Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

She saw Parish walk past poor Paul Spangler without even looking at him. Next he crouched facing the wall, craning his neck, moving his head one way or another. He was trying to see through a bullet hole in the wall. After a moment he gave up and slowly moved to place his right eye in the lower left corner of the window where Paul had been shot. Two more rounds punctured the wall to Parish’s right. He turned and stayed low as he moved away, but there was the beginning of a smile on his lips. He stopped at the far end of the room and sat down on one of the hard chairs.

“I’ve picked out the location,” Parish announced. Emily looked around to see the reaction of the others, but the only one she could see was Mary. “He’s up on the hill about halfway, at the edge of the trees. I finally saw the flashes when he fired the last two rounds.”

“ ‘He’? You mean this is only one person?” Mary asked. “I thought it was the police or something.”

Parish shook his head. “No, this is just Mr. Mallon.” He looked at Mary and Emily, his expression now confident. “This should hardly be shocking to you. That is not a deer out there. It’s a man. He thinks, he learns, and he fights. Now we’re past deciding whether or not to hunt him. He knows where we are, and who we are, and how to get to us. We have to kill him, or we’ll be destroyed too. Do you both understand what I’ve said?”

Emily could see Mary’s eye turn to watch her in the dim light, but neither woman spoke.

“Good,” said Parish. “Now we’ve got to go after him. As I said, the muzzle flashes came from halfway up the first hill, at the edge of the woods. The way to get him is to use our superior numbers and firepower. Arm yourselves immediately with every weapon you have, and all the ammunition you can carry. If you have dark clothing you’re not wearing, put it on. You have two minutes.”

Emily hesitated for a moment, then judged that obeying Michael was better than crouching behind the couch. It was the way out, into the darkness and the woods. She had carried a large purse that was like a backpack, and she had a Glock nine-millimeter pistol inside. She crawled to the table where she had left it, took out her pistol, and put it on the floor beside her while she slipped on the black sweater she had brought from her cabin, then picked it up again. She felt so much better with the gun in her hand that she stood up.

Parish said, “I have here some containers of camouflage makeup. Don’t try to make a pattern. That’s for daytime. Smear some on your face, neck, the backs of your hands-anything that’s exposed. Any amount is better than none, and the more the better.”

When Mary handed the flat can to her, Emily took a gob of it on her fingertips. As she rubbed it on her forehead, cheeks, and neck, she whispered, “Paul is dead. Where did Debbie and Ron go?”

Mary shrugged, but said nothing.

“Time’s up,” said Parish. “I’m going outside. The first thing I will do is cut the power to the whole ranch. That will be your signal to leave here. You know where he is, so try to stay out of his line of fire, and move quickly. He will fire his weapon. When he does, we’ll use the flash to locate him and return his fire: all three of us at once. When you have fired, advance to the next protected spot and wait for your next chance. When he fires again, do the same, and move closer. Keep it up until he’s dead. Do I need to repeat anything?”

There was no answer, so he said, “It will work if you keep your heads. See you later.” Then he slipped out the front door.

Emily looked down at her watch and began to time Michael’s progress. It had been thirty seconds, then a minute, two minutes. She looked away and tried to see the expression on Mary’s face, and once again had the same feeling she’d had many times in her life. She was alone and apart, the only one who didn’t really believe, the only one who had doubts and subversive thoughts. She could not see Mary’s face, but she could read her posture. She was waiting eagerly for his signal, tense with the worry not that he might be wrong but that she might disappoint him. She might not move fast enough, or be smart enough, or something.

The lights went out, Mary swung the door open and disappeared, but Emily hung back. Maybe if they were out there stalking Mallon, then the safest place to be was right here. There was the sudden crack of a rifle, some wood chips in the air, and Emily hurried out into the night.

The white lights that ran along the driveway from the gate to the gym went out, but Mallon raised the night-vision scope to his eye and saw the back door swing open. He fired shots at the people coming out, but they came out fast, ran hard, and spread out into the shadows.

Almost at once there was ragged gunfire, three muzzle flashes from different directions. Chips of bark from the trees above and behind him rained down, and he heard bullets thudding into the grass on the hill ahead of him. Mallon ducked down, his rifle empty. He left the rifle on the ground under the bush, took up the loaded one, crawled down the back of the slope a few feet, and slipped into the woods.

The next phase was going to be more dangerous, but he had known from the beginning that it would come. He had shot two people, and judging from what he had seen during the brief time while the window had been lit, he believed that left five who were alive and unhurt. It was a simple puzzle: anyone he met in the woods was an enemy. Anyone else meeting someone in the woods had four chances that it was one of his friends, and only one chance that it was Mallon.

He kept moving down the hill toward the buildings until he found a spot where several twisted old California oaks with trunks the size of a man’s waist had clumped together, two of them with forked trunks. On his first trip through, he had noticed this spot because it was such good cover. He sat down with his back to a tree to wait for the hunters.

The night was quiet, the leaves on the trees hanging still and dead in the windless air. Mallon remained perfectly still, his rifle across his lap, and listened. He knew that anyone else in the woods would be walking, climbing toward the spot where he had last been seen. Mallon would stay here, looking like part of a tree, or like a shadow.

It was a long time before the first footsteps reached his ears. The soft carpet of pine needles in the evergreen grove had made their movements silent, but now, as they came nearer to Mallon, their feet crushed dried oak leaves and their pant legs whipped through the low weeds and wild plants that grew in the wider spaces between the oaks.

Emily looked to her right to be sure that she was in line with Mary, and far enough away from her. Mallon was not turning out to be what everyone had expected him to be, and Emily was beginning to think he was likely to put a bullet between somebody else’s eyes. As they had walked up the first few yards at the bottom of the hill, Emily had begun to listen for the shot. The best that could happen was that they would get Mallon to fire at one of them too early and miss, and the flash in the dark would reveal him. Staying far apart and moving was really the only tactic they could use in this situation of pistols against a sniper rifle. During the few seconds after he fired, Mary and Emily would pour about twenty rounds into Mallon’s hiding place from both sides.

As Emily climbed in the dark woods, she found herself revisiting a thought she’d been having for about a week. It had started the night when she had served as the scout for Markham and Coleman. She had begun to suspect that it was time for her to move on. No, that was not true. She had begun to suspect that a long time ago. Watching those two perform had made her admit to herself that it was getting to be urgent. The disaster on the beach with David Altberg had made the impression stronger, but since then she had been so busy, so tied up with the problem of covering and cleaning up the mess, that she’d had no time to think.