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Back Loitering With Intent Save as PDF
Chapters (64)
  1. Stuart Woods
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  64. AUTHOR’ S NOTE

WHEN SUTHERL AND LEFT the movie theater it was twilight, and he had forty minutes until he went to work. He drove back to the vacant lot, switching off his headlights before he turned down the dirt track. There had been lights on in the house when he passed and a car in the driveway.

He took a small flashlight from his tool kit, slipped it into his pocket, then opened the duffel and assembled the rifle, screwed in the silencer and loaded a magazine, though he expected to fi re only once. You never knew.

He found his way to his firing position behind the azaleas and sat down cross-legged behind the row of bushes. He checked the rifl e again, shoved in the magazine and racked the slide. He checked his watch: ten minutes to eight.

At five minutes to eight, the kitchen light went on, and a man walked to the refrigerator, took out a covered dish, put it into the microwave and pressed some buttons. He stood for two minutes while the dish warmed. Sutherland could have shot him then, but he would have had to break glass, which might distort the trajectory and even alert a neighbor.

Finally, the man removed the dish from the microwave, set it on the table, picked up a corkscrew and opened the bottle of wine left for him.

Sutherland rose to one knee, rested his elbow on the other knee and sighted through the space with the missing pane. It was a shot of only a little more than thirty feet.

His subject sat down at the table, lifted his glass, took a sip and set the glass down.

Sutherland thumbed down the safety and squeezed off the round.

His subject took the bullet in his left temple, spraying blood and gore, and went down. Not even his wineglass was disturbed. Sutherland put the rifle on safety and made his way back to the car, where he unloaded and disassembled the rifl e and returned it to the duffel.

Half an hour later he drove into the darkened airport and parked the car where he had found it. He took a bottle of Windex and a cloth from his tool bag and wiped down every surface he might have touched, then shook out the fl oor mat to remove any dirt he might have tracked into the car. He took his tools and duffel and walked back to his own airplane.

EARLY THE FOLLOWING morning, in the soft, green light of the predawn, Sutherland set down his airplane on the Everglades strip, taxied to the ramada, refueled the airplane, then got into the Jeep Wrangler he kept at the little house and drove home to Jupiter and his wife.

Later that day, an unmarked envelope containing a large sum of cash was left inside the front screen door of his house.

41

41

STONE WA S PACKING his bags after a late breakfast when his cell phone buzzed. “Hello?”