Old Sammy
Interstate 35
A few miles north of
It was dusk. The setting sun beyond the
Gabriel had been lying there, nestled down into the tall grass on top of a shooting blanket, for quite sometime. Even with a layer of polypropylene, he couldn’t deny the cold that had sunk deep into the Northerner’s bones. The cold aided in the lurking, sluggish feeling from the Inderal he’d taken nearly an hour prior. Gabriel shifted his weight to one elbow and reached back to draw the stock of the .30-06 rifle into his shoulder. Those small cold eyes never left the convenience store parking lot, never left the truck, never left the unknowing. With his eyes locked half a kilometer away, the hunter’s hands worked without thought, chambering the round and removing the covers from the scope.
Through the scrutiny of the rifle’s scope the scene was much brighter. The parking lot lights had come on and made the features of the tired hired hands starker, casting shadows under their chins, in the sockets of their eyes, and under the brims of their hats. The group of workers, five in all, gathered around the tailgate of the old battered Ford. A suitcase of Natural Ice was open and cans had been handed out all around.
The soon-to-be assassin’s shoulders moved ever so slightly as a small breath slid between lips barely parted. Thump. Gabriel’s pulse was soft, his heart beat slow and regular, his body steady, almost sedentary from the chill. The natural pause of bodily movements came and went following his slight inhale, that slight breath finding its way back out. The crosshairs of the riflescope fell down from the head of a worker, fell with his ever so slight exhale, and coming to rest on the hood of a second car. Thump. A second slow, measured, breath hissed between teeth closed, but not clamped, and the rifle sight rose, bearing once again onto a baseball capped head. As Gabriel’s body paused, waiting to exhale, the index finger of his right hand squeezed back towards his palm.
The red mess splattered against the store window, filling in the spider webs of the Plexiglas as quickly as they formed. The round had passed through the worker’s head even before the report had reached his comrades.
Thump. Gabriel’s right hand left the trigger well, and pulled the charging handle to the rear. Thump. The body dropped to the ground, completing a half-spin from where the worker had been leaning against the side of the pickup truck. Thump. The handle found itself forward once again; a new round sat chambered and waiting. The familiar scent of spent powder reached Gabriel while he inhaled and acquired a second target – a man who had just realized his co-worker had been shot. Gabriel could see the panic and surreal state of misunderstanding spread across his face.
The second shot rang out loud against the wide-open
Jules didn’t know what he was doing. Nothing made any sense and for a while now he had stopped trying to even figure life out. A gun. The bloody thing weighed so much more than they seemed to in the movies. And what’s worse, Jules was only vaguely aware of how to use the damn thing. For now it just sat there, a large dead weight on his hip and inside his coat. Coat, who knew
The streets were crowded in downtown
Jules was having a hard time with the entire situation. This was not something he ever pictured himself doing. Jules McCleary was a vice president of a major fashion company, not someone who would kill two others because of a situation he was blackmailed into. And yet what other choice did he really have? Better them than him, right? If Ken Morrison was killed the Golems might be exposed. The Golems. The situation would be better than if Ken Morrison isn’t killed. Jules McCleary would certainly be exposed then.
Jules shivered and wanted to vomit and curl up into a little ball all at the same time. A passing head of hair, salt and peppered dark and gray, found Jules about to pull a gun on an old lady. The Siren stopped himself when he found he was mumbling something about needing a drink. The street sign said 17th and Guadalupe, but it was Arturo’s Bakery and Café that drew Jules. A perfect hand reached out and opened the door and Jules walked into a room filled with a hundred different scents, each screaming warmth and broadcasting comfort.
* * *
“Why does this city have to be so damn big?” Old Sammy was talking to himself and he knew it. But he looked at George who was decked out in his black leather shield of a coat and knit stocking cap. As the human’s eyes found their way up to the Golem’s dark glasses, he noticed the intent stare fixed onto the doorway. “Expecting company?”
“It’d be too easy if he were to just walk in here.” The words, barely a mumble, weren’t exactly intended for human ears.
“Eh?”
“Nothing.”
Sammy shrugged off George’s generic cold demeanor and turned to reach for his coffee. While reaching though, his attention found a Siren in line at the counter.
“Jules?”
* * *
The skin crawled on the back of his neck as Jules swore he just heard his name called out. From his spot in the line, he turned and almost fainted at the sight that beheld him. Seated against the wall were Old Sammy and George Pruent. The Siren stopped his hand, the pistol’s rough grip brushed against a sole fingertip. That sole fingertip instead exuded that Siren cool and raised itself, signaling that Jules was “going to be a minute.”
“What do you suppose he’s doing here?” Sammy slid the question out of the corner of his mouth.
“You’re crippled friend probably sent him.” George yawned out his reply and reached for his coffee. It was very black, very bitter, and very fitting.
Outside he might have been the picture of cool, calm, and collected, but the Siren was barely able to give the server his order. The moments dripped by as coffee percolated and the room about him brimmed with chatter that seemed to buzz into Jules’ mind. They know. They saw my hand move. They saw the gun. My cover is blown. Damn it, don’t lose it now Jules. A cup of coffee was delivered and broke the near-insanity that had seized and surged through Jules like a heavy dosage of electricity. With java in hand, the Siren made his way to the table, his pistol weighing a metric ton on his hip. Not here. He couldn’t kill the two of them in a public place. That would be spelling Jules’ own doom. I must play this smart, must play it safe. With all the cool that he could muster, Jules sat down at the table. Come on now, I’ve got a lot of ground to cover, and that damn assassination could be tomorrow. These two have to die soon.
“I’m glad to finally find you two,” Jules quipped as he seated himself.
“Tell me you’ve got good news.” Sammy, despite the false elderly appearance of his greying hair, betrayed actual youth. Were George not such a stone, Jules thought he might have seen him wince at that.
“Tell me you’ve got a place to stay. I just got in this morning.” Jules sipped at his coffee. It might seem cliché, but a hotel slaying would give him plenty of time to dispose of the bodies. Jules McCleary commits double murder in a Texas Motel. The mental headline almost gagged him. It was in such bad taste and so frighteningly close to reality.
“It’s not up to your standards.” Jules and Sammy both seemed taken back that the Golem had even spoken.
“Are you saying I’m not invited?” One of the Perfect One’s eyebrows arched to emphasize the question.
“No, he’s trying to tell you that we are staying at the Motel 6 just out of town.”
“Oh.” A few seconds of uncomfortable silence settled onto the trio. Sammy tinkered with his coffee and Jules was busy picturing the remainder of the newspaper article that would surely haunt him. I’m going to have to flee to
“It’s a big damn city.”
“Are you sure this guy even showed up?”
“Yes.” Again, two pairs of slightly shocked eyes turned towards the Golem.
“How?”
George didn’t answer. From inside his coat he pulled out a newspaper. Squeezed onto the front page, and into a corner dedicated to news other than the recount in
“That’s him? You’re certain?” Jules didn’t know if the sign of proof was a relief or a bad thing. George didn’t even nod; cool as granite, he sipped his coffee.
Sweat covered Jules’ body as he continued to stare into the darkness of the room. It wasn’t large, but due to all the media in the area, the decision had been made that Jules staying with Sammy and George would just be easier. He could see their bodies barely illuminated by thin shafts of light that cut from the hall outside and through the curtains that never seemed to shut all the way. In his hand, the steel of the pistol was heavy and seemed oddly cold. Jules looked down at the black firearm, looked down at the key that would open a gate and send him on his way to safety. All he had to do was turn the key. All he had to do was kill two people. A finger wrapped about the trigger as the pistol was levelled off at a sleeping, unsuspecting shape. Click! Jules’ heart was bashing out a thousand beats per minute. Nothing had happened. He had pulled the trigger and the bloody thing just went click.
Images of a thousand TV shows and movies and what the guy who loaded the thing had done flowed through Jules’ mind. A shaky, trembling hand reached up and pulled back on the slide, but his slick fingers couldn’t mount the force to bring it all the way to the rear. Jules cursed and put the grip of the pistol between his knees and with both hands pried the slide as far back as it would go, a grunt of effort accompanied the click of the slide returning forward. One of the bodies, one of people sleeping moved, just tossing, but Jules wasn’t going to take any chances. A toss found the pistol landing beneath a couch pillow.
In a mental fury Jules got up. His fingers wove into his perfect hair, (tussled as it was), and he began a quick, jerky, pacing about the room. The bodies had long since settled down into silence before Jules noticed. He was simply too shaken to continue. His chest was visibly heaving, those thin shafts of light spilling through the curtain had turned the layer of sweat to a sheen over his skin, skin so perfect that it seemed fake. The Siren reached about in the near darkness and found a black silk shirt. He tossed it on, sans undershirt, and managed to stuff the heavy dark pistol into his pants waistline. Dress shoes were pulled on as well before the Siren disappeared out into the frosty
“I thought
“Huh?” He hadn’t noticed the cold, hadn’t noticed that his sweat had rapidly cooled and was torturing his skin. “Yeah…me too.” The conversation was trivial, over even before it started as Jules stared blankly at the back of a man composed of sinew and rawhide and wrapped in a parka and walking down the motel sidewalk with a cup of coffee in hand. His eyes stuck out to Jules, they were small, crow footed almost like a cowboy. But it didn’t matter. Jules shuffled down the sidewalk in the direction that the cowboy had come from; it seemed as good a direction as any in the numbed state of disarray that the Siren’s world had become.
* * *
In order to survive you, I must first survive myself. The words meant more now to Jules McCleary than perhaps any other ever had. The last nine days had taught Jules more about himself than perhaps he ever wanted to know. He learned just how close he could come to killing in cold blood. No, worse than killing in cold blood, killing to save him from something that might possibly happen. He had walked up to that edge, he had taken a good look down that path, he had held the gun, and he had looked down its barrel and saw what was going to become of him. He couldn’t do it. His fear of the Hatters’ Guild, of this Old World society that had the power to make him dance, had given him shears, shears that cut away the strings and left Jules McCleary as no one’s puppet. Instead he did what he knew what he must do deep down all along. He aided in the search. This wasn’t about Jules McCleary any longer. This wasn’t a Siren situation. This wasn’t a Golem fight. Holding that gun had rid Jules of any illusions he had had, and smeared the lines between races to the point where they needn’t even exist any longer. The way of the gun had turned Jules McCleary into a born-again.
Jules turned his drive away from the Hatters’ Guild to the situation at hand in
“With a needle in a haystack you at least have the advantage of knowing you’re looking for a needle.”
“Right…here we’re banging around blindly and hoping we find someone announcing on a street corner that he is being paid to kill a man.”
“You’ve got a gift for words.” The Golem had a gift for sarcasm. He was almost as dry as any Brit could hope to be.
“That means a lot coming from you George.”
The news hit CNN late. The Gore camp had finally conceded and tomorrow victory and concession speeches would be given from respective parties. Four individuals in
Old Sammy caught the news report first. He’d made it a habit of keeping CNN on at all times, and it finally paid off.
“Get up! Right now. We don’t have time to lose.”
“Sammy, you’re age is showing.”
“Damn it George, I don’t care. Gore is conceding today. We have to find out where Bush’s speech is going to be and get there.”
“I’m up.”
“Jules!”
“Bloody hell Sammy. I have to make myself up. I can’t go out into public otherwise.”
“I don’t think the ladies’ll care man.”
“It’s not about the ladies, Sammy. It’s about mankind. You forget, if we don’t powder and put in contacts and a great many other tricks that we’ve acquired over the past hundreds of years we stick out. In a crowd, eyes would just be drawn to us. Waldo has it easy. They’ll be cameras there. Heaven forbid one scans the audience and pulls me out.”
“Save your speeches then and put your damn powder on. I’ll start the car.” Sammy tossed his coat on and grabbed the keys to the rental car. Outside it was crisp, cool, but the sun was up. Sammy would always remember that it was a Wednesday. Wrapped in his own condensation he weaved in between parked cars and found theirs. The interior was cold but Sammy was too alive to realize it. He slammed the key into the ignition, starting the motor and gunning the heat out of habit. A quick spin of the radio dial revealed the news during this commercial break and on that morning show. It was really happening.
Sammy waited in the car for the Golem and the Siren; he waited, but not well. His fingers drummed at the steering wheel, glanced at and contemplated sounding the horn, and changed the radio station at least two dozen times before he saw the door open and the Golem and Siren broke into the morning air. The two moved in a huddled collective, apparently not in as much a rush as their human counterpart.
“Where to?” Jules said as he slid into the back seat. It had been established that since George was paying for the car he rode shotgun.
“The Capitol Complex. Bush’ll speak from there.”
“Any time when?”
“My guess is it’ll be before
“Good, swing by McDonalds. I’d kill for an Egg McMuffin right now.”
* * *
Old Sammy wasn’t the only one who had taken to the habit of sleeping with the 24-hour news stations on. The man who’d taken to calling himself Gabriel had awoken to the news at around five that morning. Since then, he’d taken his time carefully inspecting every aspect of his operation. Maps were poured over again, for an already countless time. Gabriel knew the routes of the security guards about the John H. Regan building by heart. He’d even snuck into it a time or two disguised as a janitor. His rifle was cleaned already, but it was inspected with a cotton swab and then oiled. Each round was looked over with a magnifying glass, any with the slightest dings or dents or cracks were discarded. Gabriel would settle for nothing less than perfection.
The news rolled across the television behind him and announced that Bush would be addressing the nation from the steps of the Capitol building in
George, Sammy, and Jules arrived on the scene at
“So now what?” Sammy asked the Golem and the Siren as they stood near the trunk of the car.
“He’s using a rifle, so we have to find any place that a rifle could be shot from and…find anyone with a rifle…” George just stopped, as from behind his dark sunglasses white eyes took in the various buildings that seemed to form a ring about the rolling green lawn, which sprawled in front of the
“There’s about a million places he could shoot from. Hell, he could be in that crowd somewhere.”
His janitor jumpsuit gave everyone reason to not pay attention to him. The eyes of the average American, even the eyes of an inquisitive American, just looked over the servant class, but for Gabriel that was the intended reaction. He casually pushed a cart down the halls of the John H. Reagan building as he made his way towards a previously decided upon room. He knew he wanted one from the center, it would make it that much harder for the shot to be zeroed in on. His small, crow footed eyes didn’t drift nervously down to the cart; they didn’t look to where his rifle was hidden. His hands weren’t sweating, and his heart was beating at a racehorse pace. Inderal. It almost wasn’t fair.
Gabriel wasn’t thinking about fair or not as he pried open the door into the office. His sinewy neck strained as he leaned his head through the doors and made sure that the room was unoccupied. A quick check of his digital Timex showed him it was
“…And the tiny ship was tossed, yes the tiny ship was tossed…” The sound of his own voice shocked him a bit, though he didn’t jump, no, the soon to be assassin was as calm as Death. His rifle and firing blanket were both lain out on the table just before the window. A crude ledge of books had been stacked up to serve as a rest for the rifle, a rest that the long, blackened weapon was set on.
* * *
“Damn it.” Sammy cursed as he turned about in a small circle just on the fringe of the crowd. “Where the hell could he be?” Jules and George had both split off and were looking about the buildings that rung the lawn about the Capitol and sent Sammy here to scan the crowed, in the event that the assassin had changed that part of the plan. Nothing had changed. Sammy didn’t know how he knew, but he did. Deep down inside he could feel it, feel it draw his eyes to the various windows and rooftops as his futile search wore down in the final minutes before the speech was to start. An announcer stepped up to the microphone on the stage and announced to all that “Ladies and gentlemen, the 43rd President of the
* * *
With the rifle tucked into his shoulder, Gabriel’s pulse sounded that much louder, his breathing amplified. He had the best seat in the house as he lay across the desk and peered through the scope of the rifle. Beyond him, beyond the glass, and looking just as he had in the pictures, stood, beaming like a father, Ken Morrison.
A slight pivot on his elbows set the remainder of the scene before Gabriel. He’d been hesitant about looking at the sniper teams, he didn’t know how, but people seemed to know when you were looking at them. It was simply too great of a risk.
Hard and smooth, like wind-cleaved granite, Gabriel returned the rifle to Ken Morrison, pausing momentarily on the newly announced President Elect. Morrison had gotten dressed up today, a nice, very black, very business-like suit, and a tie that was not too festive, but not considerably conservative either. He’d shaved this morning.
Gabriel had checked twice. His heart rate, that thumping that seemed so loud he could almost hear it, was beating at a steady, and conservative, 45 beats per minute. His breathing was slow and shallow; Gabriel barely noticed the sight picture change as he inhaled.
Screams accompanied the spray of red. Sammy spun about in a circle, frantic, his eyes shot to where he thought the sound had come from. It had been so far away.
The race had begun. In a world of fog, Gabriel’s hand reached back, and wrapped about the charging handle.
Thump.
The bolt clicked back and the expended brass flipped end of over end, seemingly in slow motion. It was all too easy. The bolt clicked soundly forward, Gabriel knew by the feel that the round was seated perfectly. His body adjusted about the rifle, finding itself relaxed, and looked into the scope for that second shot.
Thump.
The scene on the other side of the rifle’s scope was a mad house. The Secret Service Men seemed to be moving in slow motion. Each of their rapid strides seemed to be churning water as Gabriel’s hand found the trigger. Killing a man is easy. Killing two men, therein lies the challenge.
Thump. Crack!
Horror rode in the wake of the second bullet. It missed and struck the podium below the President Elect’s feet. The scene had exploded into a mass of fury before Ken Morrison’s body had struck the ground. Secret Service agents were running this way and that, yelling orders and brandishing an assortment of weapons. From several rooftops long-rifle teams turned to hone in on the John H. Reagan building and a shot rang out, shattering a third floor window.
The round grazed the shoulder of the assassin as he had been reaching back to chamber a third shot of his own. It burned like Hell, and gritting his teeth against the pain, he managed the bolt forward. But what he saw through the rifle’s scope proved the shot pointless. Bush was gone, the scene was cleared, and now it was time for Gabriel to escape to a life of riches. He dropped the rifle where it lay and headed for the door. He didn’t even notice his hand clutching at his shoulder, stemming the blood from the long, deep bullet gash.
His head was spinning faster than his body would allow him to move, and it was seriously hampering Gabriel’s progress down the office hall that just seemed to keep getting longer and longer. His heart tried as hard as it could to pump faster, to supply oxygen to all of his muscles, to aid in his escape. It simply couldn’t, the beta-blocker that had allowed the second shot had ruined any thought of escape. Getting shot was not part of the plan.
* * *
“Start the car now.” George didn’t raise his voice as the three of them clamored into the vehicle. They’d agreed to meet here just in case something like this had happened. Sammy slammed the thing in reverse and they all knew that it was time to flee the scene. They all knew that the world had just been changed, and only tomorrow would tell just how much.
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