Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

“I’m not looking for apologies,” said Parish. “There were errors, and if I fail to point them out, you won’t improve. This time we had the target five ways, so no matter what she did, she was going to be ours. But she could have gotten off a shot and hit somebody. We didn’t have to give her that chance. Fortunately, Debbie took it away from her.”

Coleman shifted uneasily in his seat. “Watch the timing, and make sure the tracker is clear. That’s it, right?” He put his hands on the arms of the chair as though he was ready to stand up.

“Not quite,” Parish said. “When the target falls, you’re not home yet. There were other customers in that place, the waitress, and the bartender.”

“Well, yeah,” said Markham. “But Emily took care of them, so we didn’t need to.”

Emily said, “What were you waiting for?” Her voice was strained, as though she was trying to keep it calm but couldn’t quite do it.

Parish warned her with his eyes, and turned to the men. “Emily is right, of course. Once a gun appears, anyone in the place is justified in killing you, and some of them get over any reluctance very quickly. Some bartenders hide a gun near the cash register. Emily perceived that this one was moving in that direction and needed to be dead before he got there. You didn’t.” He let them think about it for a moment, then stood. “That’s it.” He smiled. “Otherwise, it was a perfect evening.” He held out his hand so Coleman could shake it, then turned to Markham and let him shake it.

Markham muttered, “Thank you, Michael. Thanks, Emily.”

“You’re welcome,” said Parish. “If we can do anything more for you in the future, get in touch.”

He walked them out to the porch and watched them cross the road to get into their cars. As they backed into the driveway, Emily joined him. “Wave to them,” he said. “And smile. The man just gave you a ten-thousand-dollar tip.”

Emily waved her hand. She could see Coleman waving energetically back to her as he drove out the gate. “No, he didn’t,” she said through her false smile. “You did.”

As soon as the two cars had gone around the first bend, Parish said, “Where to next?”

She grinned, and this time the expression was real. “I want to be the one to give Debbie her check. I’d like to see the look on her face. Do you mind?”

“Not at all.” He watched her slip into the lodge and snatch up the check that Markham had left, then hurry toward the gym. He walked across the long drive toward the hill in the direction of the firing range. He had problems to consider, and he welcomed the solitude. He had managed, by force of will and self-discipline, to control several unsatisfactory situations at once, but he had not yet had the time to consider what they had to teach him.

Parish had designed last night’s hunt to provide a specific experience for two paying clients. He had assumed that when Lydia Marks was made to believe that an informant had come to her, she would do as she had done in the past: show up with her client, Mr. Mallon, and they would interview the informant together. Parish went over his reasoning again: they had come to the self-defense school together, and while they were talking to Parish, they had said they’d gone to Pittsburgh together to interview Catherine’s sister. They had also said they were fresh from interviewing some woman in Los Angeles together. Parish had been perfectly justified in drawing the conclusion that if he presented an informant as bait, two targets would appear, not one. He had chosen those two targets over all others precisely because he had wanted to provide each of his two clients with a kill of his own.

Parish strode up through the dry brown weeds that covered the hill, considering. When he had heard Debbie’s first radio transmission making it clear that there was only one target, he had dreaded the dissatisfaction of his two amateur hunters: they would feel cheated with only one kill between them. But he had overestimated them. They were too arrogant to have noticed that their challenge had been insultingly easy. They had been so spoiled and flattered all of their lives that whatever meager achievement they accomplished was magnified to heroic proportions. There had been nothing for Parish to worry about. He had greatly overestimated them.

But that thought brought its own worries. Their mistakes on the hunt had been gross and shocking. He had seen at the time that most of the mistakes had come from pure selfishness. Coleman and Markham had each wanted to beat the other to the kill, each rushing to get his money’s worth and the other man’s too. Their greedy competition had been carried out in a mental vacuum, so that they had eagerly fought over one target, and left five equally good targets-the bartender, the waitress, and the three customers-completely alone. In their minds, only Markham, Coleman, and their designated target existed.

Parish never let his discoveries go unconsidered, and he sensed that this one had great potential for the future. The key to a new source of profits might be contained in the single word competition. There had also been other discoveries that cheered him a bit. He had watched his staff react instantly and expertly to salvage the hunt. And although he may have misjudged Markham and Coleman-their experience, their sagacity, their technical competence-he had not been mistaken in choosing to exploit them. They were acceptable.

The camp’s prices for the initial training, in money and in time, ensured that all of his guests were wealthy and idle. Month by month, the classes came and went, while Michael Parish watched and listened. Some clients were plagued by a fantasy that strangers would steal their money or take them hostage or rape them. Some of the middle-aged men who had been born too rich and protected to have been forced into military training when they were young seemed to thirst for it now, to feel their incompleteness and inadequacy and want to patch it up. But among the legion of silly, frightened, or bored people who paid him over a thousand a day for simple shooting lessons, he would see a few who had real potential. It was a small group, and they were very precious to Parish. What they wanted was the real thing.

Often he could see it in their eyes. On the range, they weren’t aiming at targets, they were aiming at a person, and he knew that the person had a name. When they were in martial arts, they were the ones who went into a strange reverie when they punched or kicked the heavy bag. The clenched teeth, the fixed, determined stare, the strain when the blow connected told him that they were seeing a particular face.

He waited, and eventually the hints would start. The student would ask where to hit to cause the most damage, what it took to make the heart stop beating. The ones he wanted had no interest in self-improvement. They only half-listened to lessons about anything but firing the fatal shot or striking the deathblow. Their ears merely monitored the stream of talk for tips that might help them fulfill the dream of the avenger that their minds were forming.

Parish never approached any of the guests to offer special services. He simply answered questions, admitted the truth that the lessons of self-defense were the same as the skills of an aggressor: a bullet could do nothing but punch a hole in what it hit. The bullet did not distinguish between an opponent who was about to attack and an unsuspecting enemy who had committed his offense five years ago. The methods, the lessons Parish taught, were the same.

Parish accepted only a very few, the ones who were right for his needs. They had to be reasonably good at their lessons. They had to be haters, but they had to hate in the right way. Parish could not be involved with lunatics who were afraid of whole races, or wanted to kill politicians or other public figures. He could not accept the sort of emotional, undisciplined person who would go into it in a hot rage, without considering what killing a human being would be like or what it would mean after it had been accomplished. Students he found acceptable had to embrace the hunt, not see it as a sin or a crime that they were driven to take on themselves. If they saw it as a sin, they might later decide that the way to lift the burden of the sin was to confess it. What he needed were people who were immune to seeing their acts as infractions, because they could not imagine why they should ever be denied any possession, or any pleasure.