Hunter Read online

  Andrew Macdonald

  HUNTER

  I

  As he pulled into the parking slot near the edge of the huge, asphalt lot an empty beer can crunched under one of the front wheels of the car. He turned off his lights and surveyed the area. Yes, this was a good spot; he had a clear view of each automobile turning from the lone entrance driveway into the lot, where it had to slow almost to a stop under the bright, mercury-vapor lamp there, and he also was well situated for seeing which row of the lot each vehicle eventually turned into. He pulled his coat more snugly around his neck, turned the radio dial until he found an FM station which was broadcasting his favorite Schubert sonata, and settled down to wait.

  It was nearly 20 minutes before he spotted what he was looking for. A brown sports van barely slowed as it came bouncing up the entrance ramp. Its tires squealed as it made the turn at the top. For a single instant the faces of the two occupants were visible to Oscar: the driver, a mulatto with a bushy Afro, and the woman beside him, dark haired and with a rather broad nose, but still clearly White.

  The van’s tall antenna with the orange ping-pong ball on top made it easy for him to follow the course of the vehicle with his eyes after it turned into the fourth lane down from where he was parked. Oscar waited until the van stopped, then he started his engine and swung out of his parking space, following the route taken by the other vehicle. He wanted another look at the couple before they went into the supermarket, just to be certain. Then he would choose another parking slot, as near the van as possible, and wait for them to return.

  As he rolled cautiously along the asphalt between the two lines of parked cars, he did not see the couple in his headlights until he was nearly opposite their van. They were both standing near the passenger side of their vehicle, apparently arguing about something.

  A sudden, reckless impulse struck Oscar: why not do it now, instead of waiting for them to go into the store and then come back? There were no other cars moving in the lane and no other pedestrians in sight, except at the far end, near the store entrance. Unfortunately, though, the brown van and the couple were on his right, and his passenger-side window was rolled up. It seemed to him too awkward to have to lean across the seat and roll the window down while they were watching.

  Would he be able to turn his car around and drive back up the lane before anyone else came or before the couple moved? Perhaps he should get out of the car now and hit them on foot. His palms became sweaty, and he felt his muscles tighten as the possibilities flashed through his mind with lightning speed.

  Just as he came fully abreast of the van he spotted a vacant slot three cars down, also on the right. Good! He would pull in there. If no one else had appeared he would back out and move down the lane in the opposite direction, with the van on his left this time.

  In the cold night air the perspiration rolled down his cheeks in rivulets as he fought to calm his nerves. It was always this way just before an operation. Even back in ‘Nam, every time he’d had to take his F4 up on a run through that deadly North Vietnamese antiaircraft fire, he’d had to fight this jittery, sweaty feeling. Once he was in the thick of things, the fear disappeared; it was just before that was always the bad time — the time when it was still possible to back out.

  His grip tightened convulsively on the steering wheel, and the motion of the car became jerky as he maneuvered into the parking space. An instant glance to the rear, and then he put his vehicle into reverse and backed it quickly around.

  In another five seconds he was opposite the couple again. He stopped the car with a jerk, inadvertently killing the engine. Damn! And in the rearview mirror he saw a fat woman, two bags of groceries in her arms and a small child trailing her, walking down the lane, about 60 yards away. Both the bushy-haired mulatto and his rather dumpy, pasty-faced female companion stopped talking and turned to look directly at him. They were about eight feet from his open window.

  An instant calm fell over Oscar, the expected calm for which he had been waiting. With a smooth motion, neither too hurried nor too slow but precise and deliberate, he lifted the rifle from beneath the blanket on the seat beside him, raised it to his shoulder, and, left elbow braced against the door, carefully squeezed off two shots.

  The ear-shattering reports echoed through the huge lot, but Oscar remained calm as he put the rifle down, restarted his engine, and accelerated smoothly toward the exit ramp. As he turned at the end of the lane, he paused to glance back toward the van. The mulatto’s body was sprawled out into the roadway; the woman apparently had fallen backward, beside the van, and was not visible. Both shots had been head shots, and Oscar was quite certain both the man and the woman were dead. He had seen their skulls literally explode into showers of bone fragments, brain tissue, and blood as the high-velocity projectiles struck them.

  The icy calm stayed with Oscar all the way home. Not until he had put the car in the garage, entered the house, and taken off his coat did it give way to the euphoria he always felt afterward. He whistled contentedly to himself as he gave his rifle a quick cleaning and then returned to the garage to change his license plates. It took him only two minutes to remove the special plates and replace them with his regular ones.

  He carefully checked the adhesive-backed plastic letters and numerals which he had pressed onto the flattened plates. He had been worried about the adhesive not holding the thick plastic pieces to the metal, especially in this cold weather. He pried gently at the edge of a letter with the blade of his pocket knife. The adhesive resisted, then gradually yielded, so that he was able to work the blade between the plastic and the metal and, with a few seconds of effort, peel the entire letter loose. That was reassuring, but he was still mindful of the time, a few days ago, when he had arrived at home and found a number missing from the plate altogether! After that he had done some experimenting with different adhesives. It took him nearly 20 minutes to peel loose all of the plastic pieces and rearrange them into a new pattern this time, but he did not begrudge the extra effort required.

  How fortunate, he thought, as he turned out the garage light, that his automobile was such a common model. There must be 10,000 tan Ford sedans practically indistinguishable from his in the Washington metropolitan area. Still, he was pressing his luck to keep using the same modus operandi. Six times in a little over three weeks — 22 days to be exact — with the same car, the same rifle, the same routine, just different parking lots and different license numbers, was really too much, he thought to himself.

  But more than two weeks ago he had made up his mind that he would not vary his style until the news media broke their silence on the killings. There had been a big news splash after the first double shooting, three weeks ago. “Interracial couple gunned down in parking lot,” the Washington Post headline had screamed, and the other media also had stressed the fact that the two victims were a Black male and a White female, even though the newsmen had no way of knowing then that the gunman had a racial motive. The naughtiness of the notion that he might have apparently was too titillating for them to resist.

  When the second double killing came four days later, it had been mentioned briefly on the inside pages of the Post and then quietly dropped. The third, fourth, and fifth pairs of shootings had been greeted with total media silence. The reason was clear: at some time between the second and third shootings it had dawned on the media people that the killings were racially motivated, and the realization frightened them. They didn’t want to encourage any would-be imitators, or even give hope to a great many Americans who would cheer anyone who might be going around picking off racially mixed couples.

  By now the bastards really must be bursting at the seams trying to keep the lid on this, Oscar thought, grinning. They couldn’t hold out much longer. He had a strong hunch, appr
oaching certainty, that tonight’s work would crack them wide open.

  In the passageway between the garage and the house Oscar hesitated. He had some paperwork in the study to finish, if he were to have the new proposal ready in time for his meeting with Colonel Ericsson Thursday. But he couldn’t stomach the idea of any more paperwork tonight, and it already was a bit late for calling Adelaide. He decided to put in a couple of hours in the shop before bedtime. Happy with his decision, he snapped his fingers and began whistling again as he turned down the stairs to the cellar.

  Oscar Yeager was a consulting engineer by profession, a tinkerer and occasional inventor by inclination. After leaving the Air Force in 1976, he had gone back to school and earned graduate degrees in both electrical engineering and computer science. He had begun hiring out as a consultant even while finishing his graduate work at the University of Colorado. After that he had set up shop in the San Francisco area and, through an Air Force acquaintance from his Vietnam days, now a contract officer in the Pentagon, had acquired a series of design contracts. It was these contracts which had led him to move to Washington four years ago.

  Actually, Oscar didn’t have to work at all; the royalties coming in on one of his antenna patents were quite sufficient to meet his rather modest needs. He worked, not so much because he was eager to pile up more money in the bank, but because he thought it a good idea to keep his hand in. Furthermore, the extra income made it possible for him gradually to increase his stock of laboratory equipment, which was damned expensive. Anyway, the work fitted in nicely with his own tinkering inclinations, he did it all at home on his own schedule, and he almost never spent more than 20 hours a week at it.

  Oscar moved easily between the racks of electronic equipment, carefully avoiding tripping over interconnecting cables, as he made his way to the corner where the computer quietly hummed and chittered to itself. He glanced at the sheaf of fanfold paper which the printer slowly had been disgorging all evening and noted with satisfaction that the calculations for the new antenna system were nearly finished. If things continued to go well, he just might have all the work done for which he was seeking another Air Force contract even before the contract was signed Thursday.

  He wouldn’t tell Ericsson that, of course. He would dribble out results over the next six months. That would keep the Air Force happy and give Oscar plenty of opportunity to justify expenses to pay for the new spectrum analyzer he wanted.

  If it weren’t for the damned paper shuffling, this government contract work would be ideal, Oscar reflected. But every contract required filling out literally hundreds of pages of absolutely asinine forms, for which the instructions were maddeningly obtuse. What percentage of his suppliers and subcontractors during the past three years were Blacks? the government wanted to know. How many were Spanish surnamed? How many were American Indians, Asiatics, or Aleutian Islanders? Were his percentages in each of the above cases at least equal to the percentages of the corresponding minorities in the work force in the county or municipality where the contract work was performed? Had he ever knowingly used contract funds to purchase supplies from a company not in compliance with regulations 148 c.(4) or 156 a.(1) of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission? If so, why? Give full particulars. And on and on and on.

  And the bastards actually checked all the answers! Once Oscar had tried to shortcut the paper work by scrawling “not applicable” across a whole page of questions which asked what percentage of the contractor’s advertising budget went to media oriented specifically toward minority markets, whether the pictorial or photographic material used in the contractor’s advertising depicted the contractor’s employees/customers as racially mixed (and if not, why not?), and the like.

  The forms came back to him with an eight-page letter from one of the Pentagon’s regiment of Equal Opportunity compliance officers, full of unctuous cant about the essential nature of the government’s program for “racial justice” and demanding that each question be answered fully. Oscar finally had had to submit copies of his itemized balance sheets to convince the sanctimonious oaf that he did not advertise and had neither employees nor customers and could not, therefore, be expected to explain why his nonexistent illustrated advertisements did not show the required racial mix of smiling Black, Brown, Oriental, and White faces among his “employees/customers.”

  He felt his temper rising as he remembered the paper work still facing him on the new contract. Well, perhaps he could coax Adelaide into doing all of it tomorrow evening. He put the thought of paper work out of his mind and flipped on the light in the shop. Oscar had converted his entire basement, originally consisting of two bedrooms, a recreation room, and a bath, to his special needs.

  The computer and the electronics laboratory were in the recreation room, a chemical laboratory was in one of the bedrooms, a small but well-equipped machine shop was in the other, and the bathroom doubled as a photographic darkroom. Altogether he had more than half a million dollars worth of modern scientific instruments and tools at his disposal, and they served him well, both at work and play, with the border between the two types of activity often becoming quite fuzzy.

  Tonight, for example, he intended to put the finishing touches on a project that had nothing to do with his Air Force contract work or with any other remunerative enterprise. And yet this was hardly a plaything, Oscar thought as he opened a cabinet and took out a tubular, metal device, carefully examining the threaded portion in one end. Satisfied, he put the device on a work table beside the smaller of his two precision metalworking lathes.

  He reached into a drawer in the lower portion of the cabinet and removed an object wrapped in an oily rag. Discarding the rag, Oscar held a new, .22 caliber semiautomatic pistol with a long, cylindrical barrel in his hand. He quickly and expertly disassembled the pistol, returning everything but the barrel to the drawer.

  An hour and a half later Oscar grinned with satisfaction as he blew away the last of the metal chips with an air hose and then screwed the tubular device smoothly onto the new threads he had just turned on the outside of the pistol barrel: a perfect fit! The threaded end of the aluminum-alloy tube snugged up tightly against the freshly cut shoulder on the steel barrel as the ball detent clicked into place. He could see no indication of misalignment between the barrel and the silencer when he sighted carefully down the bore. Now for the test.

  Oscar reassembled and loaded the pistol and walked back into the electronics lab. A touch on a button concealed above the door frame caused a four-foot-wide section of the far wall to swing smoothly out at a right angle. Flipping a switch in the exposed recess turned on a floodlight at the far end of a long, horizontal tunnel lined with sections of 30-inch sewer pipe. Oscar ran a target down the wire to the end of the tunnel and seated himself comfortably beside the spotting scope at the firing bench. This basement target range, which he had built himself, was known only to him. With the concealed door to the recess closed behind him, he could fire even the largest of his rifles without a sound being heard in the house above him — or in his unsuspecting neighbor’s yard, beneath which the bullets impacted in the target area.

  Tonight, however, noise was no problem, and he left the door open. He squeezed off ten rounds, each one making a sound about like a champagne bottle being uncorked, but not half so loud. The shots were grouped nicely inside a three-inch circle on the target, which was almost as well as he had been able to do before modifying the pistol. Oscar was satisfied; now he could change his modus operandi.

  II

  Last night’s shootings had been too late to make the morning paper, but the television news was full of them as Oscar fixed breakfast. As he had guessed they would, the masters of the media finally had decided to lift the curtain of silence with which they heretofore had shrouded his nocturnal parking-lot activities. The newscaster excitedly barked out the details: “…12 known victims of a mad killer… apparent racial motivation for the shootings… more than 200 FBI agents working on the case for the
last two weeks… a tall, blond man sought as a suspect….”

  At this last item Oscar became thoughtful. So someone had gotten a glimpse of him; it must have been the fourth shooting, when he had left his car and fired from a standing position. He strolled into the bathroom and looked searchingly at his reflection in the mirror: the deep-set gray eyes; the craggy lines of jutting nose and chin; the yellow stubble on his broad, heavy jaw; the somewhat oversized ears; the thin scar running diagonally across his left cheek, the consequence of a skiing accident some years ago; the high, smooth forehead beneath his uncombed, golden-blond hair. It was an easy face to spot in a crowd, unfortunately.

  Well, it was almost certain that no one had gotten a clear view of his face, or there would have been more of a description, probably even an artist’s sketch. Still, he would have to be much more careful in the future. He had been almost deliberately reckless the first few times. Defiance of the authorities had been as much a motive as the abhorrence he felt for those selected as targets. There had been another motive too, he reflected, and it had weighed at least as much as the others: the therapeutic motive, the need to purge himself of the spiritual malaise which had been afflicting him increasingly in the last few years.

  How had that begun? Oscar tried to remember. Was it after he moved to Washington, or had it started earlier? Probably earlier; he thought he could trace it all the way back to Vietnam. He just became much more aware of it in Washington.

  In Vietnam it was basically the Vietnamese which had bothered him. He had arrived there with no particular prejudices, but he quickly acquired a strong distaste for Vietnamese of both sexes and all ages. He didn’t like their looks, their smell, their values, their behavior, or their company. He couldn’t see that it made the slightest difference whether they were ruled by a gang of communist gooks in Hanoi or a gang of capitalist gooks in Saigon. He would have been just as happy if the South Vietnamese and the North Vietnamese had been left alone to kill each other indefinitely.