Silent Prey

picked up the rifle.
    “You never had this problem before . . . .”
    “The guy hasn’t done anything. The others were scumbags . . . . This is a cop . . . .”
    “He’s a goddamn computer asshole cockroach and he’s gonna put good guys in jail for doing what had to be done. And you know what happens if we get sent up? We’re fuckin’ dead, that’s what. I personally doubt that I’d last a fuckin’ week; if they come for me, I’m stickin’ my goddamn pistol in my mouth, because I ain’t goin’ . . . .”
    “Jesus . . .”
    Thick, standing well back from the window, looked at the restaurant across the street through the low-powered scope. A Visa emblem was stuck to the window on the door, under the script of the restaurant’s name and logo. Looking at the logo, the theme song from an oldtelevision show trickled through his head: “Have gun, will travel” is the card of a man  . . .
    He picked up the Visa sign in the scope, touched the laser switch with his thumb. A red dot bloomed on the sign. Thick had a head the size of a gasoline can, with small ears that in the semidark looked like dried apricots. “He’s worse than the shooflies.”
    “He . . .” Thin’s eyes went to the street, and Thick followed them. The restaurant door was opening.
    “Wrong guy,” Thin blurted.
    “I know . . . .”
    A man in a white tennis shirt and white shoes stood there, probing his gums with a plastic toothpick. The toothpicks were shaped like swords, Thin knew. They’d made a recon trip to the steak house the night before, to figure times and placements. The target always came in for the Friday special, New York strip with sour-cream baked potato and choice of draft beer. The man in the tennis shirt ambled down the street.
    “Fuckin’ faggot,” said Thick. He flicked the switch on the laser sight and the red dot bloomed on the Visa sign.
     
    Bekker sighed.
    All done.
    He turned away from Cortese’s body, his mind like a coil of concertina wire, tense, sharp, dangerous. He touched his shirt pocket: the pocket was empty. He stepped out of his room, with a touch of anxiety, and went to the old dresser where he kept his clothes. A half-handful of pills were scattered across the top of it, and he relaxed. Enough. He picked up several, developing a combo rush as he went, popped them into his mouth, savored the acrid bite, and swallowed. So good; but so few. He looked at the top of the dresser, at the pillsthere. Enough for another day, no more. He’d have to think about it—but later.
    He went back into the workroom, killed the monitors, their green screens blanking out. Nothing to see anyway, just horizontal lines. Bekker ignored the body. Cortese was simply garbage, a matter of disposal.
    But before the death . . . A new gumball dropped, and Bekker froze beside the worktable, his mind sliding away.
    Louis Cortese had been dark-haired, seventy-one and one-half inches tall, one hundred and eighty-six pounds, and thirty-seven years old—all of it carefully recorded in Bekker’s notebooks. He’d been a graduate in electrical engineering from Purdue University. Before Bekker’d cut off his eyelids, when Cortese had still been trying to ingratiate himself, still fending off the idea that he was about to die, he’d told Bekker that he was a Pisces. Bekker had only a vague idea what that meant, and he wasn’t interested.
    Cortese’s body lay on a stainless-steel countertop, which had cost six hundred and fifty dollars at a restaurant-supply shop in Queens. The countertop, in turn, was fixed to an old wooden library table; Bekker’d had to cut down the legs to get the proper working height. Overhead, a rank of three shop lamps threw a flat, cold light on the table.
    Because his research subjects would be alive, Bekker had fixed restraining rings to the table. A brown nylon strap was clipped to a ring just below Cortese’s right armpit, and ran diagonally from the armpit across the chest between the nipple and the shoulder, to another ring behind the neck, then from behind the neck, back across the opposite side of the chest to another ring below the left armpit; it held Cortese like a full nelson.Additional straps crossed the body at the waist and knees and bound the wrists and ankles.
    One of the hands was taped as well as bound: Bekker monitored blood pressure through a catheter placed in the radial artery, and the wrist had to be totally immobilized. Cortese’s jaws were