Heat Lightning

After a last look around, he pulled off the reflective strap and stuffed it in a pocket. When he did that, he vanished. He was gone; he was part of the fabric of the night.
    Across from the courthouse, just downhill, a metal spire pushed up from a vest-pocket park, illuminated by spotlights. Ten-foot granite slabs anchored the foot of the needle. On the slabs were more bronze plaques, with the names of the local boys who didn’t make it back from all the wars fought since Stillwater was built. A blank plaque awaited names from Iraq and Afghanistan.
    The shooter slipped across the street, to the edge of the memorial. The brilliant spotlights made the nearby shadows even darker. He disappeared into one of them, like an ink drop falling into a coal cellar. Before he went, he pulled back the sleeve of the running suit and checked the luminous dial of his combat watch.
    If Sanderson stuck to his routine—or the dog’s routine, anyway— he’d walk down the west side of Third Street sometime in the next ten minutes. Big German shepherd. Shame about the dog.
     
 
CHUCK UTECHT had been the first man on the controller’s list. He’d been a smooth white egg of a man, whose insides, when he cracked, flowed out like a yellow yolk. He’d given up three names. He’d given them up easily.
    “I only did one bad thing in my life,” he cried. “I’ve been making up for it ever since.”
    His final words had been “I’m sorry,” not for what he’d done, but because he knew what was coming and had peed his pants.
    The scout could extract only so much information from a man who accepted his own execution, who seemed to believe that he deserved it. They had not been in a place where the scout could use pliers or knives or ropes or electricity or waterboards. All he had was the threat of death, and Utecht had closed his eyes and had begun mumbling through a prayer. The scout had seen the resignation; he looked at the shooter and nodded.
    The shooter shot him twice in the back of the head, halfway through the prayer.
    Now he waited for Sanderson and the dog.
    They needed two more names.
    The scout said in the shooter’s ear, “He’s coming.”
     
 
BOBBY SANDERSON strolled down Third Street with the dog on the end of its lead, a familiar nighttime sight. The dog was as regular as a quartz watch: took a small dump at eight o’clock in the morning, and a big one at eleven o’clock at night. If it wasn’t out on the street, it’d be somewhere in the yard, and Sanderson would step in it the next day, sure as God made little green apples. So, twice a day, they were on the street.
    Sanderson was preoccupied with an argument he’d had with his girlfriend. Or maybe not an argument, but he didn’t know exactly what else you could call it. She didn’t want him out at night; not for a while. Not until they found out whether something was going on.
    “If you’re scared enough that you have meetings, then you ought to be scared enough to stay inside at night,” she’d said. She’d been in the kitchen, drying the dishes with an old square of unbleached muslin. She smelled of dishwashing liquid and pork chop grease.
    “You know what happens with the dog if he don’t get his walk,” Sanderson said. “Besides, who’s going to mess with Mike?”
    But before he’d gone, he’d stepped back to the bedroom, as though he’d forgotten something, had taken the .38 out of a bedroom bureau and slipped it into his pocket. He was not the kind of guy to be pushed. If somebody pushed, he’d push back, twice as hard.
    Sanderson was fifty-nine, five-six, a hundred and sixty pounds. A short man, with a short-man complex. You don’t fuck with me. You don’t fuck with the Man.
    He thought like that.
    He thought like a TV show.
     
 
THE SHOOTER was waiting behind a rampart of limestone blocks next to the monument. Not tense, not anything—not thinking, just waiting, like a rock, or a stump, or a loaded bullet. Waiting . . . Then two words in his ear: “He’s coming.”
    He heard first the click of the dog’s toenails on the sidewalk. The animal probably went a hundred pounds, maybe even one-twenty. Had to take him smoothly. . . .
    Close now.
    The shooter’s hand was at his side, with the pistol dangling from it. When they’d scouted Sanderson on a previous walk, they noted that the dog was always on a long lead—there’d be some distance between the dog and Sanderson. The dog didn’t seem particularly nervous, but might