After seeing to his two horses, Dana Potter picked up the last plastic storage box from the bed of the white Dodge Ram pickup with Kansas plates that he’d stolen in Abilene the evening before.
Potter lugged the boxes across the dusty yard to the back of an old ranch house surrounded by steep, rocky, arid hills in the middle of a nowhere that began thirty miles to the east and went on all the way to the New Mexico border.
A tall, wiry, and weathered man in his early forties, Potter toed open the kitchen door with his cowboy boots and went inside.
“That’s the lot of it,” he said.
Mary, his wife, looked up from the ultralight rifle she had mounted lengthwise in a portable gunsmith vise set up on an old wooden table covered in grocery bags.
“Put them there,” Mary said, gesturing with a screwdriver to the floor.
He put the boxes down and went over to his wife. “She come through zeroed?”
“Only one way to find out,” she said.
He hugged her. “I’ll do the basic check if you want to call on the sat phone. We can shoot her tomorrow.”
She hugged him back. “Thanks. I’ve been worried.”
“I know. Go on, now.”
Potter leveled the bolt-action rifle in 6.5mm Creedmoor using a bubble level he placed on the elevation turret of the gun’s Schmidt and Bender tactical telescopic sight. Then he dug in an open box of tools next to the gun vise and came up with a hard plastic case that contained a bore-sighting system precisely calibrated to the gun.
Mary was on her phone. “Jesse?”
She listened, smiled, said, “Long drive, but it’ll be worth it. How’re you feeling?”
In the silence that followed, Potter leveled and taped a custom cardboard chart to the kitchen wall. Then he got out the bore-sighting device itself.
It had a long tapered front end that fit snugly down the barrel of the rifle. The rear of it was the size of a Bic lighter and featured a laser.
Mary listened intently, and then her face clouded. “Put on Patty.”
Potter said, “What?”
His wife held up a finger.
Potter threw up his hands and turned around to peer through the scope. He adjusted the gun and the vise until the crosshairs were dead on a similar set of crosshairs printed on the chart taped to the wall.
Mary said, “Patty, I’m thankful for you being there. What’s his temperature?” Her expression darkened further. “Well, no matter what happens, he has to take his meds. Okay? Tell him his dad and I will call again later.”
She hung up, angry. “Jesse refused two doses of his medicine, and he’s running a steady low-grade fever because of it.”
Potter felt himself tighten, and then he sighed.
“Look at it from his perspective. He’s a fifteen-year-old who’s been told he’s going to die unless he can get access to an insanely expensive treatment his government doesn’t believe in and won’t pay for. He’s trying to get some control over his life, and refusing meds is his answer.”
Mary tried to stay angry, but then she let it go, appearing more sad than convinced. “I don’t like being away from him like this. Every moment, it’s…”
“Did we have a choice?”
“No,” she said, and her expression hardened. “We didn’t. We don’t. It’s no use wishing we had the money any other way. How’s my doll looking?”
He went to the gun and flipped on the laser sticking out of the barrel. A glowing red dot appeared on the chart three inches above the printed crosshairs.
“Perfect,” he said. “You’re three high at a hundred meters, dead on to three hundred. Two turret clicks and you’re zero at five hundred.”
“I do like precision.”
“It’s everything,” he said, taking her rifle from the vise and setting it aside.
Potter picked up his own rifle. Green custom stock with a nice grip, the gun was also chambered in 6.5mm Creedmoor, but it carried a Leica sniper scope with an illuminated reticle.
When properly sighted in, Potter’s rifle was more than capable of handling a five-hundred-yard shot. He just wanted to make sure it would when the time—
The sat phone blinked and beeped before he could start testing the rifle.
It was a number he recognized, and he answered.
“Peter here,” said a male voice with a slight British accent. “How was the drive?”
“Just beat that storm coming.”
“Any trouble entering the country?”
“None.”
“I told you the passports and veterinarian papers were solid.”
“We didn’t even need them. You going to give us our assignment?”
“It’s all there, in the closet in the back bedroom. Everything you’ll need.”
Mary left the kitchen, heading toward the back bedroom.
Potter stayed where he was. “You’ll deposit the down payment?”
“As soon as you tell me you’re taking the job.”
“We’re here, aren’t we?”
“Just the same.”
Mary came back into the kitchen carrying a thick manila envelope. She’d lost several shades of color.
“I’ll call you back,” Potter said, and he clicked off. “What’s the matter?”
“Jesus Christ, Dana,” she said, handing him the envelope. “What the hell are we into now?”