Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

She had gotten no sleep the night after the Altberg debacle. Two days later, she’d had to begin following Mallon to Los Angeles. He had kept her awake most of the night with his antics. She had been on the telephone for all those hours with two sets of amateurs, telling Kira and the boys where to wait for Mallon and holding Markham and Coleman back. She’d had no time when she was alone, awake, and rested to consider what she had been doing and make a decision about the future.

That had always been her main problem, she admitted. She was too passive, too reluctant to make her own decisions. Ten years ago, at the age of nineteen, she had gone all the way out to Arizona just because her boyfriend, Danny, had asked her to. Then, even though she had been terribly unhappy about Phoenix and about him, she had not thought of another plan and carried it out. She had simply stayed there until Mary had come along and brought her to the hotel to meet Michael.

She had been contented enough with her life after that, but somehow ten years had gone by. In one more, she would be thirty, and she still had no real direction in her life. She was better off than she had ever been before. She had improved physically from the constant exercise she’d gotten, and she had banked a lot of money. She could go somewhere and start over again. She looked up the hill at the cabin where she, Mary, and Debbie had kept their belongings. The one beside it was Spangler’s. That, she conceded, was probably what had really set her to thinking tonight. She didn’t want to die like that. She had to find something new. But what would it be, and where did she want to go?

It was really a question of getting herself to say good-bye to Michael. It was going to be difficult after all these years of trying to please him. He would know that the reason was that she had lost faith in him. It would not matter what she said; he would know.

Mallon very slowly raised the night-vision scope to his eye and turned it on: there were two luminous human shapes with glowing eyes, both carrying pistols. They walked slowly, about a hundred feet apart, at least two hundred feet from where he sat. He let the scope hang from his neck and very slowly raised the rifle to his shoulder. He judged that the one on the right was the greatest threat because the brush on that side was thickest and afforded the best cover. He aimed the rifle using the crook of the double-trunked tree in front of him as a rest, and fired.

He stared ahead as he cycled the bolt, trying to keep his eye on where the other one had gone, losing sight of the shape in the dark. A second later, someone fired. The shots were wide and high, but he saw the flashes. He aimed at the spot just as that one ran for a new hiding place. He raised his aim to the person’s chest, tried to lead him, and fired, then cycled the bolt again. He knew he had missed.

The person had disappeared, and the air was silent again. Mallon raised his night-vision scope to his eye again. The bright green glow showed him the bushes, the black sky, the trunks of trees, but no human shape. Mallon knew that he was in danger. He had shot this guy’s companion, then fired from the same spot, then lost sight of him. It was time to move. He dropped to the ground and crawled to the right into a big patch of low bushes that looked as though it had grown up after a tall tree had fallen. He burrowed into the bushes until he reached a stump, and that confirmed his guess. It was two and a half feet wide a yard above the roots, and the top was flat, cut with a saw.

Mallon sat behind it, rested his rifle on the top, and listened. He had counted five shapes in the window of the lodge before the lights had gone off. If his count was accurate, there were still four out there. He used his night scope again, slowly turning first to the left, then to the right until he had studied the woods on all sides. It was possible that the second man had simply turned and dashed down the hill toward the main lodge.

There were more footsteps. Mallon could tell that they were coming from behind him. There were three, four, five crunches, and then the person stopped to listen. Mallon gripped his rifle and waited, using the sounds to judge the man’s position. As soon as he heard the next crunch he threw himself back, rolled to his belly at the side of the stump, saw the shape and fired into it, rolled back and cycled the bolt. He could see the body was horizontal, but he could not tell more than that, so he rose to one knee and fired at it again, then trotted to get past it.

Mallon reached the spot and stopped involuntarily to stare down at the body. It was-had been-a woman. She had been tall and thin, her red hair in a ponytail and covered by a baseball cap. With the dark grease she had smeared across her face, he could not tell what she looked like, but she seemed young. He looked up and forced himself to move on.

He stopped at the edge of the woods and peered up the hill at the spot where he had hidden to fire at the main lodge. None of the hunters seemed to have reached it yet. He raised the night scope again and scanned the hillside. There was no sign of hunters in the open, so he moved up a few yards to try for a better view. As he climbed the hill, he remained inside the edge of the forest. Every ten or fifteen steps, he would stop beside a tree where his silhouette would not stand out, and spend ten seconds listening and studying the landscape with the night-vision scope. Near the top of the hill he moved deep into the woods and continued slowly. This time, when he raised the scope to his eye, it was dark.

He had drained the batteries. He closed his eyes in a pained wince. The scope had been an enormous advantage, the difference between seeing at night, like a cat, and being night-blind, like a bird. The loss was a huge one that made him frightened and sad at the same time. He lifted the strap from around his neck and placed the scope on the ground, made a mental note of where it was, then moved on cautiously. Mallon began to get used to moving without the night scope, but he could not get it out of his mind. His must have been the only one at the camp. If it had not been, then someone else would have seen him and killed him by now.

Suddenly, he knew something. Somebody else would have begun thinking about the night-vision scope by now. They would have thought of it at the very beginning, when Mallon had shot the man behind the barracks, and the hunters had looked out the window of the lodge at the dark woods and weedy hills, and seen nothing. There would be somebody in that group who had, at that moment, decided to make his way over the first hill and across the narrow valley to the dry streambed where the firing range was. It would have to be a person who had keys to the steel door of the cinder-block building, because without them there was not much chance of retrieving the night scope. The person who could do that was somebody Mallon needed to kill if he wanted to survive.

Mallon no longer tried to skirt the edge of the open ground. Now he moved deep into the woods, where he could move quickly with less fear of meeting hunters. In a few minutes, Mallon was descending the far side of the hill. He could see, ahead and off to his right, the observation tower and, beside it, the low, square cinder-block building he had broken into. From here he could not see the steel door, because it faced the observation tower and the firing range. If people had reached the building, they weren’t making enough noise to carry this far.

Mallon watched and waited. He knew that a man’s sense of time became terribly inaccurate when he was crouching in the dark, waiting anxiously for something to happen. But it had now been a very long time since he had seen his last hunter.

Now and then he took a deep breath and let it out to calm himself, but he tried to remain still. He heard a sound. He listened for a few seconds, but it did not come again. He was almost certain it had come from the direction of the observation tower. Mallon watched as one of the shadows under the roof of the observation tower moved. He lifted his rifle, rested his elbow on his bent knee to steady it, stared through the telescopic sight, and watched the shadow resolve itself into a person. Somebody had climbed the tower to see if he could make out where Mallon was.