Nothing fiinny about a murder-one conviction.

  Which was fine by Jake. As a result, he'd had plenty of work these past few years.

  Still, while a cool million for Whiny went a long way toward convincing him he could learn to live with his misgivings about this particular hit, nothing could entirely reassure him. He was breaking one of Sarge's cardinal rules: Never let anyone—neither the client nor the target—dictate the conditions of a shoot; always choose your own time and place.

  Following that rule faithfijlly was what had kept him in business, he was convinced. Timing the hit to this free-speech rally was like being locked into a straitjacket. Worse, Mr. C wanted it done as soon as he started speaking—probably he'd be watching and didn't want to listen to any more of Whiny than he had to.

  Jake could understand why Mr. C wanted a very public killing. Not even the densest citizen could miss the tragic irony: the defender of free speech shot down while speaking, murdered by some rifle-toting gun nut as he pushed for gun control instead of speech control. To hell with the wiretaps and electronic bugging! Stop the guns! A total gun ban is the answer!

  More gun-control legislation would pass in the following month than in the past decade.

  Mr. C will be getting a lot for his million, Jake thought.

  He took a deep breath and let it out. By Sunday afternoon at this time it would all be over; and by Sunday night he'd be six miles above the Atlantic, Heathrow bound.

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  But he had a lot to do before then. He'd found his perch for the hit—that was paramount. If he hadn't been able to find a good one, he'd have let the million slide, because what good was a million—even ten million—if you couldn't insure your escape.> A final condition he'd agreed to was to leave the perch—a hotel room— looking like it had been rented to a gun nut. Fredo had supplied him with some Saturday night specials, an AK-47, and even a copy of Shot0un News. Jake had agreed to leave his own rifle as well. Of course, he'd planned to anyway. Sarge had taught him that.

  Sarge, Sarge. The very act of driving north toward New York City would always make him think of Sarge. And those thoughts now made him shudder.

  Instead of heading directly into the city, Jake took a quick detour to Bernie Marsh's office building in Paterson.

  "Hey, Jake," Bernie said, rising behind his desk and smiling nervously as Jake stepped through his office door. "Something wrong.>"

  "Why should anything be wrong.>"

  "Because I . . . well, I didn't expect to see you again so soon, you know.>" Bernie's words rattled out at top speed and his palm was moist as they shook hands. "Hey, Jake, what I mean—it's just that you made your usual stop in June and I figured I wouldn't see you again till December."

  "I want to set up a little vacation time, if that's all right by you."

  "Sure! Sure!" Bernie laughed. The sound had a hysterical tinge. "Is that all.> Take all you want! You've got plenty coming! I mean, you're my best employee. Never misses a day, never complains, never sick, never takes vacation!" He laughed again. "I wish I had a hundred like you!"

  "I should be gone for a month. Starting now. So hold my checks. I'll call you when I get back."

  The tension seemed to whoosh out of Bernie as he sat down. "Sure thing, Jake. Have a great time."

  F. PAUL WILSON AND STEVE LYON

  Jake made sure to stop and say a few words to Bernie's secretary, Marge, on the way out. Never hurt to cement your status as a longtime employee.

  Jake Nacht was indeed a longtime employee of Marsh Management, Inc. Almost fifteen years now. Since shortly after Bernie had come to him looking for a way to retire his partner, Gus Abelard.

  Gus had got into nose candy in a bad way. So bad that he'd embezzled the partnership account dry and was looking for a way to trade his shares to his supplier in return for a big score of blow. Bernie had tried everything, but Gus was completely out of control. They were starting to lose clients. The partnership—then called Abelard-Marsh Enterprises—was in the real estate management business. Once people started losing confidence in your stability and reliability, you were done. They never came back. And that was beginning to happen to Abelard-Marsh because of Gus.

  So Gus had to go.

  Jake had followed Gus until he spotted him in the middle of a street-corner buy in downtown Paterson. Jake did him drive-by style with a Beretta that he later dumped in the Paterson River. As a public service, he also took out the two pushers with Gus. That made it look like a drug-war hit. Never much of an investigation. No witnesses. No one even heard the shots. No one in that corner of town never sees or hears nothing nohow. And Gus was listed as an innocent bystander.

  Bernie paid up on time, and that should have been that, but then Jake had an idea. When he first approached Bernie with it, the guy thought it was a shakedown. But when he saw Jake was on the level, he went along.

  So for the past dozen or so years, Jake had been giving Bernie thirty large a year in semiannual installments. In return, Jake Nacht was listed as an employee of Marsh Management, Inc. A night watchman, assigned solo duty to one of the abandoned warehouses or factories on the Marsh Management list of properties, receiving $26,000 in salary and another $4,000 in medical and dental ben-

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  efits. The whole deal was pretty much a wash. Jake got his money back—less deductions—in salary and benefits, and Bernie actually came out ahead: he took a $30,000 deduction on his corporate taxes.

  But the real dividend, the whole reason he'd set this up with Bernie, was that it made Jake Nacht a solid citizen, a blue-collar vertebra in the backbone of the nation's workforce. And should officialdom ever come snooping, Jake Nacht was on the rolls as a taxpayer with a visible and very legitimate source of income. Someday that simple fact might mean the difference between freedom and the joint. So though he resented every dime in withholding he had to send off to Trenton and Washington, Jake consoled himself by likening the taxes to disability insurance premiums—you paid them and hoped you never had to collect on the policy.

  But he was leaving nothing to chance on this hit. He was buying a few extra insurance policies—just in case.

  When he got to the city, Jake found a slot in the park-and-lock lot down the street and walked his suitcase into the lobby of the Belvedere Hotel.

  He might have bailed out of the hit if he hadn't found a place like the Belvedere. Turned out it was the oldest hotel in the area of the rally. Old hotels were the best. The older the better, in fact. The old ones had sash windows. Cutting a hole in a plate-glass window of one of the newer hotels got a bit dicey; it created a defect in the mirrorlike facade, Hke a fever sore on a beautifiil woman's face. Defects attracted attention.

  The Belvedere had casement windows.

  Perfect.

  He checked in as Jake Nacht, using Jake Nacht's Visa card, with a planned departure on Sunday morning.

  "I'm a light and a late sleeper," he told the woman at the

  F. PAUL WILSON AND STEVE LYON

  registration desk. "If possible, I'd like a quiet floor, as far from street noise as possible, and a room that doesn't get the morning sun."

  She smiled. "I'll see what I can do." She tapped various combinations into her keyboard, studied her screen a minute, then nodded. "I can give you something on our top floor on the north side. That should fit the biU perfectly."

  "If you say so."

  He hadn't expected any problem. The Belvedere was not a first-rank hotel; more in the faded-glory class. Even the big names were half-empty on August weekends. Most of the city seemed to close up early and clear out on Friday afternoons.

  The bellhop led him to room 1017. Jake tipped him two bucks—not a great tip, not a bad tip, just an ordinary, mediocre, immediately forgotten tip. As soon as he was alone, he checked the windows to make sure the sashes opened. They were stiff but he forced one up. He stuck his head outside for a look. The DEA building was out of sight—around the corner to his left and downtown from here. That was okay. This wasn't the perch.

  The tenth floor looked down at the scattered strollers below. Mr. C had wanted Whiny drilled from a sixth-floor window, like JFK. Maybe he thought that would induce Oliver Stone to make a movie about the Weingarten assassination. But Jake drew the line at letting someone else choose the perch.

  He studied the fire escape route map fastened to the inside of the door, locating his present room, then trailing his finger along the hall and just around the corner to the unit he really wanted. The two rooms were a little closer together than he liked, but not too bad. Just as long as he wasn't right next door.

  He'd move into the other unit tomorrow.

  But for now it was time to kick back, have a couple of drinks, maybe watch a movie on TV. Anything but sleep. Because lately, as happened every so often, he'd been dreaming about Sarge.

  After tJie squirrel incident, Jake graduated to moving targets.

  Moving pinecones.

  Sarge would tie a string to a tree limb, attach a pinecone to the string, and set it swinging. He taught Jake to lead his target—to match the speed of the bullet against the forward movement of the target and aim ahead of it so that bullet and target arri ed in the same place at the same time.

  After Sarge explained the principle, Jake quickly began putting it to work.

  The first cones were on a long string, swinging in wide, slow arcs. Within half a dozen tries Jake was hitting them regularly. Sarge moved him back. And back. And still Jake was knocking the hell out of those cones. So Sarge shortened the string, diminishing the arcs, increasing the speed of the cones. Jake needed a few shots to adjust; then he was knocking those to pieces as fast as Sarge could set them in motion.

  "Enough!" Sarge said. "You're wearing me out." He shook his head, grinning as he punched Jake lightly on the shoulder. "YouVc a natural, son. What an eye. Tve never seen anybody catch on that fast."

  F. PAUL WILSON AND STEVE LYON

  Jake soaked up the praise like a dry sponge. He could not remember ever wanting to please another person like he wanted to please Sarge.

  "Just a few more?"

  "Nah. You're too good for this nickel-and-dime stuff. We've got to move you up to shotguns and clay pigeons."

  "All right!"

  "But remember," Sarge said with a sidelong look. "I said clay pigeons. No real ones."

  "Don't worry, Sarge. I'm no pigeon eater either."

  As they laughed together, Jake realized that he finally knew what people meant when they said it was good to be alive.

  The shotgun was a whole different stor)^ The 12-gauge kicked and boomed and threw his aim off, but that was compensated by the fact that instead of a single bullet he was firing clusters of a dozen or more lead pellets. The skeets moved a hell of a lot faster than the pinecones too, but Jake started connecting with them soon enough once Sarge told him to continue the swing of his shotgun barrel after he'd pulled the trigger.

  "Eight in a row!" Sarge said, shaking his head. "Shit, I'm not wasting no more clay on you. Next week, for your fifteenth birthday, I'm taking you out into the real world. That'll be one of your presents: We'll hunt us up some real-world targets."

  "Like what.>" Jake asked, flush with excitement and pride.

  "Cars."

  Jake spent days wondering about Sarge's remark^ about cars. Were they going to a junkyard and plunk away at rusted-out hulks.> Sarge wouldn't say. When Jake pressed him for the fourth night in a row, Sarge gave his standard answer, but added something else:

  "You'll see when the time comes. But in the meantime, I'm

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  going to let you stay up late tonight. I just checked the TV Guide and it says my favorite movie is on Channel five tonight."

  "What's it called.^"

  ^^The Most Dan£ferous Game. ^^

  "Never heard of it," Jake said. But that didn't matter. If it was Sarge's favorite movie, how could it be bad.>

  "Don't worry. You'll like it. It's an oldie but a goodie."

  Even if he didn't like it, just staying up late with Sarge would be fun. And it was sure better than watching all those news shows about the war in Vietnam. Whenever the war was on, Sarge got lost in the TV.

  That night, after the eleven o'clock news, Mrs. Nacht heated up a container of Jiffy Pop and left Jake and Sarge to watch the movie. Sarge hadn't been kidding when he'd called it an oldie. And Jake wasn't so sure it was such a goodie. For one thing, it wasn't in color. And it was very dark and grainy.

  "See that girl.>" Sarge said, pointing at the screen. "That's Fay Wray, the same one King Kong went nuts over."

  Jake didn't recognize her, even though he must have seen King Kong a dozen times. Not that it mattered. This movie was definitely weird. All about this mighty hunter t^pe who gets people to come to his jungle island and then hunts them down. Sarge spoke only when the commercials came on, and there were plenty of those, but when the movie was playing he stared at that screen like he was hypnotized or something.

  "Well.>" Sarge said, switching on the lights and turning to Jake as "The End" lit on the screen. "What you think of it.> Wasn't it great.>"

  "Yeah!" Jake said, trying his best to sound enthusiastic. "That was really neat."

  "Neat ain't half of it," Sarge said, glancing back at the screen. "Greatest movie ever made. The title says it all. The most dangerous game: another man."

  The weird light in Sarge's eyes gave Jake a queasy, crawly feeling inside.

  F. PAUL WILSON AND STEVE LYON

  The next day, Sarge picked him up after school in tJie jeep and took him through a woods he had never seen before. This wasn't like the pines, and yet it was. Plenty of pitch pines about, but lots more oaks and elms and maples, the chill fall air turning their leaves orange and gold and laying a crackling carpet of brown ones underfoot.

  Sarge stopped at the base of a rise and led Jake and his .22 upward through the thick underbrush. Jake heard the sound of traffic faintly from the other side as they neared the top. Sarge motioned him into a crouch, and they crawled the rest of the way to the crest.

  The grassy slope fell gently away before him. At its base Jake recognized the two-lane blacktop of the southbound Garden State Parkway.

  Suddenly his guts were in a knot. He thought about what Sarge had said about that movie. The Most Dangerous Game, how his eyes had seemed to glow when he'd talked about hunting another man.

  "I . . ." Jake began, and noticed his teeth were chattering. 'T don't think I want to do this."

  "Do what.>"

  "Shoot somebody."

  "Shoot some—! Are you crazy, boy.> Whatever—wherever did you get that loony idea.>"

  "Well—"

  "That's the craziest thing I ever heard ofl"

  "Well, you said we were gonna shoot at cars."

  "Right. And cars ain't people!"

  "But people drive cars."

  Sarge laughed. "Okay, okay. I can see where you got conftised. No, we ain't gonna shoot no people. We're gonna shoot some tires—do a litde mischief, that's all."

  Jake allowed himself to relax ... a little. Shoot out a tire on a

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  moving car—that could be dangerous. That could kill somebody dead as a bullet.

  "Gonna have to be patient, though," Sarge said. "Got to pick your car carefully. Can't be going too fast or they might wrap themself around a tree. Can't be traveling in a pack or they could swervx into somebody else and cause a pileup. Remember, we're not looking to hurt anybody, just pop a couple of tires."

  Jake wished he were back aiming at pinecones and clay pigeons. This was scar}^

  "I don't know, Sarge ..."

  "Show me you can do it," Sarge said, that edge creeping into his voice. "Just show me you can do it, Jake."

  But somehow the words echoed in Jake's head as "Show me you will do it."

  "Someone like that," Sarge said, his voice lightening up as he pointed to a pickup truck rattling by. "Hit that rear tire there and you'll give that guy twenty or thirty^ minutes of much-needed exercise. Or better yet," he said, pointing to a Cadillac cruising past, "make a rich guy get his hands dirty."

  That didn't sound so bad. More like mischief than actually shooting at anybody.

  And the last thing he wanted to do was displease Sarge.

  Jake wrapped the strap around his left arm, snuggled against the stock in the prone firing position Sarge had taught him, and waited.

  Finally he saw the perfect prey: a Volkswagen van with a big peace symbol painted on the side.

  "Oh, get this one," Sarge said. "You've gotta get this hippie."

  Jake took aim on the blacktop just inside the white line along the shoulder, gave the rear tire a two-foot lead, then fired.

  If the tire popped, Jake didn't hear it, but he did see it collapse into a flabby mass of rubber whirling around the hubcap. The van shimmied and pulled off onto the shoulder.

  Sarge whooped and slapped him on the back.

  "Got it!"

  F. PAUL WILSON AND STEVE LYON

  But Jake wasn't through. With sudden exhilaration surging through him like electric current, he took a bead on another rear tire coming along. This one belonged to a black Mercedes with gold trim. A big-shot car, cruising the right lane, the windows rolled up tight against the chill.

  Another shot, another useless tire. The Mercedes skidded to a halt behind the van.

  Sarge put a hand on his arm.

  "Whoa! That's enough. Two's plenty. We're not looking to attract too much attention here."

  They huddled together in the brush for a few more seconds, watching the longhaired driver of the van and the three-piece suit from the Mercedes get out of their respective rides and stare at their useless tires.

  "I'll bet they'll have plenty to talk about," Sarge said as he started to slide backward. "Let's get outta here."

  Jake followed him, rising to a crouch, then straightening up when they were out of sight of the parkway. As he ran down the hill toward the jeep, Jake began to laugh. He wasn't sure why. Maybe it was a release of the almost unbearable tension that had been building within him these past few days; maybe it was the thrill of being able to be a bad boy with an adult's approval; or the knowledge that he had just gotten away with something dangerous and illegal; or the feeling that he was now an outiaw of sorts; or the tighter bond he sensed he'd formed with Sarge. Maybe it was all of those things. Whatever it was, he had to laugh to show the world how wonderful he felt.