Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

He constructed a story to make sense of it: the old boy was very rich, some billionaire who was well known to people who kept track of billionaires, but whose existence was absolutely new to Mallon. People like that visited Santa Barbara all the time, and quite a few of them had houses there. That explained the young girlfriend or wife, and it explained the boat out there, moving along at a slow walk with the couple. It carried servants with the old man’s heart medicine and Viagra or, more likely, security people who were using binoculars to study the shore for danger. From out there it was easy to see everything before, behind, and above them, while still preserving the illusion that the two were alone. He glanced to his left at the man and the woman as they passed.

His eyes, by preference, moved to the girl, but the man was in motion, and that attracted Mallon’s attention. His right hand, the one in his jacket pocket, was coming out. The girl reacted in a surprising way: she grasped his biceps, as though to keep the man from falling. The hand came out anyway. The man twisted away from her toward Mallon, and she lost her grip.

The man started to bring his hand up across his belly, toward the side Mallon was on. The girl was behind him now, and she was backing away like a wary cat. Then Mallon saw that the hand held a gun. It was a heavy, solid-looking chunk of metal, a semiautomatic pistol with square corners and a muzzle that looked huge to Mallon, like the end of a pipe.

Mallon was instantly aware of the vast emptiness around him. The distance to the next point was a hundred and fifty feet, the backtrack to the last one was twice that far, and he would be running in loose sand. Behind Mallon was the Pacific, a stretch of empty horizon that stretched around half the planet. The only place for Mallon to go was toward the man.

The man was still off balance, and he brought the gun around his body clumsily. Mallon leapt, both hands in front of him. He struck down the man’s forearm with his left fist, and brought his right into the man’s face. It landed on the man’s cheek with a smack, and he punched again quickly and reached for the gun.

The man’s body abruptly jumped and contorted, and Mallon got the impression he had heard the bang only afterward. The man dropped to the sand on his arm, covering the gun hand, but Mallon had the thought that he must have accidentally shot himself instead of Mallon. Then the body jumped, and Mallon heard the second shot.

Mallon looked up toward the young woman for an explanation, but she was doing something unexpected. She lowered her arms, and only then did he realize that what she had been doing behind the man during the struggle was waving them. She was looking at the ocean, and he followed her eyes to see what she was staring at.

The boat was moving closer now, roaring toward the beach. He saw a figure kneeling low near the bow, resting a rifle with a scope on the gunwale. He felt a moment of gratitude: the sharpshooter had undoubtedly saved his life. But then the rifle fired. The shot plowed into the cliff behind him, and he dived to the sand beside the body. He saw a hand move from the trigger to grasp a bolt and cycle it to put a new round in the chamber. The boat was pounding over the waves, the bow rising on each crest, then slapping down with such a jolt that the man in the bow could not hold the rifle steady.

Mallon looked to see if the girl was taking cover, but she was sprinting into the ocean. She had already made it down the beach and was still running, her knees high and the water nearly to her waist. She used the last of her momentum to dive over an incoming wave, and then swam. The boat swung in close to shore just beyond the line of breakers. The man crouching in the bow put down his rifle and moved along the rail to the stern as the boat glided close to the swimming woman. He rested his chest on the gunwale, took both the woman’s forearms, held her as though they were two trapeze artists, and pulled her up into the boat. Both of them lay low, nearly hidden by the side of the boat as it quickly swung out toward the sea, accelerated to full speed, and angled around the point out of Mallon’s sight.

Mallon looked down at the man in the sand. He knew he had to find out if the man was alive, but he did not want to touch him. He turned his head to stare around him-up and down the beach and out onto the water-at first to verify that it was really over, and then in the hope that people had heard the rifle and were coming to help him. He was alone. He knelt down.

He touched the man’s back, felt no breathing, then moved the hand up to his neck, with the vague intention of feeling the carotid artery for a pulse. But the man was lying face down, and Mallon wasn’t sure what he was touching. The neck seemed loose, like the neck of a dead chicken. He pulled his hand away and it was covered with a bright streak of blood. He looked at it, wiped it on the back of the man’s jacket, then realized that new blood appeared there. Pushing it down saturated the cloth.

Mallon slid one hand under the shoulder and the other under the hip, and rolled the body over. The man’s eyes were open and the jaw slack. The front of him had sand stuck to it from the forehead to the feet. Mallon could see down the half-open front of the jacket that the rifle bullet had torn through him and emerged, spraying blood and bits of flesh into the lining.

Mallon stood and looked away for a moment, then looked back and noticed the gun pressed into the sand. The sight brought back his confusion. At first Mallon had been sure that the man had been bringing the gun around toward Mallon’s chest when the rifle shot had killed him. Maybe he had been wrong. Had the man seen the rifle appear on the boat and tried to defend himself by firing a few rounds at it? And who was he? Why had he been carrying a gun on the beach? Mallon stepped closer to the body, then dropped to his knees on the sand again. He took two deep breaths and began to search the body. He patted the pockets of the man’s shorts, and then the jacket pocket, and reached inside to be sure. There was no wallet. There were no keys.

Mallon stood and looked out at the ocean again. Far off, nearly at the horizon line, there were tiny white specks that he knew were boats. Probably one of them held the woman and the man with the rifle. He had to get to the police. Mallon turned and began to run back up the beach toward the city.

When he reached the turn around the point, the tide had already come in far enough to have completely covered the sand. Now the waves were breaking against the big rocks at the base of the cliff. He ran into the surf and came to the curve. The next swell was bigger, and it came at him from a different angle, whipped by a strong west wind. It lifted him off his feet and pushed him sideways into a rock. He took a step ahead as it receded, and felt it tugging hard at his legs, drawing him out to deeper water with it. The second wave collided with him and tumbled him over so that he sat down and rolled once as it hissed and sizzled over his head. He held to the cliff and waited, then lunged forward around the point.

The going was easier now, and the waves hit him from behind, propelling him more quickly up onto the wet sand at the high-water mark. He broke into a run again, staying on the hard, wet stripe where he could run without digging in and fighting loose sand. The tide was coming in fast. At the next curve, when he ran down into the surf the water reached his chest, but he pushed off, let the first wave float him, and swam around the point, then sloshed out and resumed his run.

He reached the wide, dry section of beach. Ahead of him and to the right he could see the volleyball nets, and beyond them, the cars gliding along Cabrillo Boulevard. He turned toward them and strained to keep up his speed, trying to reach the grassy area near the road, where there were people. But now he was winded and the sand was loose and dry. Running on it was harder and slower. Once his foot didn’t clear the sand and he tripped, but he got up and ran on.