Mortal Prey

pale blue skies: the white, New England–style village church sitting on the edge of the valley, surrounded by maple trees in blazing orange fall foliage, with strips of yellow aspen above and below the clutch of maple around the church.
    A place to get married, she thought. They’d been in there for a while. She looked at her watch. Forty minutes, now. What were they doing? Maybe they’d written long vows or something.
    As she was thinking that, the church doors popped open and a man stepped out into the sunshine, and then two more, a woman in white…
    “Go,” she grunted. She pulled the Cherokee out of the notch in the trees and turned down the narrow blacktopped street. There was another notch a hundred and fifty yards out from the front of the church, but on a busier street. She wouldn’t have been able to wait. As it was, she was taking a risk. She’d wrapped the rifle in a blanket, and she’d simply pull over to the side of the road as if she were having a problem, and then she’d walk back into the line of bushes and take her shot and drop the rifle and go.
     
    HER BACKUP CAR was a half-mile away. She’d be in the second car and traveling in a few seconds more than one minute after she fired the shot. She’d timed it. She’d done all her research. She’d monitored the Star-Tribune on the Net, had found Davenport’s wedding announcement, along with a couple of pieces in the local gossip columns. She’d confirmed it with the church, and then had scouted the church. And above the church, she found a sniper’s nest, as though it had been created for that specific purpose.
    The only little piece of dissonance was that she thought she remembered Davenport saying that the wedding would be in an Episcopalian church, and this one was a Lutheran. But maybe she misremembered. Besides, it had all been confirmed.
    Now it was all coming together. The shooting point was just up ahead, a stand of oaks next to the guardrail over the valley. She jerked the car to the curb, hopped out, grabbed the blanket, and carried it past a bush to the steel barrier that overlooked the creek at the bottom of the slope. She could still be seen from the road, but again, she’d have to be unlucky….
    She was moving fast now, looking at the penguins on the porch step, the guys in black and white, standing stiffly beside the woman in white at the center, and the priest.
    She lifted the rifle and slipped the safety and pulled down on the porch.
     
    RINKER NEVER FELT death coming for her.
    She never felt pain, never saw a shining light leading her away.
    Death came without a whisper, and she was gone.

27
    MARCY REACHED UP AND TAPPED HER earpiece and Lucas looked at her, irritated, and said, “It’s not…” and then other radio people began shouting a weird mishmash of language. Everybody with an earpiece looked up at the valley wall into the notch and saw a green coat and then heard the shot, a hard, sharp WHAP.
    Then silence, and then a lone man’s voice in the earpiece, harsh but steady: “She’s down. Rinker’s down.”
     
    LUCAS COULD HARDLY believe it. He gaped at the hole in the trees, the sniper’s nest so carefully cultivated, and saw people running toward it, people with guns. Then Black began yelling something, and they all ran for their cars—or waddled, in the case of Lucas, Sherrill, and Del, who were wrapped in body armor.
    Sloan drove Lucas’s Tahoe, and Lucas, in the backseat, pulled off his jacket and shirt and struggled out of the armor. Marcy was saying, “Goddamnit, undo me, undo me.”
    Her dress was held on in the back with Velcro, and Lucas pulled it down and helped her out of the armor straps. Underneath it, she was wearing a T-shirt and shorts—anything more had made her look too big. She said, “Throw me my stuff,” and Lucas tossed a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved shirt to her, and pulled his own shirt back on.
    Marcy said to Sloan, “Don’t look,” but Sloan looked anyway and said, “Hell, you’ve got underpants, they’re no different than a swimming suit,” and she said, “Yes, they are. They’re intimate, and you looked, for which I will get you,” and Sloan said, “Yeah, but if I didn’t look, you’d be insulted.”
    “Shut up, everybody,” Lucas grated. Marcy was about to come back with something snappy, but looked at his eyes and shut up and finished dressing, and Sloan drove.
     
    THEY HAD TO go almost a half-mile to cross the valley and the creek, then a