The Shot

	It was an overcast day, which muted the strips on his high visibility vest. No matter- he was invisible in every meaningful sense. Later, witnesses would say he wore a blue ball cap. Or perhaps it was black. The profile compiled by the police stated that he was an athletic, clean shaven, caucasian man in his sixties, who walked with a heavy limp and sported a goatee. A lone security camera caught a total thirty seconds of footage of four different maintenance men, each fitting at least two of the profile's stipulations, each in the appropriate time frame. None were positively identified.

    Out of view of the camera, in a hallway empty of students, the maintenance man stopped, hanging a tag through the doorway of the third-floor bathroom. "Danger," it read, dirty in the hallway's fluorescence. "Maintenance in progress. Keep out." Closing and locking the door, he got to work. Adjustable crescent wrenches came out, a sink partially disassembled as cover. Then came a thermos. The bottom was unscrewed and tossed without ceremony into one of the tool bags. The hidden baffles examined for debris, and deemed satisfactory. An adapter screwed into its neck, too narrow to drink from. Pausing, the maintenance man grabs the bottom of thermos once more. Levering the window open, he wedges it into the tracks, forcing it to remain open three inches. Enough to let in the October winter, driving out the dry heat of decades-old water heaters. Out comes a rifle, stock unfolding with a click. The thermos screws on to the muzzle five and a quarter turns before the thread runs out. Cleanly oiled, the bolt slides back without a sound. A single round is inserted into the chamber of what was once a boy's first rifle, and the bolt slides home. Opening the door to one of the stalls, the maintenance man wedges his left hand and the rifle's fore end against the frame, brings the butt to his shoulder, and waits.

     The driver was a good man. His father had driven taxis in New York. To a man raised in the squalor hidden beneath the Iron Curtain, New York had been paradise. To his son, the suburbs of DC were more Gomorrah than Eden, but he spent relatively little time at home anyhow. The Senator spent as much time on the road as she did on the hill, and she trusted nobody else to get her where she needed to be. Not that she knew his name; she simply knew that he was the best. Pulling up to the rally, her mind was preoccupied with the coming speech. There was so much to cover- support for her party's presidential candidate, her own civil rights initiatives, the party's push against incoming immigration legislation. Thoughts poured through her brain as she stepped out of the SUV, into the brisk October air. Then there was a muffled crack, and her brain poured over the concrete sidewalk.

     The maintenance man waited long enough to see her fall, and no longer. The thermos bottom was pulled from the window, which closed with a thunk. It screwed on to the thermos body, which then came off the gun. The thermos' cap completed the package, tossed wholesale back into its bag. The stock refolded and stowed, casing still smoking in the chamber. The sink reassembled, the stall door closed, and the door unlocked within a minute. Within another he was out of the building, walking through the city. Staring blankly at an ambulance as it screamed passed him, police escort fore and behind, heading from the city hall to the nearest hospital.

     The news would call it the greatest act of political violence since 9/11. Talking heads talked about extremism and radicalization, about the breakdown of democracy and the dangers of heated words. About the need to come together in times of pain, to talk with and embrace those of all political stripes. Two states away, an engineer drops a file on his boss' desk.
"Did you hear about this weekend?" His boss asks, skimming over the technical report.
"A shame," the engineer says, turning to leave.
He isn't ashamed at all.