He thought back over the day, only now completely conscious of the fact the woman had definitely changed her routine. For three days running, she had cleaned out the horses’ stalls, but not today. And after combing the Appaloosa, she hadn’t taken the green bucket back into the stable. He recalled her route back to the house that morning and realized she’d taken the shortest route possible instead of entering through the back door the way she normally did, always leaving her dirty cowboy boots on the back porch.
He scanned the tree line beyond the ranch to the east, briefly imagining policemen staring back at him through multiple pairs of binoculars. Then he scanned the dirt road far beyond the ranch to the south. He saw no sign of law enforcement anywhere, but somehow he was sure he’d been compromised. He could feel it. Paranoia began to creep its way into his mind, and over the next ten minutes, he talked himself into believing that Gil might be stalking him. The painful tightness in his chest returned, and he decided he’d waited long enough. He would go down into the house and take the woman alive, forcing Shannon to show himself.
He took a satellite phone from the bugout bag beside him and called the al-Rashids. “This is Kashkin,” he said. “Let me speak to Akram.”
“He’s not with me right now,” said Haroun al-Rashid, the younger of the two brothers. “Is it done?”
“No, it is not done,” Kashkin said. “It’s possible I’ve been compromised; that the target is stalking me. If you do not hear from me by tomorrow morning, you should proceed with plan B.”
“What? How are you compromised? Are we all compromised?”
“No, only me. You are safe. So good luck, my friend. I must go now. May the blessings of Allah be upon you.”
“No, Kashkin, wait—”
Kashkin switched off the phone and smashed it against a rock.
He then drew his knees beneath him and began to pray, stretching the muscles of his lower back at the same time. When he was finished, he stood up and had a good look around, drawing a breath before taking that first step downhill toward the ranch.
He didn’t hear the shot because it was muffled by the house, but when the .30 caliber round struck him, it tore out his right floating rib and a good deal of flesh along with it. Kashkin wasn’t aware of any pain, just the queer sensation of having instantly had all the air sucked from his lungs.
Marie knew she’d hit him from the way he’d grabbed his side. Her shoulders were aching from sitting hunched over the mattress all day, but she shrugged it off and worked the bolt to ram another round into battery before placing the reticule of the scope right below Kashkin’s chin.
She drew a breath, held it… and squeezed the trigger a second time.
The round hit Kashkin dead center in the sternum and slammed him onto his back. He landed with his arms splayed out at his sides, and though all that Marie could see of him now was the sole of his right boot propped up on a rock, she knew she’d taken him out.
She sat back from the bed and looked up as Janet hurried into the room.
“He’s down,” she said, getting stiffly to her feet and taking her jeans from the edge of the bed. She stepped into them and gathered up the pee-stained bedspread, stuffing it down the laundry chute in the hallway. “I’ll wait til dark, then rig the travois to Tico and go up and get him. We’ll bury him on the ranch.”
28
Marie sat in the saddle atop the ridge in the light of the moon, looking down from the back of Gil’s Appaloosa mare. Kashkin was flat on his back with his eyes wide open, staring up at the glowing crescent in the sky, his arms splayed as if to embrace the heavens. The ground beneath him was stained black with his blood, and there were two cruel-looking bullet holes in his khaki Swiss Army shirt. The Mauser lay near a small rucksack water pouch, and pieces of a shattered satellite phone were scattered at his feet.
Oso sniffed at the body and growled low in his throat.
Marie pulled a Winchester model 94 in .45 caliber from the saddle scabbard and stepped down from the horse.
“Back,” she said to Oso, and he obeyed, sitting on his haunches.
Walking over to the body, she stood on the left arm and prodded Kashkin in the neck with the muzzle of the rifle to make certain he was dead before returning the Winchester to the scabbard. She gathered up the Mauser and rucksack, shouldering the ruck and pulling back the bolt on the rifle to eject the 7.92 mm round. It landed on the ground, and she crouched to pick it up, holding it in front of her discerning brown eyes.
The “boar’s tooth,” Gil called it… the round that might have killed her had she missed. She put the round into the pocket of her Carhartt jacket and gripped the Mauser with both hands, pivoting on her right foot to gaze out over her father’s ranch. It was hard reality to accept, but war had once again come to this land, and she was now no less a combatant than her husband was. She had killed another human being in a sniper duel, and this was a claim that even few Navy SEALs could make.
“Damn you, Gil,” she whispered.
She hung the Mauser from the saddle horn by the shoulder strap and did the same with the ruck. Then Marie went to stand over the body once again, her hands on her hips as she nervously chewed her lower lip. She didn’t want to touch the corpse, but there was no other way to get it down the hill. She pulled on her leather roping gloves and crouched to take hold of Kashkin’s left wrist, pushing the arm down against his side. He had been dead for six hours, so he was only about three hours into rigor mortis. Full rigor occurred at twelve hours, when the muscles were at full contraction, so he wasn’t yet stiff as a board, but he wasn’t entirely limber, either.
Within a half hour, she had him wrapped in a game bag and strapped to the travois attached to Tico’s saddle. She was mounted up and ready to start down the hill when it occurred to her she hadn’t seen Oso for the past five or ten minutes.
She called to him, and he barked twice from a distance. It was the same bark he used whenever he had treed a raccoon, and she knew that he wouldn’t come unless she went and got him. He was very hardheaded that way. So she shucked the Winchester out of the scabbard and dismounted.
“We don’t really have time for this, Cazador,” she muttered, taking a flashlight from the saddlebag and starting off through the juniper pines in the direction of the barking. She called out again to get a better fix on the dog’s location, and he answered as he had the first time. A minute later, she saw him sitting on his haunches in the beam of the flashlight beside a green Timberline tent some two hundred feet back from the ridge. The tent was pitched in a copse of junipers, and there was nothing outside it save for a small pile of coals that Marie found cold to the touch and a pair of white boxer briefs draped over a branch.
The sight of the camp was enough to make her sick to her stomach. The idea that someone had been camping up here without a care in the world, waiting patiently to blow her husband’s brains out, both frightened and infuriated her. She unzipped the tent and shined the light inside to see a large green backpack, a blue sleeping bag, and a pile of cooking equipment. There was also the lingering odor of an unwashed human being. Quickly rifling through the pack, she found the usual incidentals, numerous bags of backpacking food, and a small laptop computer. She crammed everything into the backpack then hurriedly struck the campsite, making sure to scatter the charcoal from the fire.
Forty minutes later, she stood beside her mother in the well-lighted stable looking down at the dead man lying in the center of the gray plastic tarp.