She continued currycombing Gil’s Appaloosa, Tico, maintaining an easy smile in case the shooter’s optics were strong enough to make out her facial features. A Chesapeake Bay retriever named Oso Cazador (Bear Hunter) came trotting across the yard and paused to take a leak on a post. He was a big dog, one hundred pounds, with a devilish canine smile and a reddish brown coat.
“Oso,” she said, without looking at him. “Get inside, baby.”
The dog looked at her, as if unsure if he’d heard her correctly.
“Go check on Grandma!”
The dog turned and ran back to the house, jumping onto the deck and ducking inside through the dog door.
Marie guessed there was a price on Gil’s head and that the shooter wasn’t up there for her, but even knowing there was a rifle pointed in her general direction was more than enough to make her want to run for the house. She was just able to suck in her fear and finish combing the horse before finally dropping the comb into the green bucket at her feet and walking the short but hellish few feet into the stable.
Once inside, she sat down on a bale of hay and at last allowed herself to tremble. She wrapped her arms around her shoulders, swearing quietly at her husband for bringing an assassin to their gate. Part of her knew she was nuts to believe there was a sniper in the foothills above the ranch, but another part of her realized that thousands of people the world over lived with snipers all around them all the time, never knowing when someone might be shot dead in front of them. Now that reality had come to Montana.
She got up and walked to the far end of the stable, pausing at the door to draw a breath, and then set off casually across the yard toward the house — knowing she would be within the shooter’s line of sight for better than a hundred feet. It was the longest hundred feet of her life, but she made it to cover and hurried up onto the front porch, jerking open the screen door, and ducking inside.
“Mama!” she called. “Where are you?”
Oso came running over to her.
“Right here,” her mother said, poking her head around the kitchen doorway. “Why? What’s the matter?” Her name was Janet. She was seventy-six years old and just over five feet three inches tall, with long gray hair she wore in the braid of a horsewoman.
“Stay away from the windows on the west side of the house.” Marie trotted up the staircase. “And don’t go outside!”
Janet stood in the kitchen drying her hands, then set down the towel and went upstairs. She found Marie in the spare bedroom taking Gil’s Browning .300 Winchester Magnum with a 3 to 24 Nightforce scope from the gun safe in the corner.
“Marie, what in hell’s half acre are you about?”
“We’ll find out in a minute.” Marie lay the rifle down on the bed and gathered her long brown hair behind her head, weaving it quickly into a loose braid. Then she picked the rifle back up, popped off the lens caps fore and aft, and slipped past her mother into the hall, making her way to the master bedroom on the west side of the house.
Oso followed her excitedly, thinking they must be going hunting.
Janet followed too, a discerning frown creasing her face.
“Stay away from the windows, Mama.” Marie knelt beside the bed opposite the windows, extending the legs of the bipod on the hunting rifle and resting it on the mattress. She put her eye to the scope and trained it on the ridge overlooking the house. When she spotted Kashkin, wearing an olive drab ball cap, hunkered down in the rocks behind the scoped Mauser, the urine in her bladder turned to ice water. The house was not built parallel to the ridge line, so she was looking at him angle-on and angle-off to Kashkin’s right at about 30 degrees. From the look of him, he seemed to be glassing the house, but she knew there was no way he could see deeply enough into the room to spot her because the room was too dim.
She pulled back the bolt and rammed one of the torpedo-nosed .30 caliber rounds into battery.
“Marie, what are you doing?”
She safed the weapon and got to her feet. “Have a look,” she said. “Up in the rocks above the ranch.”
Janet knelt beside the bed and pulled the stock into her shoulder. She was not a stranger to shooting, and she didn’t have to adjust the aim much in order to spot Kashkin in his nest.
“Lord A’Mighty!” She sat back from the rifle. “What’s he doin’ up there?”
Marie got down beside her. “Al Qaeda put a price on Gil’s head. He must be some kind of damn bounty hunter.” Janet got up, and her daughter retook her position behind the rifle, pulling the stock back into her shoulder and making the weapon hot. “Bring me a sofa cushion from downstairs, and fill Gil’s CamelBak with water for me,” she said intently. “I can’t see enough of this guy for a shot, so I’ll have to wait until he gets up. And lock the dog door, so Oso can’t get out.”
Janet watched her, grim faced. “Are you sure you want to do this? What if you’re wrong? What if he’s just some ignorant fool up there bein’ silly?”
“Mama, you don’t believe that any more than I do.” She continued to study Kashkin through the scope. He didn’t look like an Arab in the eyes, which was about all she could see, but if he was a bounty hunter, he could be anybody — even an American. “Now please bring me a cushion for my knees. I won’t last long on this hardwood floor, and I don’t dare take my eyes off this man. There’s no tellin’ when he’ll let out, and I can’t afford to let him get away.”
Janet went below and returned with the sofa cushion, slipping it under Marie’s knees one at a time. Oso jumped onto the bed, whining because he still thought they were going hunting.
“Get down.”
“But what about your conscience?” Janet said. “If you shoot that man, you’ll have to live with it the rest of your life.”
“Gil lives with it, so I reckon I can too. That man’s up there lookin’ to kill him, and I can’t abide it — I won’t abide it!”
Janet stood nodding for a moment and then went to fill Gil’s CamelBak with water. When she returned, Marie was naked from the waist down with the bedspread bunched up beneath her on top of the sofa cushion.
“Marie Anne! What on earth!”
“I might have to pee later. This way, I can pee on the blanket and not have to worry.”
Janet set the CamelBak down on the mattress and took a seat on the cane-back chair in the corner, resting her hand on Oso’s big head. The dog was getting frustrated with all the waiting. “We could call the police, ya know.”
“They’d just make a circus of it, especially when the media found out. And suppose he got away?” She took her eye from the scope for just a moment. “This is business between Al Qaeda and the McGuthrys, Mama.”
“Oh, so now you’re a McGuthry again.”
“This is McGuthry land,” Marie said, repositioning herself behind the scope. “Daddy wouldn’t have done any different.”
Janet sat back in the chair with a sigh. “Well, your daddy wasn’t always the smartest man in the world.”
“Mama, you know I’m right; otherwise you’d be downstairs on the phone right now callin’ the sheriff — in spite of anything I had to say about it.”
Janet clicked her tongue. “Maybe so. And then again, maybe I’m still tryin’ to make up my mind.”
“Well, until you do, I’ll be right here behind this rifle.”
By the time the sun began to set, Kashkin’s back had grown stiff, just as it had during the past three days. He thought it odd that the woman hadn’t come back out to bring the horses into the stable as she normally did, but there was no telling with people.
A coyote yammered somewhere off behind him, and his eyes shifted immediately to the colt down in the paddock. Surely she wasn’t going to leave the colt outside overnight with predators roaming the land. A single coyote would be foolish to attempt getting past the colt’s mother, but a pack of coyotes might be another story.