Dead Aim

by Thomas Perry

  He reached the spot where the fence turned away from the road into the woods, and kept walking. When he was three hundred feet from the road, he knelt beside one of the posts and tested his theory. This one had been set in a hole that was only nine inches wide, which left room for only about three inches of cement around the three-inch post. He had been right. They’d had to dig through tree roots. They’d had to carry the bags of cement and buckets of water way out here through the brush to mix by hand. There didn’t even seem to be a decent path that could accommodate a wheelbarrow. As the day had worn on, and they’d gone deeper into the forest, where the bosses didn’t come very often, the laborers had used less cement, and less care.

  Mallon walked along another hundred feet until he came to a post that looked a bit off plumb. He examined the base, and decided this was the one. He began to rock it back and forth, harder and harder, until he had it at a forty-five-degree angle. The shallow clump of concrete at the base extended only an inch or so from the pole. He went to his back on the bed of pine needles, lifted the chain-link mesh with both hands, and wriggled under, pushing with his feet. When he was on the other side, he pushed the post upright, stomped some of the loose earth around the concrete, and tried to memorize the way it looked so that he could find it again. He could tell that it was unlikely he would be able to pick it out in a hurry at night. The fence was a line of identical posts surrounded by nearly identical pine trees. He stepped to one of the trees, picked a broken bough off the ground that had already turned brown, then wove it in and out of the links.

  He stepped back to be sure he could recognize it, then turned and moved off into the fenced-in land. He was still surrounded by trees, but he could tell that, somewhere off to his left, the land rose gradually to a ridge. He headed in that direction because he guessed that might offer him the safest way of observing the complex of buildings. The lights from the area near the gate and the driveway would not reach up there.

  When Mallon had climbed for ten or fifteen minutes up the wooded slope, he came out into a field that led onto the ridge. He made out in the moonlight that it was only the first of at least three rows of foothills that stretched into the backcountry toward a high mountain range, without any glow of electric lights, or any lighter-colored gashes for roads. Just below the ridge where he stood were a couple of buildings. One was the size of a two-car garage, and the other was cabin-sized, both in the same plain style of rustic architecture as the buildings he had seen on his visit with Lydia.

  He turned around to look down toward the buildings near the gate. There the slope was clear of trees and brush, like a field of clover and alfalfa. He could make out the main lodge, and now he could see all of the parking lot across the driveway. He counted six cars. He tried to decide what that meant. One would belong to Michael Parish, the man he and Lydia had spoken to. Diane had mentioned two women instructors and a man, which meant three more cars. That left only the Lexus the red-haired man had driven, and one other.

  There was a second big building, this one with a high roof, like a barn. It had only high windows and skylights, but it was dark, so Mallon could not tell what was inside. He guessed it must be the gym that he’d heard Parish mention on his first visit, the place where they offered instruction in hand-to-hand fighting. Scattered around on the outskirts were six low buildings that he identified as barracks. Each had three doors on each side, so probably they were each divided into six private rooms with separate entrances. There was no sure way for him to tell how many of them were occupied, but from the six cars, he had to assume that at least two barracks were being used.

  It was a difficult place for an intruder, he decided. The front gate, the parking lot, and the area around the main offices were bathed in light, even at this hour. The driveway, which he could now see deserved to be called a road, was lighted at intervals all the way to the big building he had identified as a gym. The living quarters were around the complex on the outer fringes, where it was darker and quieter. Any or all of them might be occupied by people who would hear a person walking by outside. The site did not offer any obvious places for someone like Mallon to enter and be sure of going unnoticed.

  Mallon turned and looked away from the camp. Before he went down there, he would need to get a closer look at the buildings separated from the main complex. He had to be sure they weren’t occupied before he turned his back on them.

  Mallon kept to the shadowy places where groves of trees had been spared. He made his way to the more distant of the two buildings first. It was a cabin. He moved cautiously along the wall, examining it as carefully as he could. The siding consisted of rough slats nailed vertically to the frame of two-by-fours at top and bottom to cover plywood sheets, then painted a light olive to blend into the landscape.

  Mallon moved cautiously to the window on a narrow end of the building and looked inside. In the moonlight that shone through the windows he could see one room with three sets of empty bunk beds, a table, and six chairs. There was a bathroom, which was open. He could see three kerosene lanterns: one in the center of the table, and two hanging from wrought-iron supports high on the walls. The cabin looked primitive. Maybe it was an extra place to accommodate guests who wanted the illusion of roughing it, or maybe its purpose was isolation. It didn’t matter. There was nobody here now.

  Mallon took off his jacket and pressed it against a windowpane near the latch to muffle the sound while he broke the glass with the butt of one of his pistols. Then he raised the window and climbed inside. He collected a lantern and a box of matches from the table, and went outside.

  The walk to the second building was at least two hundred yards. Beside it was a wooden tower that he had mistaken for a big tree from a distance in the dark. It was on a ridge overlooking a dry riverbed that had been outfitted as a firing range. There were barrows of earth bulldozed up some distance away, where he could just make out a row of posts with white squares that were probably targets on them, and at one side, a wind sock. He knew what that was for. When he had been a boy shooting on the family farm, he had put one up himself, because the targets were far enough away so that on some days it had been necessary to adjust for the wind.

  He stepped up to the garage-like building and examined it. The walls were painted the same color as the others, but now he could see that they were made of cinder blocks. He had a suspicion, a hope that he was right about what this building might be. He quickly walked around the building, looking for windows. The fact that there were none raised his hopes higher. When he reached the door and touched it, he was almost sure: the door was steel. This was the logical place to store the things they needed for the range: paper targets, the machinery for the pop-up combat targets, bench rests, spotting scopes. But maybe, just maybe, there would be other things inside that he could use.

  Mallon examined the door closely. It opened inward so the hinges were not accessible, and there were three dead bolts set about a foot apart, so the door would be impossible for one man to batter in. The only way he could imagine opening it was with a cutting torch or a concrete saw. The cinder-block-and-mortar walls were impervious to anything he could do without tools.

  He looked up and judged the distance between the spotting tower and the building. It was about eight feet, but the tower was a bit higher than the building’s roof. He climbed the ladder to the tower platform and looked again. It seemed a bit farther than it had from the ground, but he reminded himself that he had made his judgment before fear had added a few feet. He climbed up to the rail, bending to stay under the roof of the tower, and held on to one of its supports. He took a breath, and jumped.

  He hit the roof of the building about halfway up, then dug hard with his toes and scrambled with his hands to keep from sliding off. After a moment he was able to stop himself, then lie on his belly with his toes holding him there. He took out his pocketknife.

  Amateurs who wanted to make a building secure often overlooked a single design problem, and he was lying on it now
. A composition shingle roof was designed to keep out the rain, not intruders. He used his knife to help him pry up short roofing nails so he could pull shingles from the roof. He went at it patiently, tugging off shingles and leaving the tarpaper beneath until he could feel the long line where two sheets of plywood met. He stripped the tarpaper off to expose the nails.

  He dug into the wood around each of the nail heads with a cutting blade, just deep enough to get a purchase with the bottle-opener blade, then pry the nail up a bit. He went to his knees, put both hands under the sheet, and lifted. There was a creak, and the sheet of plywood came up. It acted as a lever to bend and partially extract the nails on the other edge, so he didn’t need to remove them. He held the sheet up like an open door and looked down into the building. It was too dark to see anything in the windowless space below.

  Mallon took out the box of matches he had taken from the other building, struck one, and lowered it into the space as far as his arm would reach. The bare concrete floor was about twelve feet below him. He was fairly confident that he could drop straight down and not hurt himself, but even more certain that he would not be able to get back out. The match burned close to his fingers. He turned its head upward so that it would not burn him, then in a few seconds had to let it drop. Just before it went out, he saw the distinctive color of fresh pine board.

  He lit a second match and stared at the spot to be sure he had not imagined it. He dropped that match too, lowered himself into the hole in the roof until he was hanging by both hands from the lowest edge, then let go. He fell longer than he had expected to, but managed to land on his toes, bend his knees, and fall sideways to break the impact.

  Mallon collected himself, stood, and lit a third match. There was another lantern on the shelf in front of him, so he lifted the chimney, lit it, and blew out his match. He raised the lantern and looked around him. First he studied the inner side of the door: the dead bolts required a key.

  Shelves along the near wall held the things he had expected to see: paper targets of various sizes with black bull’s-eyes, a pile of cutouts in human shape that had been shot through many times and patched and painted, more glue and patches, a few spotting scopes and binoculars in leather cases, a bore-sighting kit, a whole shelf of cleaning kits with rods, rags, solvent, and gun oil. He moved closer to the shelf that held the binoculars. There was one set that seemed to have a single eyepiece, but not like a spotting scope. He took it off the hook where it hung, and removed the leather case. It was a night-vision scope. He turned it on and looked through the eyepiece, but it didn’t work, so he opened the battery compartment and saw that the batteries had been removed. After a short search of the shelves, he found some batteries, inserted them, and tried the scope again. The eyepiece shone with a bright green glow. He hung the scope around his neck and held the lantern up toward the opposite wall.

  In the light he saw a wooden rack that held five bolt-action hunting rifles. He came closer. They looked like the Remington Model 70 rifles he and his father had used at home when he’d been a boy, but these had polymer stocks and three-to-nine-power scopes attached. When he examined the receiver of the nearest one, it said MODEL 710. They must be what the shooting instructors used to teach the clients marksmanship. He looked to his right along a long, narrow workbench. There were two boxes of .30-06 ammunition. He nodded to himself as he looked around him at his discoveries. The room was an arsenal, a workshop, a storehouse. But it contained nothing that would convict anybody of anything.

  He thought about the people behind the lighted windows in the building on the other side of the hill. They had corrupted and destroyed Catherine and Diane. They had murdered Lydia. They had trained killers, then sent them after Mallon too. They were staying up late tonight, undoubtedly discussing other ways of isolating Robert Mallon far from here and killing him cleverly and entertainingly. After they finished with Mallon, they would train other killers to go after other victims. He could not let them do that. He had to keep looking.

  CHAPTER 32

  As soon as Mallon found the tool box, he set to work. Getting a way out of this building was his first task. He sorted through the pile of lumber, selected the few pieces he needed, and laid them out on the floor. He did not want to risk doing any hammering, so he used a hand drill and some screws to attach eight short pieces to one board and construct a crude ladder that was long enough to reach from the floor to the hole in the roof. He leaned it there to keep it out of his way, then examined the row of rifles.

  There was a chain that had been run through the trigger guards to the metal rack and attached with a padlock, but the padlock was too small to present much resistance. He set a big screwdriver at the end of the loop, hit it once with the hammer, and popped it open. Mallon took two of the rifles out of the rack, then poured the boxes of bullets into his trouser pockets. He took the last three rifles from the gun rack, removed each of the bolts, hid them on a shelf behind some paint cans, extinguished his lantern, and carried it with his two rifles up onto the roof. He pulled his ladder up after him, ran it down the outside of the building, and climbed down to the grass with his finds.

  When he reached the ground he dragged the ladder off into the nearest wooded area and hid it in the brush. Then he kept going, climbing the low hill that overlooked the camp. He kept at the edge of the trees, where he would be difficult to see, and moved along the ridge until he had found a spot behind some bushes where he could stare directly down the long driveway, see the front entrance to the main lodge, the gym, and the sides of the six barracks.

  He released the box magazine from each of his rifles, loaded it with four rounds, and pushed it back in. Next he tested his night scope by turning away from the lighted buildings and scanning the woods. The world glowed eerily bright and greenish, and he could see clearly defined shapes of trees and bushes. He turned it off and left it around his neck.

  He checked his watch. It was two-thirty A.M. He had only about three hours of darkness left, and there was a great deal to do. He took one of his rifles and his lantern, and stepped quietly down to the row of barracks. He leaned close to the first window, cupped his hands beside his eyes, and looked in. It was a small bedroom.

  There was a sudden, loud pop and the glass beside his head shattered, spraying a shower of shards inward onto the polished wooden floor of the room. Mallon dropped to the ground, snatched up his rifle, and stared into the dark brush on the hillside above him. Somebody had shot at him. Either they had heard him coming down here to the barracks or they had seen him as soon as he had driven up the road, and had followed him. He strained his eyes to distinguish shapes in the dark brush, then remembered the night-vision scope. It was hanging from his neck, but he had not had the presence of mind to use it. He held it to his eye, and gazed up the hill at the brush. He could clearly see a man, crouching in a clump of bushes about a hundred and fifty feet away. As Mallon watched, the man raised his pistol to take a leisurely aim.

  Mallon rested his left elbow on the ground, quickly cycled the bolt to bring a round into the chamber, and stared through the rifle’s telescopic sight. The feel of the rifle was familiar—the weight, the shape of the stock. The only part that he had not felt before was the grainy texture of the polymer stock. He moved the rifle slightly, unable to find the man’s shape again in the narrow field of the sight. Then the man fired, the round kicked up dirt beside Mallon, and he flinched involuntarily. But the muzzle flash had been bright, placed directly in the center of Mallon’s sight. Mallon fired, enduring the long-forgotten kick of the recoil on his right shoulder and cheek. He lowered the rifle and raised the night-vision scope to his eye. In the bright green, he could see that the man had collapsed backward, but his torso was held upright by the branches of the bush he had hidden in. He recognized the face now. It was the young man with red hair from the hotel in Los Angeles. Mallon could see dark blood flowing from a big wound in his chest. The man was dead.

  Mallon scrambled to his feet and ran toward the c
over of the woods, then turned down the slope, away from the living quarters. He ran down the hill to the side of the gym and stood with his back to the wall. He used his night scope to study the six cabins, waiting for someone to emerge from a door. But after a few minutes, he still had seen nobody coming after him. Now and then he would lean outward from the side of the big building to see if there was any movement visible in the main lodge. When he could not detect any, he would return his attention to the cabins.

  There was little to them but a two-by-four frame, half-inch plywood nailed on, and a layer of rough-cut vertical slats on the outside to serve as siding to keep the weather out. The one he’d broken into to steal the lantern and matches had been finished on the inside by having cheap wallboard tacked in to hide the studs, but the sheets had been left with their joints showing, not even taped and painted to make them look like plaster. He wasn’t even sure whoever had built them had bothered to insulate them. No wonder someone inside had heard him prowling around.

  Mallon kept moving his gaze from one to another, but seeing nobody come out, then turning around to look at the main lodge, where the shades still covered the windows. Maybe he could get down there, past the lighted area, and reach his car. But then he saw the shade of a window at the near end of the main lodge pushed aside, and half of a face—one eye, part of a nose and mouth—appeared, then vanished. There were quick dark shadows behind the window shade a moment later: the man was resting a rifle on the windowsill, searching for a target. Mallon aimed his rifle so he could see through the telescopic sight, and held himself still. The shade came up quickly, and Mallon could see two heads, figures in dark clothes, leaning toward the window to see what was happening. Behind them there was more movement.