'Bob, you should talk to the FBI if you don't think these Idaho people are sophisticated enough.'
'I don't have anything they'd recognize yet. I have to develop some evidence. I'd just get myself locked in the loony bin.'
'Oh, Lord,' she said.
'This is going to be one of your things, isn't it?'
There was a long moment of quiet. He let the anger in him rise, then top off, then fall, then he began to hurt a little.
'What do you mean, 'things'?'
'Oh, you have these crusades. You go off and you get involved in some ruckus. You don't talk about it but you come back spent and happy. You get to be alive again and do what you do the best. You get to be a sniper again. The war never ended for you. You never wanted it to end. You loved it too deeply. You loved it more than you ever loved any of us, I see that now.'
'Julie, honey, you don't know what you're saying.
You're on painkillers. I want you to be comfortable. I'm just going to look into some things for a while.'
She shook her head sadly.
'I can't have it. Now it's come to my daughter. The war. It killed my first husband and now it's come into my life and you want to go off and fight it all over again, and my daughter, who is eight, had to see a man die. Do you have any idea how traumatizing that is? No child should have to see that. Ever.'
'I agree, but what we have is what we have and it has to be dealt with. It can't be ignored. It won't go away.'
He could see that she was crying.
'Get some help,' she finally said.
'Call Nick, he's with the FBI. Call some Marine general, he'll have connections.
Call one of those writers who's always wanting to do a book with you. Get some help. Take some money from my family's account and hire some private guards. Don't be Bob the Nailer anymore. Be Bob the husband and Bob the father. Bob the man at home. I can't stand that this is in our life again. I thought it was over, but it's never over.'
'Sweetie, I didn't invent this. It's not something I thought up. Please, you're upset, you had a terrible experience, you're in what we call post-traumatic stress syndrome, where it keeps flashing before your eyes and you're angry all the time. I've been there. Time is going to heal you up, your mind as well as your body.'
She said nothing. She looked at Bob, but wasn't seeing him any longer.
'But I have to deal with this. Okay? Just let me deal with this.'
'Oh, Bob--' She started to cry again.
'I can't lose you, too. I can't lose both you and Donny to the same war. I can't. I can't bear it.'
'I just have to look into this. I'll be careful. I know this stuff, I can work a lot faster alone and you'll be safer without me there at all. Okay?'
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.'
