a second, and then we stood still on the board and looked all around. Behind us were trees. To our left and our right were trees. In front of us the ravine ran away west, into the far distance, straight and narrow. What little that grew in it was way down below us. The far end was almost out of sight. There was a smudge of grey there, an interruption, as if the trench was stopping shorter than it wanted to, maybe because of an unrelated rockfall aeons later.
I looked down at the plywood and saw two vague oval shapes, close together, each one of them about the size of an ostrich egg, or a quarter-size football, side by side, like footprints from a person standing still. The shapes were grey, or slightly silvery, the way plywood gets when rubbed with metal, and there was graphite too, from lubricating grease, as well as plain old dirt from the air, because deep down at a microscopic level the grease would always be sticky.
I squatted down and traced the shapes with my finger. I said, ‘A rifle that size has biped legs coming down off the front of the forestock. They can lock up or down. He put a little grease on the hinges, to protect them, like a cautious man should, and he wiped the excess with a cloth, and then he rubbed the cloth on the biped legs, against corrosion, especially the feet, which are the only parts that touch the world, after all, and then he came out here to practise so many times and in so many slightly different positions he left marks this big.’
‘Sherlock Homeless,’ she said.
I stared down the length of the ravine. I said, ‘Suppose those rocks make a kind of shelf or table? Suppose that’s where he put his targets?’
She said, ‘What rocks?’
We paced it out, exactly parallel in the woods, staying straight, compensating for dodged trees, with me stepping a comfortable yard every time, with her counting, silently at first, and then when we got to twelve hundred and fifty she started counting out loud, initially in a low mutter, pure routine, and then she started to speak with more clarity and excitement as the numbers grew larger and larger, only to end with a low quizzical tone as I stepped absolutely level with the last of the tumbled grey rocks and she said, ‘Fourteen hundred yards.’
TEN
THE ROCKS WERE indeed the result of an ancient fall, as far as I could tell, and they did indeed make a kind of shelf or table. Only twelve inches deep and four feet wide at its flattest. But apparently that was enough for a whole bunch of beer cans and bottles. There were shreds of metal and powdered glass everywhere. Shreds of white, too, as if he had rigged paper targets from time to time. Behind the shelf the rocks themselves were chipped and cratered all over. They were seriously blasted. Hundreds and hundreds of rounds had been fired. Maybe even thousands.
I said, ‘We need a container.’
Casey Nice said, ‘What kind?’
‘Just some little thing.’ I pointed below the chipped and cratered rocks. ‘We should take some dust with us. For the gas chromatograph. We need to know if they’re the same bullets.’
She patted her pockets, and I saw her hit a possibility, and discount it, and then come back to it when she ran out of alternatives. She looked at me, a little embarrassed.
I said, ‘What?’
She said, ‘I have a pill bottle.’
‘That should work.’
She put her hand in her pocket and took out a small orange bottle with a label. She popped the top and spilled a bunch of pills into her palm. She shovelled the pills back in her pocket loose, and she put the top back on the empty bottle, and she tossed it to me.
‘Thanks,’ I said. I brushed dust and grit and dirt into piles, and pinched it all up with finger and thumb, and dropped it in the bottle, over and over again, a little at a time. I had no real idea what a gas chromatograph was, except I was sure it was very sophisticated and could work with the tiniest of samples, but we needed lead fragments, and I wanted to increase the odds. So I kept on pinching and dropping until the bottle was more than half full, and then I put the top back on, and I put the bottle in my pocket, and I said, ‘OK,