Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30) - John Sandford Page 0,96
street, more talking. He risked a look, and there was enough ambient light to make out a couple and a dog, walking down the hill with a flashlight showing the way. They stopped at the edge of the cemetery for a moment, then moved on. Another moment and he picked up the scent of fresh dog shit.
Didn’t bother to bag it. That annoyed him; that always annoyed him when he saw it.
Time dragged. He let it drag. Slept off and on, with no cars to disturb him. If there was still a shift of cops, he thought they’d be arriving perhaps two hours before the school opened. He set his cell phone alarm to vibrate, and dozed, sitting upright, but comfortable, his back against a gravestone.
At five, he woke, found a thin layer of dew covering the blanket. He began watching again, alert now: his time was coming. At 5:30, he saw a suspicious-looking car pull into the hospital parking structure—there appeared to be two men in it. Tracking its taillights, he watched though his binoculars as the car drove to the top floor of the parking ramp, although there were empty spots on the two floors below.
He was too far away to tell if the men got out of the car; he heard no car doors slam, but they might have closed them quietly.
Over the next hour, when the car didn’t reappear, he decided that it was very possible that the occupants were FBI or Secret Service agents. He was not sure if they’d hear the shot from his .223—if they were inside a car, or if they were behind a hospital door, he thought they probably would not.
Just in case, he decided that he needed to be closer to the spot where he’d hidden the gun, so he could conceal it again after taking the shot. He crawled the fifty yards to the shed and lay down beside it. From that position, he didn’t have as clear a view of the playground as he did from his tombstone lair, and the rifle’s bipod wasn’t high enough to give him a clear view over the grass and weeds. He tied his coat, blanket, and camera bag into a bundle, thick enough that he could get a steady gun rest that was high enough to see over the weeds and the edge of the slope. He couldn’t see the parking ramp’s top floor, but that wouldn’t make any difference one way or the other. Once he took the shot, he had to re-hide the gun, and then move, fast, without looking like he was moving fast.
He was a full minute from his car, but unless he was unlucky, the feds, if they were there, wouldn’t be aware of the shot for at least that long; and if they were aware of it, they wouldn’t be aware of where it came from.
He settled into the new spot and checked his watch. Ten minutes to seven—forty minutes or an hour to wait. Now, if the kid only showed. After the previous attempt, maybe he wouldn’t.
* * *
—
A FEW KIDS began straggling onto the playing field at 7:30. More came behind them, waiting for the first bell. He picked out a boy who seemed to be about McGovern’s likely height and counted bricks on the wall behind them—three courses of bricks with concrete joints were about eight inches high. He counted eight three-brick courses up the school’s brick wall above the boy’s head and marked the height in his mind.
Then McGovern showed up.
At ten minutes to eight, the boy ambled around the corner of the school building with two other kids. He was wearing a ball cap, but his lower face looked right. Had to be right. Quick white smile, that square jaw. He was wearing a black Patagonia jacket and a blue shirt over dark slacks.
Dunn was breathing harder now, struggled to control it, but the adrenaline was on him. He pulled on plastic kitchen gloves, got the gun from under the shed, unzipped the case, took the rifle out, fumbled the magazine but then got it seated, jacked a shell into the chamber, put the gun on top of his jacket. He used the binoculars to spot the kid again. He was