Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30) - John Sandford Page 0,49

thought, to hide a rifle.

He put the block back in place.

* * *

—

HE LEFT THE CEMETERY in the dark and walked back to his car. At home, he loaded Google Earth, which had a fairly accurate measuring tool, called up a satellite image of the school, and measured the distance from the cemetery cottonwood to the back of the school. Four hundred and ninety-six yards.

He thought about that and a question popped into his head. Was it necessary to actually kill the kid? Or only hit him? And maybe, not even hit him, if the bullet hit close enough to frighten him. It now occurred to Dunn that the important thing was that the right people knew that the kid had been shot at.

Better if he was actually hit, because then there’d be no doubt, but a close miss might be good enough. He thought about it that night, in bed, and decided that he needed to find out exactly how bad a shot he was.

And the next day was Saturday, the job site closed down.

* * *

—

HIS WEST VIRGINIA CABIN was deep in the woods and more than rustic: it was primitive, and for that reason, had never been broken into, although somebody had peppered the outhouse with a .22.

The cabin itself was a prefabricated metal shed with four windows and one door, which was locked with a heavy padlock, and all of it set on a concrete slab. Inside was an old wooden table with two metal folding chairs, a waist-high shelf that served as a kitchen counter, and a wide wooden rack that would keep an air mattress off the floor. There were fluorescent lights hung overhead with a plug-in cord that dropped to the floor at one side of the shed.

All of that could be seen through the windows, which was why nobody had ever tried to break in: there was nothing to steal and breaking in would be a pain in the ass.

When he went to the cabin, Dunn brought from home a Honda generator, a compact microwave, five gallons of gas, twenty gallons of water, an air mattress that was double-bed wide and five inches thick, and quite comfortable when inflated, and a sleeping bag. The generator would sit outside, with a single cord running through a hole in the side of the cabin to a multi-socket extension, where he’d plug in the lights and the microwave. He did have cell phone service.

Primitive, but snug.

* * *

—

ON THIS SATURDAY, he took along his total station, the tripod that supported it, and the reflector that bounced the distance-measuring laser beam back to the instrument.

Dunn had bought the land a couple of years after it had been clear-cut, and was therefore cheap—it no longer had harvestable timber and wouldn’t for a couple of decades, and was useless for agriculture, too rough and, in places, too swampy. A few hundred yards from the cabin, a narrow creek wound across the property and he thought if he shot a line along the creek he might find a place where he could set up a five-hundred-yard shot.

He spent an hour finding the spot, lasing various possibilities with the total station, until he found a place on a hillside not quite as high as the cemetery in Tysons Corner, shooting to a creek bank over a patch of cattails. He stapled a target to a tree trunk and carried his .308 back to the spot on the hillside. A rotting log made a convenient rifle rest. The rifle mounted a 5-25 variable-power scope; he went with 25 power and began shooting.

He fired six times, taking his time, then carried the rifle down to the target, and found that he’d missed the entire eighteen-by-twelve-inch target all six times. He couldn’t even find a place in the creek bank where the shots might have hit.

He had to think about that for a while. He wasn’t that bad a shot. Maybe the scope had gotten bumped. He marched back toward the spot where he’d started shooting, but only a rough-paced hundred yards back. He found a place to shoot, braced the gun against a tree trunk, and fired three shots. Back at the target, he found a half-moon hole at the bottom far-right edge of the paper. He was shooting low and right.

He gave the scope four clicks of left windage and eight clicks of elevation, went back to his hundred-yard spot and fired three more shots. At the target, he found all