Theaella

39

“The money,” Jerry Z said.

Matthew held up a wait-a-sec finger. Then he plucked the straw out of Jerry’s orange soda.

“The f**k you think you’re doing, b***h?”

Matthew folded the straw twice, gripped it so the triangle of bent plastic protruded a quarter inch from between his index and middle fingers.

A makeshift push dagger.

He couldn’t risk a fight, not after the concussion. He didn’t want to raise his heart rate. He didn’t even want to break a sweat. Any action he took would have to be efficient and immediately debilitating.

“Okay,” Jerry Z said, leaning in and conveniently bringing his forehead into range. “I been cool about all this. But you’re about to find out who I really am.”

Matthew dealt a single quick strike, the edged straw slamming into Jerry Z’s forehead.

At first the big man didn’t move. He stared at Matthew, shock enlarging those pebble eyes. His forehead was split neatly in a five-inch line above the brow, a cracked egg that had yet to seep.

Then the blood came.

A controlled rush into both eyes.

Jerry blinked once, twice, sagging forward. Matthew palmed the top of his head and slammed his face into his tray. The plastic muffled the noise, but it was enough to put him out.

Matthew rose and set his chair back in place. Heading down the stairs, he removed his phone, changed the settings, added a voice filter, and dialed 911.

“You’ll find a man bleeding and unconscious on the second floor of the McDonald’s at Sunset and Crescent. He has thousands of dollars of stolen goods in his possession.”

As he reached the main floor, commotion erupted upstairs. A manager shouldered past Matthew, lunging for the stairs.

Unseen and unnoticed, he stepped out into the cool night breeze.

Walking away, he dug the necklace from his pocket. The pendant spun gently beneath his fist, the cursive words coming clear at intervals: I’ll always be here by your heart.

What had Jack said? That when you love someone, you never move on. They get into your cells, live inside you even when they’re gone.

Matthew had been trained to remain aggressively alone. To never show vulnerability. To ignore pain. To protect the mission at all costs.

Intimacy, it seemed, required the precise opposite. It required baring yourself to the best and worst that the world could generate. It required living alone in a bedroom filled with old photos and memories long after the warmth and light of a relationship had faded to ash. It required giving someone a marcasite necklace to wear after you’re dead.

He thought about Jack, broken down by life and the loss of a baby, helpless in the face of his then-wife’s suffering. Everything I tried just made things worse. I would have done anything. You understand? Anything.

Jack had reached a breaking point where he couldn’t take any more pain. And Matthew had judged him harshly for that. He’d judged him for trying and failing at something that Matthew lacked the courage to even attempt.

Closing his hand around the antique necklace, he wondered at the myriad elements that constituted bravery and counted those he was lacking.

The door to 6G floated a half inch above the threshold. Sometime before midnight Matthew crouched above the welcome mat and slipped a crisp envelope beneath. The bump within caught a bit of friction, but the package slid through.

He had written nothing on the envelope, and there was no message inside. It was empty save for a piece of jewelry with a lifetime of sentiment attached to it.

He’d cleaned the necklace upstairs with dishwashing liquid and water, removing any oil and sweat residue. The envelope, fresh from the box, contained no fibers or trace DNA. His fingertips were coated with a thin layer of superglue, and he wore latex gloves on top of that. He’d glitched the hallway security camera to ensure that his late-night visit would not be memorialized.

He would have indulged these habits even if he didn’t share a building with a perspicacious district attorney who had her eye on him in mostly unflattering fashion. But knowing that Melanie was here six floors up made him pay even more meticulous attention to every last ritual.

He had to be perfect.

Especially in light of the impossible task he was going to undertake tomorrow.

Perfect meant invisible, autonomous, without emotion.

He rose and stood a moment in the empty hall.

He was never here. He wasn’t even here now. He had no fingerprints, no footprints, no image captured by the eye of the lens overhead.

It was a koan worthy of Jack: If a man moves through the night and no one sees him, does he really exist?

Sometimes even he wondered.

Trapped Sweat and Spilled Blood

If you looked at the side of the building, you’d see nothing at all. If you squinted hard, perhaps you’d discern the faintest bulge at the fifth floor, the sandstone fa?ade curving outward.

What you wouldn’t detect was the semi-stable folding platform, two feet wide and five feet long, cantilevered out from the ledge of the open bathroom window. You wouldn’t see the mechanical bracketry rigged to the mouth of the sill and braced against the wall outside because it was all—the platform, the bracketry—painted the precise color of the sandstone.

Nor would you see the man atop the shooting platform, literally suspended in midair in a supported prone position sixty-four yards above the sidewalk.

He wore a Crye sand-tan pullover combat shirt, matching cargo pants, and a matching pair of Kevlar-and-leather aviator gloves. Cammy paint on his face and wrists, also the shade of a desert dune, further blended him into the backdrop.

For the short time before engagement, Matthew Smoak was nothing more than a slight disruption of the visual field, a tiger standing in tall savanna grass.

Spray paint had worked fine on the Remington 700. There was no need for any intricate design, just enough shading to break up the outline of the rifle. To further ensure his invisibility, he used a killFLASH honeycomb, a metallic anti-reflection device clamped over the scope to dampen any glint or glare.

He’d required a vantage into the courtyard of the Three Monkeys Café that didn’t exist, a shooting position floating in space. A seemingly unsolvable problem that he had, with a little help from his friends, solved.