One Shot

mass of panicked humanity, right in front of the man with the rifle. Range, less than thirty-five yards. Very close.
    His fourth head shot killed a man in a suit. His fifth missed completely. The Sierra Matchking passed close to a woman’s shoulder and hissed straight into the ornamental pool and disappeared. He ignored it and moved the Springfield’s muzzle a fraction, and his sixth shot caught a guy on the bridge of his nose and blew his head apart.
    The man with the rifle stopped firing.
    He ducked low behind the garage wall and crawled backward three feet. He could smell burnt powder and over the ringing in his ears he could hear women screaming and feet pounding and the crunch of panicked fender benders on the street below.
Don’t worry, little people,
he thought.
It’s over now. I’m out of here.
He lay on his stomach and swept his spent shell cases into a pile. The bright Lake City brass shone right there in front of him. He scooped five of them into his gloved hands but the sixth rolled away and fell into an unfinished expansion joint. Just dropped right down into the tiny nine-inch-deep, half-inch-wide trench. He heard a quiet metallic sound as it hit bottom.
    Decision?
    Leave it, surely.
    No time.
    He jammed the five cases he had in his raincoat pocket and crawled backward on his toes and his forearms and his belly. He lay still for a moment and listened to the screaming. Then he came to his knees and stood up. Turned around and walked back the same way he had come, fast but in control, over the rough concrete, along the walkway planks, through the dark and the dust, under the yellow-and-black tape. Back to his minivan.
    The rear door was still open. He rewrapped the warm rifle in its blanket and slid the door shut on it. Got in the front and started the engine. Glanced through the windshield at the parking meter. He had forty-four minutes left on it. He backed out and headed for the exit ramp. Drove down it and out the unmanned exit and made a right and a left into the tangle of streets behind the department stores. He had passed under the raised highway before he heard the first sirens. He breathed out. The sirens were heading east, and he was heading west.
    Good work,
he thought.
Covert infiltration, six shots fired, five targets down, successful exfiltration, as cool as the other side of the pillow.
    Then he smiled suddenly. Long-term military records show that a modern army scores one enemy fatality for every fifteen thousand combat rounds expended by its infantry. But for its specialist snipers, the result is better. Way better. Twelve and a half
thousand
times better, as a matter of fact. A modern army scores one enemy fatality for every one-point-two combat rounds expended by a sniper. And one for one-point-two happened to be the same batting average as five for six. Exactly the same average. Simple arithmetic. So even after all those years a trained military sniper had scored exactly what his old instructors would have expected. They would have been very pleased about that.

    But his old instructors had trained snipers for the battlefield, not for urban crime. With urban crime, factors unknown on the battlefield kick in fast. Those factors tend to modify the definition of
successful exfiltration.
In this particular case, the media reacted quickest. Not surprisingly, since the shootings took place right in front of the local NBC affiliate’s window. Two things happened even before a dozen panicked bystanders all hit 911 on their cell phones simultaneously. First, every minicam in the NBC office starting rolling. The cameras were grabbed up and switched on and pointed at the windows. Second, a local news anchor called Ann Yanni started rehearsing what she knew would be her very first network breaking-news report. She was sick and scared and badly shaken, but she knew an opportunity when she saw it. So she started drafting in her head. She knew that words set agendas, and the words that came to her first were
sniper
and
senseless
and
slaying.
The alliteration was purely instinctive. So was the banality. But
slaying
was how Ann Yanni saw it. And
slaying
was a great word. It communicated the randomness, the wantonness, the savagery, the ferocity. It was a motiveless and impersonal word. It was exactly the right word for the story. At the same time she knew it wouldn’t work for the caption below the pictures.
Massacre
would be better there.
Friday Night Massacre? Rush Hour Massacre?
She ran for