Dead Aim (36 page)

Of all the uncomfortable feelings that night had caused, the only one she could find a solution for was the inability to defend herself. Over the next few weeks she had talked to a few boys she knew, the ones who owned guns and took karate lessons. One of them had told her about the self-defense camp in the forest north of Ojai.

Kira had called the camp and asked if they would mail her an application. When it arrived, she had carried it to her father. Kira’s father was the president of a boring company that made computerized devices that controlled car fuel intake, but he had once been a marine. Actually, he had been a captain in the Marines, but to him rank was not the distinction that mattered. To him, men were marines, or they were not.

He had stared at the brochure and at the application with the stony face he used for business. When he had looked up at her, the pale gray eyes were soft and concerned. “Baby, has something happened that you haven’t told me?”

She had been prepared for this. She had giggled and shaken her head hard. “Of course not. It’s just that when I come home late, the street near my apartment sometimes seems so dark and empty. I thought it might make sense to, you know, learn to take care of myself.”

He had nodded and handed her the brochure. “Go do it. I’ll pay.”

She had gone to the camp. She had always been good at classes like dance and gymnastics, and the hand-to-hand combat classes that Debbie taught had been like seeing the final picture in a set of assembly instructions: this was what all the work had been about. Spinning, kicking, and assuming exact postures correctly were precisely what she had been taught to do in dance classes. Doing handsprings and flips, balancing and rolling to recover from falls were just gymnastics exercises she had been trained to do since she was a toddler. After a
month with Debbie she had become quick and wily. But a month had not satisfied her. It had only been enough time to stimulate her imagination. She had called her father and asked if she could stay on for another month.

She referred to him as “Jonathan” when she talked about him, but never when she spoke to him. She called him “Daddy” and told him that she was getting so good that he would be amazed. She talked to him about her work on the pistol range. She knew that Jonathan Tolliver had a deep skepticism about how much a hundred-and-ten-pound girl could ever learn to do in a hand-to-hand fight with a two-hundred-pound man, but he had great faith in firearms. He had always kept a few of them around his house: an M1911A1 .45 sidearm like the one he had been issued in the Corps, a .44 Magnum revolver that looked a lot like the guns cowboys used in movies, and two semiautomatic nine-millimeter pistols that he kept as a greeting for burglars. He fired them now and then to keep his aim sharp.

He had tried to interest Kira in shooting as a hobby when she had been fourteen and painting signs of future trouble on her face, because he considered shooting clean and wholesome. At the time, Kira had considered shooting “something farmers do when the 4-H Club is closed.” This time, when she began to tell him about going onto a combat range and firing tight, rapid groups into man-shaped pop-ups, she knew she had him.

He had paid for psychiatry since she was eleven, paid unwittingly for drugs and tattoos, then for drug therapy and tattoo removal. He had paid her tuition to schools that were ever more geographically and thematically distant from the main thoroughfares of human activity. Self-defense seemed to him to be a simple, practical matter, like bread or a roof. The fact that she had expressed interest in something practical was a sign of better times. That she had stayed interested for so long was a hint of character that had previously been hidden from him. He paid.

Kira had been keeping a secret. It was not what had brought her to
the camp, but it had been one of the things that had kept her here, working on marksmanship and tactics from dawn until dark every day, then doing exercises and practicing kicks and punches with Debbie until she needed to sleep.

Kira wanted to kill somebody. It was something she had thought about often since she had realized that it was not impossible. She had already chosen Mr. Herbick. He was the headmaster of the Shoreham School. The policy at the Shoreham School had always been to respect the privacy of others. But he had waited until Kira’s class was at an assembly, and then searched their lockers. It had been an educational experience for Kira. She had learned that at a private school, there were no such things as a right to privacy, freedom from capricious search and seizure, or due process. Within ten minutes of the discovery of a plastic bag of white powder in her locker, she was no longer enrolled in the Shoreham School.

The pleasant part of the lesson was that the officials of the Shoreham School didn’t feel that they owed the Commonwealth of Massachusetts any more attention to legal customs than they owed Kira. Headmaster Herbick and his assistant, Miss Swinton, called her mother in to witness a short, informal ceremony in which they flushed the white powder down the toilet in the headmaster’s private bathroom and moved her permanent record file from the N–Z filing cabinet in the back office and into a file box in a storeroom marked “Inactive.” At the time, she had been a year and a half from college. Mr. Herbick said he wished her luck, but of course she should not expect letters of recommendation from any school personnel.

It was late January. She could not transfer to another private school for the rest of the year, so she had been forced to go to a public high school. It took a day to find one that had space for her and a day to register, but the following Monday she found herself in a huge hallway that smelled of Lysol, jostled and pushed by the sort of crowd she had never seen anywhere but at a rock concert. She had to get used to bathrooms that were filthier than those at a turnpike rest stop, and so
dangerous that she had to plead with girls she met in class to go with her and guard the stall door. This change had been educational, too.

Kira had lasted the year and a half, and had been admitted to a small women’s college in Vermont. From then on, her higher-education career had been a constant unsuccessful search for a new school where she would be happy. When she dropped out of the last one, she had already wanted to kill Mr. Herbick for over three years. He had changed her life. But it wasn’t until she actually had been trained in ways of going about it that she decided it must be done. She confided her fantasy to Debbie, the instructor she liked best, and Debbie accompanied her to Michael Parish. He placed her in a chair at the main lodge and spoke with her for hours, then dismissed her. It took four meetings held at two-day intervals before he agreed to arrange a hunt.

Herbick was easy. Kira had imagined a scene in which she would corner him somewhere and hold a gun on him, and he would weep and beg for mercy in a very satisfactory way. When it came to the actual event, it was less dramatic. It was like walking across a pasture and shooting a cow. She decided it was actually better that way: simple removal.

The problems came later. She had changed herself, which was what she had intended, but the change was of a slightly unexpected character. She had found that she had lost her capacity to have relationships with people who did not understand. They were living passive, uneventful, unimaginative lives, like the one she had lived before. She spent a year going on dates that always began with promise and retained exactly the same promise to the end. It was as though she and the boy were separated by a panel of perfectly clear, impenetrable glass. One of them would begin to talk, but the message would never quite reach the other. She would hear the boy talking about himself, but she could not respect his experiences or share his feelings, because he had never done anything as big and risky as what she had done. The problem became worse after her second hunt, and still worse after the third. She came to love killing. She had found the ultimate
pleasure, the power to simply look at someone and think, I can easily kill you. The only reason you don’t fear me is that you are too unimaginative to know it. The fact that nobody could look at little Kira Tolliver and realize that she was a killer added to the feeling of power, but it also isolated her.

She had realized that the best place where she could attempt to find a full and open relationship with a man was among men who had done exactly the same thing she had done. She had come and asked Michael Parish if there was any way she could come to work at the camp, or buy a long-term membership to make her regular visits at a cheaper rate. He had said he would think about it and keep her request in mind, so she had gone home and waited.

She had waited for weeks without hearing his reply, but then Michael had called unexpectedly and told her about this hunt. He had said he would let her join it for free while he thought about her request. She was becoming more confident by the minute. After all, who was either of them kidding? He knew that someday, she was going to inherit a whole lot of money. And she would probably, in the meantime, marry a man with some money. Parish knew he would get repaid with interest. He wasn’t being so magnanimous.

Today she was taking advantage of something practical that she had learned over the past couple of years: that of all human beings, the only ones who were welcome everywhere, at all times, were beautiful young women. She looked up at Tim through her lashes as he shoved her bag into the back seat, then held her door open for her. She climbed in. As Jimmy, the tall dark one, drove the car down the gravel driveway toward the gate, she opened the bag and pulled out her new Beretta S9000 with the short barrel, slipped it into her purse, then found two full magazines and put them into the compartment beside it. She was aware that two of the three men in the car were staring at her in fascination. She thought that was just about right.

A
s the car moved along the winding road toward the coast, Kira studied the photographs. She could see that the guy was a bit tired and a bit worried, not aware in at least the first shot that anybody was taking his picture. She put them into her purse and when her hand emerged again it held her cell phone. “Think it’s time to call Emily and Paul?”

Tim wobbled his head noncommittally, but from the driver’s seat came Jimmy’s voice. “Yeah, you can try. He’s had enough time to check in at a hotel, if L.A. is as far as he’s going.”

She dialed the number they had been given. “It’s busy,” she announced.

“Okay,” said Tim. “We know we’ve got to drive an hour and a half anyway. Parish will probably hear where he is by then and call us.”

“Right,” said Lee. “There’s no need to nag them.”

Kira put her phone away and stared out the window. Coming down through the national forest made it seem later than it was. There was always a hill baking in bright late-afternoon sun on the east side, and another in deep shadow on the west. She waited until she judged that
she had let the right interval elapse before she spoke again. “Are you guys friends from before, or did you meet at the camp?”

In the front seat, Jimmy and Lee turned their heads, and she could see their eyes meet. That look passed between them, that awful look that said, We knew it: we knew she would turn out to be stupid.

Tim turned his blue eyes to her and said, “Lee and Jimmy knew each other before. I met them at the camp about six months ago. They haven’t said their last names or where they’re from, and neither have I.”

She felt a gush of gratitude to him for answering. She knew the others would have left her question hanging in silence, and she would have hated that. Tim’s eyes were even better than she had thought at first. She did not even bother to construct a formulation in words. She acted on it, setting him apart from the others, making a distinction in her mind. She gave Tim her very best smile. She had known she would have to choose. When a girl was with three boys, they would eventually force her to, even if it was something they would all do together. They always had to know. She pursued his attention, to keep him looking at her. “But have you hunted with them before?”

“No,” he said. “We’ve all hunted, but we each went solo. With the safari crew, I mean.”

She laughed, making her eyes flash at him and throwing her hair back to show her perfect skin. She let the laugh become a lingering smile to let him see her small, perfect teeth. “It’s pretty funny when you say it that way.”

“That’s what it is,” said Tim.

“Not today, though. This is a party, and we get to do our own party planning. How do you think we should get him?”

“Beats me. Depends on where we find him, I guess.”

The conversation wasn’t very promising. Maybe Tim was feeling self-conscious because the other two were up there listening, and he couldn’t see their faces. “I think I’ll try calling again.”

This time she heard only a partial ring, and then Emily’s voice. “Yes?”

Kira clutched Tim’s forearm. “It’s me, Kira. Do you have a location?”

“Affirmative. He’s checked in at the Beverly Towers on Sunset, room 1503.”

“Great,” said Kira. “Thanks.”