J. Black - The Shop

“You have the sniper rifle?”

“I have it in the duffle.”

“Get it and set up where I tell you.”

“But what about—”

“Tell them to stay where they are. You said you were a sharpshooter, right?”

“I’m not a sniper.”

“Then you’re about to learn a new skill. No time like the present.”

She listened as he described the spot. She would be concealed, but on high enough ground where she could set up the rifle and shoot anyone who came in.

“What am I looking for?”

He told her.

“You’re sure?”

“It’s what I’d do.”

It took Jolie several minutes to get to the security center and retrieve the rifle and attach the sniper scope. “Rusty” wasn’t a good enough word for her ability with a sniper weapon. She’d only shot a sniper rifle twice—all her expertise was with a handgun. She took the H & K with her, too—sans the sound suppressor—and made her way to a slight raised mound in the garden, hidden from view by royal palms and the low-hanging branches of a magnolia tree. She crawled in and started to set up the tripod.

As she was doing so, her ears registered the drone of a helicopter.

She sighted on the helipad, not thirty-five meters away. The rain had abated a little, but the island was shrouded in a gray-green opaqueness—Jolie could barely see the white cross on the lawn.

The helicopter was kicking up a racket now, circling the island. Loud and low, menacing. Jolie wasn’t rattled. She brought herself down to the task at hand, looked through the scope, keeping the white-marked helipad in the crosshairs. Adjusting, a little higher. It would be nice to shoot the rotor, but she thought the easiest shot would be to get them as they emerged from the helo. Then they’d be sitting ducks.

For one second, the last vestiges of her law-and-order mindset rebelled. Then necessity shut it down.

The helicopter’s rotors were deafening.

Jolie concentrated her vision through the sight and kept as still as she could. Willed her heart to beat slower. Got in the zone. The way she did in the sharpshooter competitions. A kind of Zen.

He’d told her to shoot between heartbeats if possible.

So quiet in herself, she heard another sound, even under all the racket—a car engine. Her ears were now hypersensitive, as was every other part of her. She kept steady on the scope. Breathe . The helicopter hovered but didn’t touch down. She could see the chopper pilot through the window, headset ending in a comma at his mouth.

Then Jolie felt something zing past, split a leaf in two, and explosions of dirt all around her.

Someone was shooting at her .

Landry had half expected fire on Jolie’s position. He’d given her the second-best sniper position, hoped that whoever was left on the island would concentrate his fire on the obvious choice. But the man was thorough.

Thorough, but vulnerable.

The fire came from the hedge at the side of the main house, closest to the cabanas. Landry made his way around until he was behind the shooter.

He hoped Jolie had not panicked. If she lay flat on the ground and remained concealed, odds were good she would not be hit.

He’d planned to take the guy out quietly. Instead, he shot the man from a distance to keep him from killing Jolie. He understood this was an emotional thing—he wanted the cop to stay alive. Not the smartest thing he ever did.

Now he’d drawn attention to his location and had open space to cross.

He made it across and grabbed up the AR-15. The magazine was empty. The helo began to rise. The pilot had created the distraction and now was done.

Landry fired his own rifle at the helo but missed. He headed toward the causeway, staying hidden wherever he could.

Jolie clung to the ground like a limpet. Head down, eyes closed, like the ostrich with its head in the sand. Fire only raked the ground near her once, before she realized the majority of the fire rippled off to the left, twenty yards away.

No matter how terrifying an experience, no matter how great the fear that quicksilvered through your system and shattered everything in its path, it could not last for long. Abject terror could not sustain itself at that level forever. At first, when the fire raked her position, Jolie had flattened out and put her head down and prayed. She felt as if Edward Scissorhands was chopping his way around her. Finally she realized the danger was past, and the bullets were hitting elsewhere.

They didn’t know she was here .

They were guessing.

They’d fired on her position because it was a logical place to set up as a sniper. Now the shooting had stopped. The helicopter flew away.

But what did it mean? Had they given up?

It could be a trap. She decided to stay where she was, meld even more into the earth. The rain spattered the bushes and flowers and ferns and her windbreaker, her dark windbreaker that fit in with whatever shadows there were in this gray expanse of nothing.

If the helicopter came back, she would aim for the rotors and blow it out of the sky.

The SUV was parked on the road just beyond the gatehouse, already turned around for a quick escape.

Landry saw no movement. He guessed they were already on the island. He figured the driver of the SUV had rendezvoused with the helo farther up the coast, and Cardamone had come with the driver. For the second time, they’d used the helo as a distraction, tried to drive him into the open. It didn’t work, but the helo had slowed him down.

Now he had to figure where they would go.

Plenty of options, but he thought Cardamone and the SUV driver would try the tunnels. That was what he himself would do.

The entrance closest to the causeway was the octagon house.

He retraced his steps to the cabana pool house.

Landry still didn’t know how many there were. Three down. Best-case scenario, there was only Cardamone, the driver of the SUV, and the pilot. The pilot would be busy flying the helo.

In the little cupboard that led into the pool house, he radioed Jolie.

“They shot at me,” she said.

“You’re all right?”

“Fine.”

“Time to get them out of the tunnel,” he said.

“Now? I don’t want to get shot at again.”

“The man who shot at you won’t be shooting anymore.”

A pause. “You want me to go get them now?”

“Five minutes ago. There’s a Carolina skiff at the dock the bad guys came in—you can take that.”

“We don’t have a key.”

“I brought it around to the dock—the engine’s running. Just go.”

“You mean we could have gotten them out earlier? We could have gotten away ?”

Her response annoyed him. He didn’t expect her to understand the mission, but he wished she wouldn’t waste time assigning guilt.

“Roger,” he said, and clicked off.

Then he waited at the mouth of the tunnel.

If luck was with him, they would pass by.

And he would be behind them.

Turned out, it was one man and he came from above and behind.

Landry did not hear him.

Lifted off his feet in what felt like a massive explosion, Landry hit the ground on his right shoulder with an awful crunching sound.

He’d been hit—the sound of the gunshot came less than a second after impact.