Firebreak

8

Parker walked into a large square room lined with deep tall shelves and with stacks of sports equipment in neat piles in the middle of the floor. What he'd seen in here that had drawn him in was a large round red-bull's-eye target, straw-stuffed, on a wooden easel, leaning against shelves at the back of the room. What did Marino and his friends use to shoot at that target?

His first walk around the room, scanning the shelves, came up with nothing. Back in the doorway, he called to Wiss, "How's it coming?"

"Slow," Wiss said. He sounded almost tearful with frustration.

Bob, in good humor, looked over from watching the work to call, "You find your gloves?"

"Not yet."

Parker went back into the room, for another circuit, slower, looking deeper into all the shelves. There was almost no time left. If this didn't pan out, he'd just have to shoot the bastard, go up the stairs, and see what happened.

There. Feathers. Neat feathers along a narrow wooden stick. Parker moved two sets of ski poles out of the way, and there was the quiver, tan, canvas, faked up with Indian motifs, containing half a dozen arrows. And next to it the bow.

When he slid the bow out from the shelf, it was a very hard stiff wood, almost black, nearly four feet long, carved into a graceful complex shape that looked like an Arabic letter or a symbol on a sheet of music. The bowstring was only fastened at one end, and hung too short. It wasn't an ordinary cord but a kind of cable, many threads wound together to make something hard and strong.

Parker glanced over at the door, but couldn't see the stairs from here. He put the end of the bow where the string was attached onto the floor, against his instep, and bent the wood down until he could put the loop at the top end of the string over the tip of the bow into the nock.

Had he ever shot one of these things? If he had, he couldn't remember it, but it wasn't high technology. He selected one of the arrows, which also had a nock at the back end of the shaft, beyond the feathers, which the bowstring nestled into. He wrapped his left hand around the bow's grip, rested the arrow's shaft on top of his fist, and worked out how to hold the arrow with the fingers of his right hand. Something like a pool cue grip seemed right, between the feathers and the nock.

When he tried drawing the bowstring back, it was surprisingly taut. If he managed to let the thing go in the proper way, it would move with a hell of a force, but he could see how easy it would be to flub it, and have the arrow dribble away across the floor, asking a bullet to come rushing back.

There was no way to do practice shots. But there was nothing else to do either, except be gunned down either by Bob's friend Harry or by the law.

Parker moved up to the wall just to the left of the doorway. If he moved forward, he would see Bob diagonally across the room, seated on the sixth step, leaning back against the seventh step and the side wall, half-turned toward Parker, Colt in lap, eyes on Wiss and Elkins.

Parker inhaled, and held it. He drew the string back to his ear, left arm out straight as he held the bow. He stepped into the doorway, aimed down the shaft, opened his right hand. The arrow streaked across the space like an angry wasp and pinned Bob's chest to the wall.