Dead Aim

by Thomas Perry

  “But this was a woman,” Coleman said.

  “All of this works even better if the target is a woman. They’re not subject to instinctive rivalry if they see men, and they’re more likely to worry about being rude, so they stop staring sooner. But you didn’t give this target a chance to reassure herself. Instead of going to safe positions off to the side, you faced her table directly, and began to reach for weapons when you were still too far away to use them. And most importantly, you forgot to wait until the tracker, Debbie, had moved out of the way.”

  “We knew we wouldn’t hit her or anything,” said Coleman. “She stood up as soon as we came in.”

  Parish appeared to be considering the argument, then spoke quietly and carefully. “It seems to me that you may have underestimated the target because she was a woman. You knew that she was an experienced professional detective. You knew that Debbie had lured her to that restaurant by posing as an informant. Now, the conclusion I wanted you to draw from that information was that this target knew she was in a situation that had great potential for danger. She might be armed—as, in fact, she was. If she realized that she had been set up, then she would know it was Debbie who had done it. If you’ll remember, the plan was for Debbie to get physically out of sight before anything happened that might make the target feel threatened. Debbie was to see you come in the front door, and excuse herself to go to the ladies’ room, remember? That would get her away from the table and behind the target, to control the back corridor and the rear exit. Her act of standing up and walking back there would also distract the target from whatever was going on at the front entrance, which was your taking positions. Done right, it makes all three of you safe: the target can’t figure out whom to watch, so she tries to swivel her head to see where Debbie’s going, and back up front to see what you’re doing. But it wasn’t done right.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Coleman. “I guess I was the one who got too eager.”

  Markham didn’t contradict him, or chime in to share the blame. It was true. He even knew what Coleman had been trying to do. He had wanted first blood. Probably he had even hoped his first round would be fatal, so he would get the kill, and Markham would have paid twenty-five grand to fire shots into a corpse.

  “I’m not looking for apologies,” said Parish. “There were errors, and if I fail to point them out, you won’t improve. This time we had the target five ways, so no matter what she did, she was going to be ours. But she could have gotten off a shot and hit somebody. We didn’t have to give her that chance. Fortunately, Debbie took it away from her.”

  Coleman shifted uneasily in his seat. “Watch the timing, and make sure the tracker is clear. That’s it, right?” He put his hands on the arms of the chair as though he was ready to stand up.

  “Not quite,” Parish said. “When the target falls, you’re not home yet. There were other customers in that place, the waitress, and the bartender.”

  “Well, yeah,” said Markham. “But Emily took care of them, so we didn’t need to.”

  Emily said, “What were you waiting for?” Her voice was strained, as though she was trying to keep it calm but couldn’t quite do it.

  Parish warned her with his eyes, and turned to the men. “Emily is right, of course. Once a gun appears, anyone in the place is justified in killing you, and some of them get over any reluctance very quickly. Some bartenders hide a gun near the cash register. Emily perceived that this one was moving in that direction and needed to be dead before he got there. You didn’t.” He let them think about it for a moment, then stood. “That’s it.” He smiled. “Otherwise, it was a perfect evening.” He held out his hand so Coleman could shake it, then turned to Markham and let him shake it.

  Markham muttered, “Thank you, Michael. Thanks, Emily.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Parish. “If we can do anything more for you in the future, get in touch.”

  He walked them out to the porch and watched them cross the road to get into their cars. As they backed into the driveway, Emily joined him. “Wave to them,” he said. “And smile. The man just gave you a ten-thousand-dollar tip.”

  Emily waved her hand. She could see Coleman waving energetically back to her as he drove out the gate. “No, he didn’t,” she said through her false smile. “You did.”

  As soon as the two cars had gone around the first bend, Parish said, “Where to next?”

  She grinned, and this time the expression was real. “I want to be the one to give Debbie her check. I’d like to see the look on her face. Do you mind?”

  “Not at all.” He watched her slip into the lodge and snatch up the check that Markham had left, then hurry toward the gym. He walked across the long drive toward the hill in the direction of the firing range. He had problems to consider, and he welcomed the solitude. He had managed, by force of will and self-discipline, to control several unsatisfactory situations at once, but he had not yet had the time to consider what they had to teach him.

  Parish had designed last night’s hunt to provide a specific experience for two paying clients. He had assumed that when Lydia Marks was made to believe that an informant had come to her, she would do as she had done in the past: show up with her client, Mr. Mallon, and they would interview the informant together. Parish went over his reasoning again: they had come to the self-defense school together, and while they were talking to Parish, they had said they’d gone to Pittsburgh together to interview Catherine’s sister. They had also said they were fresh from interviewing some woman in Los Angeles together. Parish had been perfectly justified in drawing the conclusion that if he presented an informant as bait, two targets would appear, not one. He had chosen those two targets over all others precisely because he had wanted to provide each of his two clients with a kill of his own.

  Parish strode up through the dry brown weeds that covered the hill, considering. When he had heard Debbie’s first radio transmission making it clear that there was only one target, he had dreaded the dissatisfaction of his two amateur hunters: they would feel cheated with only one kill between them. But he had overestimated them. They were too arrogant to have noticed that their challenge had been insultingly easy. They had been so spoiled and flattered all of their lives that whatever meager achievement they accomplished was magnified to heroic proportions. There had been nothing for Parish to worry about. He had greatly overestimated them.

  But that thought brought its own worries. Their mistakes on the hunt had been gross and shocking. He had seen at the time that most of the mistakes had come from pure selfishness. Coleman and Markham had each wanted to beat the other to the kill, each rushing to get his money’s worth and the other man’s too. Their greedy competition had been carried out in a mental vacuum, so that they had eagerly fought over one target, and left five equally good targets—the bartender, the waitress, and the three customers—completely alone. In their minds, only Markham, Coleman, and their designated target existed.

  Parish never let his discoveries go unconsidered, and he sensed that this one had great potential for the future. The key to a new source of profits might be contained in the single word competition. There had also been other discoveries that cheered him a bit. He had watched his staff react instantly and expertly to salvage the hunt. And although he may have misjudged Markham and Coleman—their experience, their sagacity, their technical competence—he had not been mistaken in choosing to exploit them. They were acceptable.

  The camp’s prices for the initial training, in money and in time, ensured that all of his guests were wealthy and idle. Month by month, the classes came and went, while Michael Parish watched and listened. Some clients were plagued by a fantasy that strangers would steal their money or take them hostage or rape them. Some of the middle-aged men who had been born too rich and protected to have been forced into military training when they were young seemed to thirst for it now, to feel their incompleteness and inadequacy and want to patch it up. But among the legion of silly, frightened, or bored people who
paid him over a thousand a day for simple shooting lessons, he would see a few who had real potential. It was a small group, and they were very precious to Parish. What they wanted was the real thing.

  Often he could see it in their eyes. On the range, they weren’t aiming at targets, they were aiming at a person, and he knew that the person had a name. When they were in martial arts, they were the ones who went into a strange reverie when they punched or kicked the heavy bag. The clenched teeth, the fixed, determined stare, the strain when the blow connected told him that they were seeing a particular face.

  He waited, and eventually the hints would start. The student would ask where to hit to cause the most damage, what it took to make the heart stop beating. The ones he wanted had no interest in self-improvement. They only half-listened to lessons about anything but firing the fatal shot or striking the deathblow. Their ears merely monitored the stream of talk for tips that might help them fulfill the dream of the avenger that their minds were forming.

  Parish never approached any of the guests to offer special services. He simply answered questions, admitted the truth that the lessons of self-defense were the same as the skills of an aggressor: a bullet could do nothing but punch a hole in what it hit. The bullet did not distinguish between an opponent who was about to attack and an unsuspecting enemy who had committed his offense five years ago. The methods, the lessons Parish taught, were the same.

  Parish accepted only a very few, the ones who were right for his needs. They had to be reasonably good at their lessons. They had to be haters, but they had to hate in the right way. Parish could not be involved with lunatics who were afraid of whole races, or wanted to kill politicians or other public figures. He could not accept the sort of emotional, undisciplined person who would go into it in a hot rage, without considering what killing a human being would be like or what it would mean after it had been accomplished. Students he found acceptable had to embrace the hunt, not see it as a sin or a crime that they were driven to take on themselves. If they saw it as a sin, they might later decide that the way to lift the burden of the sin was to confess it. What he needed were people who were immune to seeing their acts as infractions, because they could not imagine why they should ever be denied any possession, or any pleasure.

  Parish was patient, and Parish never compromised. He observed, and then he waited until the right students came to him and tried to persuade him to give them the chance they wanted. After he was convinced that they were the right ones, he did not assume that they were ready. He had to impress upon them the seriousness, not only of the act they contemplated but also of sharing knowledge of the act. Anyone who knew of a kill was dangerous to the others and, therefore, was in danger if he seemed unreliable.

  Parish had not yet failed in choosing clients who would not compromise the hunt. He had also prohibited hunting anywhere near the self-defense school. Almost every hunt had taken place in some distant part of the country. Over the years, he had permitted only two expeditions anywhere within the state of California, neither within eighty miles of here.

  The clients were satisfyingly malleable. They were so egotistical that they could easily be made to believe that what they wanted was their birthright, simply because they wanted it. The logic was irresistible because it was familiar to the rich. They believed they had more of everything than other people because they—or more often, their ancestors and consequently they themselves—were superior. They had done more for society than their inferiors: they had tamed a wilderness into a sprawl of shopping centers, or created labor for the masses, or developed some innovation into a corporation. It was simply the law of nature that they should be richer, because they were better.

  Parish professed to agree with their deeply held belief in their superiority. It made no sense, he repeatedly declared, that in the United States the upper classes should have to suffer offenses at the hands of nobodies. It was an outrage that such a perversion had been allowed to grip this country. In other parts of the world, these incidents were not tolerated. The authorities would simply have made these vermin disappear. Parish had traveled in certain circles with access to inside information, and take his word for it, even in some countries he could name that professed egalitarianism, the ruling class was not subjected to insult, insecurity, or harm. The authorities knew whom they were working for. They took care of such matters efficiently and quietly. Parish’s flattery always worked, because his customers were so convinced of their superiority, so cushioned from reality by their money, that they didn’t know they were being flattered.

  The secret that Parish never revealed to anyone was that the reason he knew how to instill in his chosen students the taste for killing was that he had it himself. It was a kind of addiction, a gnawing need that had afflicted him since the Africa days. After he had come to this country, it had taken him years to find a way to feed it.

  He had managed to do very well. Here he was, training his killers openly, without having to hide anything from anyone, because he was operating a legitimate self-defense school. He had little to fear from the authorities in the distant places where the hunting parties took place, because there was no connection to make between the targets and Michael Parish. There was nothing to fear from the authorities in California, because he and his people never did anything illegal here. As soon as his mind had formed the thought, he remembered the exceptions. He should never have allowed Catherine Broward to hunt in California.

  He reached the end of the dry arroyo, opened the steel door of the storage building at the end of the firing range, and took out a rifle. He loaded it and fired a round at one of the targets placed at two hundred yards, then cycled the bolt. Dead aim was not just a matter of practice—of training hand and eye. It was a matter of calm, of control. It was character. He had, narrowly and provisionally, kept Emily and Debbie happy. But he would have to try to restore balance, and keep the other instructors involved. He had one more loose end to clip.

  CHAPTER 18

  Parish stood at the side of the main lodge’s meeting room, his back to the night-darkened windows, holding his wine glass in his left hand. He kept his right hand empty so he could offer it to the men to shake, or put his arm around the women. The glass held an inch of red wine, and always stayed at the same level because he never drank any of it. He never approached anyone at these final-evening farewell parties, merely oversaw them as he oversaw everything else at his school. The students came to him—first in greeting, simply acknowledging him as they arrived, and then again singly, as they saw their chances—to smile and talk.

  “I’ve loved my time here,” said Helen Corrigan. She had a habit of lifting her shoulders and compressing her face in an ingratiating smile during her pronouncements, then simultaneously releasing both sets of muscles in a gesture that signaled both her satisfaction and her intention to stop talking.

  Parish bent his head lower to nod slightly. “I’m very glad. Tomorrow, as everyone in your class goes home, you’ll be given a questionnaire about your experience. Sometime in the next few weeks, maybe you’ll share any ideas you have for improving things: the courses, the accommodations, the food, or anything else. Now that this little group has spent a month with us, you’re all a very valuable resource.”

  “We are?” She was flattered.

  “You’re experts,” he said. “You’ve learned what we were intending to teach, and now it’s your turn to teach us by telling us what we could do better.”

  As her face grew sincere, it went slack and allowed a few of the wrinkles that had been surgically erased to reveal their shadows. “I’ll try,” she said. “But this has been a life-changing experience I wouldn’t tamper with too much. I’ve always been a little afraid, without really being aware of it. That’s not entirely over, but the stupid part is, the part that’s almost like a superstition: you’re scared, but you don’t know what you’re scared of, and it doesn’t matter, because whatever comes along, you’re not capable of thinking of anything to do ab
out it. Now I know there are some things I can do that will help.”

  Parish lowered his voice and leaned down again. “I sensed that we were succeeding with you, Helen. I’ve kept an eye on you, and I’ve been very pleased with your progress.”

  “So have I.” She giggled. “I’ve even lost fifteen pounds.” She raised her hands to her shoulders and half-jokingly twirled around.

  Parish chose to take her seriously. “We’ve all noticed that, too. It’s not uncommon. Our guests eat a nutritious, balanced diet and get a great deal of exercise without giving either much thought.”

  “After the first few days, I began to think of friends I’d like to talk into coming here. One look at the weight I lost would be enough for some of them.”

  “I’d love to see a few of your friends here,” he said. “If the physical program is what attracts them, fine. Come back with them, and you can help them learn. As you know, we have to keep classes very small and personal, but with enough notice, we might be able to arrange something just for you and your friends.”

  “I’ll think about that. I will.” She repeated her gesture of lifting her shoulders and tightening her facial muscles, then settling again, and moved on to let others pay their respects.

  Parish let his eyes wander around the room without letting them focus on anyone. This class had consisted of six men and women in their fifties or sixties. Because the basic course at the camp took a month and started at forty thousand dollars, it was inconvenient to the lower classes: all of these people could afford to come back when they wished. He had seen on the first day that there was only one who had any potential whatever as a hunter, but the rest were useful in their way: there had to be some harmless self-defense students or it would be hard to account for Parish’s income, or the existence of this place.