He knew we came this way. But some mornings we did not. He may have had to wait. He was calm and confident and able to flatten his brain out, and wait for the exact morning. That was the hardest skill, the skill that so few men really had. But you have it, don't you, brother?
A sprinkle of rain fell against his face. It would start pounding soon and the evidence would be gone forever.
Why didn't I think this through yesterday? I'd have had him, or some part of him. But now, no, it would be gone.
He's won again.
He searched for hides, looking down from the trail into the rough rocks beneath. Every so often there'd be a spot flat enough to conceal a prone man, but upon investigation, each spot was empty of sign. And as he rode, of course, he got farther out. And from not everywhere on the ridge was the shelf of land visible where both Dade and Julie could be hit in the same sweep.
So on he went, feeling the dampness rise and his sense of futility rise with it. He must have missed it, he thought, or it's already gone. Damn, he was a long way out. He was a long way out. He was getting beyond the probable into the realm of the merely possible. Yet still no sign, and Junior drifted along the ridge, over the small trail, tense at the coming rain, Bob himself chilled to the bone and close to giving up.
He couldn't be out this far!
He rode on even farther. No sign yet. He stopped, turned back. The target zone was miniature. It was far distant. It was-Bob dismounted, let Junior cook in his own nervousness.
He'd thought he'd seen a little point under the edge of the ridge, nothing much, just a possibility. He eased down, peeking this way and that, convinced that, no, he was too far out, he had to go back and look for something he had missed.
But then he saw something just the slightest bit odd. It was a tuft of dried brush, caught halfway down the ridge.
Wind damage? But no other tufts lay about. What had dislodged it? Probably some freak accident of nature .. .
but on the other hand, a man wiping away marks of his presence in the dust, he might just have used a piece of brush to do it, then tossed the brush down into the gap.
But it caught, and as it dried out over the two days, it turned brown enough so a man looking for the tiniest of anomalies might notice it.
Bob figured the wind always ran north to northwest through this little channel in the mountains. If the wind carried it, it would have come off the cliff just a bit farther back. He turned and began to pick his way back in that direction and had already missed it when, looking back to orient himself to the tuft of bush, he noticed a crevice and, peering into it, he looked down to see just the tiniest, coffin-sized flatness in the earth, where a man could lie unobserved and have a good view of the target zone.
He eased down, oriented himself to where Dade had died and Julie fell. He was careful not to disturb the earth, in case any scuff marks remained, but he could see none. At last he turned to get his best and first look at the killing zone from the shooting site.
Jesus Christ!
He was eight hundred, maybe a thousand meters out.
The killing zone was a tiny shelf far off at the oblique.
There were no features by which he could get an accurate distance-by-size estimation, and even on horseback, the targets would have been tiny. The scope wouldn't have blown them up too much, either: too big a scope would have amplified the wobble effect until a sight picture was simply unobtainable and, worse, it would have had too small a breadth of vision at this range. If he lost contact with his targets, he might never have gotten them back in time. He had to be shooting a 10X, nothing bigger than a 12X, but probably a 10.
That's some shooting. That's beyond good, that's in some other sphere. Careful, precise, deliberate, mathematical long-range shooting is very good shooting. Knowing instinctively how far to lead a moving target in the crux of the fraction of the second you've got, knowing it automatically, subconsciously .. . that is great shooting.
Man, that is so far out there, it's almost beyond belief. He knew of one man who could hit that shot, but he was dead, a bullet having exploded his head in the Ouachitas.
There might be two or three others but-He now saw too why the shooter had missed the kill on Julie.
He didn't make a mistake: he had the shot perfectly.
He was just betrayed by the physics of the issue, the bullet's time in flight. When he fired, he had her dead to rights. But it takes a second for the bullet to travel that long arc, to float down on her, and there's plenty of time, even in that limited period, for her to alter her body movement or direction enough to cause the miss. That's why Dade is at least an easier shot. He's not moving, to say nothing of at the oblique, on horseback galloping away as Julie was.
Bob sat back. His head ached, he felt dizzy, his heart beat wildly.
He thought of another man who might have done this.
He'd buried the name and the memory so far it didn't usually intrude, though sometimes, in the night, it would come from nowhere, or even in the daylight it would flash back upon him, that which he had tried to forget.
But he had to find out. There had to be a sign. Somehow, some way, the shooter would have left something that only another shooter could read.
Oh, you bastard. Come on, you bastard. Show me yourself. Let me see your face, this once.
He forced himself to concentrate on the hard scrabble dirt before him. He felt a raindrop, cold and absolute, against his face. Then another. The wind rose, howling.
