Time to Hunt (43 page)

But then something came into his mind.

“No. No, I see. He has to hit you, because he knows exactly how quickly you could get back to the ranch and a phone and that’s cutting it too close. Nikki’s not a problem, she’s probably not together enough to think of that. But he has to do you to give himself the right amount of time to make his getaway. He’s figured out the angles. I can see how his mind works. Very methodical, very savvy.”

“Maybe you’re dreaming all this up.”

“Maybe I am.”

“But you want the man-to-man thing. I can tell. You against him, just like Vietnam. Just like all the other places. God, I hate that war. It killed Donny, it stole your mind. It was so evil.”

But then Nikki came back with a Coke for her dad and a nurse came in with pills and their time alone was finished.

T
he wind howled; it was cloudy today, and maybe rain would fall. Bob’s horse, Junior, nickered nervously at the possibility, stamped, then put his head down to some mountain vegetation and began to chew.

Bob stood at the shooter’s site. It was a flat nest of dust across an arroyo, not more than two hundred meters from where Dade had been shot and maybe 280 from where Julie fell. If he had had a range finder, he would have known the range for sure, but those things—laser-driven these days, much more compact than the Barr and Stroud he’d once owned—cost a fortune, and only wealthy hunters and elite SWAT or sniper teams had them. It didn’t matter; the range was fairly easy to estimate from here because the body sizes were easy to read. If you know the power of your scope, as presumably this boy would, you could pretty much gauge the distance from how much of the body you got into your lens. That worked out to about three hundred yards, and then it was a different matter altogether: you entered a different universe when the distances were way out.

Why did you miss her?
he wondered. She’s running away, she’s on the horse, the angle is tough; the only answer is, you’re a crappy shot. You’re a moron. You’re some asshole who’s read too many books and dreamed of the kick you get looking through the scope when the gun fires, and you see something go slack. So you do the old man, then you swing onto the racing woman, her horse bounding up and down, and it’s too much shot for you. You misread the angle, you misread the distance, you just ain’t the boy for the job.

Okay. You fire, you bring her down. There’s dust, and then she emerges from the dust, running toward the edge. She
wants
you to shoot her, so you concentrate on her,
not the girl. You’ve really got plenty of time. There’s no rush, there’s no up-down plunge as there would be on a horse; it’s really a pretty elementary shot.

But you miss again, this time totally.

No, you ain’t the boy you think you are.

That added up. That made sense. Some asshole who thought too much about guns and had no other life, no family, no sane connection to the world. It was the sickening part of the Second Amendment computation, but there you had it: some people just could not say no to the godlike power of the gun.

But how come there ain’t no tracks?

Apparent contradiction: he’s not good enough to make the shot, but he is good enough to get out cold without any stupid mistakes, like the print of his boot in the dust, which would at least narrow it down a bit. Yet he leaves two shells and a thermos. Yet all three are clean of prints. How could that be? Is he a professional or not? Or is he just a lucky amateur?

Bob looked at the bipod marks, still immaculate in the dust, undisturbed by the process of making plaster casts of them. They would last until the rain, and then be gone forever. They told him nothing; bipod, big deal. You could buy the Harris bipod in any gun store in America. Varmint shooters used them and so did police snipers. Some men used them when they took their rifles to the range for zeroing or load development, but not usually: because the bipod fit by an attachment to the screw hole in which the front swing swivel was set. That meant the screw could work lose under a long bench session and that it could change the point of impact much more readily than a good sandbag. Some hunters used them, but it was a rarity, because you almost never got a prone position in the field, so the extra weight was not worth it. Some men used them because they thought they looked cool. Would that be our guy?

He stared at imprints of the legs, trying to divine a
meaning from their two, neat square images. No meaning arrived. Nothing.

But contemplating the bipod got him going in another direction: What’s he see? Bob wondered. What’s he see from up here?

So he went to the prone and took up a position indexed to the marks in the dust. From there he had a good, straight-on view of Dade’s position, yes; and the shot—with the stable rifle, the sun behind you, the wind calm as it was at that point in the day—it was just a matter of concentrating on the crosshairs, trusting the rig, squeezing the trigger and presto, instant kill. You threw the bolt, and no more than a few seconds later you had the woman.

He now saw how truly heroic Julie had been. Nine-hundred-ninety-nine out of a thousand inexperienced people just freeze on the spot. Sniper cocks, pivots a degree or so, and he has a second kill. But bless her brilliant soul, she reacted on the dime when Dade went down, and off she went with Nikki. He had to track her.

Bob had a thought here. What happens if the point where she was hit wasn’t within pivot range of this spot? What happens if there’s some impediment? But there wasn’t. It was an easy crank, an arc of about forty degrees, nothing in the way, you just track her, lead her a bit and pull the trigger.

Why did he miss?

Bob thought he had it.

He probably didn’t keep the rifle moving as he pulled the trigger
. That’s why he hits her behind the line of her spine, he’s centered on her, but he stops when he fires, and the bullet, arriving a tenth of a second later, drills her trailing collarbone.

That made a sort of sense, though usually when you were tracking a bird or a clay with a shotgun and you stopped the gun, you missed the whole sucker, not just hit behind on it. Maybe the birds moved faster. On the other hand, the range was a lot farther than any wing or clay
shooting. On the third hand, the velocity of the rifle bullet was much faster.

There were so many goddamned variables.

He sat back.

Used to be pretty goddamned good at this stuff, he thought. Used to have a real talent for understanding the dynamics of a two- or three-second interval when the guns were in play.

None of this made any goddamned sense, not really, and he had no way of figuring it out and his head ached and it was about to rain and destroy the physical evidence forever and Junior nickered again, bored.

Okay, he thought, rising, troubled, facing the fact that he had not really made any progress. He turned to go back to the horse and his empty house and his unopened bottle of Jim Beam and—

Then he saw the footprint.

Yeah, the cops missed a footprint, that’s likely.

He looked more closely and saw in a second that it was his own footprint, a Tony Lama boot, size 11, the one he was wearing, yes, it was his goddamned own. A little hard to ID because he’d turned and sort of stretched it out and—

That was it.

There it was.

He turned back, quickly, and stared at the bipod imprints.

If he has to
pivot
the bipod, the bipod marks would be distorted. They’d be rounded from the fast, forceful pivot as he followed her, and one would inscribe an arc through the dust. But these bipod marks were squared off, perfectly.

Bob looked at them closely.

Yes: round, perfect, the mark of the bipod resting in the dust until the rain came and washed it away.

He saw it now: this was a classic phony hide. This hide was built to suggest the possibility that a screwball did the
shooting. But our boy didn’t shoot from here. He shot from somewhere else, a lot farther out.

Bob looked at the sky. It looked like rain.

H
e rode the ridgeline for what seemed like hours, the wind increasing, the clouds screaming in from the west, taking the mountains away. It felt like fog, damp to the skin. Up here, the weather could change just like that. It could kill you just like that.

But death wasn’t on his mind. Rather, his own depression was. The chances of finding the real hide were remote, if traces remained at all. When the rain came, they would be gone forever. Again he thought: nicely thought out. Not only does the phony hide send the investigation off in the wrong direction, it also prevents anyone from seeing the real hide until it is obliterated by the changing weather. So if he does miss something, the weather takes it out.

Bob was beginning to feel the other’s mind. Extremely thorough. A man who thinks of everything, will have rehearsed it in his mind a hundred times, has been through this time and time again. He knows how to do it, knows the arcane logic of the process. It isn’t just pure autistic shooting skill, it’s also a sense of tactical craft, a sense of the numbers that underlie everything and the confidence to crunch them fast under great pressure, then rely on the crunching and make it happen in the real world. Also: stamina, courage, the guts of a burglar, the patience of a great hunter.

He knew we came this way. But some mornings we did not. He may have had to wait. He was calm and confident and able to flatten his brain out, and wait for the exact morning. That was the hardest skill, the skill that so few men really had. But you have it, don’t you, brother?

A sprinkle of rain fell against his face. It would start pounding soon and the evidence would be gone forever.

Why didn’t I think this through yesterday?
I’d have had
him, or some part of him. But now, no, it would be gone. He’s won again.

He searched for hides, looking down from the trail into the rough rocks beneath. Every so often there’d be a spot flat enough to conceal a prone man, but upon investigation, each spot was empty of sign. And as he rode, of course, he got farther out. And from not everywhere on the ridge was the shelf of land visible where both Dade and Julie could be hit in the same sweep.

So on he went, feeling the dampness rise and his sense of futility rise with it. He must have missed it, he thought, or it’s already gone. Damn, he was a long way out. He was a
long way out
. He was getting beyond the probable into the realm of the merely possible. Yet still no sign, and Junior drifted along the ridge, over the small trail, tense at the coming rain, Bob himself chilled to the bone and close to giving up.

He couldn’t be out this far!

He rode on even farther. No sign yet. He stopped, turned back. The target zone was miniature. It was far distant. It was—

Bob dismounted, let Junior cook in his own nervousness. He’d thought he’d seen a little point under the edge of the ridge, nothing much, just a possibility. He eased down, peeking this way and that, convinced that, no, he was too far out, he had to go back and look for something he had missed.

But then he saw something just the slightest bit odd. It was a tuft of dried brush, caught halfway down the ridge. Wind damage? But no other tufts lay about. What had dislodged it? Probably some freak accident of nature … but on the other hand, a man wiping away marks of his presence in the dust, he might just have used a piece of brush to do it, then tossed the brush down into the gap. But it caught, and as it dried out over the two days, it turned brown enough so a man looking for the tiniest of anomalies might notice it.

Bob figured the wind always ran north to northwest
through this little channel in the mountains. If the wind carried it, it would have come off the cliff just a bit farther back. He turned and began to pick his way back in that direction and had already missed it when, looking back to orient himself to the tuft of bush, he noticed a crevice and, peering into it, he looked down to see just the tiniest, coffin-sized flatness in the earth, where a man could lie unobserved and have a good view of the target zone.

He eased down, oriented himself to where Dade had died and Julie fell. He was careful not to disturb the earth, in case any scuff marks remained, but he could see none. At last he turned to get his best and first look at the killing zone from the shooting site.

Jesus Christ!

He was eight hundred, maybe a thousand meters out.

The killing zone was a tiny shelf far off at the oblique.

There were no features by which he could get an accurate distance-by-size estimation, and even on horseback, the targets would have been tiny. The scope wouldn’t have blown them up too much, either: too big a scope would have amplified the wobble effect until a sight picture was simply unobtainable and, worse, it would have had too small a breadth of vision at this range. If he lost contact with his targets, he might never have gotten them back in time. He had to be shooting a 10X, nothing bigger than a 12X, but probably a 10.

That’s some shooting. That’s beyond good; that’s in some other sphere. Careful, precise, deliberate, mathematical long-range shooting is very good shooting. Knowing instinctively how far to lead a moving target in the crux of the fraction of the second you’ve got, knowing it automatically, subconsciously … that is
great
shooting. Man, that is so far out there, it’s almost beyond belief. He knew of one man who could hit that shot, but he was dead, a bullet having exploded his head in the Ouachitas. There might be two or three others but—

He now saw too why the shooter had missed the kill on Julie.

He didn’t make a mistake: he had the shot perfectly. He was just betrayed by the physics of the issue, the bullet’s time in flight. When he fired, he had her dead to rights. But it takes a second for the bullet to travel that long arc, to float down on her; and there’s plenty of time, even in that limited period, for her to alter her body movement or direction enough to cause the miss. That’s why Dade is at least an easier shot. He’s not moving, to say nothing of at the oblique, on horseback galloping away as Julie was.