The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (58 page)

She said, “If you had been told to shoot Mr. Guinness that day, could you have done it?”

Keith answered without hesitation. “Yes.”

She could see he believed it.

She said, “So this woman, April Ozga . . . Did you ever see her again?”

Yes. I went to her house a couple days later. That was as long as I could make myself wait. I knew it was wrong. Maybe not against department policy, technically, since with Guinness dead the case was closed, so I didn’t have to worry about tainting a witness or anything like that. But I knew going to see her was . . . just wrong. But I couldn’t help myself.

The address she’d given us was in Bay Heights. I went there on a Saturday, figuring she’d be home, but when I found the address I started to worry. It was a house, not an apartment. A nice house too, way nicer than a woman in her mid-twenties should be able to afford. I started to worry that maybe she was married even though she didn’t wear a ring. I realized then I didn’t actually know anything about her. She could be a lesbian, for God’s sake. If she wasn’t, she pretty much had to have a boyfriend, as beautiful as she was. But I got out of my car anyway and walked up to the door. It seemed to take forever for someone to answer when I rang the bell.

The man who did looked old enough to be her father. He said, “Yes?”

I said, “Hi. I’m Officer O’Donnell, Metro-Dade Police. Is April Ozga here?”

“Oh. Sure. Come in. Is everything all right?”

“Yes,” I said, stepping in. The living room was filled with furniture that looked like it was pretty old. That is to say, it wasn’t new and expensive stuff like a young person with money might buy, or really beat-up hand-me-downs like you’d expect for a young person who blew everything they had on the mortgage. I saw some family photos on the walls. They included pictures of this guy who’d let me in, looking younger, and a couple of dark-haired girls. One of them looked like she might have been April at about ten or twelve years old.

The man said, “You’re here about Thursday.”

I said, “Yes.”

“Thank God she’s all right.”

“Yes.”

“Sit down. I’ll go get her.”

I nodded, although I wasn’t going to sit down—I was too nervous. But a woman came in just as the man turned to leave the room. She had to be his wife, April’s mother. He explained to her who I was, then went as far as the bottom of the steps to yell April’s name up them. It was so much like I remembered from when I was a teenager, going to pick up dates, I almost laughed. Her mother came over to me and gripped my hand. She didn’t shake it, she just held it with both of hers and gazed into my eyes with a look that said my being there reminded her of how scared she’d been on Thursday.

She said, “Nothing’s wrong, is it?”

I said, “No. Everything’s fine.”

She offered me something to eat or drink. In between the words I heard footsteps on the stairs. I turned toward them and watched April come into the room. Watched her pause, recognizing me.

Her father said, “This policeman’s here to see you.”

I said, “Keith O’Donnell.”

April said, “Yes, I remember.” She came toward me slowly, stopped a fair distance away.

Her parents turned to look at me then. Everybody stood there, waiting for me to say something.

I said, “How have you been?”

April said, “Fine. All right, I guess.”

“I wanted to . . . see how you’re doing.”

There was a moment’s pause. Then her mother said, “That’s nice. It’s nice to see the police know she might be, you know,
affected
by what she went through.”

Her father said, “Sit down. You two can talk.”

April said, “Let’s talk outside. We can go for a walk.”

She headed for the door. Her mother made these cooing noises, encouraging us to stay, but her father said, “No, no. It’s all right. Give her some privacy.”

I nodded and smiled to them both and followed April outside.

She started up the sidewalk and I fell into step beside her, not knowing what to say. After a moment she said, “They mean well but . . .”

“They’re your parents?”

“Yeah. I had to move back in with them. I had an apartment, but my roommate lost her job. She couldn’t pay the rent, so she moved out. I couldn’t manage on my own, so I had to move back here.”

“Well, maybe it’s for the best. This way you weren’t living alone when Thursday happened. It’s good to be able to go home to someone who cares about you after something like that. Even a boyfriend wouldn’t have been the same if you don’t live with him.”

“I don’t have a boyfriend right now.”

I didn’t say anything, pleased as hell with myself for getting that information out of her so cleverly.

She made a sound. I looked over and saw she was crying.

“Oh!” I said. “I’m sorry. I should have been more sensitive. You know the department has victim’s advocates you could talk to. They could help you work through this.”

She looked over at me, wiping her eyes. “I thought that’s what you were.”

“No, I’m a police sniper. I was there that day. I saw you through my rifle scope.”

At the time I couldn’t read her expression, but now I see that was the moment she realized what I was doing there.

I said, “Does that make you feel any better? To know I was watching over you?”

She didn’t answer for a moment. Finally she said, “That day is the scaredest I’ve ever been. I actually peed myself.”

“I’ve done that lots of times.”

She looked at me again, trying to see if I was kidding.

“Seriously. When I was in the Marines. You get set up on a target and sometimes you can’t move. I mean you can’t move at all or someone will shoot you. If you really gotta go, you just go.”

We walked in silence for a while.

Then she said, “Did you see the whole thing? Thursday?”

“Not the beginning. We got there at nine-ten.”

“But you saw the end?”

“No. The other sniper was on station then. I’d just stepped out into the hall.”

“I saw him do it. Kill himself, I mean. I didn’t see him shoot Martin but I saw him put the gun in his mouth and pull the trigger. All that blood. I was looking at him then. I saw the look in his eyes right before he did it. He realized he didn’t have a choice.”

“He had a choice. Lots of choices. He made a couple of bad ones.”

She didn’t say anything.

I said, “I’m glad you’re all right.”

She said, “Thanks.”

“We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

“What should we talk about?”

“Anything you want.”

Again, I didn’t think of it then, but right there she could have turned around and gone home. She could have told me to get lost, told me what a scumbag I was for coming around like this, so soon after what happened. But she didn’t. We kept walking, and talking. We walked around the block five times.

“We started dating.”

From his expression and his tone of voice, Barbara knew the answer to her next question. But she asked it anyway. “Are you still seeing each other?”

“No.”

“When did you stop?”

“A couple weeks ago.”

She nodded, watching him. The sadness in his eyes was the first real emotion she’d seen from him. It wasn’t much, at that, but he obviously wasn’t very expressive. Most people fidgeted at least a little bit when describing stressful situations they’d been through, maybe tapping one foot or wringing their hands, but Keith had just sat there so far. Captain Smith said snipers needed to be able to remain perfectly still for long periods of time. They also had to be intelligent and observant and extraordinarily patient. Keith seemed to have all those attributes.

She said, “So around this time, did you keep having trouble concentrating at work?”

“Yes. Sort of.”

“What do you mean?”

“I, uh, I started seeing targets differently.”

My first sniping assignment after the Guinness case was providing cover for an undercover narcotics officer. He was going to make a buy off a drug dealer in West Miami, back in this industrial area. I was set up on the third floor of an old factory 175 yards away. This was like eleven o’clock at night. Dean was there with me, sweeping the area with night-vision binoculars, but I had my regular scope. The buy was supposed to happen in an open space that was lit with streetlights. I could see just fine. I could see the dealer. He was there before our guy, standing there waiting around. Dean and I joked about that. This guy was supposed to be a big shot, that’s why Narcotics targeted him, but big shots don’t show up early and then stand around waiting. They sure don’t stand around lit up like that, so anyone can see them. We figured this guy was either a small fry who’d been sent there by his boss or he’d just recently jumped up the ranks. If he’d been promoted, at this rate he wasn’t going to stay on top very long.

Dean and I both had headsets on. We were listening to the task force we’d been loaned to arguing about whether they could send their guy out to meet the dealer early without looking suspicious. It was while I was waiting for them to make up their minds that I started noticing things about the dealer. He didn’t look nervous exactly, but he looked, you know . . . uncertain. Like he really was some low-level guy who wasn’t sure what he was doing yet. I could see his expression clear as day. It made me think of April and the look on her face a couple weeks before.

It bothered me. It
worried
me. I felt like I could feel how vulnerable this guy was, standing there not knowing I had him in my sights. Snipers can’t afford to do that. They make sure you don’t think that way when you’re in school. That’s why they have you put your sights on real people sometimes, not just bull’s-eyes. I never had a problem with it before. In Iraq most of the targets I took out didn’t know I was there, and some of them were unarmed. I watched some of them for a long time, hours maybe, waiting to get the right shot. I watched one guy for days. That whole time, with all of them, they looked like they were so close I might have been standing right next to them. You get to know somebody’s habits when you watch them like that. You see their mannerisms, you get to know their personalities to some degree. And the whole time you have their life in your hands, right up until the moment when you take it. But it never bothered me.

It was bothering me now. I watched the dealer look up and down the road between the buildings, cross his arms and uncross them, lick his lips and then lick them again like his mouth was dry. I told myself to get over it. This guy was a criminal. He was there to sell drugs. He probably had a gun tucked in his waistband under his shirt. But it didn’t matter. I could feel the power I had over him and it gave me a weird sort of itch between my shoulder blades.

Maybe it didn’t help that the task force was arguing about whether this might be a trap. The dealer looked so clueless, they thought he might be some pissant whose bosses sent him out there as bait. Dean was checking every alley mouth and window for signs of an ambush, but he didn’t see any. Still, we agreed I had to be ready to drop this guy in a heartbeat.

So I kept the crosshairs trained on him. The task force finally decided to send their man out, so I listened to the supervisor giving him last-minute instructions. I listened with half an ear, since now I was thinking about April’s parents, the look in her mother’s eyes when the sight of me made her remember how scared she’d been for April. I wondered if somebody somewhere was worrying about this dealer. I wondered if he had any kids. When I tried to imagine pulling the trigger on him, it made me feel sort of weak and sick.

It turns out I never had to take the shot. The undercover went out there and made the buy and there wasn’t any trouble. The dealer never pulled a gun and no one else ever came out of the shadows. And we got the whole conversation on tape. The task force was happy. I wasn’t. I was relieved I didn’t have to shoot the guy, and when I realized that, I was scared.

Over the next six months, I had I don’t know how many other sniping assignments. I don’t get that many. It must have been June before I had someone in my sights again. During that time I was mostly providing cover for raids on crack houses, watching the windows while the team went in the front door. A couple of times I saw suspects come out windows and make a break for it, but none of them started shooting at the team, so I didn’t have to take them out. I could have done it, though. I’m sure of that. I’d worry about it while I was sitting there staring at the house—I’d worry that I would start to worry, and that would get me going—but when someone popped out a window I snapped into focus. I’m sure I wouldn’t have hesitated if any of them had pulled a gun. I’m sure of it now and I was sure of it then too, and that made me feel better, since I started to think that if it was a different story shooting someone who was shooting at my guys, then I probably could have shot that dealer after all, since that’s the only reason I would have been told to. At least that’s how I figured it. After a while I changed my mind, or realized I was wrong in the first place. The problem wasn’t that I couldn’t shoot a target unless they were dangerous, it was watching their every move that bothered me, getting to know them, and then putting a bullet through their head.

By September I wasn’t sure I could do that anymore.

Barbara said, “Did you tell anyone?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Keith shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Finally, some sign they were getting somewhere.

“Well,” he said, “like I said, I didn’t really think it was a problem until September. Probably late September. That’s only, what, five, six weeks ago.”

“But those were five or six weeks you weren’t sure you could do your job.”

“Well, I only got like three assignments during that time.”

“Still, what if you’d found yourself in a situation where you were told to take the shot? Did you have a plan for that?”

“No.”

“So what happened yesterday . . .”

“That wasn’t planned.”

She didn’t say anything, watching him.

Eventually the silence became too much for him. He said, “Most of those weeks were when things were going bad with April. That’s part of this. I don’t know how, but . . .”