“Do you remember?”
“Not much. The police have talked to me. Poor Mr. Fellows.”
“He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I am very sorry about that.”
“Who did this?”
“The police seem to think it was some random psycho in the hills. Maybe a militia boy, full of foolish ideas, or someone who just couldn’t handle the temptation of the rifle.”
“Have they caught anybody?”
“No. And there were no distinguishable prints on a cheap thermos they recovered. They really don’t have much. A couple of shells, some scuffs in the dust.”
She looked off. Nikki was coloring steadily, a big Disney book. The scent of flowers and disinfectant filled the room.
“I hate seeing you here,” Bob said. “You don’t belong here.”
“But I am here,” she said.
“I’ve asked Sally Memphis to come up and stay with you. She’s a couple of months pregnant but she was eager to help. I called Dade Fellows’s daughter, and she said her father has a ranching property over in Custer County, remote and safe in a valley. When you get better, I want Sally to move you up there. I want you and Nikki protected.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Nikki, honey, why don’t you go get a Coke?”
“Daddy, I don’t want a Coke. I just had a Coke.”
“Well, sweetie, why don’t you get another Coke. Or get Daddy a Coke, all right?”
Nikki knew when she was being kicked out. She got up reluctantly, kissed her mother and left the room.
“I haven’t told the cops,” he said, “because they wouldn’t get it and they couldn’t do anything about it. But I don’t think this is a wandering Johnny with a rifle. I think we got us a big-time serious professional killer and I think I’m the boy he’s after.”
“Why on earth?”
“There could be many reasons. As you know, I have been in some scrapes. I don’t know which of ’em would produce this. But what that means is until I get this figured out, I believe you are in more danger around me than less. And I need freedom. I need to get about, to look at things, to get some items sorted out. This guy’s got a game going on me; but now I have the advantage because for a few days more he won’t know he missed me. I have to operate fast and learn what I can in the opening.”
“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.”
“It still makes no sense. If he’s two hundred yards out, then the time in flight is so minimal he hits the sight picture he sees, and he don’t shoot if he don’t see the right sight picture. You’re sure the horse stumbled?”
“I felt it. Then, whack, and I was down, there was dust everywhere, the horse was crying.”
“Okay. Next, I heard four shots fired. One into Dade, the knock-down shot, the third shot, then the fourth into Dade’s head.”
“Thank God I never saw that.”
“But there was a third shot?”
“I think so. But I went off the edge.”
“You jumped off the edge? You weren’t knocked down?”
“I jumped.”
“God. Great move. Right move, great move, smart move. Guts move. Guts move. That gets you a medal in the Marine Corps.”
“It was all I could think to do.”
“So he did take a third shot. He was shooting at you. Man, I cannot figure why he is missing. Why is he missing? You jump, but at two hundred meters or less, with a seven-millimeter Remington Mag, what he sees is what he gets. He can’t miss from that range. Maybe he’s not so good.”