Long Range (Joe Pickett Book 20)(33)
Patterson said that he often worked very late at the courthouse and that he took Four Mile Road to clear his head before returning to his small apartment downtown. He said he had no idea how the shooter knew when he’d arrive, but he guessed the rifleman had tracked his movements and set up to wait. At the moment the bullet had shattered the glass, he’d been fiddling with the radio dial, trying to find the all-night sports talk station he sometimes picked up on this stretch of road. If he hadn’t been bent over awkwardly to the right, the bullet would have likely hit him square in the face.
Steck helped Patterson into his vehicle and transported him to the Twelve Sleep County Memorial Hospital for observation. Joe and Woods remained on the scene until dawn, keeping a watchful eye out for the shooter if he decided to double back, which he didn’t do.
It was obvious to both of them how the incident had taken place. The stretch of Four Mile Road that Patterson had been driving on was a three-mile straightaway that led to the T-junction that was Highway 78. On the other side of the highway was a thick stand of cottonwoods approximately two hundred yards away, which were the only trees in sight. The shooter had obviously parked in the trees to set up, and had waited for Patterson to drive down the road toward him.
It was a miracle that the shooter had missed and Patterson was still alive. The bullet had punched through the windshield directly above the steering wheel. The shooter had assumed he’d hit his target when Patterson careened off the road into the ditch. Why the gunman hadn’t followed up to make sure Patterson was dead was a mystery, Joe thought. Perhaps he’d been afraid of being seen by a passerby, or he had been so confident in his shot that he’d deemed it unnecessary.
Woods reported that Sheriff Kapelow and forensics tech Norwood were on their way and that the sheriff had warned Joe and Woods not to enter the trees and risk fouling the crime scene. No doubt, Joe thought, Kapelow’s hope was to find footprints, used food wrappers, or a spent casing.
Joe used that unnecessary warning as his excuse to drive away and leave Woods to deal with his boss.
*
HALFWAY UP THE HILLSIDE, Joe paused to get his breath back and to turn and look at the Eagle Mountain Club. In the distance, the line of homes including the Hewitt home was no more than a pale band set against the green of the grounds. He couldn’t make out individual structures, and the band undulated slightly in the heat waves as the temperature rose. Joe shook his backpack off and stuffed his vest into it for the rest of the way.
Nate had a sophisticated range finder around his neck and his weapon in a shoulder holster. Joe had found a spare set of binoculars in his office and brought them along as well.
“From here,” Nate said as he peered through his range finder, “we’re just short of a mile. Sixteen hundred yards, to be exact.”
“That’s a long way,” Joe said.
“It is. But it’s doable,” Nate said.
“Seriously?”
Nate nodded. “It’s right at the edge of the envelope for a special operator with the right weapon, but it’s a shot he would take.”
“I can’t even see the Hewitt house clearly from here.”
“I think that was the idea,” Nate said. “If you can’t see him, he can’t see you. Every man can be a sniper these days.”
*
THE WORLD OF long-range shooting wasn’t unfamiliar to Joe, because it had become an integral aspect of his job as a game warden in an incredibly short period of time. He couldn’t recall a technical revolution in big-game hunting happening as quickly, and he likened it to when repeating arms had been introduced to the American West or when modern gunpowder had replaced black powder over a hundred years before he was born.
He still cringed when he encountered a hunter in possession of such a technically advanced weapon.
Before the last ten years, a six-hundred- to eight-hundred-yard shot had been considered extreme and ill-advised. Ethical hunters rarely even tried one because the possibility of wounding an animal that far away made it more difficult to finish it off or track it if it ran away. Most hunters didn’t even pull the trigger if the game was over two hundred yards away.
High-tech laser range finders like the one Nate carried had changed everything. Knowing the exact distance of the target made ultra-long shots possible, because the shooter could adjust his aim to account for all of the factors—wind, temperature, atmospheric pressure, incline/decline—that would affect the shot. There were now rifle scopes that were computers in and of themselves and they enabled the shooter to dispense with a subsequent laser range finder. Scopes were now range finders and ballistic calculators.
In addition to precision optics, carbon fiber–wrapped barrels were lighter and stiffer and they cut down on vibration. Bad rifle ergonomics had been replaced by perfectly sculpted composite stocks. Bad steel triggers had been replaced by foolproof titanium. Specially engineered ammunition resulted in rounds that were more powerful, more accurate, and more consistent. Copper alloy–jacketed bullets with ballistic tips emerged from muzzles at over three hundred thousand rotations per minute.
As Nate had said, any man could now be a sniper. The average-Joe hunter could own a technologically advanced and engineered rifle that was beyond anything a military sniper had possessed twenty years before.
All it took was money.
Joe had seen rifles that cost the hunters carrying them over six thousand dollars for the rifle and scope. And he’d met an elk hunter who bragged that his weapon was custom-made for him for nearly twenty thousand.