Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

Mallon very slowly and quietly cycled the bolt of the rifle once more, placed the crosshairs on the person, held them there, and squeezed the trigger. There was a click. He released the magazine, and the lightness of it in his hand told him it was empty. He groped in his pockets for any loose bullets that he had not loaded, but he found none. He looked up at the tower again. The person was climbing down the ladder.

Mallon gently placed the rifle in the weeds, took the pistol from his right jacket pocket, and crawled through the brush toward the building. He crawled until he could tell that the man was on the other side, where the door was. Then he stood and walked quietly to the nearest wall of the structure. He was careful not to touch the wall, because any small sound would carry to the inside. If the hunter was already in, he might hear it. Very slowly, Mallon came around to the side of the building, listening as much for any sounds he might make as for the hunter. He heard the key slip into the first lock. He heard it turn and the dead bolt snap back, then heard the second one. There was a pause, and Mallon was not sure whether he had made a noise-maybe just his breathing would be enough-or if the third lock wasn’t the same. He waited, then heard the lock snap back. There was a rustling, and a clank as the person turned the handle. The door hinge creaked.

Mallon stepped around the building toward the doorway and saw the man standing in the threshold. The man raised the hand that held a pistol and turned toward Mallon just as Mallon fired.

Mallon knelt beside the body. He hoped the man had a flashlight so he could use it to search the building for more rifle ammunition. Maybe his night scope had not been the only one after all. If not, there could be more batteries in boxes on the shelves that he had missed. He held his pistol under his left arm and dug into his trouser pocket for the box of matches. He found it, struck a match against the box, and a sharp pain hit his hand so hard that he released it into the air. A second blow exploded into the side of his head.

He was on the floor already when he saw his match fall toward the cement surface a few feet away, the flame at the head just a streak of blue, the small aura of light it threw below it growing wider and brighter. It hit, bounced once, and kept burning a yard from his face. He only recognized that what had hit the side of his head had been a kick when he saw what was coming at him from the darkness beyond the small, dying flame.

It was a young woman, her hair cut as short as a man’s. She was wearing a pair of gray sweatpants, black shoes that were not sneakers but thin-soled like racing shoes, and a black pullover with a tank top over it, as though she had been in the middle of a workout of some kind. The expression on her face was emotionless, her eyes not on his face but trained on his hands and feet in intense concentration. He realized that he had lost the gun. He tried to roll out of her reach, but the next kick caught the back of his leg above the knee, and he felt pain shoot through it up to his back, and down to his heel.

Behind him, he heard her say, “My name is Debbie. I want it to be the last thing you hear: Debbie.”

He kept his body still until he got his left hand into his jacket pocket and around the second Beretta pistol. He heard her shoe squeak as she shifted it slightly on the concrete, and he knew that he had to ignore the pain and act now. He abruptly rolled toward her and fired through the fabric of his pocket.

Debbie looked at him with a terrible surprise, then began to fall as the match burned out.

Michael Parish had been observing and evaluating over the past three days, and he had decided he would need to make a great many changes in the program. As it was, each of his students knew how to fire weapons with some accuracy, and each knew how to engage in limited hand-to-hand combat with an opponent of his own physical size, age, and sex. But none of them had developed into hunters.

When they appeared to have the advantage, they instantly became overconfident and foolhardy. When they were at a disadvantage, they seemed to become listless and dispirited and muddled, unable to think clearly or act decisively. They waited for a leader to emerge and tell them what to do, then needed to have him keep them at it. They had not yet learned to translate their fear into a need to act, or to remain calmly determined when a target wasn’t hit with the first shot and became dangerous.

Parish walked slowly through the woods, his AK-47 assault rifle in his left hand, following the sounds of the shots. Parish was unhappy. Everything seemed to be going badly. Spangler was dead. Kira Tolliver had quit in the middle of the hunt and gone home, and he knew that she would not be back to hunt again, now that Tim was dead. They had both been only in their early twenties, and both had been wealthy in exactly the right way-with plenty of money in trust funds and no professions-and very much fascinated with the hunt. The loss of those two depressed him. Certainly he should drop the idea of sending groups of clients out after targets. He had known that for days. But the loss of Tim and Kira made him wonder whether it might not be better to scrap any hunt that involved more than one client. In fact, it was clear that he had not taken seriously enough the mistakes made by his students in the killing of Lydia Marks. The performance of Markham and Coleman should have been warning enough.

For years, the traditional hunt with a tracker, a scout, and one client who would shoot under the direction of a professional hunter had been perfectly practical. Virtually the only way that it could fail was if the client paid to hunt a target who was under close surveillance by some police organization. Even then, it would have to be a police group that was spectacularly good at staying hidden but was present in large numbers. Such a situation was always theoretically possible: clients paid to hunt people they hated, and sometimes people who prompted hatred also raised the interest of the police. So far, it had never happened. The targets had been a harmless and somewhat unremarkable parade of faithless lovers, business rivals, bullying bosses. Some of the grudges had been so old that the target had no idea he still had an enemy, so stale that even Parish’s people had difficulty tracing the target to a current address. That had made the hunts even safer. He would return to his core business. Trying to train real killers, turning amateurs into experts who had the taste for it and the nerve, was simply too difficult.

He was on his way to the most recent set of shots, because they seemed to him to have come from the precise direction he had been hoping for. Parish was accustomed to the sound of shots reaching his ears from the firing range.

Debbie had volunteered to make her way around Mallon to the range to get into the blockhouse, pick up a night-vision scope and a good rifle, and then end this. Parish had been prepared to do it himself, but he had been pleased to hear her suggest it. He took it as evidence that he had at least been right about his staff. They were not incompetent, and they were not paralyzed simply because there had been casualties.

He had agreed to let her go for several reasons, all of them practical. He wanted her to have the credit, the glory of being the hero, because he understood that loyalty came from such things: not what he did for her, but what she had invested in his goodwill. He also knew that although Debbie had a rapport with some of the campers-particularly certain women-the other staff members were less likely to be impressed. She wasn’t apt to strike them as the ideal leader to obey while Parish sneaked up into the backcountry.

He had said to her, “I know you can do this, but I’ve got to be sure that absolutely nothing can go wrong. I need someone to watch your back while you handle this. Take Ron with you.”