There was no joy in slaying an unarmed man. The challenge was in
bypassing his trained guards to get to him.
It was the stalk that mattered most not the shot, the path and not the
destination. Once in the proper position, any fool could pull a
trigger. Getting to the proper position was the trick. Always.
'This way,' Morrison said.
'How can you tell? I can't fucking see anything!'
The two cars pulled to a halt, and Ventura heard doors slamming and
voices raised.
'Trust me,' Ventura said.
'I know exactly what I am doing.'
His phone vibrated.
'What?'
'Another player approaching. Black man in a new Dodge van, Alaskan
plates, looks like a rental car. Just passed me.'
Ventura frowned. Who was this? Just a coincidence?
Some fisherman running late for his hotel reservation, or pan of the
backup plan? And a black man? That would be unusual. The Chinese
didn't much like black people.
Of course, they didn't much like anybody who wasn't Chinese. A lot of
people in the West didn't realize that Eastern societies were the most
racist on Earth. They not only despised and looked down on Westerners,
they despised and looked down on each other. The Chinese hated the
Japanese who hated the Koreans who hated the Vietnamese, and all
variations thereof. The only thing worse than being a foreigner was
being a half-breed.
Well. Whoever he was, it didn't matter. As long as Ventura knew where
the man was, he was no problem, just one more piece on the board he
needed to track.
'Keep me advised,' Ventura said. He tapped the headset off.
'Let's go for a little ride in the cool summer night, shall we.
Doctor?'
Morrison stared at him, and that wide-eyed sense of amazement that
arrived when he'd realized that Ventura was having fun here was still
on his face.
A man like Morrison couldn't understand it, of course.
Men like him never did.
Sunday, June 12th Beaverton, Oregon
Tyrone stood by the Coke machine at the hotel and ran his credit card
through the scanner slot. The credit appeared on the screen, and he
tapped the button that delivered a plastic bottle of the cola. The
noise it made seemed loud in the quiet night.
He was still rattled. Once everything seemed to be okay, his dad had
gone off to Alaska, to help collect the man supposedly responsible for
what had happened at the boomerang tournament. Tyrone, Nadine, and his
mother were at the motel, miles away from the park, and the madness had
stopped, but he couldn't forget it. It was like some kind of
nightmare. He had wanted to kill people, and if he'd had a weapon--a
knife or a gun or a stick--he would have killed somebody. And the
