Ghost Sniper

51

Rhett Hancock had arrived in Toluca early in the day to begin his reconnaissance of the town, riding in the backseat of a Dodge Charger with darkly tinted windows and two of Ruvalcaba’s men riding up front. All three were heavily armed, determined not to be taken alive.

Now it was night, and Hancock sat alone in his room on the north side watching pornography on television with the sound turned down. He was tired of living in motels and hotels, tired of being bored all the time. Nothing pleased him anymore, not even sex. The only thing that excited him was having a target in the crosshairs, and there weren’t enough of those to sustain him.

He fumbled with an empty tequila bottle beside him on the bed, tossing it onto the floor without thinking. The bottle shattered against the tile.

“Fuck,” he muttered, making a mental note not to climb out on that side of the bed in his bare feet.

The blond actress on the TV screen was having sex with two men at the same time. She reminded Hancock of his second girlfriend. Her name was Jennifer, the only girl he had ever loved, and he had accidently killed her on his seventeenth birthday.

They’d been driving home on a Saturday night in young Rhett’s restored 1977 Pontiac Firebird, having spent the night drinking around a bonfire at a buddy’s farm in Kansas. Racing along on a black moon night, they sang aloud to a lonesome Lynyrd Skynyrd tune with the T-top open, the wind blowing through Jennifer’s long blond hair. The song began to increase in tempo, and she cranked up the volume as Rhett downshifted into third, gunning it through a wide curve and out onto his favorite stretch of open road.

“Lord, I can’t change!” they sang. “Won’t you fly… high… free bird, yeah!”

From the pitch black, a ten-point buck leapt in front of the car.

Rhett hit the brakes, cut the wheel, and promptly lost control. There was only one tree along that stretch of road, a hundred-year-old red oak, and they hit it head-on doing better than seventy-five miles per hour.

He came to in a ditch the next morning, sitting up in the mud with a splitting headache, dried blood caked to his face. The first sight he saw was the Pontiac smashed against the tree. The second sight was Jennifer’s mangled body wrapped around the pillar post of the windshield, most of her face sheared off by the glass.

Rhett was put on juvenile probation for a year, working manual labor jobs after school and drinking in secret. He withdrew from his family and hardly ever spoke. At the age of eighteen, he was put on adult probation, where he remained until his twenty-first birthday. At the age of twenty-three, after a brief legal battle to seal his juvenile record, he was able to enlist in the United States Army.

The rest, as they say, was history.

Hancock sat staring at the porn star in his drunken stupor, allowing himself to think of Jennifer for the first time since the morning of the crash. The pain of thinking back on her smile, her voice, even the smell of her became more than he could stand. He snatched the Sig Sauer from beside him on the bed, thrust it under his chin, and squeezed the trigger.

The hammer dropped with a click, but the gun did not fire.

“What the fuck?” he said in shock, breaking out in a cold sweat and jacking the slide to eject the bullet.

He examined the round to see a perfect pin strike in the center of the silver primer.

“No fuckin’ way,” he whispered. Sick to his stomach, he got out of bed and stepped on a shard of the broken tequila bottle. “Motherfucker!” he swore in pain, falling back on the mattress and grabbing his foot to pull out the jagged piece of glass. “Motherfuckin’ son of a bitch!”

The cut was not big, but it was deep in the sole of his foot, just forward of the heel. It hurt badly and bled profusely. Hancock glanced at the television. The girl was up on all fours now, her two comrades really going to town on her.

He grabbed the pistol and hurled it at the old television. To his amazement, the weapon bounced off the glass picture tube and clattered across the tile. He sat staring after the gun for a long moment, feeling more hopeless and lost than ever before. Hancock’s eyes welled with tears, and he began to sob. He fell over on the mattress and cried himself to sleep.

In the morning, he awoke hung over with a foul taste in his mouth. His foot was throbbing, but the bleeding had stopped. He got out of bed on the safe side and limped over to his rucksack on a chair near the window, digging out a military first aid kit and taking it back to the bed. He filled a syringe with lidocaine and injected the foot near the wound, wincing as he depressed the plunger. Then he injected himself at the ankle. When the entire foot was numb, he pressed his thumbs down hard on either side of the wound to get it bleeding again, squeezing out a pea-size globule of pus. Wiping away the pus with a wad of cotton, he injected five hundred milligrams of amikacin directly into the wound to kill off any remaining infection.

Next, he took a foil packet of sutures from the aid kit and closed the wound with three stitches. Hancock slapped a patch of sticky black adhesive tape over it and went to take a shower, standing beneath the water for a long time.

By the time he emerged from the bathroom, he’d made an important decision: he would follow Billy Jessup’s example and attempt to live a normal life. Maybe he’d move to Thailand. Or maybe he’d stay in Mexico; buy a fishing charter up in Baja. That seemed a relaxing way to live. One thing was sure: he didn’t dare go back to the States.

Hancock grabbed his ruck from the chair and pulled out two unopened bottles of tequila, which he took into the bathroom and poured down the toilet. He dropped the caps into the trash and set the empty bottles on the back of the commode.

He was finished drinking, but he wasn’t finished killing. Chance Vaught was still loose in Toluca, and Vaught could finger him for the Downly hit. If he was going to have any shot at all of leading a normal life, he’d need a clean slate. Otherwise the stress of watching over his shoulder for the FBI would drive him back to the bottle, and he’d eventually end up right back where he’d been the night before: with a gun stuck up under his chin.