Time to Hunt Part 34

"What are you talking about?"

"Nikki, honey, why don't you go get a c.o.ke?"

"Daddy, I don't want a c.o.ke. I just had a c.o.ke."

"Well, sweetie, why don't you get another another c.o.ke. Or get Daddy a c.o.ke, all right?" c.o.ke. Or get Daddy a c.o.ke, all right?"

Nikki knew when she was being kicked out. She got up reluctantly, kissed her mother and left the room.

"I haven't told the cops," he said, "because they wouldn't get it and they couldn't do anything about it. But I don't think this is a wandering Johnny with a rifle. I think we got us a big-time serious professional killer and I think I'm the boy he's after."

"Why on earth?"

"There could be many reasons. As you know, I have been in some sc.r.a.pes. I don't know which of 'em would produce this. But what that means is until I get this figured out, I believe you are in more danger around me than less. And I need freedom. I need to get about, to look at things, to get some items sorted out. This guy's got a game going on me; but now I have the advantage because for a few days more he won't know he missed me. I have to operate fast and learn what I can in the opening."

"Bob, you should talk to the FBI if you don't think these Idaho people are sophisticated enough."

"I don't have anything they'd recognize yet. I have to develop some evidence. I'd just get myself locked in the loony bin."

"Oh, Lord," she said. "This is going to be one of your things things, isn't it?"

There was a long moment of quiet. He let the anger in him rise, then top off, then fall; then he began to hurt a little.

"What do you mean, 'things'?"

"Oh, you have these crusades. You go off and you get involved in some ruckus. You don't talk about it but you come back spent and happy. You get to be alive again and do what you do the best. You get to be a sniper again. The war never ended for you. You never wanted wanted it to end. You loved it too deeply. You loved it more than you ever loved any of us, I see that now." it to end. You loved it too deeply. You loved it more than you ever loved any of us, I see that now."

"Julie, honey, you don't know what you're saying. You're on painkillers. I want you to be comfortable. I'm just going to look into some things for a while."

She shook her head sadly.

"I can't have it. Now it's come to my daughter. The war. It killed my first husband and now it's come into my life and you want to go off and fight it all over again, and my daughter, who is eight, had to see a man die. Do you have any idea how traumatizing that is? No child should have to see that. Ever."

"I agree, but what we have is what we have and it has to be dealt with. It can't be ignored. It won't go away."

He could see that she was crying.

"Get some help," she finally said. "Call Nick; he's with the FBI. Call some Marine general; he'll have connections. Call one of those writers who's always wanting to do a book with you. Get some help. Take some money from my family's account and hire some private guards. Don't be Bob the Nailer anymore. Be Bob the husband and Bob the father, Bob the man at home. I can't stand that this is in our life again. I thought it was over, but it's never over."

"Sweetie, I didn't invent this. It's not something I thought up. Please, you're upset, you had a terrible experience, you're in what we call post-traumatic stress syndrome, where it keeps flas.h.i.+ng before your eyes and you're angry all the time. I've been there. Time is going to heal you up, your mind as well as your body."

She said nothing. She looked at Bob, but wasn't seeing him any longer.

"But I have to deal with this. Okay? Just let me deal with this."

"Oh, Bob-"

She started to cry again.

"I can't lose you, too. I can't lose both both you and Donny to the same war. I can't. I can't bear it." you and Donny to the same war. I can't. I can't bear it."

"I just have to look into this. I'll be careful. I know this stuff; I can work a lot faster alone and you'll be safer without me there at all. Okay?"

She shook her head disconsolately.

"You have to answer me a question or two, please. All right?"

After a bit, she nodded.

"You went over this with the cops, only they won't let me see the report. But they don't have a clue. He's already got them outfoxed. Now, I'm a.s.suming no two shots followed upon each other closely. Is that right?"

She paused again, thinking, and then at last yielded.

"Yes."

"There must have been at least two seconds between shots?"

"It felt like less than that."

"But if he hits Dade in the chest, then he hits you in the collarbone, and you're forty, fifty yards away, it took him some time to track and fire. So it had to be at least two, maybe three seconds."

"You won't put Nikki through this?"

"No. Now-he hits you moving. I'm guessing you were really galloping, right?"

"Yes."

"That's a pretty good shot."

He sat back, his respect slightly increased. An oblique fast-mover, at two hundred yards.

"Why does he hit you in the collarbone and not in the full body?"

"It's my right collarbone, not my left one," she said. "That means he was aiming at my back, dead center. What I remember is the horse seemed to stumble forward just a bit, and the next second it was like somebody hit me in the shoulder with a baseball bat. The second after that I was down; there was dust everywhere. Nikki came back to me. Somehow I got up. I was afraid he'd shoot at her, so I yelled at her. Then I ran away from her so that he'd shoot me instead."

"It still makes no sense. If he's two hundred yards out, then the time in flight is so minimal he hits the sight picture he sees, and he don't shoot if he don't see the right sight picture. You're sure sure the horse stumbled?" the horse stumbled?"

"I felt it. Then, whack, and I was down, there was dust everywhere, the horse was crying."

"Okay. Next, I heard four shots fired. One into Dade, the knock-down shot, the third shot, then the fourth into Dade's head."

"Thank G.o.d I never saw that."

"But there was a third shot?"

"I think so. But I went off the edge."

"You jumped jumped off the edge? You weren't knocked down?" off the edge? You weren't knocked down?"

"I jumped."

"G.o.d. Great move. Right move, great move, smart move. Guts move. Guts move. That gets you a medal in the Marine Corps."

"It was all I could think to do."

"So he did take a third shot. He was was shooting at you. Man, I cannot figure why he is missing. Why is he missing? You jump, but at two hundred meters or less, with a seven-millimeter Remington Mag, what he sees is what he gets. He shooting at you. Man, I cannot figure why he is missing. Why is he missing? You jump, but at two hundred meters or less, with a seven-millimeter Remington Mag, what he sees is what he gets. He can't can't miss from that range. Maybe he's not so good." miss from that range. Maybe he's not so good."

"Maybe he's not."

"Maybe the cops are right. It's some psycho."

"Maybe it is. But that would cheat you out of your crusade, wouldn't it? So it can't be a psycho. It's got to be a master sniper."

He let her hostility pa.s.s.

"Another thing I can't figure is how come he's shooting at you at all? You'd think once he did me, it's over. That's it. Time to-"

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. G.o.d, I hate that war. It killed Donny, it stole your mind. It was so evil."

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

CHAPTER T THIRTY-ONE.

The 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 c.r.a.ppy shot. You're a moron. You're some a.s.shole 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. he wondered. She's running away, she's on the horse, the angle is tough; the only answer is, you're a c.r.a.ppy shot. You're a moron. You're some a.s.shole 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 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. 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 a.s.shole 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 G.o.dlike 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 p.r.o.ne 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 p.r.o.ne 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 c.o.c.ks, 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. .h.i.t 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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned variables.

He sat back.

Used to be pretty G.o.dd.a.m.ned 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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned 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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned 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 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. 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.