behind the wheel of his hunter-green Chevy Blazer. He was a mile away from the scene within ten minutes of pulling the trigger. His hands shook as he turned on the stereo and the eclectic compilation CD he’d burned off Napster years ago began playing. Robert Goulet finished “The Impossible Dream,” a song from the musical Man of La Mancha.
The shooter nodded as Goulet crooned about the world being better off for one man striving with his last ounce of courage. “Amen,” the shooter softly said to himself. “Amen to that.”
The next song was REM’s “The End of The World.”