Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(40)

As he drove by, he saw one car entering, and one car leaving. Both stopped at parking gates, which would be a problem if he had to get out in a hurry. If he shot from the parking structure, the investigating cops would know the exact time when he pulled the trigger, from witness testimony. They would know soon enough that the shot came from the hospital, and would therefore know within a minute or so of when the car would be leaving the structure. And if there were cameras . . . and there probably were . . .

He couldn’t use his own car and even a rental would be dicey—renting a car involved showing a driver’s license and he suspected the rental agencies took secret videos of the renters, shot across the rental desk.

Dunn was a fan of military thriller fiction and movies, black ops stuff, and while the operators always seemed to know where to get a gun or a fake ID, or how to start a stolen car by rubbing a couple of wires together, Dunn didn’t know any of that.

It seemed simple enough in a movie: you’d go to a sleazy neighborhood where some vaguely Middle Eastern–looking guy would sell you everything you needed to go underground. He didn’t know any Middle Eastern–looking guys. He didn’t know enough about car electronics to steal one. Another problem—he didn’t know when the kid would appear on the playing fields. Could he sit in a car for an hour or two without attracting attention?

The parking structure was looking like a bad idea. He drove around the neighborhood, and four blocks behind the hospital found a possibility. An old cemetery, not more than a hundred yards long and fifty across, sat at the crest of a hill behind a neglected picket fence. The grass inside had been mown, but not recently, and was ankle-high in most places, even higher in scattered clumps of sumac. There were a few large granite tombstones, but most of the stones were small flat arches of what looked like once-white limestone, tilted this way and that, many so weathered that the inscriptions were barely legible. A dozen mature trees were spotted across the cemetery, and there were clumps of saplings, self-seeded volunteers.

On the hospital side of the cemetery, the hillside fell away sharply toward the back of the hospital. A weed-choked track ran along the bottom of the slope, and on the other side of it were an electrical substation and a mechanical yard, probably related to the hospital, with what looked like backup generators and a couple of large tanks, possibly for diesel. The hospital parking ramp rose on the other side of that, probably two hundred and fifty or three hundred yards away.

Dunn parked on the street a block away from the cemetery, walked along the rough track between the cemetery and the electric substation, until he thought he was about at the middle of the graveyard, then climbed the embankment. The picket fence on the back side of the cemetery was more than neglected—it had crumbled and fallen in several places.

Once on top of the ridge, Dunn looked down at the school’s playing fields, which were clearly visible, but a long way out. How far? Four hundred and fifty yards? More? Even with his surveyor’s eye, he wasn’t sure.

He looked around, found a handy tombstone, and sprawled beside it. He was six feet back from the bluff, and a rifle, he thought, would set up perfectly for a shot at the school. A senile cottonwood tree stood twenty yards down to his left; he moved over to it. The trunk was big enough that he’d be invisible from the street that ran along the front of the cemetery, and the slope below was sharp enough, and the hospital far enough away, that he couldn’t be seen from below, either.

But it was an extremely long shot; with a moving target, almost impossible for a man of his limited skills. The target would have to be motionless.

He spent a few minutes walking around the cemetery, zeroed in on a crumbling wooden shed, which probably once held yard tools. The shed was sitting on patio-style concrete blocks, each three inches thick, two blocks to each stack. He knelt and looked at them, and on one side of the shed found a loose block. He used his pocketknife to pry at it, careful not to make any obvious scratches. When it was loose, he pulled it out, and peered under the shed, then stuck his arm under. There was enough space, he thought, to hide a rifle.

He put the block back in place.



* * *



—

HE LEFT THE CEMETERY in the dark and walked back to his car. At home, he loaded Google Earth, which had a fairly accurate measuring tool, called up a satellite image of the school, and measured the distance from the cemetery cottonwood to the back of the school. Four hundred and ninety-six yards.

He thought about that and a question popped into his head. Was it necessary to actually kill the kid? Or only hit him? And maybe, not even hit him, if the bullet hit close enough to frighten him. It now occurred to Dunn that the important thing was that the right people knew that the kid had been shot at.

Better if he was actually hit, because then there’d be no doubt, but a close miss might be good enough. He thought about it that night, in bed, and decided that he needed to find out exactly how bad a shot he was.

And the next day was Saturday, the job site closed down.



* * *



—

HIS WEST VIRGINIA CABIN was deep in the woods and more than rustic: it was primitive, and for that reason, had never been broken into, although somebody had peppered the outhouse with a .22.

The cabin itself was a prefabricated metal shed with four windows and one door, which was locked with a heavy padlock, and all of it set on a concrete slab. Inside was an old wooden table with two metal folding chairs, a waist-high shelf that served as a kitchen counter, and a wide wooden rack that would keep an air mattress off the floor. There were fluorescent lights hung overhead with a plug-in cord that dropped to the floor at one side of the shed.