Target America

28

Marie sat in the saddle atop the ridge in the light of the moon, looking down from the back of Gil’s Appaloosa mare. Kashkin was flat on his back with his eyes wide open, staring up at the glowing crescent in the sky, his arms splayed as if to embrace the heavens. The ground beneath him was stained black with his blood, and there were two cruel-looking bullet holes in his khaki Swiss Army shirt. The Mauser lay near a small rucksack water pouch, and pieces of a shattered satellite phone were scattered at his feet.

Oso sniffed at the body and growled low in his throat.

Marie pulled a Winchester model 94 in .45 caliber from the saddle scabbard and stepped down from the horse.

“Back,” she said to Oso, and he obeyed, sitting on his haunches.

Walking over to the body, she stood on the left arm and prodded Kashkin in the neck with the muzzle of the rifle to make certain he was dead before returning the Winchester to the scabbard. She gathered up the Mauser and rucksack, shouldering the ruck and pulling back the bolt on the rifle to eject the 7.92 mm round. It landed on the ground, and she crouched to pick it up, holding it in front of her discerning brown eyes.

The “boar’s tooth,” Gil called it… the round that might have killed her had she missed. She put the round into the pocket of her Carhartt jacket and gripped the Mauser with both hands, pivoting on her right foot to gaze out over her father’s ranch. It was hard reality to accept, but war had once again come to this land, and she was now no less a combatant than her husband was. She had killed another human being in a sniper duel, and this was a claim that even few Navy SEALs could make.

“Damn you, Gil,” she whispered.

She hung the Mauser from the saddle horn by the shoulder strap and did the same with the ruck. Then Marie went to stand over the body once again, her hands on her hips as she nervously chewed her lower lip. She didn’t want to touch the corpse, but there was no other way to get it down the hill. She pulled on her leather roping gloves and crouched to take hold of Kashkin’s left wrist, pushing the arm down against his side. He had been dead for six hours, so he was only about three hours into rigor mortis. Full rigor occurred at twelve hours, when the muscles were at full contraction, so he wasn’t yet stiff as a board, but he wasn’t entirely limber, either.

Within a half hour, she had him wrapped in a game bag and strapped to the travois attached to Tico’s saddle. She was mounted up and ready to start down the hill when it occurred to her she hadn’t seen Oso for the past five or ten minutes.

She called to him, and he barked twice from a distance. It was the same bark he used whenever he had treed a raccoon, and she knew that he wouldn’t come unless she went and got him. He was very hardheaded that way. So she shucked the Winchester out of the scabbard and dismounted.

“We don’t really have time for this, Cazador,” she muttered, taking a flashlight from the saddlebag and starting off through the juniper pines in the direction of the barking. She called out again to get a better fix on the dog’s location, and he answered as he had the first time. A minute later, she saw him sitting on his haunches in the beam of the flashlight beside a green Timberline tent some two hundred feet back from the ridge. The tent was pitched in a copse of junipers, and there was nothing outside it save for a small pile of coals that Marie found cold to the touch and a pair of white boxer briefs draped over a branch.

The sight of the camp was enough to make her sick to her stomach. The idea that someone had been camping up here without a care in the world, waiting patiently to blow her husband’s brains out, both frightened and infuriated her. She unzipped the tent and shined the light inside to see a large green backpack, a blue sleeping bag, and a pile of cooking equipment. There was also the lingering odor of an unwashed human being. Quickly rifling through the pack, she found the usual incidentals, numerous bags of backpacking food, and a small laptop computer. She crammed everything into the backpack then hurriedly struck the campsite, making sure to scatter the charcoal from the fire.

Forty minutes later, she stood beside her mother in the well-lighted stable looking down at the dead man lying in the center of the gray plastic tarp.

Oso sat across from them whining.

“He doesn’t look much like a Muslim to me,” Janet remarked.

“Me neither.” Marie knelt beside him and went through the cargo pockets of his olive drab trousers. She found his German passport, driver’s permit, and the key to a rental car.

Janet knew they were both way out of their depth. “We should call somebody, honey.”

“Like who?”

“Like you know who. I understand ya don’t wanna hear it, but we gotta tell Gil sooner or later, and there ain’t no point to waiting.”

Marie folded the tarp back over Kashkin’s stiffening body. Then she went to the wall and picked up the phone, calling Gil’s number and being sent straight to voice mail. She swore under her breath and left a message for him to call her right away.