It was so beautiful, he... - John Fetto

Hawley looked out from the roof and for a moment he forgot about the men in the courtyard across the street. As if lifted by the breeze that shifted from the foothills behind him, his gaze swept beyond the brick building was carried high over the cranes arching above Oakland’s harbor and the top of the freighter’s superstructure, toward a pair of sailboats tacking on the bay. For a moment his eyes saw nothing but the sunlight on the water on the tilting boats and he remembered another day, another time, when all he had to do but to hold the wheel on a boat like that, paying attention to nothing but the way the wind rolled over the sail. Then Hawley remembered the men across the street and his gaze dropped down, watching them. They were still stacking sandbags in the far corner of two cement walls, and as Hawley stared, one of them began assembling something made of black metal behind the bags. It could have been nothing more than a long piece of pipe attached to a rectangular box, until the top of the box cracked open and the man laid down a green band of ammunition and snapped it shut. He pulled back on the slide and grinned at his companion and when he did a gold tooth glinted in the light. Hawley raised the rifle and found the gold tooth enlarged in his scope. It glinted as brightly as the sunlight around the sailboat, and kept shining, until Hawley squeezed the trigger.