When he finished with the shooting, he sat in the cabin and cleaned the rifle, scrubbing out the bore, putting a light coat of lubricant on the mechanical parts, then wiping those down. As he worked, he continually flashed on the plan, and on his place in history, even if that place, with good luck, turned out to be anonymous.
Probably wouldn’t be admired. He would be shooting a kid. The effect, though, would be critical: the planners of 1919 would change history, dragging the nation away from catastrophe...
Maybe, he thought, he could leave a will that disclosed his part in the program. Or a letter locked in a safe, so that his name would be known.
—
THAT NIGHT,LATE, he drove to the cemetery overlooking the Stillwater School, parked a half block away. He snuck down the narrow road at the bottom of the cemetery slope, climbed the slope when he thought he was about halfway down the length of the graveyard. At the crest of the slope, he sat and listened, then walked as quietly as he could through the weeds to the old tool shed. He found the loose supporting brick, pulled it free, and pushed the rifle through the hole. He listened again, heard only a distant rumble of cars, and slid the block back in place.
He sat and listened for a few minutes more, heard not much but the usual trucks and airplanes, and then snuck back out to his car. He picked up a dog walker in his headlights, three or four blocks away from the cemetery. Not a problem. The man paid no attention to Dunn and his truck, but it made him think:dog walkers. People also walked dogs in the morning. He’d seenthem on his way to work. The old cemetery would be a nice spot to take a dog...
The next morning, before going to work, he cruised the cemetery, saw no dog walkers. The school’s schedule, available online, showed classes beginning at 8:30, with a fifth-grade recess at ten o’clock. Lunch was at 12:30, with a fifth-grade gym class at two o’clock. Watching from the top of the hill, but well away from the cemetery, he found a hefty percentage of the arriving kids didn’t go directly into the school, but walked around to the playing areas and hung out there until a preliminary bell rang at 8:25.
Would Thomas McGovern be one of them? He had no idea. He’d prefer to shoot early, a time with heavier traffic to get lost in; and decided that checking the pre-bell time slot would be worthwhile.
—
HE SPENT A SLEEPLESS NIGHT, getting his guts up and playing and replaying in his mind the shot he might be making the next morning. He was out of bed at six, as the sun was coming up, dressed himself in field pants and a tan barn coat. He got a Canon digital camera and his camera bag out of a cupboard, put a 35mm lens on the camera, tucked two zoom lenses in the bag, along with a pair of Swarovski 8x25 binoculars.
By 7:30, he was ambling down the street at the top of the cemetery, hands in his jacket pockets, camera bag hanging off one shoulder. It occurred to him then that a dog would have been an excellent decoy and possible alibi... but he didn’t have a dog.
As he came up to the graveyard, he checked around—there were houses across the street, but no activity. In the two-blockwalk, he’d been passed by only one car. With one last check, he stepped through the cemetery gate and immediately moved back behind a screen of brushy trees, toward the slope overlooking the hospital and the cemetery.
He walked quickly to his shooting position next to the cottonwood, and sat down in the grass, but without the rifle. Glanced at his iPhone: 7:40. The morning was cool and damp, with dew glittering in the grass; he was wearing a wool sweater under the barn jacket and was warm enough, but he could feel the stress building in his chest. He got the Canon out of his camera bag, perched the bag atop a ground-level limestone grave marker that said, in eroded letters, “George Janson, 1864–1929.”
He put the camera atop the bag, turned it on, framed a few shots, made them, switched lenses to the 70-200 zoom, made a few more shots, went back to the first lens, then used the binoculars to scan the school grounds. There was only one kid on the playing area, and he was too tall to be McGovern.
He put the binoculars on the camera bag, then half stood, and looked back toward the street. He’d heard a couple of more cars pass by, but hadn’t yet seen an actual human being on foot.
Three more kids showed up on the playground, two girls and a boy. A few cars trickled into the hospital parking ramp below him.
The first kid was still shooting baskets, the other three were standing in a huddle, looking at cell phones. With a last look around, Dunn duckwalked thirty yards to the empty tool shed, pulled the concrete block loose, reached through the hole under the shed, caught the end of the gun case, and dragged it out. He removed the rifle and the magazine tucked in next to it, andduckwalked and crawled back to the shooting site. He propped the rifle on the camera bag and scanned the playground. A dozen kids now. The binoculars were excellent, the sharpest available. He couldn’t quite make out faces, though. He could see hair color and complexion and height and dress. Should be good enough: nobody he could see looked like the photo of McGovern.
Below him, a white pickup turned into the parking ramp, disappeared inside.
The kids were now walking into the playing grounds in a steady stream, and four or five were shooting around with the basketball; most of the rest were looking at cell phones or talking, and Dunn thought that one particular huddle of girls might be passing a cigarette.
“ON THE GROUND! GET DOWN ON THE GROUND! LET ME SEE YOUR HANDS. LET ME SEE YOUR HANDS!”
—
DUNN FLINCHED ANDDUCKEDbehind the camera bag, looked over his shoulder, toward the street, saw nothing. Men were shouting, had to be cops... but they weren’t shouting at him. He’d seen no sign of police cars.
More shouting and a car’s engine howled in the parking structure and brakes squealed and more men were shouting, and looking down toward the open walls of the structure, Dunn saw five or six men in suits pointing guns at somebody that he couldn’t see, on the far side of the ramp.
And he thought:It’s somebody else. My God, somebody else wasthere to take a shot and the police had staked out the parking ramp.And he, Dunn, was right there, above them, with a rifle, and nobody was looking at him, nobody was coming.
He pulled the rifle off the camera bag and low-crawled over to the tool shed, hurriedly pushed the gun back in its case and shoved it as far as he could beneath the shed. Then he crawled back to the camera bag, put the binoculars in the bottom of the bag with the lenses on top of them, crawled toward the street, and when he was eight or ten yards out, peeked from behind the screen of trees.
Nobody.
The screaming from the parking ramp had stopped. He slung the bag over his shoulder, walked out of the cemetery and over through the neighborhood to his truck. He sat in the truck, shaking, and not from the cool weather.
So close.
He wondered if the other man was one of the two people he’d sent the letter to—or if he was the man who’d sent a letter to Dunn. No way to know, unless there was media coverage. He caught his breath, started the truck, and drove away from the cemetery into the brightening day.
So close.
