The hatred flared as he pulled the trigger.
The rifle jolted. Time in flight was about a second, maybe a little less. As the 175 grains of 7mm Remington Magnum arched across the canyon, tracing an invisible parabola, unstoppable and tragic, he had the briefest second to study her. Composed, calm, on two feet, defiant even at the end, holding her wound. Then she disappeared as, presumably, the bullet struck her. She tumbled down and down, raising dust, until she vanished from sight.
He felt nothing.
He was done. It was over.
He sat back, amazed to discover the inside of his jacket soaked with sweat. He felt only emptiness, just like the last time he’d had this man in his scope—only the professional’s sense of another job being over.
He put the scope back on the man. Clearly he had been eliminated. The gravity of the wound, its immensity, its savagery, was apparent even from this distance. But he paused. So resilient, so powerful, such an antagonist. Why take the chance?
It felt unclean, as if he were dishonoring someone who might be as great as himself. But he again yielded to practicality: this wasn’t about honor among snipers but doing the job.
He threw the bolt, ejecting a shell, and put the crosshairs squarely on the underside of the chin, exposed to him by the man’s supine, splayed position. This would drive a bullet upward through the brain at eighteen-hundred feet per second. A four-inch target at 722 meters. Another great shot. He calmed himself, watched the crosshairs still, and felt the trigger break. The scope leaped, then leaped back; the body jerked and again there seemed to be a cloud, a vapor, of pinkish mist. He’d seen it before. The head shot, evacuating brains in a fog of droplets. The fog dissipated. There was nothing more to see or think.
He rose, threw the rifle over his shoulder. He gathered the equipment—the ten-pound sandbag was the heaviest—and recased the binoculars. He looked about for traces of himself and found plenty: scuffs in the dust, the three ejected shells, which he scooped up. He grabbed a piece of vegetation from the earth and used it to sweep the dust of his shooting position, rubbing back and forth until he was convinced no sign of his having been there existed. He threw the brush down into the canyon before him, and then set out walking, trying to stay on hard ground so as to leave no tracks.
He climbed higher into the mountains, expertly and without fear. He knew it would be hours at the least before any kind of police reaction to his operation could be commenced. His problem now would be the remote possibility of running into random hunters or hikers, and he had no wish to kill witnesses, unless he had to, which he would do without qualm.
He walked and climbed for several hours, finally passing over the crests and descending to rough ground. He hit his rendezvous spot by three and got out the small transmitter and sent his confirmation.
The helicopter arrived within an hour, flying low from the west. The evac was swift and professional.
He was done.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Bob rode up through the trees and across the barren, high desert to the mountains. He loped easily along, trying to calm himself, wondering if he could make it before the sun rose fully. The black dogs seemed to have gone back to their kennel. They kept no schedule, nothing set them off; they were just there some days and not some others. Who knew? Who could tell, who could predict?
He tried to think coherently about his future. Clearly he could not stay here much longer, because the weight of living off his in-laws was more than he could bear. It turned all things sour and made him hate himself. But he doubted he could get started in his profession, which was running a lay-up barn for horses, not until he sold his spread in Arizona and had the money to invest in an upgraded barn and other facilities. Plus, it would mean getting to meet the local vets, getting them to give him referrals. Maybe the place was already crowded with lay-up barns.
He could sell his “story.” Too bad old Sam Vincent wasn’t around to advise him, but Sam had come to a sorry end in that Arkansas matter which even now Bob had his doubts about starting up. It got a lot of people killed, for not much but the settling of forgotten scores. He had some shame left in him for that thing. Maybe scores weren’t worth it.
But if Sam wasn’t around, who could he trust? The answer was, nobody. He had an FBI agent friend in New Orleans and a young writer still struggling with a book, but not yet having had any success. Who could he approach? The jackals of the press? No, thank you, ma’am. They turned him off beaucoup.
No, the “story” thing wasn’t any solution to his problems, not without the advice of somebody he trusted. That left shooting. He knew his name was worth something in that world—some fools considered him a hero, even, like his father, a blasphemy he couldn’t begin to even express—and the idea of making that pay somehow sickened him. But if he could pick up work at a shooting school, where they taught self-defense skills to cops and military personnel, maybe that could bring in some money and some contacts. He thought he knew some people to call. Maybe that would work. At least he’d be among men who’d been in the real world and knew what it meant to both put out and receive fire. He tried to imagine such a life.
The sound was clear and distinct, though far off. No man knew it better than he.
Rifle shot. Through the pass. High-velocity round, lots of echo, a big-bore son of a bitch.
He tensed, feeling the alarm blast through him, and had a moment of panic as he worked out that it was possible the shot had come from exactly where Julie and Nikki ought to be. In the next split second he realized he didn’t have a rifle himself and he felt broken and useless.
Then he heard a second shot.
He kicked Junior and the horse bolted ahead. He raced across the high desert toward the approaching mountains, his mind filling with fear. Hunters, who happened to get a good shot at a ram or an antelope in the vicinity of his women? Random shooters, plinkers? But not up this high. Maybe there was some trick of the atmosphere, which made the sound of the shots travel from miles away, up through the canyons, and it only now reached him and was meaningless. He didn’t like the second shot. A stupid hunter could shoot at something wrong, but then he wouldn’t shoot again. If he shot again, he was trying to kill what he was shooting at.
There was a third shot.
He kicked the horse, bucking a little extra speed out of it.
Then he heard the fourth shot.
Christ!
Now he was really panicked. He reached the darkness of the pass but had a moment’s clarity and realized the last thing he should do would be to race out there, in case someone was shooting.
As he slowed the animal down to a walk, he saw Nikki’s horse, its saddle empty, come limping toward him.
A stab of pain and panic shot through his heart. My baby? What has happened to my baby? Oh, Christ, what has happened to my baby?
A prayer, not one of which had passed his lips in Vietnam, came to him, and he said it briefly but passionately.
Let my daughter be all right.
Let my wife be all right.
“Daddy?”
There she was, huddled in the shadows, crying.
He ran to her, snatched her up, feeling her warmth and the strength of her young body. He kissed her feverishly.
“Oh, God, baby, oh, thank God, you’re all right, oh, sweetie, what happened, where’s Mommy?”
He knew his wild-eyed fear and near loss of control were not helping the girl at all, and she sobbed and shuddered.
“Oh, baby,” he said, “oh, my sweet, sweet baby,” soothing her, trying to get both himself and her calmed down, back in some kind of operational zone.
“Honey? Honey, you have to tell me. Where’s Mommy? What happened?”
“I don’t know where Mommy is. She was behind me and then she wasn’t.”
“What happened?”
“We were looking at the sunrise across the valley. Mr. Dade was there. Suddenly he blew up. Mommy screamed, the horses bucked, and we turned and rode for safety.
Mommy was—oh, Daddy, she was right behind me. Where’s Mommy, Daddy? Oh, Daddy, what happened to Mommy?”
“Okay, sweetie, you have to be brave now and get a hold of yourself. We are going to have to ride out of here soon. You have to settle down and be calm. I’m going to go look for Mommy.”
“No, Daddy, no, please don’t go, he’ll kill you too!”
“Honey, now, you be calm. I will take a look-see. You stay here in the shadows. When you feel up to it, gather your horse and get Junior’s reins. We will be riding like hell out of here very shortly. All right?”
His daughter nodded solemnly through her tears.
Bob turned, whipped off his hat, and slithered along the wall of the pass toward the light. As he neared it, he slowed … way … down. Fast movement would attract the eye, draw another shot if the bad boy was still scoping. Swagger thought he wouldn’t be. Swagger thought he’d hit his primary and his secondary and the girl couldn’t figure in anything, and so he was beating it to higher elevations or his pickup or whatever. Who knew? That had to be figured out later. The issue now was Julie.
He edged ever so slowly toward the light, at last setting himself so that he had a good vantage point. Some dust still hung in the air, but the sun was bright now. He could see poor Dade about one hundred-odd yards away, right at the edge. From Dade’s broken posture alone it was clear the old man was finished, but a monstrous head wound testified to no possibility of survival. Bad work. Expanding bullet, presumably fired in through the eye or something, a cranial vault explosion, gobbets of brain and blood flung everywhere.
He looked about for a sign of his wife, but there was none. He saw her horse over in the shade, calm now, chewing on some vegetation. He looked about for a hide in case she had gotten to one, but there were no rocks or bushes thick enough to conceal or protect her. That left the edge; he tried to recall what lay beyond the edge, and built an image of a rough slope littered with scrub vegetation and rocks, down a few hundred feet to a dense mess of pines where the creek ran through. Was that right, or was it some other place?
He thought to call, but held back.
The sniper hadn’t seen him yet.
There really wasn’t a decision to be made. He knew what had to be done.
He slipped back to where Nikki, who had now collected herself, stood with the two horses.
“Do you have any sense of where the shots came from, sweetie? Did you hear them at all?”
“I only remember the last one. As I was riding and had reached the pass. It came from behind.”
“Okay,” he said. If the shot came from “behind,” that probably meant he was shooting from across the canyon, on the ridgeline that ran anywhere from two hundred meters to one thousand meters away. That jibed with the position of Dade’s body, too. Whatever, it meant the shooter was cut off from where they were by the gap between the mountains and wouldn’t be able to reach them from here on out, unless he came after them. But he wouldn’t come after them. He’d fall back, get to safe ground, hit his escape route and be out of here.
“All right,” he said, “we are getting the hell out of here and beelining straight for home, where we’ll call the sheriff and get him and his boys in here.”
She looked at him, stricken.
“But, Mommy—she’s out there.”
“I know she is, honey. But I can’t get her now. If I go out there, he may shoot me, and then what have we got?”
He didn’t think he would be. He had worked it out to the next logical step: whoever had done the shooting, his target was not Dade Fellows but Bob Lee Swagger. Someone had reconned him, planned the shot, knew his tendencies and lay in wait from a safe hide a long way off. It was a sniper, Bob felt, another professional.
“She might be hurt. She might need help bad.”
“Listen to me, honey. When you are shot, if it’s a bad hit, you die right away, like poor Mr. Dade. If it ain’t hit you seriously, you can last for several hours. I saw it in Vietnam; the body is very tough and it’ll fight on its own for a long time, and you know how tough Mommy is! So there’s no real advantage to going to Mommy right now. We can’t risk that. She’s either already dead or she’s going to pull through. There’s nothing in between.”
“I—I want Mommy,” said Nikki. “Mommy’s hurt.”
“I want Mommy, too,” said Bob. “But sweetie, please trust me on this one. We can’t help Mommy by getting ourselves killed. He may still be there.”
“I’ll stay,” said Nikki.
“You’re such a brave girl. But you can’t stay. We have to get out of here, get the state cops and a medical team here fast. Do you understand, baby girl? That’s what’s best for Mommy, all right?”
His daughter shook her head; she was not convinced and nothing would ever convince her but Bob knew in his Marine heart that he had made the right decision—the tough one, but the right one.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
It had to happen sooner or later and he was glad it happened sooner. It had to be gotten out of the way.
“Mr. Swagger,” said Lieutenant Benteen, the chief investigator of the Idaho State Police, “would you mind stepping over here for a second, sir?”
Bob knew what was coming. As he stood on the escarpment, two and a half hours had passed since the shooting. His daughter was with a female state police detective and a nurse back at the house; here, an investigation team and coroner’s team worked the crime site, while below a team of sheriffs deputies struggled through the trees and underbrush for a sign of Julie Swagger. Across the gorge, detectives and deputies looked for evidence of the shooting site, ferried there by a state police helicopter that idled on that side of the gap.
“I figured you would be talking with me,” said Bob. “You go ahead. Let’s get it done with.”
“Yes, sir. You know, when a wife is killed it’s been my experience that ninety-eight percent of the time, the husband is somehow involved, if he didn’t do the thing himself. Seen a lot of that.”
“Sure, it figures.”
“So I have to ask you to account for your whereabouts at the time of the shooting.”
“I was on the other side of the pass, riding up to join my wife and daughter. We usually go out for an early morning ride. Today we had words, and I let the girls go alone. Then I got mad at myself for letting my damn ego seem so important, so I went after them. I heard four shots and rode like hell, to find my baby girl in the shadows of the pass. I looked out and saw poor Dade. I decided the best thing was to get Nikki back to the house, where I called you all and you know the rest.”
“Did it occur to you to look for your wife?”
“It did, but I had no medical supplies and I didn’t know if the shooter was around, so I thought it best to get the girl out of here and call in the sheriff and a medical team.”
“You are, sir, I believe, a marksman of some note.”
“I am a shooter, yes. I was a Marine sniper many years ago. I won the big shoot they hold in the east back in 1970. The Wimbledon Cup, they call it. Not for tennis, for long-range shooting. Also, I have been in some scrapes over the years. But, sir, can I point a thing out?”
“Go ahead, Mr. Swagger.”
“I think you’ll find them shots came from the other side of the gap. That’s what my daughter said, and that’s what the indication of Dade’s body said. Now, there ain’t no way I could have fired those shots from over there and gotten to my daughter over here in a very few seconds. There’s a huge drop-off, then some rough country to negotiate. I was with my daughter within thirty seconds of the last shot. You can also see the tracks of my horse up here from the ranch house, and no tracks that in any way connect me with what went on over there. And finally, you have surely figured out by now that poor Dade is gone because whoever pulled the trigger thought he was hitting me.”
“Duly noted, Mr. Swagger. But I will have to look into this further, to let you know. I will be asking questions. I have no choice.”
“You
go ahead. Do I need a lawyer?”
“I will notify you if you are considered a suspect, sir. That’s how we do it out here.”
“Thank you.”
“But you were a shooter who used a rifle with a scope? And if I don’t miss my best guess, this was a pretty piece of shooting with just such a rig.”
“Possibly. I don’t know yet.”
“This couldn’t be some sniper thing? Some other sniper? Maybe someone getting even with you for something in your past?”
“I don’t know, sir. I have no idea at all.”
The lieutenant’s radio crackled and he picked it up.
“Benteen here, over.”
“Lieutenant, I think we found it. Got a couple of shells and some tracks, a coffee thermos and some messed-up ground. You care to come and look?”
“I’ll hop right over, Walt, thanks.” He turned to Bob. “They think they found the shooting position. Care to look at it, Mr. Swagger? Maybe you can tell me a thing or two about this sort of work.”
“I would like to see it, yes, sir. There’s no word on my wife?”
“Not yet. They’ll call as soon as they know.”
“Then let’s go.”
Of course the chopper was a Huey; it was always a Huey and Bob had the briefest of flashbacks as the odor of aviation fuel and grease floated to his nose. The bird rose gracefully, stirring up some dust, and hopped the canyon to the ridgeline on the other side and set its cargo down.
Bob and the lieutenant jumped out and the bird evacuated. A hundred yards away and up, a state policeman signaled and the two men followed a rough track up to the position. There, the younger cop stood over a little patch of bare ground. Something glittered and Bob could see two brass shells in the dust. There were some other marks and scuffs, and a Kmart thermos.
“This appears to be the spot,” said the young officer.