Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

She shook her head disconsolately.

“You have to answer me a question or two, please. All right?”

After a bit, she nodded.

“You went over this with the cops, only they won’t let me see the report. But they don’t have a clue. He’s already got them outfoxed. Now, I’m assuming no two shots followed upon each other closely. Is that right?”

She paused again, thinking, and then at last yielded.

“Yes.”

“There must have been at least two seconds between shots?”

“It felt like less than that.”

“But if he hits Dade in the chest, then he hits you in the collarbone, and you’re forty, fifty yards away, it took him some time to track and fire. So it had to be at least two, maybe three seconds.”

“You won’t put Nikki through this?”

“No. Now — he hits you moving. I’m guessing you were really galloping, right?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a pretty good shot.”

He sat back, his respect slightly increased. An oblique fast-mover, at two hundred yards.

“Why does he hit you in the collarbone and not in the full body?”

“It’s my right collarbone, not my left one,” she said. “That means he was aiming at my back, dead center. What I remember is the horse seemed to stumble forward just a bit, and the next second it was like somebody hit me in the shoulder with a baseball bat. The second after that I was down; there was dust everywhere. Nikki came back to me. Somehow I got up. I was afraid he’d shoot at her, so I yelled at her. Then I ran away from her so that he’d shoot me instead.”

“It still makes no sense. If he’s two hundred yards out, then the time in flight is so minimal he hits the sight picture he sees, and he don’t shoot if he don’t see the right sight picture. You’re sure the horse stumbled?”

“I felt it. Then, whack, and I was down, there was dust everywhere, the horse was crying.”

“Okay. Next, I heard four shots fired. One into Dade, the knock-down shot, the third shot, then the fourth into Dade’s head.”

“Thank God I never saw that.”

“But there was a third shot?”

“I think so. But I went off the edge.”

“You jumped off the edge? You weren’t knocked down?”

“I jumped.”

“God. Great move. Right move, great move, smart move. Guts move. Guts move. That gets you a medal in the Marine Corps.”

“It was all I could think to do.”

“So he did take a third shot. He was shooting at you. Man, I cannot figure why he is missing. Why is he missing? You jump, but at two hundred meters or less, with a seven-millimeter Remington Mag, what he sees is what he gets. He can’t miss from that range. Maybe he’s not so good.”

“Maybe he’s not.”

“Maybe the cops are right. It’s some psycho.”

“Maybe it is. But that would cheat you out of your crusade, wouldn’t it? So it can’t be a psycho. It’s got to be a master sniper.”

He let her hostility pass.

“Another thing I can’t figure is how come he’s shooting at you at all? You’d think once he did me, it’s over. That’s it. Time to—”

But then something came into his mind.

“No. No, I see. He has to hit you, because he knows exactly how quickly you could get back to the ranch and a phone and that’s cutting it too close. Nikki’s not a problem, she’s probably not together enough to think of that. But he has to do you to give himself the right amount of time to make his getaway. He’s figured out the angles. I can see how his mind works. Very methodical, very savvy.”

“Maybe you’re dreaming all this up.”

“Maybe I am.”

“But you want the man-to-man thing. I can tell. You against him, just like Vietnam. Just like all the other places. God, I hate that war. It killed Donny, it stole your mind. It was so evil.”

But then Nikki came back with a Coke for her dad and a nurse came in with pills and their time alone was finished.

The wind howled; it was cloudy today, and maybe rain would fall. Bob’s horse, Junior, nickered nervously at the possibility, stamped, then put his head down to some mountain vegetation and began to chew.

Bob stood at the shooter’s site. It was a flat nest of dust across an arroyo, not more than two hundred meters from where Dade had been shot and maybe 280 from where Julie fell. If he had had a range finder, he would have known the range for sure, but those things — laser-driven these days, much more compact than the Barr and Stroud he’d once owned — cost a fortune, and only wealthy hunters and elite SWAT or sniper teams had them. It didn’t matter; the range was fairly easy to estimate from here because the body sizes were easy to read. If you know the power of your scope, as presumably this boy would, you could pretty much gauge the distance from how much of the body you got into your lens. That worked out to about three hundred yards, and then it was a different matter altogether: you entered a different universe when the distances were way out.

Why did you miss her? he wondered. She’s running away, she’s on the horse, the angle is tough; the only answer is, you’re a crappy shot. You’re a moron. You’re some asshole who’s read too many books and dreamed of the kick you get looking through the scope when the gun fires, and you see something go slack. So you do the old man, then you swing onto the racing woman, her horse bounding up and down, and it’s too much shot for you. You misread the angle, you misread the distance, you just ain’t the boy for the job.

Okay. You fire, you bring her down. There’s dust, and then she emerges from the dust, running toward the edge. She wants you to shoot her, so you concentrate on her, not the girl. You’ve really got plenty of time. There’s no rush, there’s no up-down plunge as there would be on a horse; it’s really a pretty elementary shot.

But you miss again, this time totally.

No, you ain’t the boy you think you are.

That added up. That made sense. Some asshole who thought too much about guns and had no other life, no family, no sane connection to the world. It was the sickening part of the Second Amendment computation, but there you had it: some people just could not say no to the godlike power of the gun.

But how come there ain’t no tracks?

Apparent contradiction: he’s not good enough to make the shot, but he is good enough to get out cold without any stupid mistakes, like the print of his boot in the dust, which would at least narrow it down a bit. Yet he leaves two shells and a thermos. Yet all three are clean of prints. How could that be? Is he a professional or not? Or is he just a lucky amateur?

Bob looked at the bipod marks, still immaculate in the dust, undisturbed by the process of making plaster casts of them. They would last until the rain, and then be gone forever. They told him nothing; bipod, big deal. You could buy the Harris bipod in any gun store in America. Varmint shooters used them and so did police snipers. Some men used them when they took their rifles to the range for zeroing or load development, but not usually: because the bipod fit by an attachment to the screw hole in which the front swing swivel was set. That meant the screw could work lose under a long bench session and that it could change the point of impact much more readily than a good sandbag. Some hunters used them, but it was a rarity, because you almost never got a prone position in the field, so the extra weight was not worth it. Some men used them because they thought they looked cool. Would that be our guy?

He stared at imprints of the legs, trying to divine a meaning from their two, neat square images. No meaning arrived. Nothing.