"Turn on to that dirt road," said Hayworth.

A few minutes of careful attention to avoiding the larger mud puddles brought them to the end of the road, where it widened out into a parking area. A couple of cars were parked in some of the less soggy areas at the far end.

Dawn found a spot that wasn't going to sink the truck axle deep in mud, and shut off the engine. Lydecker got out, and held the door for Hayworth, who was doing his best to ignore him.

She watched her feet and managed to find some solid ground between the puddles.

"I'll get one of my students to take me home, thanks," said Hayworth.

"You're very welcome," snapped Dek. The passenger side door slammed, and loud, sharp sound echoed oddly.

"That was a shot!" realized Dawn.

She looked across the truck, and couldn't see either one of the men. Then she saw Dek, heading down the slope on the other side of the parking lot, moving at a run.

Dawn picked up her feet and followed. As she rounded the truck, she saw that a muddy Hayworth was just getting up. Dek was just flashes of motion between scrubby trees. She got her feet wet in a small stream, and then pounded up the slope on the other side, branches tearing at her clothes.

When she caught up, Dek was standing with hands on his knees, head down.

"Find the brass!" he ordered breathlessly, looking up at her for just a moment, then back at the soggy leaves. She glanced around, noticing the impression from someone laying in the leaves, and couple of dead branches leaning against a tree.


"Somewhere over here," he said, waving her over.

She saw a glimpse of yellow metal next to a tree root. She picked it up, turned it over in her hand and read "Winchester .223 MATCH" from the base. The empty case was the size of her little finger.


"It's still warm," she said, and dropped it into his hand as he stood up.

"I have a nasty suspicion that we are dealing with an amateur." He pocketed it. Dawn decided that she didn't ever want to see that expression directed at her.

"Oh, Dawn?" he added. "The next time I do something really bone-head stupid like charging a sniper- don't follow me." His expression hadn't changed.

****


Lydecker crouched behind the sniper's blind of dead branches. He could see the entire parking area, the entrance to a shelter, and the top edge of the excavation. In some ways, it was a beautiful choice of location. Whoever he was, the gunman could have snuck in without being spotted by anyone at the dig, or anyone on the road.

On the other hand, he examined the empty brass. Snipers didn't use .223. They were much happier with .308, or even fifty caliber. Large bullets went further and made bigger holes. Not that .223 was anything to take lightly on the receiving end. Competitive high-power shooters, though. . . . "More to the point, why did he run away instead of taking another shot?"

"Dawn, come here a minute." Lydecker considered the impressions in the leaves. A large flat area would correspond with the body of a right handed rifleman, with the small divot nearest to the blind coming from the left elbow, and the other one from the right elbow. The scrape through the leaves further away would be where the shooter moved his foot while getting the position lined up with the target, whoever that was. "Have you ever played Twister?"

Dawn nodded, and the corners of her mouth twitched up in a smirk for just a moment before her eyebrows raised for a question.

"Lie down with your left elbow here," he told her, pointing. "Try not to disturb the leaves. And your body needs to be there."

Dek watched her eyes flicker over the area. She put her palms flat on the ground, and let herself settle slowly onto the shooter's print. She placed her elbow carefully, and looked up at him with puzzled blue eyes.

Over the next few minutes, he coached Dawn into a textbook prone firing position for a rifle. He could tell she was getting impatient. He remembered how much the X-5s fidgeted when they were learning to shoot at eight years old.

"What am I doing?" she asked without moving. There was tension in her voice, and he could see that she was getting tired of holding the position.

"Firing an imaginary rifle," he said, reaching over to turn her left hand palm up to support the stock, and curled her right hand around to reach the imaginary trigger. "Now, look at how your hands are lined up. Where is that rifle pointing?"
"Just to the right of my truck," said Dawn softly. "Where you and Professor Hayworth were standing."


Lydecker looked at Dawn's feet. The toe of her left boot was scraping into the leaves a few inches beyond the mark that was already there.

"That's what I needed to know." He tapped her shoulder. "The shooter is shorter than you are, probably by a couple of inches." She rolled onto her left side and stretched, obliterating the last of the print in the leaves.

"What happened to your jacket?" asked Dawn, reaching up to tug on his sleeve and putting the tip her finger through a small hole. He looked, and found a second hole, with grey traces of burned powder.

"I'm tired of being a target," he snarled. He imagined the path of the bullet through his sleeve. Seven or eight inches to his right, and he would have been instantly dead. Just a little twitch for the shooter, but the difference between a hole in his left sleeve, and a hole in his heart. He didn't have any doubt where the sniper had been aiming.

****

Dawn felt the cold and wet from the leaves soaking through her jeans. It felt good to get out of that weird, lopsided position. She rolled onto her stomach and stretched again, then dragged her hands back through the leaves to get them under her shoulders to push herself up off the ground.

Her right hand touched something that wasn't soggy leaves. Whatever it was, the surface was made of leather, with a little bit of metal, and she wrapped her hand around it and shook it clear.

"What the Hell is a gun doing here?" she thought, almost dropping it.

"We've got one weird sniper." Dek took it out of her hand and pulled it out of the holster. The magazine dropped free of the grip, and he turned it in his hand and snapped it back in.

She pushed herself to her feet as he finished whatever noisy fiddling he was doing with the gun.

"9mm HK pistol. Someone with good taste, but no sense." He put the weapon back into leather. "If you've got a rifle, why bother with this?"

She shrugged. "Why are there two people after Hayworth?"

"This one's interested in me. A six inch miss from a hundred yards I can believe. Hayworth was almost three feet away from me."

"I thought you were on the same list as Hayworth. Is there anyone else?" Dawn tried to imagine how many more people might think Dek should be dead.

It was his turn to shrug. "You carry this one," he told her. "If you need to use it, point first, snap off the safety, then squeeze the trigger. It's set up to clip inside the waistband on your left side."

Dawn accepted the weapon, and decided that there really wasn't any other way to carry it. She pulled down her sweater to cover the grip. "I survived this long with out carrying a gun," she thought. "I am going to take this off the instant I get home."

They picked their way back down the hill to the parking lot.

"I'm tired of this Rambo shit," growled Lydecker as they splashed through the creek. "I'm not fucking 25 anymore."

"Why not?" asked Dawn flippantly. Then her feet quit moving as she realized exactly what she meant.

"I can't believe I just said that," she thought. "I was born in 1995." She was a bit relieved that he didn't seem to have heard her.

*****

The sound track from a cowboy movie was leaking through the walls from the next room. Hoof beats and gunfire worked on her nerves. She remembered the sound of a dozen nine-year olds running in hard-soled boots, and felt the beginning of tears.

The bottle in front of her was almost empty. She could remember breaking the seal and opening it, a while ago. What she couldn't remember was when she'd stopped pacing, and taken a seat at the table.

The rifle was back in its case, under the unmade bed, and her boots stood in front of the door, with dried mud slowly flaking off them onto the mauve motel carpet.

"You panicked," she said out loud. "Twice." Maybe another swallow would blur out those memories.

"You left a weapon behind." She set the bottle down with a jolt, and watched the ripples bounce around inside the glass.

"You missed. What is wrong with you?" She sniffled, and brushed the back of her hand across a damp cheek.

"And you're going to feel like crap tomorrow morning." One more, and that was the last of the alcohol. The empty joined the line of others. Six weeks here, and the empties were marching most of the way across the wall.

"What's tonight's scheduled nightmare?" she asked herself, getting up unsteadily. She shut off the light and sat on the bed. Her clothes made a pile on the floor, and she climbed under the covers, naked except for the knife.

Her dream self with the AR-15 glided through the woods like a shadow, while her body relaxed in sleep. Her dream self smelled the oil on the rifle, the wet air, and the fallen leaves, as she lay on the damp ground. The weight of the dream rifle settled on her left hand, against her shoulder. The dream girl took aim, as the two passengers climbed out of the truck. The one didn't matter, the other drew her total attention. The man looked older than she remembered, but the frown was familiar, and in the dream he looked straight at her like he could see her.

Her dream self held her breath, and took up the little bit of slack in the trigger. The target slammed the door, throwing his body into it. In the dream she could feel his anger like a shock wave, and she tensed, shifting the rifle and releasing the shot.

She knew instantly that she'd missed. He was running towards her through the trees, fallen twigs crunching under his feet. Panic. She fled, dream-slow, with the rifle in her hands.

The panic was still there when she woke up in the darkness. The cowboy movie was over, and all was quiet except for someone snoring, and the traffic, and a dog somewhere.

"At least that wasn't the bad nightmare," she told herself. "There wasn't any snow."