Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

Parish answered, “Yes. He hasn’t lost his nerve. He was just upset with himself for hitting David Altberg on his first shot when he was aiming for Mr. Mallon. He’ll be fine. He’ll probably be on the range every spare moment for a time, giving himself the illusion that he’ll never miss again.”

They walked in silence, moving along the ridge toward the firing range. Mary asked quietly, “Would you do this to me?”

Parish looked at her blankly. “What?”

“If you thought I had lost my nerve and wanted out, would you let me go, or would you kill me?”

Parish took the rifle in his right hand and put his left around her waist as they walked. “I didn’t tell you to kill him.”

“You sent me out there to watch for your signal. And it’s exactly the way he was supposed to shoot Mallon when he missed.”

“Oh, is it?” he asked without interest. “I’ll have to take your word for it. I wasn’t there.”

“You would kill me, wouldn’t you?”

He pulled her close and laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous.” He leaned down and gave her cheek a kiss, then released her and held his watch close to his face so he could make out the faint glow of the dial. “This took longer than I expected. Would you mind putting the rifle back in the rack before you come down? I told Emily and Debbie that I would help with the rest of this.” He held the rifle out to her. “Unless you’d rather do that?”

“I’m not digging any graves,” Mary said. “I’ll put the rifle away.” She took it from him, stood still, and watched him moving down the hill toward the lodge. She turned and walked in the other direction, toward the storage building at the end of the firing range.

Mallon had been awake in his hotel bed for hours, waiting for daylight. At five A.M., he got out of bed, stepped to the window, and opened the curtains. Across the road, he could see the small stucco building with a tile roof that housed public rest rooms, and beyond it, the white beach and the blue ocean. The hotel was quiet.

He put on a pair of jeans, a baseball cap, and a sweatshirt, went down to the beach, and began to walk, staring at everything washed up by yesterday’s high tide. He tried to force himself to stop imagining that each of the big bundles of kelp was a man, but he walked close to a couple of them to be sure.

Mallon was trying to keep himself from being angry. He knew that the police department couldn’t afford to have every cop out on the beach all night waiting for the body to wash in, but now that it was dawn they could at least try using metal detectors to find the gun. Otherwise some two-year-old with a sand shovel was going to dig it up and take it home in his plastic bucket. He walked at a steady, quick pace along the same route he had taken the day before. When he got to the stretch of beach where the man had been killed, he saw that there wasn’t even a marker or a line of police tape.

Mallon reached a spot that looked to him like the place where the older man had pulled the gun out of his jacket. He looked at the point he had just passed and judged the distance to the next one, then looked out to his right at the ocean. There was nothing on that side that he could use to take his bearings: the Pacific was an unchanging expanse of blue that met the horizon, but he could tell that the tide was low. The surf line was at least fifty feet farther away than it had been when the man was shot. He turned to his left and used the cliffs to verify the distance.

Mallon walked back and forth on the beach, digging his feet into the sand, kicking it out of the way, sometimes dragging one foot sideways to plow a little deeper. He remembered that it was the way Lydia had searched for Catherine’s belongings the day after she’d died, and it made him feel sadder and more hopeless, and yet more desperate to do something about their deaths. He was the first to walk on this stretch of beach this morning, so the trails he was making were clear and easy to see. He kept widening the area of his search, staring hard at the sand in case he uncovered some part of the pistol without feeling it.

A wind came up, and he looked back and realized that a lot of time had passed. The places where he’d brushed the surface and exposed the wet, mortar-like sand were dry and powdery now. The wind was blowing the sand smooth again, so he could no longer be sure where he had searched. The sun was much higher, and his sweatshirt was wet with perspiration. He looked at his watch: he had been here for nearly four hours. He turned to look back the way he had come. There were local people on the beach now: adults lying on blankets, children crouching just above the surf, digging. He had seen a few of them on his walks, knew which parts of town they lived in, but had never spoken to any of them. Seeing them made him feel isolated and vulnerable. He had lived here for ten years, but he was a stranger.

He looked at the sand around him to measure how much of the area he had searched. It was hopeless. He began to walk back toward the hotel. It was still early, but usually Diane was in her office by nine. If she had heard his recorded messages, she would be trying to reach him at home, and failing.

At the hotel he called her number, but there was no answer. He showered, and dressed in some of his most respectable-looking clothes. He had bought the sport jacket on a trip to New York because he had seen it in a window. Mallon had packed in a hurry last night, anxious to get out of his house and into the safe anonymity of a hotel, and he had taken the coat because it had been visible in his closet and had not required evaluation.

He tried calling Diane again, but there was still no answer. He looked at his watch. It was after ten. Even if Diane was in court or something, surely Sylvia, the secretary, should be in. He paced back and forth a few times, and on the fifth trip across the room, he simply kept going out the door. There was no point in waiting in the room. He took the elevator downstairs to the lobby, went out the back, and walked to the lot to find his car. He drove to the municipal parking structure on Anacapa Street, then walked down De la Guerra to Diane’s office. Even though he had come in person to give Diane time to return to her office, he found himself hurrying.

As he walked along De la Guerra, he noticed a young woman with long red hair getting out of a car not far from him. She was tall and lean and had a pretty face. He took the risk of a second glance, but at that moment she was not walking, as he had expected. She was still by the car, facing him. She held a camera up before her face, using one hand to focus a big lens.

Mallon’s spine straightened and his brain sent an impulse to turn away and appear not to be staring at her, but he heard the click. He faced forward and forced his muscles to relax. He felt foolish, and hoped she had not seen his clumsy attempt to keep from being caught staring. But then, before his mind had quite worked out the words that went with his new feeling, he had begun to be uncomfortable again. Why did she have a camera? Had she been taking his picture?

He looked in the other direction and realized that he had been between the woman and the county courthouse. It was a pretty building, famous for being pretty, in fact, and he supposed she had taken a picture of that.

When he reached the low white office building, he stepped into the hallway and walked to Diane’s door. He turned the knob and pushed, and to his relief, the door swung open. But when he went inside, he could see that things weren’t right. The overhead fluorescent lights weren’t on. The place had a different feeling. It seemed lifeless, silent.

The door to Diane’s office opened, and Sylvia came out. She was holding a potted plant, staring down at it as she walked. She looked up to see Mallon standing in the office, gasped audibly, and gave a little jump. Then she seemed to go limp. “Oh! You really scared me.” She glared at him for a second, then looked down past the rim of the pot fretfully, and he could tell that she had spilled a little dirt on the rug.