The Devils Teardrop

lifting his head and firing a shot occasionally.
    Parker said, “He’s nuts. He doesn’t even have body armor.”
    “Len!” Cage shouted, then winced at the pain.
    Parker took over. “Len! . . . Len Hardy! Get back. Let SWAT handle it.”
    But he didn’t hear them. Or pretended he hadn’t.
    Cage wheezed, “It’s like he’s got some kind of death wish.”
    Hardy stood and sprinted toward the bus, emptying his weapon as he ran. Even Parker knew this wasn’t proper procedure for a tactical operation.
    Parker saw the Digger move toward the back of the bus, where he’d have a good shot at Hardy. The detective didn’t notice. He huddled on the ground, completely exposed, reloading.
    “Len!” Parker cried. “Get under cover.”
    “He doesn’t even have Speedloaders,” Cage muttered. Hardy was slipping the new shells into his revolver one by one.
    The Digger moved closer to the back of the bus.
    “No!” Parker muttered, knowing he was going to see the young man die.
    “Jesus,” Cage cried, gasping.
    Then Hardy looked up and must have realized what was happening. He lifted the gun and fired three more times—all the shells he’d been able to reload—and then he stumbled backward, trying to get to cover.
    “He’s dead,” Cage muttered. “He’s dead.”
    Parker saw the killer’s silhouette near the emergency exit in the back of the bus—where he had a perfect shot at Hardy, sprawled on the street.
    But before the Digger could fire, an agent rolled out from behind a car and crouched, firing a stream of bullets into the bus. Blood sprayed the inside windows. Then there was a sensuous whoosh and fire erupted inside the bus. A flaming stream of fuel flowed to the curb.
    Hardy struggled to his feet and ran for cover behind a District squad car.
    There was a heartrending scream from inside the bus as the interior disappeared in orange fire. Parker saw the Digger, a mass of boiling flames, rise once then fall into the aisle of the bus.
    There were soft snaps from inside—like the popcorn that Stephie had made earlier for her brother’s surprise dessert—as the Digger’s remaining bullets exploded in the fire. A tree on Constitution Avenue caught fire and illuminated the macabre spectacle with an incongruously cheerful glow.
    Slowly the agents rose from cover and approached the bus. They stood at a cautious distance as the last of the burning ammunition detonated and the fire trucksarrived and began pumping foam on the charred hulk of the vehicle.
    When the flames had died down, two agents in full body armor made their way to the door of the bus and looked inside.
    Suddenly a series of loud bangs shook the Mall.
    Every agent and cop nearby dropped into defensive positions, lifting their weapons.
    But the sounds were only the fireworks—orange spiders, blue star bursts, white concussion shells. The glorious finale of the show.
    The two agents stepped out of the doorway of the bus, pulled their helmets off.
    A moment later Parker heard one of the agent’s staticky transmission in Cage’s radio. “Vehicle is secure,” he said. “Subject confirmed dead” was the unemotional epitaph for the killer.
    * * *
    As they walked back to the Vietnam Memorial Parker told Cage about Czisman, how the shooting had started.
    “He fired warning shots. He hadn’t done that, the Digger would’ve killed a hundred people right here. Maybe me too.”
    “What the hell was he up to?”
    In front of them a cop was covering Henry Czisman’s body.
    Cage bent down, grimacing in pain. A medic had poked his abdomen and proclaimed that the fall had resulted in the predicted broken rib. The agent was taped then given some Tylenol 3. The most frustrating part of the injury seemed to be that shrugging was momentarily too painful for him.
    The agent pulled the yellow rubberized sheet away from the corpse. He went through the journalist’s pockets. Took out his wallet. Then he found something else.
    “What’s this?” He lifted a book out of the man’s jacket pocket. Parker saw that it was a little gem of a book: Leather-bound, hand-stitched pages, not “perfect”—glued—binding as in mass-market books. The paper was vellum, which in Thomas Jefferson’s day was smoothed animal skin but nowadays was very high-quality cloth paper. The edges of the paper were marbleized in red and gold.
    And inside, the calligraphic handwriting—presumably Czisman’s—was as beautiful as an artist’s. Parker couldn’t help but