Parting Shot

1.

Another victim.

Sheryl Behar.  

Fifty-four.  (Though by now they know age doesn’t matter.)

Another yellow pushpin in the county map.  (Yellow for female.  Blue for male.  Red for child.  Though by now, they know gender and geography don’t matter either.)

Another news conference in the makeshift police briefing room at the far end of the stationhouse’s main hallway.  A windowless, fluorescent-lit room of various former functions - temporary file storage, ad hoc staff meetings, end-of-shift surprise birthday parties for municipal employees - requisitioned now in the name of calamity.    

Another occasion to pull open the tent flaps on the media circus.  To crank up the   calliope of local broadcasts and network feeds.  The folding chairs and tables are jammed against each other haphazardly, broken as if violently from their original neat rows.  Black, green, red, yellow cables wind along the floor like colorful, poisonous snakes.  

The camera lights fill the briefing room with heat against which three old ceiling fans turn uselessly.  The lights flood the room with the blistering brightness of an interrogation, but in reverse: there’s a cop in the halogen crossfire. 

Another occasion for Webster County Sheriff William “Big Billy” Wyatt to get smaller.  To continue performing his disappearing act.  Diminishing before their eyes, in some slight but detectable, physical way, with each announcement of each new victim.  

Soon the media circus is in full swing, and Big Billy is the performing seal in the center ring - squawking, dancing, sadly amusing, pointlessly upbeat.  The reporters are the circling lions and tigers, beasts of every stripe (baseball jackets over tee-shirts, dark suits over sweat-stained Oxford buttondowns, the occasional tailored ensemble with pumps) growling and salivating and ready to pounce on the meaty, slow, well-lit prey.  The long silver booms of the microphones are a herd of curious giraffes, insinuating their way from high up down into Billy Wyatt’s face.  

The victims: male, female, old, young, black, white, spinster aunt, bright-eyed teen - by now it’s clear there is no pattern.  By now it’s clear that no pattern is the pattern.  To make apparent the randomness.  To strike fear and terror democratically,  unilaterally.  

Nothing new.  Matches the same MO.  Officers are swarming the area.  The sniper will make a mistake.  They always do.

Now the reporters are cormorants - squawking, shrieking, as they swoop over a fresh corpse: What do I tell my readers?  What do I say to my viewers?  Stay inside?  Avoid convenience stores?  Avoid unnecessary errands?  Keep the kids home from school?  Don’t travel alone?  

A media circus.  A frenzy of wires and cords and electronics and Blackberries and handhelds and cell phones and walkie-talkies and shouts and accusations and recriminations, tossed irritably and cynically toward the podium—the only conversational tone the reporters seem to know.   

The bright, airless briefing room.  A new and special circle of hell.

It’s a chaotic, cheerless realm.  

It’s a grim, gruesome assignment.

And local tv reporter Sam Stevens would much rather be here than at home.    

2.

Whatever the sanitary term “failing marriage” might mean exactly, Sam Stevens  knew his marriage was way past it.  It was in free fall - separate rooms, petty revenges, combustible fury on simply beholding the opposing spouse.  Fury like a flame - reliable, always flickering, always ready to ignite. 

Her latest tactic was to ignore him.  To turn away as if he weren’t there.  As if he  were a ghost.  Not just a ghost.  An intensely annoying ghost.   

They hid it skillfully.  There, and only there, they were in sync.  They presented the world with the ideal couple, the ideal family, so that to his television audience, he could remain trusted, well-liked, and approved of.  His high-visibility job was their meal ticket.  But his job was also her trump card.  Because high visibility also meant high vulnerability.  She could at any moment, for instance, call another reporter – some “lifestyle” hack in thick pancake makeup, eager to land a scoop – and go on air to catalogue what a shit he was, a shitty husband and shitty father, and although the charges would be utterly groundless, it wouldn’t matter, this being television.  His all-important Q score—the medium’s measure of trustworthiness and likeability—would plummet, and his livelihood would be gone by the next evening news.  The truth of it would be secondary—immaterial—amid the taint and whiff of scandal, and his employer would move swiftly on to someone squeakier-clean.  

Was she really capable of doing such a thing?  Yes, more than capable.  What had once been her impish sparkle, her playful unpredictability, had turned into a flamboyant recklessness.  Yes.  She could do it—or something like it that he hadn’t sufficiently imagined yet.  And the threat of that something was what let her stay out until three with her wildest and most unsavory friends, while Sam fed their son Tommy and afterward helped him struggle through his homework.  It was what let her fly off to Puerto Vallarta and Cabo San Lucas with who knew who to do who knew what, while he tucked in their son and reassured him that Mommy would be back very soon.  

He had the job.  He had the limelight.  She had the power.

*

Sam drove home from the police briefing, keeping the news radio on, flipping between local stations, comparing the coverage.  The excitement in the announcement of the latest victim was still in the live feeds, and helped to distract him from his familiar dread about heading home.    

What the victim had been doing.  Who she was waiting for.  Details of the victim’s life.  Brief on-the-scene exchanges first with neighbors.  Then, friends.  Then, with an uncle or cousin, the hastily appointed family spokesman.  Finally, with the immediate family, who had initially refused to speak, but now - days or even mere hours later - were eagerly pouring forth.  Despite the mantle of confusion, the story rolled out in a surprisingly orderly, predictable way, victim to victim.  A ritualized dance of television culture.  A Kabuki theatre of disaster. 

The sniper was out there somewhere.  No one knew where he would strike next.  But he almost certainly would.  That was the tenor of the reports.  That was the tone.  That was how the radio stayed on in cars, in homes.  Advice.  Instruction.  A voice in the dark.  Don’t go out alone.  Don’t go out unless absolutely necessary.  Don’t leave children unsupervised.  Don’t let them play in the yard.  

Sam followed the familiar roads home - a route he could almost drive blindfolded.  

In fact, it seemed there were fewer cars on the road.  It felt like an off hour, a lull, although it was technically rush hour.  But still a sheen of normality, if you turned off your radio.  If you shut off your tv.  That was your only chance to have any sheen of normality.

Sam was still a mile from home when he saw him.  

He recognized the stride first.  That bowlegged lurch that a lot of kids had with those heavy backpacks, but something distinctive in it too.  Then the mop of hair.  

He’d been mildly disturbed to see a kid walking home alone.  

He was shocked to discover it was his own.

Shuffling alone along the side on the road.  That big blue backpack.  A little soldier strolling through a war zone.  The only kid out walking.   

Jesus.  Jesus Christ.  Sam’s face flushed with anger.  His temples pulsed.  He felt the heat in his chest.  

He slowed, put the signal on, pulled the Toyota over to the side a few yards ahead of his son.  

Tommy looked up from under his brown bangs and jumped back in fear, ready to run, until he saw it was his father.  

Sam threw the passenger door open.

He was ready to scream at him: What are you doing?  Do you have any idea?

But he saw Tommy’s stricken face, the fear dancing in his eyes, the terror deep in there, probably present for the entire walk, probably surging with every passing car.

And then the next message of Tommy’s look:

She didn’t pick me up.  

“Get in.  Right now,” said Sam.  

Tommy leaped into the safety of the Toyota’s back seat.  Sam saw the gush of relief on him.

“What the hell . . .”

“I had Chess Club.”  Tommy looked down at his blue backpack.  “She didn’t come get me.”  He played with the zipper of his parka absently.  “I guess she forgot.”

One kid.  One precious son.  And she forgot.

A maniac loose.  And she forgot.

The ball of rage, the knot of fury, gathers up in him, almost chokes Sam Stevens.  

Cunt.  Selfish cunt.  Selfish, out-to-lunch cunt.  

I ought to kill her.  

But she’s his mother.  

Sam looks over at his son.  Relaxing now, the tension leaving his young frame, in the presence of his father.  

Tommy looks up at his dad.  A look Sam sees more and more, as the boy grows older, and observes the world, and observes his place in it.  A forlorn look.  Sam recognizes it—recoils to recognize it—as an echo of his own haunted look, his own posture of guardedness and weariness—the withered garland of his marriage.   

Now, at last, written plainly on his own son.

She’s his mother, all right.