Dead Aim

by Thomas Perry

  The person had disappeared, and the air was silent again. Mallon raised his night-vision scope to his eye again. The bright green glow showed him the bushes, the black sky, the trunks of trees, but no human shape. Mallon knew that he was in danger. He had shot this guy’s companion, then fired from the same spot, then lost sight of him. It was time to move. He dropped to the ground and crawled to the right into a big patch of low bushes that looked as though it had grown up after a tall tree had fallen. He burrowed into the bushes until he reached a stump, and that confirmed his guess. It was two and a half feet wide a yard above the roots, and the top was flat, cut with a saw.

  Mallon sat behind it, rested his rifle on the top, and listened. He had counted five shapes in the window of the lodge before the lights had gone off. If his count was accurate, there were still four out there. He used his night scope again, slowly turning first to the left, then to the right until he had studied the woods on all sides. It was possible that the second man had simply turned and dashed down the hill toward the main lodge.

  There were more footsteps. Mallon could tell that they were coming from behind him. There were three, four, five crunches, and then the person stopped to listen. Mallon gripped his rifle and waited, using the sounds to judge the man’s position. As soon as he heard the next crunch he threw himself back, rolled to his belly at the side of the stump, saw the shape and fired into it, rolled back and cycled the bolt. He could see the body was horizontal, but he could not tell more than that, so he rose to one knee and fired at it again, then trotted to get past it.

  Mallon reached the spot and stopped involuntarily to stare down at the body. It was—had been—a woman. She had been tall and thin, her red hair in a ponytail and covered by a baseball cap. With the dark grease she had smeared across her face, he could not tell what she looked like, but she seemed young. He looked up and forced himself to move on.

  He stopped at the edge of the woods and peered up the hill at the spot where he had hidden to fire at the main lodge. None of the hunters seemed to have reached it yet. He raised the night scope again and scanned the hillside. There was no sign of hunters in the open, so he moved up a few yards to try for a better view. As he climbed the hill, he remained inside the edge of the forest. Every ten or fifteen steps, he would stop beside a tree where his silhouette would not stand out, and spend ten seconds listening and studying the landscape with the night-vision scope. Near the top of the hill he moved deep into the woods and continued slowly. This time, when he raised the scope to his eye, it was dark.

  He had drained the batteries. He closed his eyes in a pained wince. The scope had been an enormous advantage, the difference between seeing at night, like a cat, and being night-blind, like a bird. The loss was a huge one that made him frightened and sad at the same time. He lifted the strap from around his neck and placed the scope on the ground, made a mental note of where it was, then moved on cautiously. Mallon began to get used to moving without the night scope, but he could not get it out of his mind. His must have been the only one at the camp. If it had not been, then someone else would have seen him and killed him by now.

  Suddenly, he knew something. Somebody else would have begun thinking about the night-vision scope by now. They would have thought of it at the very beginning, when Mallon had shot the man behind the barracks, and the hunters had looked out the window of the lodge at the dark woods and weedy hills, and seen nothing. There would be somebody in that group who had, at that moment, decided to make his way over the first hill and across the narrow valley to the dry streambed where the firing range was. It would have to be a person who had keys to the steel door of the cinder-block building, because without them there was not much chance of retrieving the night scope. The person who could do that was somebody Mallon needed to kill if he wanted to survive.

  Mallon no longer tried to skirt the edge of the open ground. Now he moved deep into the woods, where he could move quickly with less fear of meeting hunters. In a few minutes, Mallon was descending the far side of the hill. He could see, ahead and off to his right, the observation tower and, beside it, the low, square cinder-block building he had broken into. From here he could not see the steel door, because it faced the observation tower and the firing range. If people had reached the building, they weren’t making enough noise to carry this far.

  Mallon watched and waited. He knew that a man’s sense of time became terribly inaccurate when he was crouching in the dark, waiting anxiously for something to happen. But it had now been a very long time since he had seen his last hunter.

  Now and then he took a deep breath and let it out to calm himself, but he tried to remain still. He heard a sound. He listened for a few seconds, but it did not come again. He was almost certain it had come from the direction of the observation tower. Mallon watched as one of the shadows under the roof of the observation tower moved. He lifted his rifle, rested his elbow on his bent knee to steady it, stared through the telescopic sight, and watched the shadow resolve itself into a person. Somebody had climbed the tower to see if he could make out where Mallon was.

  Mallon very slowly and quietly cycled the bolt of the rifle once more, placed the crosshairs on the person, held them there, and squeezed the trigger. There was a click. He released the magazine, and the lightness of it in his hand told him it was empty. He groped in his pockets for any loose bullets that he had not loaded, but he found none. He looked up at the tower again. The person was climbing down the ladder.

  Mallon gently placed the rifle in the weeds, took the pistol from his right jacket pocket, and crawled through the brush toward the building. He crawled until he could tell that the man was on the other side, where the door was. Then he stood and walked quietly to the nearest wall of the structure. He was careful not to touch the wall, because any small sound would carry to the inside. If the hunter was already in, he might hear it. Very slowly, Mallon came around to the side of the building, listening as much for any sounds he might make as for the hunter. He heard the key slip into the first lock. He heard it turn and the dead bolt snap back, then heard the second one. There was a pause, and Mallon was not sure whether he had made a noise—maybe just his breathing would be enough—or if the third lock wasn’t the same. He waited, then heard the lock snap back. There was a rustling, and a clank as the person turned the handle. The door hinge creaked.

  Mallon stepped around the building toward the doorway and saw the man standing in the threshold. The man raised the hand that held a pistol and turned toward Mallon just as Mallon fired.

  Mallon knelt beside the body. He hoped the man had a flashlight so he could use it to search the building for more rifle ammunition. Maybe his night scope had not been the only one after all. If not, there could be more batteries in boxes on the shelves that he had missed. He held his pistol under his left arm and dug into his trouser pocket for the box of matches. He found it, struck a match against the box, and a sharp pain hit his hand so hard that he released it into the air. A second blow exploded into the side of his head.

  He was on the floor already when he saw his match fall toward the cement surface a few feet away, the flame at the head just a streak of blue, the small aura of light it threw below it growing wider and brighter. It hit, bounced once, and kept burning a yard from his face. He only recognized that what had hit the side of his head had been a kick when he saw what was coming at him from the darkness beyond the small, dying flame.

  It was a young woman, her hair cut as short as a man’s. She was wearing a pair of gray sweatpants, black shoes that were not sneakers but thin-soled like racing shoes, and a black pullover with a tank top over it, as though she had been in the middle of a workout of some kind. The expression on her face was emotionless, her eyes not on his face but trained on his hands and feet in intense concentration. He realized that he had lost the gun. He tried to roll out of her reach, but the next kick caught the back of his leg above the knee, and he felt pain shoot through it up to his back, and down to his heel.

/>   Behind him, he heard her say, “My name is Debbie. I want it to be the last thing you hear: Debbie.”

  He kept his body still until he got his left hand into his jacket pocket and around the second Beretta pistol. He heard her shoe squeak as she shifted it slightly on the concrete, and he knew that he had to ignore the pain and act now. He abruptly rolled toward her and fired through the fabric of his pocket.

  Debbie looked at him with a terrible surprise, then began to fall as the match burned out.

  CHAPTER 35

  Michael Parish had been observing and evaluating over the past three days, and he had decided he would need to make a great many changes in the program. As it was, each of his students knew how to fire weapons with some accuracy, and each knew how to engage in limited hand-to-hand combat with an opponent of his own physical size, age, and sex. But none of them had developed into hunters.

  When they appeared to have the advantage, they instantly became overconfident and foolhardy. When they were at a disadvantage, they seemed to become listless and dispirited and muddled, unable to think clearly or act decisively. They waited for a leader to emerge and tell them what to do, then needed to have him keep them at it. They had not yet learned to translate their fear into a need to act, or to remain calmly determined when a target wasn’t hit with the first shot and became dangerous.

  Parish walked slowly through the woods, his AK-47 assault rifle in his left hand, following the sounds of the shots. Parish was unhappy. Everything seemed to be going badly. Spangler was dead. Kira Tolliver had quit in the middle of the hunt and gone home, and he knew that she would not be back to hunt again, now that Tim was dead. They had both been only in their early twenties, and both had been wealthy in exactly the right way—with plenty of money in trust funds and no professions—and very much fascinated with the hunt. The loss of those two depressed him. Certainly he should drop the idea of sending groups of clients out after targets. He had known that for days. But the loss of Tim and Kira made him wonder whether it might not be better to scrap any hunt that involved more than one client. In fact, it was clear that he had not taken seriously enough the mistakes made by his students in the killing of Lydia Marks. The performance of Markham and Coleman should have been warning enough.

  For years, the traditional hunt with a tracker, a scout, and one client who would shoot under the direction of a professional hunter had been perfectly practical. Virtually the only way that it could fail was if the client paid to hunt a target who was under close surveillance by some police organization. Even then, it would have to be a police group that was spectacularly good at staying hidden but was present in large numbers. Such a situation was always theoretically possible: clients paid to hunt people they hated, and sometimes people who prompted hatred also raised the interest of the police. So far, it had never happened. The targets had been a harmless and somewhat unremarkable parade of faithless lovers, business rivals, bullying bosses. Some of the grudges had been so old that the target had no idea he still had an enemy, so stale that even Parish’s people had difficulty tracing the target to a current address. That had made the hunts even safer. He would return to his core business. Trying to train real killers, turning amateurs into experts who had the taste for it and the nerve, was simply too difficult.

  He was on his way to the most recent set of shots, because they seemed to him to have come from the precise direction he had been hoping for. Parish was accustomed to the sound of shots reaching his ears from the firing range.

  Debbie had volunteered to make her way around Mallon to the range to get into the blockhouse, pick up a night-vision scope and a good rifle, and then end this. Parish had been prepared to do it himself, but he had been pleased to hear her suggest it. He took it as evidence that he had at least been right about his staff. They were not incompetent, and they were not paralyzed simply because there had been casualties.

  He had agreed to let her go for several reasons, all of them practical. He wanted her to have the credit, the glory of being the hero, because he understood that loyalty came from such things: not what he did for her, but what she had invested in his goodwill. He also knew that although Debbie had a rapport with some of the campers—particularly certain women—the other staff members were less likely to be impressed. She wasn’t apt to strike them as the ideal leader to obey while Parish sneaked up into the backcountry.

  He had said to her, “I know you can do this, but I’ve got to be sure that absolutely nothing can go wrong. I need someone to watch your back while you handle this. Take Ron with you.”

  She had looked distressed for half a second, but the way he had said it had been the right way. She had understood that once she had a night scope and a rifle, she would be nearly invincible. But nearly was not good enough. There was still one strategy that could ruin everything. If Mallon could stay out of her sight and motionless until she passed him, he might be able to kill her before she found him. Debbie had understood this, and she had understood why the only possible companion was Ron Dolan, the other martial arts instructor. She had nodded and said, “Okay, Michael,” and waited while Dolan had prepared.

  Now, if Parish read the sounds right, Debbie and Ron had probably succeeded. He had not heard the distinctive crack of Mallon’s rifle, but he had heard the pops of a couple of pistol rounds, first one, then a delay, then the other. That, very likely, had been the pistol Debbie had brought out there with her being fired into Mallon, and then someone—Ron, probably—firing the coup de grâce into Mallon’s head to be sure he was dead. Those were the two kinds of people Debbie and Ron were, and it was another reason why he had insisted on their going together. He felt an upwelling of affection for them. They were like a pair of dogs that he had chosen from different litters and raised. He knew exactly what each of them could do, and he knew that they would do it.

  As Parish passed the crest of the first hill and looked down at the range, he admitted to himself that he had mishandled Robert Mallon: he should not have considered him sport. There had been old students begging Parish for a second or third hunt, and he had decided this would get them all off his mind at once. He should have used his staff as trackers and scouts to lure Lydia Marks and Mallon somewhere together, and gotten rid of both of them himself. Then he would have been free of worry once more, and been able to arrange safe hunts for a few carefully selected amateurs in his own time, maintaining the orderly schedule of new self-defense classes and keeping his staff rested and happy and well paid. He had learned that much from this experience.

  There was still one other thing that nagged at him, and that was the stubborn refusal of the human mind to be fully revealed and understood. He had made a terrible mistake with Catherine Broward. He had asked Catherine all of the right questions, made her tell him all the details of the relationship with her boyfriend from the first day. Parish had made her describe the period when she had been in love with Mark Romano and waited in their apartment each day for him to come home and ask her to marry him. Talking about that period had, strangely, seemed to make her more uncomfortable than the final phase, the one that had taught her what her boyfriend had really been like. The end she had narrated in a bored monotone, as though she were talking about someone else.

  After hearing her talk for hours, Parish had been satisfied. Now he knew that he should not have been. He should have known that something was wrong, because she had talked with such feeling about the good times, and none at all about the bad. She had not felt the right kind of anger or hatred. She had fooled him.

  Catherine had gone through with the hunt very smoothly and efficiently. She had politely thanked Parish for the training and for making it possible for her to kill her boyfriend. Then she had gone away. He had sometimes thought about her. He had even considered that she might be one of the young self-defense students who would come back soon, asking for more advanced training, or for a specialized apprenticeship with one of the instructors, all the while hungering for the next hunt.

&n
bsp; Parish felt a dull jab in his right palm and realized his fingernails had been digging into the skin. He rubbed the open hand against his thigh. He had been wrong about Catherine Broward, wrong about Markham and Coleman, wrong about Tim Hillis and Kira Tolliver. They had all been weak. Parish had also misjudged Diane Fleming. Diane was another disappointment. Since Mallon was here and she was not, she too must have done something stupid.

  Parish’s course intersected with the dry arroyo he had converted to a combat firing range. He moved down the bank into the channel, where he would be difficult to see, and cautiously made his way toward the blockhouse. As he approached the building, he could see that the door was open, and there was a man’s body lying on the ground outside it. Parish smiled: they had gotten him in two shots.

  He stepped closer to the body and bent down to look. It was Dolan. He straightened instantly, raising his eyes to scan the hillside and the woods beyond as he stepped backward to get into the deep shadows under the eaves, and place his back against the cinder blocks.

  “Who’s there?” It was a scared voice, the voice of a woman who was in pain. It was Debbie’s voice.

  “It’s Michael,” he called softly. He took another look around him, then slipped inside. He reached into his pocket and took out the small Mag-lite he carried. When he turned the crown to switch it on, he kept the beam wide and dim, but what he saw was confusing. He moved the beam around the room, saw a big opening in the roof, and then saw a jumble of things on the floor: tools, wood, rifles. He kept moving it, and then found Debbie. She was sitting on the floor with her legs extended and her back leaning against the wall, her left hand clutching her belly. She seemed to have no gun, but there was one lying only a dozen feet away on the open floor.