Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

Mallon hurled the big stone. As soon as it left his hands, he dashed after it. The man’s head spun, but his eyes seemed to see only Mallon’s body, not the flying stone. He raised the pistol just as the broad flagstone hit his torso just below his chest. The pistol went off, spitting a flash of sparks. There was a heavy huff of air leaving his lungs, he buckled and staggered backward into the hedge, and then Mallon was on him. Mallon’s momentum propelled them both through the hedge into the street, with Mallon on top. He wrenched the pistol from the man’s grip and turned it toward the man, just as the man’s other arm jabbed hard at Mallon’s throat.

Mallon fired twice quickly, the two rounds pounding into the man’s chest like punches. His jab lost its power, and both of his arms went limp and fell lifeless to the pavement, spread wide from his body.

Part of Mallon’s mind was suddenly, oddly, detached from his body’s terror and agitation. He knew exactly what was about to happen, and knew what he must do to avoid it. He stood up. Then, without hesitation, he spun and ran across the road to the other side and hurdled a privet hedge, looking for the best place to take cover. He heard the sound of the car coming to life again. The headlights brightened the house to his left. In a moment they would be sweeping around the corner and onto him. He threw himself down behind the hedge and pressed his face into the grass.

The car came up and stopped with a short skid beside the body of the man Mallon had shot. The man in the driver’s seat opened his door, and the dome light went on. He appeared to be in his late thirties, tall and lean like the first man. He popped out and shut the door to put out the light, produced a pistol, and bent his legs to lean on the hood of the car and take two-handed aim at the house above the fallen man. He made no attempt to kneel down and determine whether the man could be saved. He just gave a harsh, loud whisper: “Markham! You alive?” There was no response, no movement.

The man stared over his car at the houses on that side of the street, at the shrubbery and trees along that side, even up at the roofs, but never behind him. Mallon had a persistent ringing in his ears, and the sight of the man seemed distant and absurd. The man was devoting all of his attention to the dark hiding places on the side of the street where he had found his fallen companion. He had simply assumed that Mallon would have shot him and run up that lawn for the cover that was closest. The man would not even consider the chance that Mallon had run across the street, and was behind him. Mallon began to feel hope.

Mallon lay on the ground behind the hedge, carefully aiming the dead man’s pistol through the space between two woody stems just above the grass. After thirty or forty very long seconds, the man stuck his gun into his coat, bent low, and began to drag his companion’s body toward the door behind the driver’s seat. He stayed low, apparently confident that Mallon was hiding on the far side of the car. When he had pulled the body to a spot just behind the door, he went lower, and swung the door open. The dome lamp threw a sudden bath of light onto the deserted street, and the man’s face suddenly changed. Still bent low, he slammed the door and snatched the gun out of his jacket, and Mallon knew he’d been seen.

The man raised the pistol, and he and Mallon both fired. Mallon was aware of two shots tearing through the foliage above and around him, but after a moment, the man fell forward onto his face.

The two men now lay on the pavement. Mallon had seen the places where they had been hit, and the detached, calm part of his mind assured him that they were dead, but he stepped over the hedge and across the street to look down at them and confirm it. He put the pistol into his jacket pocket. He picked up the second man’s pistol and put it into his other jacket pocket. Their weight stretched the material and pulled his jacket down on his shoulders.

He reached for the handle of the car door, but as he did, he realized he could hear another engine. He could see lights beginning to glow on the trees in front of the house at the bend again. This car was coming fast. He would not have time to run across the street to his hedge. He considered getting into the dead men’s car, then considered hiding behind it. He saw that the pattern of blood on the pavement near the men’s bodies was beginning to light up already. It was time to lie down.

Mallon had to lie on his belly to hide the gun in his hand and to be able to get up quickly, but he felt keenly the hardness of the asphalt. The two men on either side of him lay in perfect, open-eyed repose, like two whitefish in a delicatessen’s display case. He tried to imitate their stillness as the approaching car’s headlights brightened, swept across the house at the bend, and then settled on them.

The glare intensified rapidly, until he could see red through his eyelids, and then the car stopped. He heard a door open and slam, waited for another that never came, but heard the sharp, small clop of a woman’s shoes coming around the car. They stopped.

“Oh, Jesus.” It was just above a whisper, but it was Diane’s voice. “Oh, Jesus.”

Mallon pushed off the pavement and got to his feet, and she gave a little cry. She was only a silhouette in front of the headlights, but he could make out that she was wearing tight, dark pants of some kind and a blouse. As he stepped toward her, she at first recoiled, then seemed to reel a little, as though she felt faint. “It’s me,” he said. “I’m not dead. Get in and drive us out of here.”

She seemed to see that this was undeniably what she needed to do. She trotted the three steps back to the car, got in, and immediately threw it into gear to drive off. Mallon was only halfway in when the car shot forward, but he pulled his leg inside and let the acceleration shut the door. She glanced at him, wide-eyed, for a second, then stared ahead at the dark road.

“What happened?” she asked, her voice going up the scale as she spoke. “Who are those men on the ground? What happened to them?”

Mallon stared at her, watching her face while the outdoor lights of houses passed across it, then left it in darkness, only the glow from the instrument panel giving her a yellowish pallor. “I killed them,” he said.

“Killed them?” she repeated. “How?”

“I was going to say that it wasn’t my fault, but of course it was. It took some effort. I heard their engine, so I knew they were coming. They guessed where I would be hiding, but I knew what their guess would be.”

“What do you mean?”

“I could see that they were here to kill me, so I had to stop them.”

Diane looked at him in disbelief, her eyes wide, then squinted ahead at the road for a moment. Her eyes shot back to his face again and again, as though each time she expected some change to have occurred, but each time was shocked to see that it had not. “You just decided they were all here to harm you? You just guessed that and shot them?”

He leaned close to her, and stared at the clock on the dashboard. “Ten-oh-five. I guess you were nearly on time. It was a good plan, but it didn’t work out well at all,” he said wearily. “No, I guess it did.”

Diane was sitting stiffly, both hands on the wheel, but Mallon could see that her right eye was trying to keep him in sight. Mallon noticed that he was still holding a gun in his hand. He considered for a moment, then slipped it back into his jacket pocket.

He sat back in the seat, and he could see a change in her posture. She straightened so noticeably that it looked as though she were growing.“I’m not sure that this was a good idea,” she said. “We’ll have to make a convincing argument that we had a compelling reason to leave the scene.”