The suspect’s eyes flicked around—to the kids, weeping in a corner; to the apartment door, propped closed with a chair because he had broken the latch when he kicked it in; to the window, where he seemed to expect the peering faces of would-be rescuers. Forget that it was five stories up, with no fire escape. Keep looking, buddy, the sniper thought. All the better to keep you in my sights. It was bad enough that the gun-brandishing creep had provoked the wrath of the city’s SWAT team; now he had Byron Stone’s rifle pointed at him. Most folks would have told the offender to jump out the window and get done with it. Byron was as comfortable with a rifle as an accountant is with a mechanical pencil. From his eighth birthday, when he was bequeathed his granddaddy’s .22 for plunking at cans and groundhogs (and stray cats when no one was looking), through boot camp, Ranger training, sniper school and the police academy, he figured he hadn’t gone longer than a week without shooting a gun.
