If he hadn’t needed to take a piss, none of it might have happened.
As it was, the sniper decided to take a break from the audiobook—the killer had just been revealed, the main character’s brother-in-law—and he set the earbuds and iPod aside and stood and stretched and headed out of the hut.
The sky was clear and the sun was bright and the temperature was rising. It was these days that he dreaded most. Sure, he had the shade of the hut to keep the angry sun from flaying his skin, but the hut acted as a kind of oven and roasted him alive. He would be covered in sweat some days, and sometimes brought a portable fan to keep him cool.
He started down the embankment toward the hole that he used to relieve himself. He unzipped and did his business, and it was as he was shaking off that he heard the distant blast of a tractor-trailer horn over the ridge.
The sniper tilted his head just slightly, cocking his good ear toward the ridge in case the horn came again.
For several seconds all he heard was the usual wind and the cicadas, nothing else.
He started back toward the hut before veering off toward the short trail leading up to the top of the ridge. The horn just didn’t make sense. Not out on this highway, which was fairly traveled but never busy enough to warrant a trucker blasting his horn.
Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was something. Either way, the horn was going to bug him if he didn’t check things out.
As he reached the top of the ridge, he crouched down and inched his way forward. There was a space between two boulders that he sometimes used to peek out through before setting up for a shot, and he used it now to peer down at the highway.
The tractor-trailer was long gone, but the sniper saw why the trucker had briefly sounded his horn. Two people were walking down alongside the highway, a man and a woman, and the man …
The sniper pulled his spare scope from one of the pockets of his cargo shorts. He glassed the highway and the man and the woman and realized that, yes, the man was the same guy from yesterday, the driver of the Mustang.
Now it appeared the man had made his way back out here with a friend—the girl drove a small white VW—and was looking for … what, exactly?
The sniper knew there would be no traces of the guy’s Mustang. The team that had taken it was completely professional and never left a trace. That didn’t mean the guy wouldn’t be suspicious. It had happened in the past, but luckily nothing serious had ever come of it. So maybe this was nothing. Maybe—
The sniper squinted, focusing again on the man.
Son of a bitch.
Instead of staying in last night like he had planned, one of his buddies called him up and invited him to the bar, and they had been sitting around a table telling stories and jokes when the man showed up. Which wasn’t surprising, seeing as how his car had just broken down and he had nowhere else to go. But then later, after the girl—that girl, the sniper realized, the one right there with the small white VW—after she had come in and Wes had gone up to her and started acting like a jackass, this guy had messed up Wes and Tommy and Lloyd—Lloyd who even had to go to the hospital in Partridge. And those three guys were not a trio that could easily be messed with. They were tough dudes. Incredibly tough dudes. And the guy—the guy right now staring down at the dirt where his car had sat less than twenty-four hours ago—had handled them like a pro.
The sniper had seen enough. He crawled backward and stood and replaced the scope in his pocket and brought out his cell phone.
It took two rings before the call was answered.
The sniper said, “We might have a problem.”