Fear the Night

61

A chill ran through the Night Sniper as he saw a man carrying what looked like a small duffel bag, crossing the street half a block down. He slowed his pace, stalling until the man had climbed half a dozen steps to a concrete stoop and disappeared into a building.

Relieved, the Sniper picked up his pace.

He hadn’t expected this kind of security. Since leaving the apartment across the street from Repetto’s, he’d spotted uniformed cops, then people who might be working undercover. Real or suspected, he’d managed to avoid them all.

Other people walking the dark streets, who fortunately weren’t police, paid little attention to the homeless man in his long, rumpled coat, shuffling dazedly along the sidewalk. The fact that there were somewhat fewer homeless in New York these days seemed to make him even less noticeable, less of an actual person. He was a problem that was ended, or at least made manageable, and was no longer of concern. If anyone did look at him closely, the brown paper bag jutting from a pocket would explain his apparent disorientation. There was nothing unusual about people like him in New York. They existed in the thousands and drew no particular interest.

Yet he didn’t feel the smug invulnerability that usually sustained him when in his homeless persona. His heart was beating faster and he was slightly out of breath, hyperalert. Adrenaline. Terrifying, but like a drug.

There was another police car, gliding across the intersection at the next block. The Sniper barely managed to halt and become part of the shadows. Again, he was sure he hadn’t been noticed.

Reasonably sure.

How long before they see me? Approach me?

What was going on here? Security in Amelia Repetto’s neighborhood, yes. But this sudden and relentless tightening of a net was beyond what he’d anticipated.

What do they know?

How do they know it?

One thing was for sure. They knew something. They’d been ready for him and had a plan that was now in effect. No surprise there. Everyone in the game knew that Amelia Repetto was being used to lure him. Like a staked lamb. But the number and intensity of the Sniper’s pursuers were upsetting.

For the first time since the game had begun, his confidence was shaken.

He was frightened.

He had to admit it. Afraid.

But, as always, he knew where he was, and what he had to do. He changed direction and walked several blocks to the west. To a subway stop that had been closed for several months, awaiting renovation.

He managed a smile but didn’t like the nervous twitch at the corner of his mouth. Like a fox, he’d go to ground and let the hounds pass over him, near him, unaware of his presence, not realizing how lucky they were not to find him. He was pleased by the analogy. He drew comfort from it.

Like a fox. But dangerous.

When he reached the darkened subway stop, he paused near the narrow concrete stairwell descending to the plywood-boarded entrance. No one seemed to be observing him, but just in case, he removed the bagged whiskey bottle from his pocket, pretended to take a swig, then started down the stairs that descended to blackness.

He was in familiar territory now, where a part of him had never left and still knew where it belonged, a discard and a freak hiding away from the rest of humanity.

His probing fingers found a rough wooden edge in the darkness, and he inserted them beneath it and began prying a plywood panel loose on one side to provide entry.

Through his fear he knew he was going home. Home to the ferocious security of a demon in hell.

Vanya. Dante Vanya.

Bobby had heard two guys standing outside Rocko Bill’s Sports Lounge talking about this Vanya, about the Night Sniper. They’d observed something on TV inside the lounge and seemed to think Vanya and the Sniper were one and the same.

One of the guys gave Bobby a shit-kicker look, and Bobby moved on.

They were both big and they might have been a little drunk, so he waited until they’d left before returning to the lounge entrance. He edged the door open to the sound of talking, laughing, and a baseball announcer doing a Braves game on the channel out of Atlanta. Bobby had a clear view of one of the big TVs above the bar. There was a news crawl across the bottom of the screen, but he couldn’t make out what it said. He did hear the name again-“Vanya”-in the conversation of people seated near the door.

Dante Vanya.

“Hey, you!”

Bobby looked in the direction of the voice. A bald man behind the bar was waving what appeared to be a white towel at him. “Out! Get the fuck out!”

Bobby backed away, letting the door swing shut. Things had changed. Now he-and the police-knew the name of the Night Sniper:

Dante Vanya.

If he was the Night Sniper.

If he was the homeless man who didn’t belong.

If he was real.

So many ifs. Bobby jammed his fists into his pockets and bowed his head as he limped away on newly raised blisters.

That was the trouble. When you went to the police and they didn’t believe you, it made you doubt yourself.

Officer Tom Dillon hoped to hell somebody knew what they were doing. He wasn’t due at the precinct till tomorrow for his next shift, and here he was looking for a guy named Vanya who might be the Night Sniper.

It was all part of a Special Operations Division plan that had sprung into place because Repetto had called it in after somebody’d shot at his daughter. Dillon had been on the Job only two years, but he’d heard plenty about Repetto. The guy knew his shit, and that was the only thing that kept Dillon from thinking tonight might not be a total waste of time.

Fifteen minutes ago an RMP car had dropped him off three blocks away from the crime scene, and he’d been walking ever since. He’d been assigned to stay on the move, observe, and get the information out fast on his two-way if anything or anyone merited suspicion.

Dillon wished he were home in bed with his wife, Glorianne, who was pregnant. Even in her fifth month, Glorianne was capable of having and enjoying sex. That had been something of a surprise to Dillon. But the doctor had said-

The young officer stopped and stared. He was sure he’d just seen somebody start down the steps of a subway stop half a block away, near the next corner. Which didn’t make sense, because he knew the subway stop was closed and boarded up. Had been for months.

Or maybe it had been a trick of his vision, a play of shadow, and he hadn’t seen anything at all. Dillon couldn’t be sure.

He’d better make sure.

Telling himself this might fall into the category of something that merited suspicion, he went to investigate.

Dillon peered down the narrow concrete stairwell into darkness. There was no sound from below. The acrid smell of stale urine wafted up at him, almost strong enough to make him turn his head.

“Hey!” he yelled. “You, down there!”

If anybody’s down there.

He got out his flashlight and aimed it down the stairwell, tentatively descending three or four concrete steps so he might see better.

The figure he’d glimpsed had been real. A ragged, homeless man holding a brown paper bag was just beginning to settle down with his whiskey in the shadows at the base of the steps. He glared up at Dillon, surprised, frightened, and perhaps indignant. The expression on his face suggested Dillon was invading his home.

Dillon was no stranger to the proprietary nature of some vagrants. He relaxed but kept the beam of his flashlight trained on the man. “You! C’mon up here.”

The man stood up unsteadily, as if his legs were sore, facing away from Dillon with his feet widely planted. His lower arms and hands disappeared in front of him, a slight bend to the elbows.

He appeared to be urinating, and not for the first time in the odorous stairwell.

Dillon thought about telling him it was illegal to piss down there; then he decided to be patient, let the poor guy finish his business before making his painful way back up to the city’s surface world.

That was when the man turned around with a sudden nimbleness that aroused Dillon’s suspicion. He saw that the homeless guy hadn’t been pissing but had struck a match and was holding it in the same hand that held the brown paper bag.

No, not a match. Too much flame, and growing. A twisted rag sticking up from the neck of the bottle in the bag. A wick!

Dillon tried to spin his body and clamber up the steps at the same time, scraping the toe of his left shoe on concrete and going nowhere. His right foot slipped and he banged his shin. He heard his flashlight clatter down the steps.

The explosion was more of a whoosh! than a bang. Dillon picked up a momentary stench of gasoline and realized the man had thrown a Molotov cocktail at him, and he was standing where it had detonated.

His legs were on fire!

His screams drew attention, and through his pain he managed to wrest his 9mm from its holster and fire several shots blindly through the flames in the stairwell.

The bullets splintered wood but missed the Night Sniper, who had bent down to pick up Dillon’s still-shining flashlight and shove it in a coat pocket. He hadn’t brought his own flashlight tonight because he hadn’t anticipated going underground.

The fire provided enough light to work by.

He got a fresh grip on the crooked panel and was through the plywood barrier and running down a frozen escalator, fumbling for the flashlight he’d need for the total darkness ahead.

It took a few minutes for the cops on the street to reach the subway stop and drag what was left of Dillon up to the sidewalk. Assuming, with a glance at his charred and smoldering body, that he was dead, they switched their efforts to trying to extinguish the fire at the top of the stairwell.

They had little other than the soles of their shoes and a shirt one of them had removed to try to smother the flames, but it didn’t take long for the remaining gasoline to burn itself out.

Convinced that Dillon had expired, but also knowing it could be a mistake to mentally pronounce someone dead at the scene of a crime, the three cops decided they couldn’t desert him. The shirtless cop, a big African-American named Wilson, was elected to stay with the fallen Dillon to wait for an ambulance.

It was a good thing. As if responding to their decision not to give up on him, the thing that Dillon had become began to moan.

While the other two uniforms made their way down the blackened steps and through the dark gap made by the pried plywood panel, Wilson used his two-way to call for medical transport and to get out the word:

The Night Sniper was in the subway system, on the run and under hot pursuit.