Dead Aim

CHAPTER 23

It’s going to be a special kind of hunt,” said Parish. “I’ve selected only the four of you to participate.” He surveyed the four young people sitting before him in the main lodge. They were all under twenty-five, all clean looking and physically fit. They were perfect, the sort of postadolescents that advertising agencies assembled for a television commercial, with teeth that had been straightened and polished, hair kept trimmed by expensive stylists. “You can hunt as a team or in pairs, or you can go out alone. It’s absolutely up to you. I trust each of you to that extent. You are among the very best hunters I’ve trained, in this country or elsewhere. I’ll be completely candid with you. The staff of the school will try to help by getting information to you in the field, but we will not be there to hold anybody’s hand during the hunt, or to get you out afterward.” He turned his head slowly to look at each of them.

“I can’t emphasize that enough. It’s your hunt. You have to do your own thinking. That means thinking ahead. You do your own tracking to find the target. Before you do anything to reveal yourself, and especially before you take your shot, you’ll have to do your own scouting. Think: Is this the best spot for taking down the target? Do I have a path out that will get me away before any curious bystanders arrive? Do I have a second way out if that one is unexpectedly blocked or proves dangerous? You all know what the considerations are.”

A hand went up, and Parish was pleased. He liked it when his students seemed eager. “Yes, Kira?” He could tell she was doing this to draw attention to herself, and he admired her for it.

“What can you tell us about the target?”

He smiled, then said quietly, “I was just coming to him. Mary will pass out photographs of him now.” He nodded at Mary, who had been leaning against the wall behind the four students. “She took them yesterday morning, and they came out very well. You should have little trouble recognizing him in most situations. He’s six feet tall, forty-eight years old, and looks trim and fit. He has brown hair with a bit of gray around the temples. He’s spent much of his life in the sun, so his skin has a slightly weathered look, and it’s tan. He’s divorced, and has lived alone for about ten years, so he’s comfortable without companions, and that’s the way he’s likely to be when you find him.”

Parish watched Mary handing out copies of the pair of photographs she had taken in front of the Santa Barbara courthouse and in the parking lot nearby. Each person would hold a photograph up for a moment, scrutinize it, and then lower it. He waited until all four listeners had looked at both pictures and then raised their eyes to him again.

“His name is Robert Mallon. He is, at least so far, unarmed. He’s a retired contractor and real estate developer. The bad news is that he got into the real estate development business at a time when it was about to boom, and he’s quite wealthy. As we all know, that gives a person flexibility, some experience in traveling, and possibly some allies or resources we don’t yet know about. He has also been hunted before.” He watched the faces suddenly become alert.” He has been here, and he has seen most members of the staff, which is why none of us will be going with you on this hunt.

“You’re all wondering about him now-how he survived that kind of attention, whether there’s something terribly important about him that I’ve neglected to mention. Very good. I want you to think that way. You want to know what I’m holding back about him. The truth is, there’s not much. He has an honorable discharge from the military, but so do half the men his age, and as far as we know, he didn’t see any combat. He didn’t perform some physical feat to keep from being killed. In fact, he didn’t even run away. I think that the reason he’s alive is luck.” He chuckled, shaking his head and lowering his eyes to the floor. There was a smattering of nervous laughter in the room.

He looked up suddenly. “I’m very serious. Luck is not always just an excuse we make up to account for poor planning or stupidity. In the first attempt he was out for a walk alone on a beach. There was a scout with a rifle in a boat a couple of hundred yards offshore, there primarily to keep the surrounding area secure while the hunter and the unarmed tracker approached the target on the beach and killed him. The hunter was too eager. Mallon saw the gun and attacked the hunter, and they began to struggle. In order to end it, the scout was obliged to fire from a boat rocking in the surf. Just as he squeezed the trigger, the boat moved, and Mallon was not hit. Do not underestimate luck. It’s very real.”

He brightened. “I also happen to know that it doesn’t last forever. His changed the moment you four arrived. You’re as unlike the people he’s expecting as you could possibly be. You’re superbly trained. You have each killed before and shown an aptitude for it. Your youth is an immense advantage. Your senses are at their sharpest, and you can easily move faster, and keep going longer, than anyone Mr. Mallon’s age. Mr. Mallon is now on the run. He left Santa Barbara in his car-the one he’s standing beside in the first picture-at three-fifteen. Right now he is on the Ventura Freeway heading toward Los Angeles. Emily Lyons and Paul Spangler are following him. You can call them on the road to learn where he is.” He was pleased to see that people in the room were fidgeting, anxious to leave.

“Take a last careful look at the faces of the people around you. One of the reasons I brought all four of you together was so you could see the people you don’t know. If you see any of them again later, don’t mistake them for some inconvenient bystander and open fire.” Parish turned his wrist to bring his watch into view. “It is now four thirty-nine.” He lowered his arm, pivoted, and walked toward the door. He stopped, turned his head, and said, “Good hunting.”

Kira squeezed her eyes closed and then opened them again. It was humbling. It almost made her cry. She could hardly believe that she was even here, that Michael had allowed her to be one of the people to play this game. She raised her left hand quickly to flick the curtain of blond hair from before her left eye so she could see Michael disappear.

She had been sure that while he had been talking, he had been looking right at her. Of course, he had looked at the others too-the three boys-but he had been looking at her more often, and for longer looks, than one-fourth of the time.

She stood and turned her head toward the window as though to look outside. There was nothing out there but an evergreen, but with the sun at this angle in the late afternoon, she could step into a beam of sunlight and see her reflection clearly.

She was pleased. The halter top revealed the slenderness of her waist and the outline of her breasts, and it let the definition of her arm muscles show. That was good for this group, because they probably wanted to be near a woman who was kind of buff. Some limp flower of a girl might get them blown away with her. She half-turned but kept her eyes on her reflection. The leather pants were great, too, maybe even better than the top. The window gave everything a greenish tint, so the burgundy leather looked black, but the effect was the same. There were so few people who could wear leather pants like that without looking as though their asses were crammed in and ready to explode. As the others moved to the door, she pried her eyes away from the window with a little trepidation to see whether she had attracted the kind of attention she needed.

She saw that it was the one with reddish-yellow hair who had responded first to her telepathic signal. He was looking at one of the photographs and listening to what one of his friends was saying, then suddenly he raised his eyes and turned to face her. One of his friends, the tall, thin one with the black hair, saw him do it, and moved his eyes to see what his friend was looking at. The third, a shorter, stockier one with a shaved head and a bull neck, turned to her last. He mumbled something that she hoped was “In your dreams,” instead of something nasty, but the one with strawberry-blond hair was already making his way toward Kira.

He smiled shyly. “My name is Tim. I was wondering if you would like to hunt with us.” He swept a hand in the general direction of his two friends. They were waiting for him by the door, pretending to be deep in discussion of some unrelated matter.

Kira tentatively imitated his smile, making sure hers was a bit smaller than his, and artfully made a slight shrug. She liked his eyes. They were clear blue. She looked warily at the two by the door. “Are you sure your friends wouldn’t mind?”

“They’d be glad. Having you along would make us look less like a hunting party.” He glanced around the room impatiently. “That’s why Parish hires all those babes to be his pros. It makes everybody safer.”

Kira did not like the sound of that. It was a bit too pragmatic and cynical, and not at all respectful. But at least it sounded to her like honesty, and it acknowledged that he had been looking at her in that way. He had ungrudgingly conceded to her that much-that she was too pretty to appear dangerous. She looked around the room very much the way he had, as though she were considering his invitation. “All right,” she said. “My name is Kira.”

“I know,” said Tim. He led her to the others. “This is Kira,” he said. “This is Jimmy.” He indicated the tall one, then pointed to the shorter one. “And Lee.” The shorter one, Lee, smiled and muttered something about being pleased, and the taller one merely nodded and stared into her eyes, but he did take her hand and give it a little shake.

She went outside onto the porch and they followed. At least they knew enough to let her go first, she thought. They knew she was a girl. She walked to her car, opened the trunk, lifted out her overnight bag, and slung the strap over her shoulder. Tim was at her side in a moment. “Take that for you?”

She slipped the strap and let him take it. Things seemed to be going exactly as she had planned: better than she had really expected. Since before the first time she had come to the camp, things had been going very badly for Kira, and this seemed to be a good indication of impending improvement.

Kira had first started thinking about taking some kind of self-defense class because a boy she had met at a party had tried to force her to have sex. It had been scary, and she had reacted by kicking and screaming for help instead of trying to reason with him. It had worked, but afterward she had been depressed, and there was nothing to do about it. It wasn’t that she didn’t know what was bothering her. It was that there were simply too many problems to solve at once, with one solution. One was that she had picked the boy out. She had liked him. She spent some time afterward looking back on the whole evening and wondering whether she had made his moves seem scary when they weren’t, and whether maybe if she had been a bit more tolerant at certain stages, it might not have worked out all right-been a nice experience, even. But another problem was a dissatisfaction with the small number and low quality of options she’d had at the time.

He had seemed to think she was saying, “No, no, no,” and meaning the opposite, as people sometimes did. She had decided to make it clear what she meant, but as she prepared to do that, she was aware that he might not care. With that thought had come her objective assessment that if he decided not to stop, she was not going to be able to do anything about it: he was much bigger and stronger than she was. He had stopped. He had apologized profusely. He had kept apologizing for so long and with such sincerity that he had become boring, and then annoying. She had not let him know that this was the meaning of her scowl, but had let him assume it was simple, unambiguous, outraged innocence.

Of all the uncomfortable feelings that night had caused, the only one she could find a solution for was the inability to defend herself. Over the next few weeks she had talked to a few boys she knew, the ones who owned guns and took karate lessons. One of them had told her about the self-defense camp in the forest north of Ojai.

Kira had called the camp and asked if they would mail her an application. When it arrived, she had carried it to her father. Kira’s father was the president of a boring company that made computerized devices that controlled car fuel intake, but he had once been a marine. Actually, he had been a captain in the Marines, but to him rank was not the distinction that mattered. To him, men were marines, or they were not.

He had stared at the brochure and at the application with the stony face he used for business. When he had looked up at her, the pale gray eyes were soft and concerned. “Baby, has something happened that you haven’t told me?”

She had been prepared for this. She had giggled and shaken her head hard. “Of course not. It’s just that when I come home late, the street near my apartment sometimes seems so dark and empty. I thought it might make sense to, you know, learn to take care of myself.”

He had nodded and handed her the brochure. “Go do it. I’ll pay.”

She had gone to the camp. She had always been good at classes like dance and gymnastics, and the hand-to-hand combat classes that Debbie taught had been like seeing the final picture in a set of assembly instructions: this was what all the work had been about. Spinning, kicking, and assuming exact postures correctly were precisely what she had been taught to do in dance classes. Doing handsprings and flips, balancing and rolling to recover from falls were just gymnastics exercises she had been trained to do since she was a toddler. After a month with Debbie she had become quick and wily. But a month had not satisfied her. It had only been enough time to stimulate her imagination. She had called her father and asked if she could stay on for another month.

She referred to him as “Jonathan” when she talked about him, but never when she spoke to him. She called him “Daddy” and told him that she was getting so good that he would be amazed. She talked to him about her work on the pistol range. She knew that Jonathan Tolliver had a deep skepticism about how much a hundred-and-ten-pound girl could ever learn to do in a hand-to-hand fight with a two-hundred-pound man, but he had great faith in firearms. He had always kept a few of them around his house: an M1911A1. 45 sidearm like the one he had been issued in the Corps, a. 44 Magnum revolver that looked a lot like the guns cowboys used in movies, and two semiautomatic nine-millimeter pistols that he kept as a greeting for burglars. He fired them now and then to keep his aim sharp.

He had tried to interest Kira in shooting as a hobby when she had been fourteen and painting signs of future trouble on her face, because he considered shooting clean and wholesome. At the time, Kira had considered shooting “something farmers do when the 4-H Club is closed.” This time, when she began to tell him about going onto a combat range and firing tight, rapid groups into man-shaped pop-ups, she knew she had him.

He had paid for psychiatry since she was eleven, paid unwittingly for drugs and tattoos, then for drug therapy and tattoo removal. He had paid her tuition to schools that were ever more geographically and thematically distant from the main thoroughfares of human activity. Self-defense seemed to him to be a simple, practical matter, like bread or a roof. The fact that she had expressed interest in something practical was a sign of better times. That she had stayed interested for so long was a hint of character that had previously been hidden from him. He paid.

Kira had been keeping a secret. It was not what had brought her to the camp, but it had been one of the things that had kept her here, working on marksmanship and tactics from dawn until dark every day, then doing exercises and practicing kicks and punches with Debbie until she needed to sleep.

Kira wanted to kill somebody. It was something she had thought about often since she had realized that it was not impossible. She had already chosen Mr. Herbick. He was the headmaster of the Shoreham School. The policy at the Shoreham School had always been to respect the privacy of others. But he had waited until Kira’s class was at an assembly, and then searched their lockers. It had been an educational experience for Kira. She had learned that at a private school, there were no such things as a right to privacy, freedom from capricious search and seizure, or due process. Within ten minutes of the discovery of a plastic bag of white powder in her locker, she was no longer enrolled in the Shoreham School.

The pleasant part of the lesson was that the officials of the Shoreham School didn’t feel that they owed the Commonwealth of Massachusetts any more attention to legal customs than they owed Kira. Headmaster Herbick and his assistant, Miss Swinton, called her mother in to witness a short, informal ceremony in which they flushed the white powder down the toilet in the headmaster’s private bathroom and moved her permanent record file from the N-Z filing cabinet in the back office and into a file box in a storeroom marked “Inactive.” At the time, she had been a year and a half from college. Mr. Herbick said he wished her luck, but of course she should not expect letters of recommendation from any school personnel.

It was late January. She could not transfer to another private school for the rest of the year, so she had been forced to go to a public high school. It took a day to find one that had space for her and a day to register, but the following Monday she found herself in a huge hallway that smelled of Lysol, jostled and pushed by the sort of crowd she had never seen anywhere but at a rock concert. She had to get used to bathrooms that were filthier than those at a turnpike rest stop, and so dangerous that she had to plead with girls she met in class to go with her and guard the stall door. This change had been educational, too.

Kira had lasted the year and a half, and had been admitted to a small women’s college in Vermont. From then on, her higher-education career had been a constant unsuccessful search for a new school where she would be happy. When she dropped out of the last one, she had already wanted to kill Mr. Herbick for over three years. He had changed her life. But it wasn’t until she actually had been trained in ways of going about it that she decided it must be done. She confided her fantasy to Debbie, the instructor she liked best, and Debbie accompanied her to Michael Parish. He placed her in a chair at the main lodge and spoke with her for hours, then dismissed her. It took four meetings held at two-day intervals before he agreed to arrange a hunt.

Herbick was easy. Kira had imagined a scene in which she would corner him somewhere and hold a gun on him, and he would weep and beg for mercy in a very satisfactory way. When it came to the actual event, it was less dramatic. It was like walking across a pasture and shooting a cow. She decided it was actually better that way: simple removal.

The problems came later. She had changed herself, which was what she had intended, but the change was of a slightly unexpected character. She had found that she had lost her capacity to have relationships with people who did not understand. They were living passive, uneventful, unimaginative lives, like the one she had lived before. She spent a year going on dates that always began with promise and retained exactly the same promise to the end. It was as though she and the boy were separated by a panel of perfectly clear, impenetrable glass. One of them would begin to talk, but the message would never quite reach the other. She would hear the boy talking about himself, but she could not respect his experiences or share his feelings, because he had never done anything as big and risky as what she had done. The problem became worse after her second hunt, and still worse after the third. She came to love killing. She had found the ultimate pleasure, the power to simply look at someone and think, I can easily kill you. The only reason you don’t fear me is that you are too unimaginative to know it. The fact that nobody could look at little Kira Tolliver and realize that she was a killer added to the feeling of power, but it also isolated her.

She had realized that the best place where she could attempt to find a full and open relationship with a man was among men who had done exactly the same thing she had done. She had come and asked Michael Parish if there was any way she could come to work at the camp, or buy a long-term membership to make her regular visits at a cheaper rate. He had said he would think about it and keep her request in mind, so she had gone home and waited.

She had waited for weeks without hearing his reply, but then Michael had called unexpectedly and told her about this hunt. He had said he would let her join it for free while he thought about her request. She was becoming more confident by the minute. After all, who was either of them kidding? He knew that someday, she was going to inherit a whole lot of money. And she would probably, in the meantime, marry a man with some money. Parish knew he would get repaid with interest. He wasn’t being so magnanimous.

Today she was taking advantage of something practical that she had learned over the past couple of years: that of all human beings, the only ones who were welcome everywhere, at all times, were beautiful young women. She looked up at Tim through her lashes as he shoved her bag into the back seat, then held her door open for her. She climbed in. As Jimmy, the tall dark one, drove the car down the gravel driveway toward the gate, she opened the bag and pulled out her new Beretta S9000 with the short barrel, slipped it into her purse, then found two full magazines and put them into the compartment beside it. She was aware that two of the three men in the car were staring at her in fascination. She thought that was just about right.