Billy Summers

CHAPTER 12

1

Billy wakes up disoriented. The room is completely dark, not even a shred of light leaking in from around the shade of the window facing his backyard. For a moment he just lies there, still half asleep, then remembers there is no window, not in this room. The only window here is the one in his new living room. The one he calls his periscope. This isn’t his large second-floor bedroom on Evergreen Street but the much smaller basement bedroom on Pearson Street. Billy remembers he’s a fugitive.

He gets orange juice from the fridge, just a swallow or two to make it last, then showers off the sweat from yesterday. He dresses, pours milk over a bowl of Alpha-Bits, and turns on the six A.M. news.

The first thing he sees is Giorgio Piglielli. Not a photograph but an Identikit drawing that might as well be a photo, because it’s amazingly good. Billy knows right away who worked with the police artist. Irv Dean, the Gerard Tower security guy, is an ex-cop, and it seems his observational skills are still intact, at least when he’s not reading Motor Trend or examining breasts and butts in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. There’s nothing in the lead report about Ken Hoff. If the police have connected him to the Allen shooting, they haven’t shared it with the news people. At least not yet.

The perky blonde weather girl gives a quick update, talking about how it’s going to be unusually cold for this time of year. She promises a more detailed forecast later, then turns it over to the perky blonde traffic reporter, who warns commuters to expect a slow ride this morning ‘because of a heightened police presence.’

That means roadblocks. The cops are assuming the shooter is still in the city, which is correct. They are also assuming that the fat man calling himself George Russo is also in the city. This, Billy knows, is incorrect. His former literary agent is in Nevada, possibly underground with his considerable bulk already beginning to decay.

After an ad for Chevy trucks, the anchors return with a retired police detective. He is asked to speculate on the possible reasons why Joel Allen was killed. The retired detective says, ‘There’s only one I can see. Someone wanted to shut him up before he could trade information for a reduced sentence.’

‘What kind of sentence reduction could he possibly expect?’ asks one of the anchors. She’s a perky brunette. How can they all be so perky so early? Is it drugs?

‘Life instead of the needle,’ the detective returns, not even having to pause for thought.

Billy is sure this is also correct. The only question is what Allen knew, and why the killing had to be so public. As a warning to others who might share Allen’s knowledge? Ordinarily Billy wouldn’t care. Ordinarily he’s just the mechanic. Only nothing about the situation in which he now finds himself is ordinary.

The anchors turn it over to a reporter who’s interviewing John Colton, one of the Young Lawyers, and Billy doesn’t want to see that. Just a week ago he and Johnny and Jim Albright were matching quarters to see who was going to pay for the tacos. They were on the plaza, laughing and having a good time. Now John looks stunned and woeful. He gets as far as ‘We all thought he was a really decent—’ before Billy kills the television.

He rinses out his cereal bowl, then checks the Dalton Smith phone. There’s a text from Bucky, just three words: No transfer yet. It’s what he expected, but that, added to the expression on Johnny Colton’s face, is no way to start his first day in – might as well call it what it is – captivity.

If there’s been no transfer yet, there probably isn’t going to be any transfer at all. He was paid five hundred thousand up front, and that’s a lot of cheese, but it’s not what he was promised. Up to this morning Billy has been too busy to be really mad about getting stiffed by someone he trusted, but now he’s not busy and he’s pissed like a bear. He did the job, and not just yesterday. He’s been doing this job for over three months, and at far greater personal cost than he ever would have believed. He was promised, and who breaks their promises?

‘Bad people, that’s who,’ Billy says.

He goes to the local newspaper. The headline is big – COURTHOUSE ASSASSINATION! – but it probably looks bigger and better in print than it does on his iPhone screen. The story tells him nothing he doesn’t already know, but the lead photo makes it clear why Sheriff Vickery wasn’t in attendance at Chief Conlee’s press conference. The pic shows that absurd Stetson hat lying on the steps, with no county sheriff to hold it up. Sheriff Vickery beat feet. Sheriff Vickery skedaddled. This picture is worth a thousand words. For him it wouldn’t have been a press conference, it would have been a walk of shame.

Good luck getting re-elected with that photo to explain, Billy thinks.

2

He goes upstairs to tend Daphne and Walter, then stops with the spray bottle in his hand, wondering if he’s crazy. He’s supposed to water them, not drown them. He checks the Jensens’ fridge and sees nothing he wants but there’s a package of English muffins on the counter with one left and he toasts it up, telling himself that if he doesn’t use it, it will just get moldy. There are regular windows up here and he sits in a bar of sun, munching his muffin and thinking about what he’s avoiding. Which is Benjy’s story, of course. It’s the only job he has to do now that he’s finished the one that brought him here. But it means writing about the Marines, and there’s so much, starting with the bus to Parris Island, basic … just so much.

Billy rinses off the plate he’s used, dries it, puts it back in the cupboard, and goes downstairs. He looks out the periscope window and sees the usual not much. The pants he wore yesterday are on the bedroom floor. He picks them up and feels in the pockets, almost hoping he’s lost the flash drive somewhere along the way, but it’s there with his keys, one of them to Dalton Smith’s leased Ford Fusion in the parking garage on the other side of town. Waiting until he feels it’s safe to leave. When the heat goes down, as they say in those movies about the last job that always goes wrong.

The flash drive feels like it’s gained weight. Looking at it, a marvelous storage device that would have seemed like science fiction only thirty years ago, there are two things he can’t believe. One is how many words he’s already put on it. The other is that there can possibly be any more. Twice as many. Four times as many. Ten, twenty.

He opens the laptop he thought he’d lost, a more expensive lucky charm than a battered baby shoe all grimy with dirt but otherwise about the same deal, and powers it up. He types in the password, plugs in the flash drive, and drags the single stored document to the laptop’s screen. He looks at the first line – The man my ma lived with came home with a broke arm – and feels a kind of despair. This is good work, he feels sure of it, but what felt light when he started now feels heavy, because he has a responsibility to make the rest just as good, and he’s not sure he can do it.

He goes to the periscope window and looks out at more nothing, wondering if he’s just discovered why so many would-be writers are unable to finish what they have started. He thinks of The Things They Carried, surely one of the best books about war ever written, maybe the best. He thinks writing is also a kind of war, one you fight with yourself. The story is what you carry and every time you add to it, it gets heavier.

All over the world there are half-finished books – memoirs, poetry, novels, surefire plans for getting thin or getting rich – in desk drawers, because the work got too heavy for the people trying to carry it and they put it down.

Some other time, they think. Maybe when the kids are a little older. Or when I retire.

Is that it? Will it be too heavy if he tries writing about the bus ride and the jarhead haircut and the first time Sergeant Uppington asked him Do you want to suck my cock, Summers? Do you? Because you look like a cocksucker to me.

Ask?

Oh no, he didn’t ask, Billy thinks, unless it was what you call a rhetorical question. He shouted in my face, his nose just an inch from mine, his spittle warm on my lips, and I said Sir no sir, I do not want to suck your cock and he said Is my cock not good enough for you, Private Summers, you cocksucking poor excuse for a recruit?

How it all comes back, and can he write it all, even as Benjy Compson?

Billy decides he can’t. He pulls the curtain closed and goes back to the laptop, meaning to turn it off and spend the day watching TV. Ellen DeGeneres, Hot Bench, Kelly and Ryan, and The Price Is Right all before lunch. Then a nap and then some afternoon soap operas. He can finish with John Law, who tick-tocks his gavel like Coolio in the old music videos and takes no shit in his courtroom. But as he reaches for the off button, a thought comes from nowhere. It’s almost as if someone has whispered in his ear.

You’re free. You can do whatever you want.

Not physically free, God no. He’ll be cooped up in this apartment at least until the police decide to lift their roadblocks, and even then it would be wise to stay a few days longer just to be sure. But in terms of his story, he’s free to write whatever the fuck he wants. And how he wants. With no one looking over his shoulder, monitoring what he writes, he no longer has to pretend to be a dumb person writing about a dumb person. He can be a smart person writing about a young man (for that’s what Benjy will be if Billy picks up the narrative again) who is poorly educated and naïve, but far from stupid.

I can let go of the Faulkner shit, Billy thinks. I can write he and I instead of me and him. I can write can’t instead of cant. I can even use quotation marks for dialogue if I want to.

If he’s writing strictly for himself, he can tell what’s important to him and skip what isn’t. He doesn’t have to write about the jarhead haircut, even though he could. He doesn’t have to write about Uppington screaming in his face, although he might. He doesn’t have to write about the boy – Haggerty or Haverty, Billy can’t remember which – who had a heart attack running and was taken away to the base infirmary, and Sergeant Uppington said he was fine and maybe he was and maybe he died.

Billy discovers that despair has given way to a kind of bullheaded eagerness. Maybe it’s even arrogance. And so what if it is? He can tell whatever he wants. And will.

He begins by hitting global replace and changing Benjy to Billy and Compson to Summers.

3

I started my basic training at Parris Island. I was supposed to be there for three months but was only there for eight weeks. There was the usual shouting and bullshit and some of the boots quit or washed out but I wasn’t one of them. The quitters and washouts might have had someplace to go back to, but I did not.

The sixth week was Grass Week, when we learned how to break down our weapons and put them back together. I liked that and was good at it. When Sergeant Uppington had us do what he called ‘an arms race,’ I always came in first. Rudy Bell, of course everybody called him Taco, was usually second. He never beat me, but sometimes he came close. George Dinnerstein was usually last and had to hit it and give Sergeant ‘Up Yours’ Uppington twenty-five, with Up’s foot on George’s ass the whole time. But George could shoot. Not as good as I could, but yes, he could put three out of every four in the center mass of a paper target at three hundred yards. Me, I could put four out of four center mass at seven hundred yards, almost every time.

There was no shooting during Grass Week, though. That week we just took our guns apart and put them back together again, chanting the Rifleman’s Creed: ‘This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My rifle is my best friend. It is my life.’ And so on. The part I remember best is the part that says ‘Without me, my rifle is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless.’

The other thing we did during Grass Week was sit on our asses in the grass. Sometimes for six hours at a stretch.

Billy stops there, smiling a little and remembering Pete ‘Donk’ Cashman. Donk fell asleep sitting in the tall South Carolina grass and Up Yours got down on his knees and screamed in his face to wake him up. Is this boring you, Marine?

Donk bolted to his feet so hard and fast he almost fell over, yelling Sir no sir! even before he was fully awake. He was George Dinnerstein’s buddy and picked up the nickname Donk because he had a habit of grabbing his crotch and yelling Honk my donk. He never told Up to honk it, though.

The memories are piling in as Billy suspected they would – knew, really – but Grass Week isn’t what he wants to write about. He doesn’t want to write about Donk right now either, although he might later. He wants to write about Week 7, and all that happened after that.

Billy bends to it. The hours pass, unseen and unfelt. There’s magic in this room. He breathes it in and breathes it out.

4

After Grass Week came Firing Week. We used the M40A, which is the military version of the Remington 700. Five-shot box, tripod mounted, NATO bottleneck rounds.

‘You must see your target but your target must not see you.’ Up told us that over and over. ‘And no matter what you’ve seen in the movies, snipers do not work alone.’

Even though it wasn’t Sniper School, Uppington put us in teams of two, spotter and shooter. I teamed with Taco and George teamed with Donk. I mention them because we ended up together in Fallujah, both Vigilant Resolve in April of ’04 and Phantom Fury that November. Me and Taco

Billy stops, shaking his head, reminding himself the dumb self is in the past. He deletes and starts again.

Taco and I switched back and forth during Firing Week, me shooting and him spotting, then him shooting and me spotting. George and Donk started that way, too, but Up told them to quit it. ‘You shoot, Dinner Winner. Cash, you just spot.’

‘Sir I would also like to shoot sir!’ Donk shouted. You had to shout when you addressed Up Yours. It was the Marine way.

‘And I would like to tear your tits off and shove them up your sorry ass,’ Up replied. So from then on, George was the shooter and Donk was the spotter in that pair. It stayed the same in Sniper School and in Iraq.

When Firing Week was almost over, Sergeant Uppington called me and Taco into his office, which wasn’t much more than a closet. He said, ‘You two are sorry fucking specimens, but you can shoot. Maybe you can learn to surf.’

That was how Taco and I found out we were being transferred to Camp Pendleton, and that’s where we finished our basic, which by then was mostly shooting because we were in training to be snipers. We flew to California on United Airlines. It was my first time in an airplane.

Billy stops. Does he want to write about Pendleton? He doesn’t. There was no surfing, at least not for him; how could there be when he never learned to swim? He did get himself a shirt that said CHARLIE DON’T SURF and wore it almost to tatters. He was wearing it the day he picked up the baby shoe and tied it to the belt loop on his right hip.

Does he want to write about Operation Iraqi Freedom? Nope. By the time he got to Baghdad, the war was over. President Bush said so, from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. He said the mission was accomplished, and that made Billy and the jarheads in his regiment ‘peacekeepers.’ In Baghdad he had felt welcomed, even loved. Women and children threw flowers. Men yelled nahn nihubu amerikaan, we love America.

That shit didn’t last long, Billy thinks, so never mind Baghdad, let’s go right to the suck. He starts writing again.

By the fall of 2003 I was stationed in Ramadi, still peacekeeping up a storm, although sometimes by then there was shooting and the mullahs had started adding ‘death to America’ to their sermons, which were broadcast from the mosques and sometimes from storefronts. I was 3rd Battalion, also known as Darkhorse. My company was Echo. We shot a lot of target practice in those days. George and Donk were someplace else, but Taco and I were still a team.

One day a lieutenant colonel I didn’t know stopped by to watch us shoot. I was using the M40, banging on a pyramid of beer cans at eight hundred yards, knocking them down one by one from top to bottom. You had to hit them low and kind of flip them, or the whole bunch would fall over.

This lieutenant colonel, Jamieson was his name, told me and Taco to come with him. He drove us in an unarmored Jeep to a hill overlooking the al-Dawla mosque. It was a very beautiful mosque. The sermon blaring from the loudspeakers wasn’t so pretty. It was the usual bullshit about how the Americans were going to let the Jews colonize Iraq, Islam would be outlawed, the Jews would run the government and America would get the oil. We didn’t understand the lingo, but death to America was always in English, and we’d seen translated leaflets, supposedly written by the leading clerics. The budding insurgency handed them out by the bale. Will you die for your country? they asked. Will you die a glorious death for Islam?

‘How far is that shot?’ Jamieson asked, pointing at the mosque’s dome.

Taco said a thousand yards. I said maybe nine hundred, then added, being careful to address Jamieson respectfully, that we were forbidden to target religious sites. If, that was, the l-c had such a thing in mind.

‘Perish the thought,’ Jamieson said. ‘I would never ask a soldier under my command to target one of their holy dungheaps. But the stuff coming out of those speakers is political, not religious. So which one of you wants to try knocking one of them off? Without putting a hole in the dome, that is? Which would be wrong and we’d probably go to muji hell for it.’

Taco right away handed the rifle to me. I had no tripod, so I laid the barrel on the hood of the Jeep and took the shot. Jamieson was using binoculars, but I didn’t need them to see one of the speakers go tumbling to the ground, trailing its wire. There was no hole in the dome and the harangue, at least coming from that side, was noticeably less.

‘Get some!’ Taco yelled. ‘Oh yeah, get summa that shit!’

Jamieson said we should bug the fuck out before someone started shooting at us, so that is what we did.

I look back on it and I think that day summed up everything that went wrong in Iraq, why ‘we love America’ changed to ‘death to America.’ The lieutenant colonel got tired of listening to that endless crap so he told us to shoot one of the speakers, which was stupid and meaningless when you considered there were at least six more pointing in other directions.

I saw men in doorways and women looking out of windows when we drove back to the base. Their faces were not happy we love America faces. No one shot at us – that day – but the faces said the day would come. As far as they knew, we weren’t shooting at a loudspeaker. We were shooting at the mosque. Maybe there was no hole in the dome, but we were still shooting at their core beliefs.

Our patrols into Ramadi started getting more dangerous. The local police and the Iraqi National Guard were gradually losing control to the insurgents, but US forces weren’t allowed to take their places because the politicians, both in Washington and Baghdad, were dedicated to the idea of self-rule. Mostly we sat out in camp, hoping we wouldn’t end up doing protective duty while a repair crew worked on fixing a broken (or vandalized) watermain or a bunch of technicians, American and Iraqi, tried to get the broken (or sabotaged) power plant working again. Protective duty was just asking to get shot at, and we had half a dozen Marines KIA, many more wounded, by the end of 2003. The muj snipers were for shit, but their IEDs terrified us.

The whole house of cards tipped over on the last day of March, in 2004.

Okay, Billy thinks, this is where the story really starts. And I got here with a minimum of bullshit, as Up Yours would have said.

By then we had moved from Ramadi to Camp Baharia, also known as Dreamland. It was in the countryside about two miles outside of Fallujah, west of the Euphrates. Saddam’s kids used to r&r there, we heard. George Dinnerstein and Donk Cashman were back with us in Echo Company.

The four of us were playing poker when we heard shooting coming from the other side of what we called the Brooklyn Bridge. Not just isolated shots, a regular barrage.

By nightfall the rumors had settled and we knew what had happened, at least in broad strokes. Four Blackwater contractors who were delivering food – including for our mess in Dreamland – decided to take a shortcut through Fallujah instead of going around, which was the normal protocol. They were ambushed just shy of the bridge over the Euphrates. I suppose they were wearing their armor, but nothing could save them from the concentrated fire that poured into the pair of Mitsubishi utes they were driving.

Taco said, ‘What in God’s name made them think they could drive right through the center of town, like it was Omaha? That was dumb.’

George agreed, but said that dumb or not, there had to be payback. We all thought the same. The killings were bad enough but killing wasn’t enough for the mob. They dragged the dead from the ’Bishies, doused them with gasoline, and set them on fire. Two of them were pulled apart like rotisserie chickens. The other two were hung from the Brooklyn Bridge like Guy Fawkes dummies.

The next day Lieutenant Colonel Jamieson showed up while our squad was getting ready to go on patrol. He ordered me and Taco down from the back of the Hummer we were in and told us to come with him, because there was a man who wanted to see us.

The man was sitting on a pile of tires in an empty garage bay that stank of motor oil and exhaust. It was also hot as hell because all the doors were closed and those bays had no air conditioning. He stood up when we came in and looked us over. He was wearing a leather jacket, which was absurd in a stinky room that must have already been eighty-five degrees. It had the Darkhorse Battalion emblem on the breast: CONSUMMATE PROFESSIONALS on top and GET SOME on the bottom. But the jacket was just for show. I knew it right away and Taco said afterwards that he did, too. You only had to look at him to know he was ‘fuckin’-A, CIA.’ He asked which one of us was Summers and I said that was me. He said his name was Hoff.

Billy stops short, bemused. He has just crosswired his present life with his life in the suck. Was it Robert Stone who said the mind is a monkey? Sure it was, in Dog Soldiers. The one where Stone also said that men who shoot elephants with machine guns from Huey helicopters are just naturally going to want to get high. In Iraq it was camels the grunts and jarheads sometimes shot at. But yeah, while they were high.

He deletes the last line and consults the monkey that lives between his ears and behind his forehead. After a few seconds of thought, he comes up with the right name and decides the mistake is entirely forgivable. Hoff was at least close.

He said his name was Foss. He didn’t offer to shake hands, just sat back down on the tires, which was sure to dirty up the seat of his pants. He said, ‘Summers, I heard you were the best shot in the company.’

Since that wasn’t a question I didn’t say anything, just stood there.

‘Could you make a twelve-hundred-yard shot across the river from our side?’

I took a quick look at Taco and saw he had heard it too, and knew what it meant. Our side meant anything outside of town. And if there were sides, that meant we were going in.

‘Are you talking about hitting a human target, sir?’

‘I am. Did you think I was talking about a beer bottle?’

A rhetorical question I didn’t bother answering. ‘Yes sir, I could make that shot.’

‘Is that the Marine answer or your answer, Summers?’

Lieutenant Colonel Jamieson kind of frowned at that, as if he didn’t believe there was any answer except the Marine answer, but he didn’t say anything.

‘Both, sir. Confidence maybe not so high on a windy day, but we—’ I cocked a thumb at Taco. ‘We can correct for wind. Blowing sand is something else.’

‘The wind speed forecast for tomorrow is zero-to-ten,’ Foss said. ‘That wouldn’t be a problem?’

‘No, sir.’ Then I asked a question I had no business asking, but I had to know. ‘Are we talking about a bad haji, sir?’

The l-c said I was out of line, and would have said more, but Foss waved a hand at him and Jamieson closed his mouth.

‘You ever tagged a man before, Summers?’

I told him I hadn’t, and that was true. Tagging means sniping, and when I shot Bob Raines it was up close.

‘Then this would be a very good way to start your career, because yes, this is a very bad haji. I’m assuming you know what happened yesterday?’

‘We do, sir,’ Taco said.

‘Those contractors went through downtown Fallujah because they were told by what they considered to be a reliable source that it would be safe. They were told that goodwill was shifting toward the Americans. They were also given an escort by the Iraqi police. Only their escort was either insurgents in stolen uniforms, or renegade police, or real police who chickened out when they saw what a truly awesome raft of shit was coming their way. And they didn’t do the killing, anyway. That was done by four dozen AK-wielding bad boys who … what do you think, fellas? Who just happened to turn up on the scene?’

I shrugged like I didn’t know and let Taco carry the ball. Which he did. ‘Doesn’t seem likely, sir.’

‘No, not likely at all. Those mujis were all in place. Waiting. A couple of pickup trucks were blocking the main drag. Someone planned that ambush, and we know who it was, because we were up on his cell phone. You follow?’

Taco said he did. I just shrugged again.

‘That someone was a shemagh-wearing weasel named Ammar Jassim. In his sixties or seventies, nobody knows for sure, probably including him. He owns a computer and camera store that doubles as an Internet café and triples as a game room where the local young men can play Pac-Man and Frogger when they’re not building IEDs and planting roadside bombs.’

‘I know that place,’ Taco said. ‘Pronto Pronto Photo Photo. Seen it on patrol.’

Seen it? Hell, we’d been in there, playing Donkey Kong and Madden football. When we came in, the local boys all at once remembered they had business elsewhere and put on their boogie shoes. Taco didn’t volunteer that and neither did I.

‘Jassim’s an old-line Ba’athist and new-line insurgent boss. We want him. Want him bad. Can’t call in an LGB because we risk killing a bunch of kids playing video games, which will get us a fresh bunch of bad press on Al Jazeera. Can’t afford that. Can’t wait, either, because Bush is going to greenlight a clean-up operation within days, and if you tell anyone that, I’ll have to kill you.’

‘You won’t get the chance,’ Jamieson said. ‘I’ll do it first.’

Foss ignored him. ‘Once the shit hits the fan, Jassim will be gone into the back streets with the rest of his gun-buddies. We need to get him before that can happen and make an example of that fucking Judas goat.’

Taco asked what a Judas goat was. I could have told him but kept my mouth shut and let Foss do the honors. Then he turned to me and asked again if I could do it and I said sir yes sir. I asked where I was supposed to shoot from and he told me. We’d been there before, carrying goods from resupply helicopters. I asked if I could swap the optics on my rifle for one of the new Leupold scopes or if I would have to make do with what I had. Foss looked at Jamieson, and Jamieson said, ‘We’ll make that happen.’

Going back to our barracks – the patrol had left without us – Taco asked me how sure I was that I could make the shot. I said, ‘If I can’t make it, I’ll just blame my spotter.’

He thumped me on the shoulder. ‘Fucking dickweed. Why do you always play dumb?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘There you go again.’

‘It’s safer. What they don’t know about you can’t hurt you. Or come back to haunt you.’

He chewed that over for awhile. Then he said, ‘Yeah, you can make the shot, okay, but that’s not what I meant. This is an actual guy we’re talking about. Are you sure you can do it? Shoot him stone-cold in the brainbox and take his life?’

I told Tac I was sure. I didn’t tell him that I knew I could take a life because I’d done it before. I shot Bob Raines in the chest. It was Sniper School that taught me to always take the head shot.

5

Billy saves what he’s written, gets up, and staggers a little because his feet feel like they’re in another dimension. How long has he been sitting? He looks at his watch and is astounded to see it’s been almost five hours. He feels like a man emerging from a vivid dream. He puts his hands in the small of his back and stretches, sending pins and needles down his legs. He walks from the living room to the kitchen to the bedroom, and finally back to the living room. He does it again, then a third time. The apartment seemed just the right size when he first saw it, the perfect place to hunker down in until things settled and he could drive his leased car north (or maybe west). Now it seems too small, like clothes that have been outgrown. He’d like to go out and walk, maybe even jog, but that would be a very bad idea even tricked out in his Dalton Smith gear. So he paces the apartment some more, and when that’s not good enough he does pushups on the living room floor.

Drop and give me twenty-five, he thinks of Sergeant Up Yours saying. And don’t mind my foot on your ass, you useless cumstain.

Billy has to smile. So much has come back to him. If he wrote it all, his story would be a thousand pages long.

The pushups make him feel calmer. He thinks about turning on the TV to see what’s going on with the investigation, or checking his phone for newspaper updates (newspapers may be failing, but Billy has found they still seem to get the salient facts first). He decides against doing either. He’s not ready to let the present back in. He thinks about getting something to eat, but he’s not hungry. He should be, but he isn’t. He settles for a cup of black coffee and drinks it standing up in the kitchen. Then he goes back to the laptop and picks up where he left off.

6

The next morning Lieutenant Colonel Jamieson himself drove me and Taco out to the intersection of Route 10 and the north–south road the Marines called Highway to Hell, after the AC/DC song. We went in the l-c’s Eagle station wagon, which was special to him. Painted on the back deck was a decal showing a black horse with red eyes. I didn’t like it, because I could imagine Iraqi spotters noting it, maybe even photographing it.

There was no sign of Foss. He had gone back to wherever those guys go after they set their plots in motion.

Parked out there on the hilltop in a dusty turnaround were two trucks from Iraqi Power & Light, or whatever was written in the pothooks on their sides. They looked just like American utility trucks, only smaller and painted apple green instead of yellow. The paint was much thicker on the sides, but even so it didn’t completely obscure the smiling face of Saddam Hussein, like a ghost too stubborn to go away. There was also a Genie articulated boom lift with a bucket platform.

Two power poles stood at the intersection of the roads, with big transformers on them to step down the power-load to the residential neighborhoods of Fallujah and the surrounding suburbs. Guys in keffiyehs were scurrying around, plus a couple in those kufi hats. They were all wearing orange workmen’s vests. No hardhats, though; I guess OSHA never made it to al-Anbar province. From across the river those men probably looked like any ragtag government work crew, but once you got closer than sixty yards, you could see they were all our guys. Albie Stark from our squad came over to me, flapping his headdress and singing that song about how you don’t step on Superman’s cape. Then he saw the l-c and saluted.

‘Go someplace and look busy,’ Jamieson told him. ‘And please in the name of Jesus don’t sing anymore.’ He turned to me and Taco, but it was Taco he addressed, because he had decided Tac was the smart one. ‘Give it to me again, Lance Corporal Bell.’

‘Jassim comes outside most days around ten to have a smoke and talk to his adoring fans, probably some of the same guys that opened fire on the contractors. He’ll be the one in the blue keffiyeh. Billy takes him out. End of story.’

Jamieson turned to me. ‘If you make the kill, I’ll put you in for a commendation. Miss, or hit one of the hanger-arounders, which would be worse, and I will transfer the boot that goes up my ass to yours, only harder and deeper. Do you understand that, Marine?’

‘I think so, sir.’ What I was thinking was that Sergeant Uppington could have delivered that line with far greater force and conviction. Still, I had to give the l-c props for trying. Months later he lost most of his face and all of his eyesight to a roadside bomb.

Jamieson motioned over Joe Kleczewski. He was another member of our squad, which we called the Hot Nine. Most of the ‘utility workers’ were. They volunteered for the job. They had to because Taco told them to.

‘Sergeant, do you understand what must happen as soon as Summers takes the shot?’

Big Klew smiled, showing the gap in his front teeth. ‘Get them down ASAP, then exfil like a motherfucker, sir.’

Although I could tell Jamieson was nervous – I think we all could – that made him smile. Most times Klew could coax a smile out of the stoniest face. ‘That about covers it.’

‘If he doesn’t show, sir?’

‘There’s always tomorrow. Assuming the attack doesn’t happen tomorrow, that is. Carry on, Marines, and none of that oorah shit, if you please.’ He jerked his thumb at the Euphrates and the bear trap of a city on the other side. ‘It’s like the song says – voices carry.’

Albie Stark and Big Klew tried to cram into the bucket. It was supposed to be big enough for two, but not when one of them was Kleczewski’s size. He almost knocked Albie over the side. Everybody but Jamieson laughed. It was as good as Abbott and Costello.

‘Get out, you lummox,’ the l-c told Klew. ‘Jesus wept.’ He motioned to Donk, whose brown combat boots were sticking out from beneath his pants, which were too short. This was also comical, because he looked like a kid clumping around the house in his daddy’s shoes. ‘You. Pipsqueak. Get over here. What’s your name?’

‘Sir, I am Pfc Peter Cashman, and I—’

‘Don’t salute, you dimwit, not in an op zone. Did your mother drop you on your head when you were a baby?’

‘No sir, not that I remember, s—’

‘Get in the bucket with what’s-his-fuck, and when you get up there …’ He looked around. ‘Ah God, where’s the fucking shroud?’

Maybe technically the right word for what he was talking about, but wrong in every other way. I saw Klew cross himself.

Albie, still in the bucket, looked down. ‘Uh, I believe I’m standing on it, sir.’

Jamieson wiped his forehead. ‘All right, okay, at least somebody remembered to bring it.’

That had been me.

‘Get in there, Cashman. And deploy it with utmost haste. Time is marching.’

The bucket platform rose in a whine of hydraulics. At its maximum height, maybe thirty-five or forty feet, it shuddered to a stop beside one of the transformers. Albie and Donk danced around, yanking at the shroud and finally managing to get it out from under their feet. Then, aided by some inventive cursing – including some learned from the Iraqi kids who came out to beg candy and cigarettes – they got it deployed. The result was a canvas cylinder around the bucket and the transformer. It was held at the top by hooks on one of the pole’s cross-arms and snapped together down one side, like the button-up fly on a pair of 501 jeans. The outside was emblazoned with a bunch of pothooks in bright yellow. I had no idea what they said and didn’t care as long as it wasn’t SNIPER TEAM AT WORK.

The bucket came back down, leaving the cylinder behind. It did look like a shroud once the waist-high rail of the bucket was no longer holding out the sides. Donk’s hands were bleeding and Albie had a scratch on his face, but at least neither of them had taken a header out of the bucket. A couple of times it had looked close.

Taco was craning his neck to look up. ‘What’s that thing s’posed to be, sir?’

‘Sand guard,’ Jamieson said, then added, ‘I believe.’

‘Not exactly unobtrusive,’ Taco said. Now he was looking across the river at the crammed-together houses and shops and warehouses and mosques on the other side. It was the southwestern part of town we’d come to call Queens. A hundred or so Marines came out of there in body bags. Hundreds more came out with fewer body parts than they had going in.

‘When I want your opinion I’ll give it to you,’ the l-c said – an oldie but a goody. ‘Grab your gear and get up there toot-sweet. Put on a couple of those orange vests before you get in the bucket so anyone looking sees them when you go up. The rest of you men kind of swirl around and look busy. The last thing we want is for anyone to see that rifle. Summers, keep your back to the river until you’re under …’ He stopped. He didn’t want to say until you’re under the shroud and I didn’t want to hear it. ‘Until you’re under cover.’

I said roger that and up we went, me with my M40 held at port arms and my back to the city, Taco with his feet planted around his spotter stuff. Snipers are glamor boys, the ones they make movies about and the ones Stephen Hunter writes his novels about, but it’s the spotters who really do the work.

I don’t know how real shrouds smell, but the canvas cylinder stank like old dead fish. I undid three of the snaps down its seam to create a firing slit, but it was in the wrong place unless I wanted to shoot a goat wandering in the direction of Ramadi. The two of us managed to work it around, grunting and swearing and trying to keep the goddamned thing on at least two of the crossbar hooks as we did it. The canvas flapped in our faces. The dead fish smell got worse. This time I was the one who almost fell out of the bucket. Taco grabbed my orange vest with one hand and the strap of my rifle with the other.

‘What are you men doing up there?’ Jamieson called. From below, all he and the others could see were our feet shuffling around clumsily, like grammar school kids learning to waltz.

‘Housework, sir,’ Taco called back.

‘Well, I suggest you stop the housework and get set up. It’s almost ten.’

‘Not our fault those nimrods put the slit facing the wrong direction,’ Taco grumbled to me.

I checked the new scope and my rifle – there were many like it, but that one was mine – and used a square of chamois to wipe everything clean. In the suck, the sand and dust got into everything. I handed my piece to Taco for the mandatory recheck. He handed it back to me, licked his palm good and wet, then stuck it out through the firing slit.

‘Wind speed nil, Billy-boy. I hope the bastard shows, because we’ll never get a better day for it.’

Other than my rifle, the biggest piece of equipment we had in the bucket with us was the M151, also known as the Spotter’s Friend.

Billy stops, startled out of his dream. He goes into the kitchen, where he splashes his face with cold water. He has come to an unexpected fork in what has been, up to now, a perfectly straight road. Maybe it makes no difference which of the diverging ways he takes, but maybe it does.

It’s all about that M151. It’s the optical scope the spotter used to calculate the distance from muzzle to target, and with eerie (it was to Billy, at least) accuracy. That distance is the basis for MOA, minute of angle. Billy needed none of that for the shot that took out Joel Allen, but the one he was responsible for making on that day in 2004, always assuming Ammar Jassim left his storefront to make it possible, was much longer.

Does he explain all that, or not?

If he does, that means he expects, or just hopes, that someday someone will read what he’s writing. If he doesn’t, it means he has given up that expectation. That hope. So which is it to be?

Standing there at the kitchen sink he flashes back to an interview he heard on the radio not long after he got out of the sand. Probably on one of those NPR shows where everyone sounds smart and full of Prozac. Some writer was getting interviewed, one of the oldtimers who was hot stuff back in the days when all the important writers were white, male, and borderline alcoholics. For the life of him Billy can’t remember who that writer was, except it wasn’t Gore Vidal – not snarky enough – and not Truman Capote – not quacky enough. What he can remember is what the guy said when the interviewer asked him about his process. ‘I always keep two people in mind when I sit down to write: myself, and the stranger.’

Which brings Billy back full circle to the M151. He could describe it. He could explain its purpose. He could explain why MOA is even more important than distance, although the two are always joined together. He could do all of those things, but only needs to if he is writing for a stranger as well as himself. So is he?

Get real, Billy tells himself. I’m the only stranger here.

But that’s okay. He can do it for himself if he has to. He doesn’t need … what would you call it?

‘Validation,’ he murmurs as he goes back to the laptop. He once more picks up where he left off.

7

Other than my rifle, the biggest piece of equipment we had in the bucket with us was the M151, also known as the Spotter’s Friend. Taco set up the tripod and I shuffled out of his way as best I could. The platform bounced a little and Taco told me to hold still unless I wanted to put a bullet in the sign over the shop door instead of in Jassim’s head. I stayed as still as I could while Taco did his thing, making calculations and muttering to himself.

Lieutenant Colonel Jamieson had estimated the distance as 1,200 yards. Taco took his readings on a kid bouncing a ball in front of Pronto Pronto Photo Photo and called it 1,340 yards. A long shot for sure, but on a windless day like that one in early April, a high confidence one. I had made longer, and we had all heard stories of world-class snipers making shots at twice that distance. Of course I couldn’t count on Jassim being perfectly stationary, like the head on a paper target. That concerned me, but the fact that he was a human being with a beating heart and a living brain didn’t. He was a Judas goat who had lured four men into an ambush, guys guilty of nothing but delivering food. He was a bad guy and needed to be put down.

Around quarter past nine, Jassim came out of his store. He was wearing a long blue shirt like a dashiki and baggy white pants. Today he was wearing a knitted red cap instead of a blue topper. That was a wonderful sight marker. I started to line up the shot, but Jassim just shooed the ball-bouncing kid away with a swat on the butt and went back inside.

‘Well doesn’t that suck,’ Taco said.

We waited. Young men went into Pronto Pronto Photo Photo. Young men came out. They were laughing and scuffling and grabassing around as young men do all over the world, from Kabul to Kansas City. Some of them had no doubt been shooting up those Blackwater trucks with their AKs just a couple of days before. Some of them were undoubtedly firing at us seven months later as we went from block to block, cleaning them out. For all I know, some of them were in what we called the Funhouse, where everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

Ten o’clock came, then ten-fifteen. ‘Maybe he’s taking his smoke break out back today,’ Taco said.

Then, at ten-thirty, the door of Pronto Pronto Photo Photo opened and Ammar Jassim came out with two of his young men. I sighted in. I saw them laughing and talking. Jassim clapped one of them on the back and the two men strolled off with their arms around each other’s shoulders. Jassim took a pack of cigarettes from his pants pocket. I was in the optics and could read Marlboro and see the two trademark gold lions. Everything was clear: his bushy eyebrows, his lips as red as a woman’s wearing lipstick, his salt-and-pepper beard stubble.

Taco was sighting with the M151, now handheld. ‘Fucker’s a dead ringer for Yessir I’m-a Fat.’

‘Shut up, Tac.’

I laid the crosshairs on the knitted cap and waited for Jassim to light up. I was willing to allow him one last drag before putting out his lights. He stuck a cigarette in his mouth. He put the pack back into his pocket and came out with a lighter. Not a cheap disposable Bic but a Zippo. He might have purchased it, either in a store or on the black market. It might also have been looted from one of the contractors who had been shot, burned, and hung from the bridge. He flipped it open and a tiny sunstar winked off the top. I saw that. I saw everything. Master Gunny Sergeant Diego Vasquez at Pendleton used to say that a Marine sniper lives for a perfect shot. This one was perfect. He also said, ‘It’s like sex, my little virgins. You will never forget your first.’

I drew in a breath, held it for a five-count, and squeezed the trigger. The recoil hit the hollow of my shoulder. Jassim’s knitted hat flew off and at first I thought I had missed him, maybe only by an inch, but when you’re sniping, an inch might as well be a mile. He just stood there with the cigarette between his lips. Then the lighter fell out of his fingers and the cigarette fell out of his mouth. They landed on the dusty sidewalk. In the movies, the person who gets shot flies back when the bullet hits. That’s rarely how it happens in real life. Jassim actually took two steps forward. By then I could see that it wasn’t just the hat that had come off; the top of his head was inside it.

He went to his knees, then full on his face. People came running.

‘Payback’s a bitch,’ Taco said, and clapped me on the back.

I turned and yelled, ‘Get us down!’

The platform started to descend. It seemed very slow, because the gunfire had begun on the other side of the river. It sounded like fireworks. Taco and I ducked as we left the canvas sand-shield behind, not because ducking made us safer but because it was instinctive. I listened for bullets passing and tried to get ready to be hit, but I didn’t hear anything or feel anything.

‘Get out of there, get out!’ Jamieson shouted. ‘Jump! Time to didi mau!’ But he was laughing, triumphant. They all were. I had my back slapped so often and so hard that I almost fell over as we ran back to the dirty Mitsubishi the l-c had used to drive us out. Albie, Donk, Klew, and the others ran for the little power trucks, a scam that we’d never be able to use again. We could hear yelling across the river, and now there was even more gunfire.

‘Yeah, eat it!’ Big Klew shouted. ‘Eat it big, motherfuckers! Your man just got run over by the big dark horse!’

The l-c’s old station wagon was parked behind the Iraqi power trucks in the turnaround. I opened the back to put in my rifle and Taco’s gear.

‘Hurry the fuck up,’ Jamieson said. ‘We’re blocking those guys in.’

Well, you were the one who parked there, I thought but didn’t say. I tossed in our stuff. When I slammed the hatchback shut, I saw something lying in the dirt. It was a baby shoe. It must have been a little girl’s, because it was pink. I bent down to get it and as I did, some shooter’s blind-luck round punched into the bulletproof glass of the hatchback’s window. If I hadn’t bent down, the round would have gone in the nape of my neck or the back of my head.

‘Get in, get in!’ Jamieson was screaming. Another blind-luck round pinged off the Eagle wagon’s armored side. Or maybe not so blind; by then the shooters had to be all the way down by their side of the river.

I picked up the shoe. I got in the ’Bishi and Jamieson tore out of there, fishtailing and throwing up a cloud of dust the trucks would have to drive through. The l-c wasn’t thinking about that; he was concentrating on saving his ass.

‘They’re shooting the shit out of that boom lift,’ Taco said. He was still laughing, high on the kill. ‘What have you got there?’

I showed it to him and said I thought it had saved my life.

‘You keep that thing safe, brah,’ Taco said. ‘And keep it with you.’

I did. Until the Funhouse, that November. I looked for it just as we started to clear that house in the Industrial Sector and it was gone.

8

Billy finally shuts down and stands at the periscope window of his landlocked submarine, looking out across the little patch of lawn, to the street, to the vacant lot on the other side where the train station once stood. He doesn’t know how long he’s been standing here. Maybe quite awhile. His brain feels blasted, as if he’s just finished taking the world’s longest and most complicated test.

How many words did he write today? He could check the counter on his document – now Billy’s story instead of Benjy’s – but he’s not that OCD. It was a lot, leave it at that, and he’s still got a long way to go. There was the April assault that started less than a week after he killed Jassim, followed by the pullback when the politicians got cold feet. Then the final nightmare that was Operation Phantom Fury. Forty-six days of hell. He won’t put it that way (if he even gets that far) because it’s a cliché, but hell is what it was. Culminating in the Funhouse, which seemed to summarize all the rest. He might skim through some of it but not the Funhouse, because the Funhouse was the point of Fallujah. And what exactly was the point? That it was pointless. Just another house that had to be cleared, but the price they paid.

A few people walk by on Pearson Street. A few cars drive by. One is a police car, but it doesn’t concern Billy. It’s moving leisurely, heading nowhere special and in no hurry to get there. He is still amazed that this part of the city, which is so close to downtown, feels so deserted. On Pearson Street, rush hour is hush hour. He supposes that most people who work in the city’s center haul ass to the suburbs when the workday is done – nicer places like Bentonville, Sherwood Heights, Plateau, Midwood. Even Cody, where he won a little girl a stuffed toy. The neighborhood of which he is now a part doesn’t even have a name, at least that he knows of.

He needs to catch up. Billy flips on Channel 8, the NBC affiliate, wanting to stay away from 6, which will still be running the footage of Allen being shot. 8 comes on with a BREAKING NEWS logo and a soundtrack of ominous violins and thumping drums. Billy doubts that there’s any serious news breaking with the assassin still at large. The assassin has spent the day writing a story that is in grave danger of becoming a book.

It turns out there have been developments, but nothing Billy hasn’t expected and not anything that warrants the disaster soundtrack. One of the anchors says that local businessman Kenneth Hoff has been implicated in ‘the widening assassination conspiracy.’ The other anchor says that Kenneth Hoff’s apparent suicide may have been murder. Holmes, your deductions astound me, Billy thinks.

The anchors hand it over to a correspondent standing across the street from Hoff’s home, an expensive crib that is still several rungs below Nick’s rented McMansion on the grandiosity ladder. The correspondent is a leggy blonde who looks like she might have gotten out of journalism school the week before. She explains that Kenneth Hoff has been ‘positively linked’ to the Remington 700 rifle that was used to kill Joel Allen. This is in addition to plenty of other links to the presumed assassin, who has now been ‘positively identified’ as William Summers, a Marine veteran of the Iraq war and winner of several medals.

Bronze Star and Silver Star, Billy thinks. Also a Purple Heart with a star on the ribbon, indicating not just one wound suffered in battle but two. He can understand them not wanting to do that particular rundown. He’s the villain of the piece, so why muddle things up with a heroic background? Muddling things up is for novels, not news reports.

There are side-by-side pictures. One is the photo Irv Dean took of him at the Gerard Tower security stand on his first day as the building’s resident writer. The other shows him as a new recruit, looking both solemn and goofy in his jarhead haircut. It was taken on Photo Day. In it he looks even younger than the blonde correspondent. Probably he was. They must have gotten it from some Marine archive, because Billy had no family to give a copy to on Family Day.

Local police believe that Summers may have fled the city, the correspondent says, and because he may also have fled the state, the FBI is now on the case. With that the blonde sends it back to the studio, where the anchors next display a picture of Giorgio Piglielli, and yes, they give his mob nickname, as if Georgie Pigs is an alias he might be traveling under. He’s been linked to organized crime operations in Las Vegas, Reno, Los Angeles, and San Diego, but hasn’t yet been apprehended. The subtext is that if you see a middle-aged Italian guy who goes 370, possibly wearing alligator shoes and drinking a milkshake, get in touch with your local law enforcement.

So, Billy thinks. Hoff is dead, Giorgio is almost certainly dead, and Nick’s alibied up the ying-yang. Which makes me the last melon in the patch, the last pea in the pod, the last chocolate in the box, pick your metaphor.

After an ad for some wonder pill with about two dozen possible side effects, some lethal, there are more interviews with his neighbors on Evergreen Street. Billy gets up to turn off the TV, then sits down again. He flew under false colors and hurt these people. Maybe he deserves to watch and listen as they express that hurt. And their bewilderment.

Jane Kellogg, the block’s resident alcoholic, doesn’t seem a bit bewildered. ‘I knew there was something wrong with him the first time I saw him,’ she says. ‘He had shifty eyes.’

Bullshit you did, Billy thinks.

Diane Fazio, Danny’s mom, shares how horrified she was when she found out they had allowed their children to spend time with a cold-blooded killer.

Paul Ragland marvels about how smooth he was, how natural. ‘I really thought Dave was the real deal. He seemed like a totally nice guy. It sort of proves that you can’t trust anybody.’

It’s Corinne Ackerman who says the one thing everyone else seems to have ignored. ‘Of course it’s terrible, but that man he shot wasn’t going to court for shoplifting, was he? From what I understand he was a stone killer. If you ask me, David saved the county the cost of a trial.’

God bless you, Corrie, Billy thinks, and actually finds his eyes are welling up, as if it’s the end of a Lifetime channel movie where everything comes out right. Always supposing your concept of right includes a dose of vigilante justice … and in cases like Joel Allen’s, Billy has no problem with that.

Before moving on to the traffic (still slow because of police checkpoints, sorry folks) and the weather (turning colder), there’s a final item in the courthouse assassination story, and Billy has to smile. The reason Sheriff Vickery was initially cut out of the investigation isn’t because he skedaddled when his prisoner was shot, leaving only his ridiculous Stetson behind, or not just because of that. It’s because he brought his prisoner up the courthouse steps instead of through the employees’ door further down. There was initial suspicion that he might have been part of the plot. He has since convinced them otherwise, probably admitting that he wanted the press coverage.

And I could have made the shot either way, Billy thinks. Hell, I could have made it in the rain, unless it was a deluge out of Genesis.

He turns off the television and goes into the kitchen to inspect his stock of frozen dinners. He’s already thinking about what he’ll write tomorrow.