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  Praise for

  DEAD AIM

  “Perry, veteran that he is … writes crisply, plainly and tightly, leaving the story plenty of room to run. And run it does; the reader is propelled through the plot like a bullet. The tension never ebbs. And just when a reader might think he has figured out what is going on, Perry pulls the rug out.”

  —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “Totally engrossing … The reader remains gripped in unending suspense and a shocking denouement.”

  —Library Journal

  “[Perry] has won a reputation as one of the sharpest thriller writers in the business. Dead Aim shows why. It’s smart, funny, and nasty; it will grab you and not let go. Perry … is a complete professional.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Thomas Perry is a master at hide-and-hunt thrillers and Dead Aim is the latest in an impressive line of winners.… Classic kill-or-be-killed suspense.”

  —Orlando Sentinel

  “Foolproof … superior action-film fare with a body count to match … Nobody who starts this … tale will put it down half-finished.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Perry’s 13th novel … again proves a showcase for his considerable talents—taut prose, finely crafted scenes, solid research.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2006 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 2002 by Thomas Perry

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2002.

  Perry, Thomas

  Dead aim : a novel / Thomas Perry.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-308-4

  1. Santa Barbara (Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3566.E718 D425 2002 813′.54—dc21 2002068100

  www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  The shot was an explosion that spewed a shower of bright sparks from the pistol’s muzzle into the darkness and kicked the barrel upward, but the arm of the shooter quickly straightened to level it again. The shooter fired the second and third shots into the lighted interior of the car, and the late-night silence returned. After a few seconds, crickets began to chirp tentatively again from nearby yards.

  There were three holes punched through the rear window of the car, and even from his vantage across the alley behind the shooter, Parish could see that Mark Romano’s head had been pounded forward, and the windshield had been sprayed nearly opaque with his bright red blood.

  Parish watched as one of the women gently but firmly placed her arm around the shooter’s left shoulder and took the gun from the right hand. The waiting escape car rolled up and within a few heartbeats the shooter had been hustled into the back seat. Parish leaned in to speak softly to the driver. “Go ahead. We’ll finish up here.”

  The car moved off down the alley with its lights still out. Parish walked into the garage, stopped by the side of Romano’s car, and bent to stare into the still-lighted interior at the bloody face to be sure there was no possibility of life. He reached across the body to the dashboard and took the remote control unit. He closed the car door, stepped out of the garage, and pushed the remote control button to bring the door down to cover the scene.

  As he turned, Spangler emerged from the darkness at his side and pointed at the back of a house down the alley. “There was a face in that window for a second.”

  “Better take care of it before we go,” whispered Parish. “They haven’t had enough time to get the shooter out of the area.”

  The two men walked quickly and silently up the alley. They were both tall, but they moved toward the house with a surprising ability to blend into their surroundings, passing through each shadowy space beside the garages, moving along rows of garbage cans to make their shapes get lost to the eye among the many others in the dark alley.

  The house was two lots down from Mark Romano’s—they had waited for a night when the nearest neighbors were away—so the face could not have seen much from that window, beyond the six-foot cinder-block wall that separated the alley from the yard. Parish and Spangler moved to the wall, barely glancing at each other, as though they had done this so many times that each knew the steps, neither needing to check where the other was.

  In seconds Parish was up and over the wall into the yard behind the house, and Spangler had made his way along the fence beside it. As Spangler went over the fence and dashed up the low steps toward the kitchen door, he could hear Parish breaking the glass in the window at the back of the house, and he hit the door with his shoulder before the musical sound of glass hitting the floor inside the house had stopped.

  The door flew inward, cracked into the wall, bounced, and swung back, but Spangler was already across the small kitchen, his gun drawn, slipping up the hallway toward the back bedroom at a run. He went low, held his pistol ahead of him, and stepped into the doorway.

  He saw a man in boxer shorts standing inside the room leaning against the wall, both hands on an aluminum baseball bat, waiting for Parish to try to climb in through the broken window beside him. Spangler fired once into the man’s chest as Parish fired twice through the window into the room.

  Spangler’s head spun so he could see what Parish had shot. It seemed at first that it was just a lump in the blanket, but then Spangler saw the telephone cord leading from the nightstand under the covers. He tore the blanket and sheet aside to reveal the body of the woman, the telephone receiver still clutched in her hand.

  He moved to the window, pulled the sash up, and stepped back to let Parish climb in. Parish glanced at the man on the floor as he hurried to the bed where the woman lay. He snatched the telephone from her fingers, put it to his ear, and smiled as he set it in its cradle. “Dial tone. She hadn’t gotten the call off yet.”

  “Close, though,” said Spangler. He turned to go.

  “Not yet.” He nodded at the dead man below the window. “That bat isn’t the right size for him, is it?”<
br />
  Spangler whispered, “Kids?”

  “Better check.”

  Spangler followed Parish into the hallway, mirroring his rapid, efficient movements. Parish stopped at each doorway on the left, put his head inside, turned to look both ways, then moved on. Spangler took the doorways on the right. Parish stopped at the end of the hall, where the door was closed. He tried the handle, found that it would not turn, and nodded to Spangler. Then he stepped back and kicked.

  As the door flew open, Spangler stepped in after it. He decided that the boy crouching on the floor at the far end of the bunk bed must be nine or ten, and the little sister he had pushed behind him would be around five. Parish and Spangler seemed to have the same thought, which was that they must make use of the children’s shock and immobility before they tried to run or crawl under something, as children often did. Both men centered their shots in the children’s foreheads.

  Parish and Spangler left the room and continued up the hallway. It did not make sense to go out the way they had come. The only car in the alley had been the one that had been used to spirit the shooter away, and there was nothing left near Romano’s body that they needed to think about any further. They walked across the small, drab living room, carefully avoided a skateboard that had been left near the front door, slipped the latch, and stepped outside. They made their way around the corner to the car they had parked there, and Spangler drove them up the street toward the freeway entrance.

  Forty-five minutes later, when they were driving north beside the ocean, Parish opened his window and tossed the remote control for Mark Romano’s garage door opener out onto the pavement. The little plastic case broke apart with the impact and the pieces bounced a few times, cartwheeling and then sliding to a stop a few feet apart in the right lane, where they would be crushed to bits by the next car, or the next, or the one after that.

  CHAPTER 2

  The sun was already high, but a thin, misty layer of cloud veiled it and gave it a rainbow aureole. Mallon was glad it was not fierce and glaring, the way it could be along this beach in midsummer when the sea reflected it in painful flashes and the high pressure set in to kill the breeze. He sat on a rock beneath the cliffs and watched a squadron of pelicans flying just above the water two hundred yards out, where the big kelp beds began. He watched one of them swoop up, then plummet downward in the graceless, folded jumble that pelicans made of themselves, crash into the water, and emerge with a silvery, flapping fish. The other pelicans wheeled and spread out, working the school as the first had.

  Mallon was always pleased to see them. When he had first visited Santa Barbara twenty years ago, they had been rare. On that trip, if he was out in a boat he would be lucky to see a few at sunset flying back to nesting grounds on the islands. Now they were everywhere. Three or four waddled around every day on Stearns Wharf, rolling from side to side with their wings stuck out and their long beaks agape, staring with beady prehistoric eyes at the tourists. Mallon was old enough now to have noticed that the human program of transforming the world into a poisoned desert sometimes suffered setbacks and delays.

  His back and haunches were beginning to feel stiff from sitting, so he reached for his backpack. The movement brought his eyes along the beach so that he noticed the girl standing on the sand staring out at the ocean, gazing just past the next curve of the shore. He knew he should stand up and resume his walk past her, up the beach toward home, but the way she stood, it seemed to him that she could not see him. He supposed that a suntanned, barefoot man wearing khaki shorts and gray T-shirt could easily be lost to the eye among the rocks beneath the cliff. She was clearly not expecting to see anyone here; she might have walked a mile along this stretch of beach without meeting anyone at midmorning on a weekday. There was no nearby place where a person could park a car and easily climb down here.

  He savored the feeling of invisibility: it gave him a chance to take an unhurried look at her. She was young. He judged her to be about twenty-five, and then detected an unexpected sense of loss. He was forty-eight, and the estimate placed her in a different generation, on the other side of a wall that made a certain kind of adventure not impossible but unlikely and maybe a bit ridiculous. He considered standing up, but he didn’t want to startle her now—certainly not frighten her—so he watched and waited for her to move on.

  She was pretty, with long brown hair, and that added to his discomfort because it made him feel like a voyeur. She was wearing a pair of khaki shorts not so very different from his, and a top of the sort with thin straps like strings to hold it up. She took a step. That made him feel better: this would be over soon. She paused, then leaned her body forward. Her left foot moved ahead just in time to keep her from toppling, then her right took a step to compensate, and she was walking. She kept her head down and her legs moving in a determined stride until she reached the firm margin of tightly packed sand just above the tide line, and then kept going into the water.

  The first five steps were easy, the waves foaming around her ankles, then her shins. He watched her walking in, an act so familiar that he felt her steps in his own body: the first wave hit her thighs and made her progress stop, then pulled her on with its backwash. The next one hit her at the top of her legs, and made her take an involuntary hop because the cold was reaching the tender spots. She leaned a little to the side when the next wave hit her, then straightened, hugged her arms around her chest, and kept walking. She did not dive under and begin to swim as the next wave approached, although that was what he had been sure she was going to do. She simply let it go over her.

  Santa Barbara had always been full of triathletes, marathon runners, and long-distance swimmers, and he decided she must be another sample of one these varieties. She would come up in a moment like a dolphin, swim straight out until she was past the breakers and the long Pacific swells rolled under her. Then she would turn north to swim along the coast for a mile or two, slosh back onto the beach, and run. He was perfectly contented with her. He liked the kind that wore plain khaki or something instead of those unappealing spandex outfits. Then he realized he was getting uncomfortable—short of breath—and he stood up quickly.

  When she had gone under, he had unconsciously taken a breath and held it. But this was too long. “Pah!” He pushed it out and inhaled deeply, already running across the sand toward the water. He kept his eye on the spot where she had disappeared, leaping over the first two incoming breakers, then diving over the third and crouching to let the fourth surge over him before he pushed off and began to swim. He swam a hard freestyle, his feet kicking up a wake and his arms stabbing furiously into the water and pulling, his head turning to breathe every sixth stroke.

  His mind had begun to enumerate the possibilities: maybe she had gotten tangled in a big clump of kelp, panicked, and gulped water. Maybe she’d had some kind of seizure. He reached the spot where he was almost sure she had gone down. He stroked to raise his body high, pointed his toes, and went under, feet first.

  His foot hit something, and in a reflex he pulled it back, unbelieving. He realized that he had been sure he was going to find nothing, touch nothing. The odds that he could find an unconscious person out here were minuscule. He came up for air, dived, and swam straight down. The water was dim and cloudy, yet he saw her, not below but beside him. She was hanging about ten feet down, her limbs glowing white in the murk, her hair swirling in the current, radiating out on all sides. He put his left arm around her torso, stroked with his right, and kicked toward the light.

  When he broke the surface, she did not move or twitch or join him in the gasp for air. As he shifted his left arm across her chest and began to tug her toward shore, for the first time he let himself think that she might be dead. He struggled to bring her to shallow water, trying to keep her head up but several times finding that he had failed, had taken a stroke with her head under. Each time it made him swim harder, desperate to get them to the beach, where he could do something.

  Then his foot hit sand, an
d he hauled her in more quickly, finding that he moved faster if he held both her arms and dragged her through the shallow water. When he reached the tide line he beached her on the firm, wet sand, her lower legs still in the water but her head, torso, and thighs out. She still had a pair of sneakers on her feet.

  Mallon rapidly went through the preparations for cardiopulmonary resuscitation, reassuring himself with a memory of his first instructor in the Air Force: “If he ain’t breathing and his heart ain’t beating, he’s dead. Anything you do is better for him than that.” He bent her head back, opened her mouth, made sure her tongue was visible. He carefully placed the heel of his hand below her sternum and gave the required ten pushes, then pinched her nostrils shut, leaned forward, placed his lips over her mouth and gave her a breath, then sat up and pushed her chest again.

  She gasped, a sound like a whistle, coughed, vomited. He rolled her onto her side so she could keep coughing up water without blocking her airway. “You’re going to be okay,” he said quietly. “That’s right. Cough it up so you can breathe.” He patted her back as he remembered people doing to him when he was choking on something as a child, but a very strong message from the attitude of her body told him that it was not what she wanted.

  He said, “Good. You’re going to be just fine.” Then he saw that her eyes were open, and that she was trying to get a look at him, but the sun was in her eyes because he was above her. He forced himself to say something about himself, just to reassure her that he was real, and ordinary, and friendly. “I saw you go under, and I was so afraid I wouldn’t be able to find you.”

  She sat up with great effort and stared at him in absolute disbelief, then lay on her stomach, her face pressed into the sand in sorrow.

  He stood up, not knowing where to look. Of course. She had not wanted to be saved. She had been trying to die.

  CHAPTER 3

  No, Mallon thought. Not this. Not again. He raised his head to look up at the ragged crest line of the cliffs above the beach, then turned his whole body to stare anxiously up and down the shoreline, searching for the shape of another human being. There was nobody. He looked down again at the girl lying on the sand, and forced himself to think. They were a half mile from any spot where he could climb the cliffs and get to a telephone. Even if there had been a nearby spot, he could not imagine leaving her here long enough to make a call. She might very well wait until he was out of sight and simply walk back into the water. He had to make his heart stop fluttering and concentrate. His chance to save her wasn’t when he had dragged her out: his chance was beginning now.