​​Beach Sniper

 I hate the beach.  One does, in my line of work.  Flat beaches never have adequate cover.  Rocky beaches have too much.  Worst of all, the big crashing waves at regular intervals are the perfect cover for suppressed rifle shots.  But, I needed to earn my six figures.  

We were in a coastal state I knew well, and it was all flat beach up until Chapora.  I hadn’t been back here since childhood, which had ended the moment I completed my first job as a gun-for-hire.  Since I’d been gone, they’d made the whole place a tourist attraction.  Gone were the coves clogged with narrow fishing boats.  English, Portuguese and Russian street signs hung over roadways parallel to the beaches.  I’ve already forgotten their original names.   

Dawn had just broken, and water was washing over my employer’s toes as he padded over the wet sand.  

He’d told me he wanted to watch the sunrise on a beach “where I can’t see a hotel”. S, so at six this morning, I’d driven him north for about an hour along a highway whose name I read in the Latin script instead of Devanagari.  We could’ve driven inland for five minutes, but there weren't any beaches there.  

The sand was already warm, and the grit was getting into my socks.  I stood fifty feet away from the employer, on a bank of sand held together by short tufts of grass which grew into dappled forest behind me.  The stretch of dry sand between he and I was a death trap: feet in soft sand run slower than over hard ground.  

I think he liked to pretend he was alone.  Suited me just fine.  I liked to pretend I was alone too.  Besides, this beach was deserted so early; the fishermen had gone out hours ago.  And up on the dunes I had a vantage point from which to spot and approach potential snipers.  The trees were excellent cover as well.  

“What!” the employer called to me over the crash of a wave.  He had salt-pale hair, and if it weren’t for his ridiculous Vegan-CEO-beard, one might guess we were of a similar age.  He was also so tan that his skin was almost the same shade as mine.  

I cocked my head as another wave rushed in.

“What’s up with the shirt?” 

I glanced down and stopped myself from picking at a loose button on the scratchy Hawaiian-patterned garment.  I was entirely too used to doing my job in suits and office buildings.

As I opened my mouth to offer my employer an appropriately humourless joke, it happened.  I heard a crack so loud that it could only indicate a bullet travelling at supersonic speeds.  The good thing is that if you hear the bullet, it means you’re still alive.  I was still alive, clearly, and to my sheer relief, so was my employer.  

I shouted his name as I stumbled down the dune, kicking up a cloud of too-yellow grains.  I’d always hated the beach, I thought as the dry sand between myself and the employer slowed my running pace by over twenty per-cent.  

“Get into the water!” I screeched at him.  My tone frightened him, and he looked wildly around for figures matching his idea of an assassin: burly men in black turtlenecks with ski masks and goggles.  In this heat.  Stupid man.  “Into the water!” I commanded.  

Calculations raced through my mind.  The gunshot had come from my left, but I hadn’t seen a spray of dirt anywhere to show where the bullet had landed.  So, our assassin was aiming from a place the same height or below us.  

He was on the beach, not a dune.

I tackled the employer into the surf, foam of a newly-crashed wave fizzling around my ears at the same moment I heard the second crack.  Whoever the shooter was, they were either real good or real stupid to take a second shot without changing position.    

“What are you doing?” the employer gargled.  The sea here is brown, different than in the postcards.  

“Stay down,” I spat.  Rolling over in the water, I snatched at my already waterlogged handgun.  It would be able to shoot one round for sure, but had a sixty per-cent chance of not ejecting the casing.  One shot.  “Stay down.  He’s aiming from over there.”

I jerked my head back at the beach.  He would be low down, staring right at us.  Unfortunately for him, the dawn sun’s reflections on the water would blind him if he tried to set us in his scopes.  Bright butter-yellow and pink.

I squinted out at the empty morning-red beach.  A small glimmer of light flickered about five-hundred yards away.  Muzzle flash. The crack came an instant later, along with a wave that rolled over my head.  I coughed out water and wiped salt from my eyes.  

“What’s happening?” demanded the employer.  

“Stay down,” I told him again.  All five-hundred yards away, I saw movement.  The gunman was changing position now?  Surely anyone who wanted my employer dead would send a professional.  

I stood up, water sluicing off me like monsoon rain.  I joshed my way out of the sea and began sprinting down the wet sand.  The shooter was still crawling out of his sandy hideout.  It took about a minute and a half, but my opponent didn’t try to get off a shot.  

Neither did I.  I wasn’t going to waste my one bullet.  

My killer scrambled up and over a dune and vanished amidst the palms and knotty shrubbery.  I made my second death-sprint across the dry sand and flew up the incline behind them.  Then we were in the trees.  

The shooter wasn’t a complete fool.  He’d discarded his shapeless cream-yellow overclothing and vanished into the cucumber-green forest leaves.  Shaking my head, I followed, vaulting easily over curved coconut stumps.  Ferns curled up as I passed.  I didn’t need to guess where the shooter was heading.  I smelled gas and moments later burst out onto a deserted highway.  Red dust and hot-rubber stink made my eyes water.  To my left, a blue Maruti 800 sat with its engine running.  A woman stood by it, her white and black hair pulled back over her scalp, waving herself with a faded newspaper.  She hadn’t heard me. I stalked over to her, right in the middle of the road.  Her worried eyes were still fixed in the trees.

My shooter burst out of the shrubbery just as I reached the car. 

“Saver!” the boy’s mother called to him.  With that anxiety in her voice, she couldn’t be anyone else.  They rushed to each other.  The rifle, too expensive to risk leaving behind, was still bouncing on his back as she hugged him, whispering words of relief into his forehead. 

And then they saw me, leaning against their car.  Anywhere else in the world, I could have cut an imposing figure, but here, I looked just like the killer and his mother.  Black hair, brown skin, wide nose, average height and weight for those of my sex born in this region.  They gasped anyway.

The boy- he was a boy, only twenty or so, started screaming and would have run off again had I not pointed the gun at him.  One bullet from ten feet away.  I might miss.  Probably wouldn’t.  I might’ve ended up hitting his mother.  So he didn’t run. 

The two stared at me–four frightened eyes.  The shooter had so much fine sand peppering his hair that he looked older, almost like- 

It clicked.

“You’re the Noronhas,” I said.  “Zoze’s family,” I probed.  The woman flinched.  

Zoze had been the first man I’d ever killed for money.  Not even a lot of money.  Lots of colours.  Zoze’s salt-crusted eyes, the banana-yellow of his house.  His lime-green tee, dark under his arms.  Don’t shoot me, you’ll wake Saver.  Don’t scare Magdu.  Do it quiet, he’d bleated.  But my way was faster.  Loud, red.  

“Zoze had a son,” I said. “You’re Saver.”  I pointed at the boy with my free hand.  He shivered.  Then I pointed at his mother.  “Which makes you his Magdu.”  

The boy said something I didn’t understand.  I tried smiling.  “It was easy to figure out you were aiming for me,” I explained.  “If you were hired against my employer, you wouldn’t have missed.”  I hoped that these two understood English.  Zoze hadn’t, but he’d died before this place had become a tourist trap.  How long had his wife and son been planning their revenge?  Had Magdu goaded her little boy on?  Or had she come along to convince him not to throw his life away?

I looked around the deserted roadway, with its thick trees swaying on either side of the fenders.  White bark, ochre dirt.  Someone was burning fields in the distance.  The smell tugged at my heartstrings.  

With my free hand, I took out my wallet.  “I can write a check for three hundred and fifty thousand rupees.  That’s how much--”  I paused.  No, I needed to account for inflation.  I tried to do the numbers in my head. 

“Why did you kill my husband?”  Magdu asked.  Her car’s engine rumbled so loud I almost asked her to repeat herself.

“For money.”

“Why?”  She was holding tightly onto her son, who looked ready to sling the rifle off his shoulder, my handgun be damned.

“I don’t remember,” I said honestly.  Then, when the boy buried his face in her shoulder, I lied, “It seemed important at the time.”

The boy’s hands shook on the rifle stock, his fingers so pale with tension that they were almost green.  He’d wasted eighteen…. Eighteen?  Yes.  Eighteen years of hatred wasted, because I was going to kill him before he killed me. 

It seemed a waste to me too. 

“You’re going to run out of gas soon,” I muttered to the both of them.  I stepped away from the vibrating car, flicking on my gun’s safety.  

I wrote a blank check in pen on wet paper.  “Add in as many zeroes as you like.  Well,” I clarified, “I’m good for five zeroes, in American Dollars.”  Carefully, I peeled the page out of the chequebook and stuck it behind the windshield wiper like a traffic ticket.  The car was already heating up from the new sun.  

What a day to develop a conscience. 

God, I was tired.  The employer would be sick of treading water by now.  I turned around to go.  Behind me, Saver unslung his rifle.  His mother said something.  He said something back.  How easily I’d forgotten my mother tongue, I thought.  I walked back to the forest.

I’ll only hear Saver’s bullet if he misses.

The sound of ocean waves blend with the whoosh of wind in the trees.  I don’t hear anything.  Maybe I’ll walk all the way back to the employer and he’ll extend my contract.  Maybe the beach isn’t so bad.  But I don’t think I’ll be back again.