“No, woman, no cry”

At the footbath inside the gate, Nico rinsed her feet, slipped on her flip-flops and crossed the terrace to the elevator.

Back in her room, she removed the little bottle of champagne from the refrigerator, and opened it with a soft pop. Then she filled a flute from the kitchen cabinet, and took a single sip. It was nice, she thought, very nice.

Moving to the couch, she set the champagne glass down on the glass-and-rattan coffee table, and got out her laptop. Connecting it to the phone, she waited for the CPU to boot up, then got out the plastic overlay, and went to the hidden URL she’d accessed the day before (and the day before that). She moved the cursor to today’s rectangle, and then to the one that represented her birthdate:

Hello, Nico

The cursor blinked silently.

Resting her fingertips on the keyboard, she typed

Picture, please

Instantly, an hourglass appeared in the center of the screen, and hung there, like a bug in the air at the end of an invisible thread. After a while, an image began to form, one line after another until, in the end, there was a snapshot of an old man, the same old man who was sitting in the wheelchair eight floors below.

Certain now that she had the right man, Nico went to the folding luggage rack that held her baggage. These were a battered leather pullman in which she kept her clothes, and a waterproofed case made of lime-green, high-impact plastic with a customized, foam interior. Turning the numbered wheels of the combination lock on the second bag, she sprung the catch, opened the case and checked her tools.

These were nestled in a complex of foam compartments and, once assembled, constituted the finest sniping system money could buy. There was a bolt-action, M-24 barrel that coupled with a reassuring cliick to a Kevlar-reinforced, fiberglass stock with a matte-black finish. A Leupold scope was mounted to the barrel on steel rings and bases, in tandem with a B-Square Laser. Support came from a Harris bipod, and silence from a Belgian-made helical suppressor that threaded onto the maw of the rifle’s twenty-inch barrel.

Nico assembled the weapon system with practiced ease, taking about thirty seconds, and tested the trigger’s three-pound pull. Then she inserted a single round of Teflon-coated, .308 ammunition, and rammed it home. With the silencer, scope, and laser, the rifle weighed almost eleven pounds—which made the bipod essential for accuracy.

Walking out onto the balcony, she saw that the sun was almost underwater, the horizon hemorrhaging as the sky darkened to a blue-black bruise. Backlighted from below, a dozen palm trees trembled in the evening breeze.

But the old man was right where he was supposed to be, sitting in the twilight, enjoying the day’s last gasp.

Lying on her stomach, Nico slid the muzzle between the pink balustrades at the edge of the balcony, its barrel resting on the bipod, taking the weight off her arms. Then she looked through the scope, and flicked on the laser, which cast a wafer of bloodred light between the old man’s fourth and sixth vertebrae. From the end of the barrel to the edge of his skin was less than two hundred yards, an easy shot for her, even in the gloaming. Still, she could see the light tremble on her target’s back as her finger curled on the trigger, drawing it toward her for what seemed like forever. Then the rifle spasmed, and she heard a sound like a champagne cork going off in another room. The old man jerked upright and stiffened, as if an electric shock was moving through him. Then his body slumped, sinking into itself in such a way that she knew she’d cut his spine in two.

There was no smoke, really, and no flash that anyone was likely to have seen. The cartridge she’d fired was subsonic, so the only sound that could have given things away was the noise of the slug as it slapped into the old man’s back.

Not that it mattered. No one was paying attention—certainly not the Jamaican, who was lost to Bob Marley, and certainly not the children in the pool, whose laughter hung in the air like music.

Nico sat up, and broke down the gun. No muss, no fuss.

Then she got to her feet, and returned the rifle’s components to the Underwater Kinetics case in which they belonged. Finally, she spun the custom-fitted, little brass wheels that locked the suitcase, and topped off her champagne. Then she walked out onto the balcony with her glass, sat down and waited for all hell to break loose.

There was still no reaction to what she’d done. The Jamaican was nodding in time to the Walkman’s lonely concert, eyes half-closed. The shell seekers and jogger were long gone, and the teenaged girls had packed it in. That left the woman who’d been in the Jacuzzi, who was shuffling toward the elevators, the kids and their mom. The kids were still there, splashing in the pool even as their mom stood over them, holding towels, pleading with them to get out. A minute went by. Then five. The sun was below the horizon now, so that there were only a few faint streaks of red left in the sky. Finally, as if he’d just realized that the night was almost upon them, the Jamaican removed the headphones from his ears, grasped the back of the wheelchair and, slowly, began to push the old man up the boardwalk, never noticing that his charge was dead.

But when they reached the pool, the kids saw it. And Nico saw what they saw: the old man, lifeless beyond sleep, slumped in his chair with whitewashed eyes. And the bloom on his chest where the bullet had tumbled out into his lap, tearing a hole in his shawl.

One of the little girls began to scream, and her mother admonished her, thinking the kids were fighting. Standing at the edge of the balcony, sipping her champagne, Nico could hear the woman, warning her daughter: “That’s it, Jessie, that’s really it, that’s the last time—”

Then her voice evaporated, the wind died, and a frightened whoop cut through the air. Then a second whoop, as if someone were gathering the strength to scream. And, finally, the scream itself, cutting through the night.

Leaving the balcony, Nico stepped inside and picked up the remote. Turning on the TV, she sat down on the couch and surfed among the channels until she found her favorite show. Channel 67. MTV. The Real World.

An ambulance and three police cars arrived about ten minutes later, sirens blaring. A TV camera crew came soon after that, running through the lobby to the terrace, where they got some good shots of the bloodstained wheelchair, the old man being taken away on a gurney, and the Jamaican nursemaid, sitting in a deck chair with his face in his hands. Nearby, a dozen guests stood with tropical drinks in their hands, whispering among themselves and frowning.

More than an hour went by before a policeman knocked on Nico’s door to ask if she’d seen or heard anything unusual. She told him that she hadn’t, and asked what the commotion was all about.

“A man was shot,” the policeman told her. “Down on the boardwalk.”

“You’re kidding!”

“No.”

“But I didn’t hear anything—I mean, not until the ambulance came.”

“Nobody did,” the policeman said. “Not so far, anyway.”

“But he’ll be all right, won’t he? The man who was shot?”

The cop shook his head.

“You mean, he’s dead?” she asked.

“I’m afraid so,” the policeman said. “Murdered. You might even say ‘gunned down.’”

“Here? That’s horrible!”

The policeman snorted, as if she’d told a joke. “‘Horrible’ ain’t the half of it.”

“What do you mean?”

The policeman looked embarrassed. “I shouldn’t say, but… it’s stupid.”

“What is?”

“Shooting that guy.”

“Why?”

“Guy’s name is Crane. He’s eighty-two years old. Cancer patient. Everybody knows him. Real prominent guy.”