"Break down," though, was perhaps the wrong term for Redman. He could no more "break down" his weapon than he could break down his right arm. He handled the bolt from the H amp;K PSG-1 with just the tips of his fingers, feeling the weight and shape and the touch of finely crafted metal against his own skin. The smell of the Shooter's Choice cleaner was as fond to him as perfume; a certain signaling sifted like smoke through his head when he used it to clean the rifle after a kill. It signaled an end. The final act of taking care of business. It made him relax, often for the first time in weeks.

He had taken the door off the adjoining bedroom and laid the heavy plank across two nightstands, creating a wide bench on which to work. The only light was from the street lamp outside, seeping in through the window he faced. He liked the dark. You didn't have to see so much in the dark. And you could feel more-the breeze across a sheen of sweat, the soft vacuum of silence that cupped your ears in the quiet, the weight of a careful footstep on a hallway floor. Michael Redman liked those sensations. Many times they had kept him alive.

Redman caressed the bolt like a lover's hand, wiped it down and set it next to the silencer he had removed from the barrel. He knew he would have to rezero the H amp;K before he used the suppressor again, but it had done its job this morning. Hell, the few reporter shitbirds that had gathered for Ferris's perp walk hadn't even flinched when his round fired. No one heard a thing except for the splat the bullet had made when it entered the edge of Ferris's sideburn and burrowed through his head. The only sound was that of his lifeless body crumpling to the staircase steps, dead at the second of impact, an unavoidable blessing for someone who had deserved worse. Sometimes justice was swift but not always compensative, Redman thought. But that was not the gunman's choice. He did only what he was trained to do, maybe born to do.