Masked Prey

by John Sandford

  A fat scope was mounted on top of the rifle.

  Gentry passed it over the table and Dunn took it, hefted it, looked through the scope at an exit sign at the other end of the arena. “How many rounds been through it?”

  Gentry shrugged. “Don’t know, but the barrel’s good. I took it out last week.”

  He went back to the case and pulled out a folded piece of tan paper. Unfolded, it was a target, with five seven-millimeter holes grouped in a space that could be covered with a bottle cap. “An inch and a quarter off a bench at two hundred yards,” Gentry said.

  “Good shooting,” Dunn said. He looked through the scope some more, worked the action, stuck his thumbnail in the chamber and peered down the muzzle end of the barrel, which was clean as a surgeon’s scalpel. He said, “I don’t have a huge amount of money to spend here, but I do have cash.”

  Gentry wagged his head once: “With that scope, I need to get eleven hundred.”

  “Bunny thought I could probably get it for under a grand—I mean, it’s used.”

  “Used, but perfect,” Gentry said.

  “Look, I know that’s a fair price, with the scope, if a little high, but I don’t have that kind of money with me . . .” He was lying, he had almost two thousand dollars in his pocket.

  They went back and forth a bit and Gentry finally agreed to take a thousand even, with the scope, and to throw in two boxes of his own hand-loaded 7mm: “If you can’t punch up a target at a thousand yards with this gun and my ammo, then you need to learn how to shoot better,” Gentry said, but with a smile.

  Dunn paid cash and Gentry gave him a card and packed up the gun. “Don’t go shooting any DC schoolboys with it,” Gentry said, with a quick barking laugh.

  He wasn’t looking at Dunn, which was good, because Dunn flinched.

  Got himself together and said, “That’s something else, isn’t it? That whole DC thing?”

  “There’s some goofy motherfuckers out there, bro,” Gentry said. He passed the case over the table. “Have a good time with it. Treat it right and it’ll be your best friend.”

  * * *

  —

  ON THE WAY out, Dunn lingered at a table of handguns, the rifle case in his hand. The woman selling the handguns spotted him as a buyer, rather than a looker, and hurried over and asked, “What can I sell you?”

  “Maybe nothing,” Dunn said. “But I’m working over in Baltimore on a contractor crew, we’re tearing out some old houses. Not a good neighborhood and it’s getting to be almost dark before quitting time. I got a house gun, but I’m kind of looking around for a decent piece that I could actually carry in my pocket. You know, without people looking at me, knowing what’s in there.”

  “Baltimore. Whew,” the woman said, blowing air. She was wearing a bright blue T-shirt that showed a target face with a cluster of bullet holes around the ten-ring, and the words, “Yes, I do shoot like a girl.” She said, “Baltimore’s not a good place for an honest white man. I’ll tell you what, and I’m not just selling here, I got exactly what you need. Exactly.”

  She had a bookcase-like rack behind her, pulled a plastic box off one of the shelves, opened it, and took out a hand-sized black pistol. “Sig 938. Shoots nines. I gotta say, it’s not the most pleasant gun to shoot, you wouldn’t want to go around plinking with it, but it’s accurate and it’ll flat kick ass. Magazines will hold six rounds and you get two mags with the gun. But here’s the best part.”

  She walked down the table, picked up what looked like a leather triangle, and brought it back. “This here’s a Sticky holster. The outside is sticky fabric, but the inside is super-slick cloth.” She slipped the gun into the thin holster, and said, “Here. Put it in your jeans pocket.”

  Dunn did, and the gun disappeared. He took a few steps around the table, and the gun was invisible, even with his tight jeans.

  “Now,” she said, “Pull the gun.”

  He stuck his hand in his pocket, and the gun slipped out with no felt friction at all. “Man, that’s slick,” he said. He looked at the gun. “How much?”

  “This particular model retails for six hundred dollars new . . .”

  “But it’s not new . . .”

  She took $475 cash. Dunn suspected that what the IRS didn’t know about the transaction, wouldn’t hurt anyone except the IRS.

  * * *

  —

  DUNN WENT OUT TO HIS CAR, put the rifle on the floor of the backseat, out of sight, took the Sig out of its case, thumbed six rounds into one of the mags, slapped it into the pistol, put the pistol in the Sticky holster, put the holster in his pocket and used the wristband to get back into the show.

  He was armed and he liked the feeling. Realistically, though, he had everything he needed. He watched some guy throwing hatchets at a wooden stump, sat in on a video about threats to gun-owners’ rights, and listened to a man give a talk and show a video on low-light shooting and night-vision scopes. The particular scope he was touting sold for $4,199.99, and Dunn decided he could do without it, though the technology was interesting.

  He left the show after the night-vision movie and drove over to the business district.

  * * *

  —

  MERKIN, WEST VIRGINIA, was not a pretty town, or a rich one, but it was an old place, and interesting in its own way, every kind of house from colonial to ranch, red-brick buildings on the single commercial street, kids throwing footballs in side yards, girls ambling aimlessly along the sidewalks, enjoying the warm afternoon sun and the new color in the autumn leaves.

  Dunn found a café, a slow-moving place with greasy, salty, good-tasting hamburgers and fries, and decent banana cream pie, and lingered further over a second cup of coffee, thinking about the rifle in the car, and a second shot. And the pressure in his pocket, the new carry gun.

  Time slipped away and it was late afternoon when he started back to Warrenton. He crossed the Virginia line at twilight, on Highway 33 west of Rawley Springs, not moving especially fast on the two-lane road, when two deer bolted from the forest at the side of the road.

  He hit them both, the lead deer in the hip, the second one, full on; the second deer tried to leap at the last moment and caught the top of his truck’s brush guard, rolled over it and hit the windshield. Blood exploded across the glass and the deer flipped off as the truck careened into the ditch at the side of the road. Dunn, half-blinded by the blood-slicked windshield, managed to keep the truck upright and finally stopped it, a hundred feet past the point where he’d hit the deer.

  He got out of the truck, dazed, sank up to his ankles in the ditch muck, climbed the bank to the blacktop surface; he could smell the wet-copper odor of blood on the truck. He was looking at his truck when another pickup came along, and pulled over. A bearded man got out and asked, “You okay? Hit that deer?”

  Dunn scrubbed at his forehead and said, “Yeah. One minute ago.”

  “They’re like rats, they’re all over the place.” The man looked down at the truck and said, “I got a chain, but I don’t believe I could get you out of there. You’re pretty much sunk down in the mud. You’re gonna need a tow.”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “Damn good thing you had a brush guard on there; doesn’t look like you took much damage.”

  They got a squat black tow truck out of Harrisonburg and a Virginia state patrol car with it. Dunn waded back to the truck, when he saw the cop car coming, lights flashing in the growing dark, and stashed the carry gun under the front seat. He told his story to the patrolman, who gave him a quick Breathalyzer test, “It’s a routine thing we gotta do,” and cleared him on that. The tow truck arrived and the truck driver and Dunn began trying to figure out how best to get the truck out of the ditch, with unwanted advice from the patrolman.

  When they had the tow rigged and ready to go, the patrolman said, “Let’s go look at those deer.”


  Dunn walked him back to the spot where he’d hit the two animals. One of them, a spike buck, the second one he’d hit, was dead. They found the other one off the side of the road, a doe, looking at them, eyes unhurt, pulling herself into the trees with her front legs, her back legs dead.

  “Must of broke her spine,” the patrolman said. He took his pistol from its holster, moved up close. The doe stopped struggling and looked at him, then at Dunn, catching Dunn’s eyes, and the patrolman shot her in the head and the violent crack made Dunn jump and deafened him for a moment.

  “That’s done,” the patrolman said, cheerfully enough.

  Dunn’s truck was halfway up the wall of the ditch, and they walked back, Dunn’s ears still ringing. The tow truck driver had the truck up out of the muck in another five minutes, and the driver said, “Sorry this happened, bud.”

  The patrolman, looking at the blood on the windshield, said, “Man, it looks like that buck exploded.” He added that he’d file a report that Dunn might need for an insurance claim. The tow truck driver had a pressure tank with a washer and hosed down the windshield, took a credit card for three hundred dollars, and he and the patrolman disappeared down the road toward Harrisonburg.

  Dunn got a flashlight out of his toolbox and walked back up the road to where the buck was lying in the ditch. He shined the light farther back in the woods, saw the tawny coat of the doe, stared at it for a moment, sad, still a little stunned by what had happened, shook his head, and walked back to his truck.

  At Warrenton, he went to a twenty-four-hour car wash and hosed the remaining blood off the truck. The windshield showed a short crack at the bottom edge, on the passenger side, probably caused by a hoof or possibly an antler. In Dunn’s experience, the crack would grow. There were a few scrapes on the hood. That wasn’t uncommon with trucks that worked construction sites, but Dunn, as a neat freak, scowled at the scratches, picked at them with a fingernail, and decided he would file an insurance claim, asking for a new paint job.

  When he got back to the truck, he looked around, then got the Sig out from under the front seat in its sticky/slippery holster, and put it back in his jeans pocket.

  At home, he took the rifle out of its case, and toyed with it, loading and unloading it, looking through the scope, through a window at a streetlight that must have been a half mile distant, and then at a lighted house window a block away. As he was looking at the window, a man appeared in it, from the waist up, well lit, and Dunn put the crosshairs on his ear and pulled the trigger slowly. When the trigger broke, he said, “Bam!”

  * * *

  —

  AND HE RESUMED HIS RESEARCH into possible targets, eventually picking out a girl named Cynthia Cootes, daughter of Franklin Cootes, the junior senator from New Hampshire. Unlike the Coil situation, Cynthia Cootes hadn’t moved with her father to live in Washington. Her father, in fact, lived part-time on a boat in a Washington marina, while his wife and daughter remained at home.

  Her photo on the 1919 site had been taken at the National Book Festival, where her father spoke about a book he’d written on offshore sailing. A feature story first in the Hampton Union, and later apparently stolen (or closely replicated purely by coincidence) by the Washington Post, reported he annually sailed with his daughter from New Hampshire, around to the Chesapeake and up to Washington. Cynthia Cootes was shown standing on a stage with her father, holding the book.

  He couldn’t find a reference to her school, but he did find her home address, and when he looked it up on Google Maps, he found that it was on a semirural road outside Hampton. The bad part was that the road didn’t have any immediate exit; the good part was, it was heavily wooded. He could work with it.

  * * *

  —

  THE TRIP WOULD REQUIRE some travel. Dunn didn’t want to fly, because that would mean declaring the gun. He checked, and found that Hampton was an eight-hour drive: manageable on a three-day weekend, even allowing time for scouting.

  If he waited ’til the following weekend, he might lose some momentum, but the news stations were still hot on the story of the first shooting, so he shouldn’t lose much.

  A pleasurable stress soaked down into his shoulders. He’d already had an effect on the way the nation worked.

  One more shot, and the founders of 1919 could go to work, if they hadn’t already. He wished he could meet them; he doubted that he ever would.

  * * *

  —

  HE CLICKED ON THE TELEVISION without thinking about it, almost as a reflex, since the remote was right there by his hand. He looked through the scope at a typically goofy family in a pizza ad, the whole bunch of them stuffing their faces with “Chicago-style” pizza of about ten thousand calories per serving; all the eager eaters were improbably thin.

  The pizza eaters disappeared and a talking head said, “We have more breaking news on the Audrey Coil story. Coil has admitted that she invented the right-wing 1919 website as a way to get herself on television—”

  Dunn blurted, “Wait!”

  * * *

  —

  THE STORY STUNNED HIM IN WAYS that the collision with the deer hadn’t. He clicked through three different stations catching bits and pieces of the story and then ran into his office and went out on the ’net and got the whole thing. Reading story after story, he sat frozen at the computer.

  Couldn’t be true.

  One reporter even suggested that Audrey Coil, obviously good at media manipulation, might be doing it again. But nobody believed that. Coil hadn’t just confessed, she’d been caught. The FBI was leaking details . . .

  And he saw a press conference with the FBI agent in charge, a brisk young woman with a shoulder holster. A reporter asked her if the FBI had found the gun used to shoot James Wagner, the victim of the Stillwater School murder. She demurred, a firm cut to her mouth, and threw out some bureaucratic talk about making significant progress.

  The same reporter asked about a double murder in Virginia, and again, the demurral, that said nothing but Yes, we have it all . . .

  Dunn went to bed at one o’clock in the morning, long past his usual bedtime. He didn’t sleep—he thought he didn’t sleep—but he did get a visit from Rachel Stokes.

  * * *

  —

  SHE WAS DRESSED as she was the night he killed her; she seemed to be alive, but there was a bullet hole in her forehead that gaped open like a third eye. He’d also shot her in the jaw, but that didn’t keep her from talking, although the bottom half of her chin and her throat were seeping blood, the same coppery smell left by the two deer.

  “You killed me for nothing,” she said. “I had a good life, I was a good woman, and you killed me for nothing because you are a fool.”

  “I’m not a fool,” he said, the dread gripping his heart and squeezing.

  “You’re a fool and you always were a fool. I thought I might like you and you shot me and you shot me again and you killed my brother, for nothing, for a miserable little tramp who wanted to be on TV. There was never any plan, there was never any 1919, it was all about a teenager trying to get on television.”

  “I’m dreaming.”

  “You’re not dreaming. You’re living this. You’re wide awake, Elias. I came back with a message for you. You’re bound for hell, Elias.”

  “I don’t believe in that shit,” Dunn shouted. “Go away, go away.”

  “You say you don’t believe in it, but you do, Elias. You felt that hell-bound prickle when you sat in the graveyard, shooting that little boy. You felt that prickle in your arm hairs, that cemetery tickle/prickle. The one that tells you there is a hell, and that you will burn there, all for being a fool . . .”

  He may have been dreaming and he may have been hallucinating; at five o’clock in the morning he put his feet on the bedroom floor, rubbed his head, and when he leaned back, and put one hand on the sheets, he found it so
aked with sweat, but smelling of blood. He staggered away from the bed, into the bathroom, where he stared at himself in the mirror. His face seemed narrower than it usually did, drawn, white as paper; dry, not sweaty. He felt weak, as though he might have sweated out every drop of fluid in his body.

  He went down the stairs, got a bottle of berry-flavored vitamin water from the refrigerator, gulped it down, some of it slopping down onto his T-shirt. Turned on the television, searched the news channels, but nobody was talking about Audrey Coil at five o’clock on a Sunday morning.

  He turned the television off, sat down, stared at the blank screen. The feds had the gun. They had apparently found the Stokeses. If they looked at all the people who worked with Randy Stokes, they’d come to him. If they got DNA off the rifle, if they found his DNA from the accidental gunshot wound at the Stokeses’ place . . . they’d get to him.

  He wouldn’t just be a fool to some psychological twitch called Rachel Stokes, he’d be a nationwide fool. He’d be renowned as a fool.

  * * *

  —

  NOW RACHEL STOKES climbed back inside his head: “You’re a fool. A fool. A foooool . . .”

  He shook her off, went back to the computer, the New York Times, the Washington Post. Long stories there, Senator Coil out of touch, but they had printed versions of Audrey Coil’s television interviews before she’d been apparently turned off by a family lawyer. Exterior shots of the house.

  He kicked back from the computer, then leaned into it again. A Google search turned up an address, and a street view showed the same house as he’d seen on television. The satellite pinpointed it, a sprawling, single-story bricks-and-boards place with a barn in back that was larger than the house; and a bright blue swimming pool tucked out of sight in the heavily landscaped lawn.