Thomas Perry: Dead Aim

He lit a second match and stared at the spot to be sure he had not imagined it. He dropped that match too, lowered himself into the hole in the roof until he was hanging by both hands from the lowest edge, then let go. He fell longer than he had expected to, but managed to land on his toes, bend his knees, and fall sideways to break the impact.

Mallon collected himself, stood, and lit a third match. There was another lantern on the shelf in front of him, so he lifted the chimney, lit it, and blew out his match. He raised the lantern and looked around him. First he studied the inner side of the door: the dead bolts required a key.

Shelves along the near wall held the things he had expected to see: paper targets of various sizes with black bull’s-eyes, a pile of cutouts in human shape that had been shot through many times and patched and painted, more glue and patches, a few spotting scopes and binoculars in leather cases, a bore-sighting kit, a whole shelf of cleaning kits with rods, rags, solvent, and gun oil. He moved closer to the shelf that held the binoculars. There was one set that seemed to have a single eyepiece, but not like a spotting scope. He took it off the hook where it hung, and removed the leather case. It was a night-vision scope. He turned it on and looked through the eyepiece, but it didn’t work, so he opened the battery compartment and saw that the batteries had been removed. After a short search of the shelves, he found some batteries, inserted them, and tried the scope again. The eyepiece shone with a bright green glow. He hung the scope around his neck and held the lantern up toward the opposite wall.

In the light he saw a wooden rack that held five bolt-action hunting rifles. He came closer. They looked like the Remington Model 70 rifles he and his father had used at home when he’d been a boy, but these had polymer stocks and three-to-nine-power scopes attached. When he examined the receiver of the nearest one, it said MODEL 710. They must be what the shooting instructors used to teach the clients marksmanship. He looked to his right along a long, narrow workbench. There were two boxes of. 30-06 ammunition. He nodded to himself as he looked around him at his discoveries. The room was an arsenal, a workshop, a storehouse. But it contained nothing that would convict anybody of anything.

He thought about the people behind the lighted windows in the building on the other side of the hill. They had corrupted and destroyed Catherine and Diane. They had murdered Lydia. They had trained killers, then sent them after Mallon too. They were staying up late tonight, undoubtedly discussing other ways of isolating Robert Mallon far from here and killing him cleverly and entertainingly. After they finished with Mallon, they would train other killers to go after other victims. He could not let them do that. He had to keep looking.

As soon as Mallon found the tool box, he set to work. Getting a way out of this building was his first task. He sorted through the pile of lumber, selected the few pieces he needed, and laid them out on the floor. He did not want to risk doing any hammering, so he used a hand drill and some screws to attach eight short pieces to one board and construct a crude ladder that was long enough to reach from the floor to the hole in the roof. He leaned it there to keep it out of his way, then examined the row of rifles.

There was a chain that had been run through the trigger guards to the metal rack and attached with a padlock, but the padlock was too small to present much resistance. He set a big screwdriver at the end of the loop, hit it once with the hammer, and popped it open. Mallon took two of the rifles out of the rack, then poured the boxes of bullets into his trouser pockets. He took the last three rifles from the gun rack, removed each of the bolts, hid them on a shelf behind some paint cans, extinguished his lantern, and carried it with his two rifles up onto the roof. He pulled his ladder up after him, ran it down the outside of the building, and climbed down to the grass with his finds.

When he reached the ground he dragged the ladder off into the nearest wooded area and hid it in the brush. Then he kept going, climbing the low hill that overlooked the camp. He kept at the edge of the trees, where he would be difficult to see, and moved along the ridge until he had found a spot behind some bushes where he could stare directly down the long driveway, see the front entrance to the main lodge, the gym, and the sides of the six barracks.

He released the box magazine from each of his rifles, loaded it with four rounds, and pushed it back in. Next he tested his night scope by turning away from the lighted buildings and scanning the woods. The world glowed eerily bright and greenish, and he could see clearly defined shapes of trees and bushes. He turned it off and left it around his neck.

He checked his watch. It was two-thirty A.M. He had only about three hours of darkness left, and there was a great deal to do. He took one of his rifles and his lantern, and stepped quietly down to the row of barracks. He leaned close to the first window, cupped his hands beside his eyes, and looked in. It was a small bedroom.

There was a sudden, loud pop and the glass beside his head shattered, spraying a shower of shards inward onto the polished wooden floor of the room. Mallon dropped to the ground, snatched up his rifle, and stared into the dark brush on the hillside above him. Somebody had shot at him. Either they had heard him coming down here to the barracks or they had seen him as soon as he had driven up the road, and had followed him. He strained his eyes to distinguish shapes in the dark brush, then remembered the night-vision scope. It was hanging from his neck, but he had not had the presence of mind to use it. He held it to his eye, and gazed up the hill at the brush. He could clearly see a man, crouching in a clump of bushes about a hundred and fifty feet away. As Mallon watched, the man raised his pistol to take a leisurely aim.

Mallon rested his left elbow on the ground, quickly cycled the bolt to bring a round into the chamber, and stared through the rifle’s telescopic sight. The feel of the rifle was familiar-the weight, the shape of the stock. The only part that he had not felt before was the grainy texture of the polymer stock. He moved the rifle slightly, unable to find the man’s shape again in the narrow field of the sight. Then the man fired, the round kicked up dirt beside Mallon, and he flinched involuntarily. But the muzzle flash had been bright, placed directly in the center of Mallon’s sight. Mallon fired, enduring the long-forgotten kick of the recoil on his right shoulder and cheek. He lowered the rifle and raised the night-vision scope to his eye. In the bright green, he could see that the man had collapsed backward, but his torso was held upright by the branches of the bush he had hidden in. He recognized the face now. It was the young man with red hair from the hotel in Los Angeles. Mallon could see dark blood flowing from a big wound in his chest. The man was dead.

Mallon scrambled to his feet and ran toward the cover of the woods, then turned down the slope, away from the living quarters. He ran down the hill to the side of the gym and stood with his back to the wall. He used his night scope to study the six cabins, waiting for someone to emerge from a door. But after a few minutes, he still had seen nobody coming after him. Now and then he would lean outward from the side of the big building to see if there was any movement visible in the main lodge. When he could not detect any, he would return his attention to the cabins.

There was little to them but a two-by-four frame, half-inch plywood nailed on, and a layer of rough-cut vertical slats on the outside to serve as siding to keep the weather out. The one he’d broken into to steal the lantern and matches had been finished on the inside by having cheap wallboard tacked in to hide the studs, but the sheets had been left with their joints showing, not even taped and painted to make them look like plaster. He wasn’t even sure whoever had built them had bothered to insulate them. No wonder someone inside had heard him prowling around.