Dead Aim Read online

  Parish said, “We’ll go hunting tomorrow, for practice.”

  She awoke in her cabin before dawn, dimly aware that something had occurred, and that she needed to know what it was. She sat up quickly, and in the still-darkened corner of the room she saw a tall, silent figure standing. Marcia gasped and her muscles locked, while her heart seemed to skip, then pound. “What?” she rasped.

  Mary O’Connor moved closer. Her red hair was tied back tightly. “It’s time. Get up and get dressed. We’re waiting outside.” Then she turned, opened the door, and stepped out into the dark.

  Marcia got up. She had seen in the dim light from the window that Mary O’Connor had been wearing hiking boots, khaki shorts, and a sweatshirt, so she hurriedly put on a tank top, a sweatshirt, shorts, and her hiking boots. Then she stepped outside.

  Mary O’Connor and Michael Parish were standing very close inside the shadow of the cabin—closer than two people intent on business would be—whispering. Marcia coughed just loudly enough to be sure they were aware of her. Mary’s shadow separated from Parish’s and floated quietly off up the dry hillside behind the cabin. Parish came close.

  Marcia said, “What’s happening now?”

  “This works the way I described last night,” he said. “Emily has gone out ahead of us to some likely places, tracking. When she finds the deer, she’ll signal Mary to start up and bring us.”

  Marcia could see Mary O’Connor’s tall, thin body kneeling near the top of the hill, one arm across her stomach with the other elbow propped on it to hold the small radio to her ear.

  “Here.” Parish picked up a rifle she had not seen leaning against the cabin wall and handed it to her. When she ran her hands along its stock and trigger guard, her fingers recognized it as one of the Remington Model 710 .30-06 bolt-action rifles she had used at the practice range. There was no scope on it today. He seemed to be watching her hands. “Use the factory sight. Put the bead in the notch, and the shot will be true.”

  Marcia saw Mary pop up suddenly. Her long arm waved once, and she turned and disappeared over the crest of the hill.

  “Let’s go,” said Parish. “She found it.”

  They walked in silence for a minute or two, achieving the top of the hill without stepping on sticks or dislodging stones. Parish broke the silence, whispering. “Now we get ready to kill. Part of it is seeing. Part is feeling the shot in your own body as you take it. Big mammals are all pretty similar. You aim for the parts that you feel in yourself are vital: the head, heart, lungs. Here to here.” Marcia felt his hand tap her on the side of the head, then again on the ribs, his hand just brushing the bottom of her right breast.

  They walked on for a time. Marcia held the rifle diagonally in front of her, the left hand on the foregrip, and the right clutching the polymer stock just behind the receiver. Now and then she let her right index finger slide ahead of the trigger guard to touch the safety, or moved the hand forward to grasp the bolt for a second. She was rehearsing, trying to be sure she would get it right in the darkness, to be sure she would not fumble or hesitate.

  They walked as the sky began to change, the light turned blue, and objects sharpened from dark blots to shapes that had definite boundaries, and then three dimensions. It was another half hour before the old, complicated oak trees began to have their deep green, and the sage and chaparral had lightened to gray and brown.

  She noticed now that Parish had been looking past her to his left, not at her, and she followed his eyes to see that Mary O’Connor had reappeared. She was giving Parish some kind of arm signal again.

  Parish stopped, touched Marcia’s arm, and whispered in her ear. “It’s just ahead, in a clearing by a narrow streambed. In the dry season they find small puddles to drink from. When we come into sight, it will go to your left. Lead it. You’ll take one shot only. Get ready.”

  She lifted the bolt handle, pulled it back, pushed it forward and down to put a round in the chamber, pushed the safety off with her trigger finger, and moved forward slowly. She was aware that Parish was not walking beside her anymore but a few steps behind and to her right, then far enough back to be entirely out of sight and hearing, the space that mattered. He had removed himself. As long as she looked ahead, kept her ears tuned to hear the prey, she was alone.

  She climbed the gradual rise, searching the landscape. She could see the tops of the first string of oak trees in a long line beyond the hill, and she knew they would grow that way along a streambed. As she reached the crest of the hill, she bent lower, then went to her belly and crawled, keeping her head from coming above the low weeds. She came forward until she could stare down the far side to see the green stripe across the brown field.

  She saw the deer. It was standing perfectly still, its head up and its ears twitching, its eyes like big black marbles against its tawny fur. There was a moment of joy and gratitude at being permitted this sight, this beautiful wildness still there in front of her. But even in her first glimpse she could see it was edgy, nervous. It turned its body so it was facing left.

  She formed a crook of her left elbow, propped the rifle on her left hand and stared through the notch sight, along the gleaming blue-black barrel to the bead above the muzzle. The deer’s haunches bunched up suddenly, its back legs bent, and she knew it had to happen now.

  She saw and felt the smooth, beautiful chest expand, and moved the bead in the center of the notch onto the spot where she could feel the heart beating, and squeezed the trigger. The rifle kicked hard against her shoulder and cheek, and the noise seemed to slap her ears and her stomach at the same time. She found herself standing, staring down toward the creek, but she couldn’t see the deer. She took a step, but her arm was held in a tight grip. She turned. Parish was beside her. He took the rifle from her hands.

  She could see Mary O’Connor off to the left, running at full speed down the hill toward the creek. In a second, she saw Emily Lyons stand up from the middle of some chaparral on the far hill, a rifle in her hand. She was pointing.

  “Hurry,” said Parish, and began to run.

  Marcia launched herself forward, and the slope of the hill carried her down. She had to run a few paces, then dig in with her heels to stop herself, and then she was bounding forward across the short stretch of field. When she was at the streambed—no more than a narrow trench with a few muddy spots—she saw it. She stepped closer, but Parish gripped her arm again.

  “Don’t get in front of it. They sometimes get up and run.”

  “It’s … alive?” she whispered.

  “Come this way,” he said. He pulled her closer. She was behind the deer and to its right. She could see the rib cage rising and falling, and hear a deep huff sound. There was blood on the animal’s muzzle and on the ground. “See the blood—how red it is, and the bubbles? You hit the lungs. Maybe got enough of the heart to make it die.”

  Marcia looked up from the deer, and she could see Mary O’Connor coming closer. Marcia turned toward Parish, who nodded at Mary.

  Mary O’Connor reached to her back, lifted the sweatshirt, and pulled out a pistol, then held it by the barrel, so the grips were toward Marcia. “Do you want to do it?”

  Marcia turned, her eyes on Parish. “Yes,” she said. “I should be the one.”

  Parish seemed unmoved, unconvinced. He didn’t nod or show her his approval, just looked at his wristwatch. For a second, she hated him. She wanted him to do it. He should do this. No, she knew, he shouldn’t. She took the pistol. She kept her eyes on it so she would not have to see the contemptuous look on O’Connor’s face. She aimed it at the deer’s head just behind the ear, and fired.

  The sound of the pistol did not seem loud, and she realized that the rifle shot had made her ears feel stopped. She could see the deer give a reflexive kick, but it was dead. She reversed the pistol and handed it back to O’Connor. “Thanks,” she said, her eyes on O’Connor’s forehead.

  O’Connor put the pistol away and pulled her sweatshirt over it again as Emily L
yons came up.

  Parish said to Marcia, “It was a fair shot. Any time you put a deer down with the first one, and you don’t have to tramp all over creation tracking it while it bleeds to death, it’s a fair shot.”

  “What do we do with it?”

  “Right now, we hang it from one of these trees and gut it, then let it bleed out while we walk back to get the pickup truck and drive it home. Then we’ll butcher it, refrigerate some for dinner tonight, and freeze the rest.”

  She stared down at the deer. “It looks bigger up close.”

  He stared down. “It isn’t bad.” He seemed to be consciously, willfully evading what she had meant. “This is a pretty good buck for these hills.” He took the pack off his back and produced a nylon rope. “May as well get started. Where’s the best one, Mary?”

  “There’s an oak with a good horizontal limb right over there,” she said, pointing.

  He tied the rope around the rear hooves and dragged the carcass to the tree, then threw the rope over the limb and hoisted the deer off the ground upside down. He tied the other end of the rope around the trunk to hold it, then produced a long fixed-blade knife from his pack. He looked over his shoulder to be sure Marcia was still watching, then inserted the blade at the groin and, with a slight sawing motion, began the first long incision downward toward the center of the rib cage.

  Marcia watched from beside him, because she knew that if she didn’t he would tell her to. The other two women had walked off toward the camp carrying the rifles. She said nothing to Parish, asked nothing because it was all obvious. She knew why she’d had to come out here at dawn and hunt with these three. She knew why they had wanted her to have the feel of killing. Now, as she watched Parish making a slice and then pulling the intestines out of the animal, she knew why it could not have been a rabbit or something. It had needed to be nothing less than a full-grown buck.

  CHAPTER 12

  Marcia sat across the table from Michael Parish, drinking the bubbly water. She wanted a real drink—a strong one—but when Parish had ordered water, she’d had no choice. He had not ordered for her, and she could not remember his ever having said anything about alcohol. But she knew that what would get her through this was to do exactly as he did. Her gift for sensing what men expected and yielding to it was quicker, more reliable than her ability to figure out what was really required by the circumstances. She had to put faith in her alertness and in the subtle mimicry she had practiced all her life. They could be counted on because they were a weakness, and took no effort.

  Sitting with him was disconcerting. His face was turned toward her, but his eyes kept focusing on a point beyond her left shoulder, as though he were a sly enemy watching someone sneak up behind her and trying to keep her from noticing. His conversation made the feeling stronger, because he was only prodding her into talking, to keep her calm and distracted, while he kept refocusing his eyes on Mary O’Connor, who was sitting alone in a booth thirty feet away.

  “Did you come to this restaurant when you worked in Washington?”

  “No,” she answered. “It’s a nice place, but most of its business comes because it’s in the hotel. I think I was here maybe twice, just to meet out-of-town clients who were staying here and get them to pretend to read something and then sign it.”

  “Pretend to read it?”

  She nodded, then realized that he was looking past her again, so she said, “Yes. Nobody can eat a meal and really read a legal document while a lawyer is sitting across the table providing helpful offers to explain anything that’s not clear. If a lawyer really wanted him to understand it, the document would have been sent to him in advance. So they just pretend to read all of it, trying to buy the lawyer’s respect by seeming to read rapidly and understand instantly. But they’re distracted by the food, which is tantalizing, and it’s also threatening because they want to eat it and are afraid it will get cold or the waiter will take it away, but they can’t. They have to listen to what the lawyer is saying so they won’t offend her or make her think they’re stupid. And they’re concerned about how they look.”

  “How they look?”

  “Sure. Vanity. They’re afraid to spill something on themselves. And do they look important to the strangers around them, reading contracts at lunch, or do they just look crude and commercial?”

  “And how they look to the lawyer?”

  “Of course,” she agreed.

  “When we talked before, you always seemed to resent that you were treated differently from the men,” said Parish. “But it seems to me that what you’re describing is you using your sexual attractiveness to confuse the other party in an agreement.”

  Her face flattened. She felt a wave of hot irritation at the nape of her neck. “My using it is different. It’s mine to use. Mine,” she repeated. “Not theirs.”

  “When a firm hires a lawyer, aren’t they hiring the whole person?”

  He was looking closely at her now. She wished he would look at O’Connor again. “That depends,” she said firmly.

  “Education? Grammar and diction?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Those things.”

  “Manners?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “Voice?”

  She gave him a glare. “Within certain limits. If you had an irritating way of speaking that wasn’t the product of a handicap or something, it probably would be legal not to hire you.”

  “And if you have a soft, musical voice that men find pleasant, it would be legal to consider that an asset, wouldn’t it? Surely when you went in front of a judge and jury you used that voice.”

  “This isn’t about me.”

  “Of course it is,” Parish insisted. “What about your eyes and your hair? Your complexion?” He smiled. “Your figure?” He seemed to know she was about to interrupt, so he dropped the smile and spoke more quickly and seriously. “Suppose your company did a study to find out a jury’s reactions to a group of lawyers. I’ve heard there are companies that do that kind of research.”

  “There are,” she said tersely.

  “Well, suppose they did one and found that a jury’s reaction to an attractive woman was more positive than their reaction to an ugly one. Wouldn’t the company be foolish not to hire her and use her in difficult cases?”

  “Why are you trying to make me angry? Do you think I’ll fall apart if I’m not?”

  “No,” said Parish. “I’m just curious to know what you’re thinking. It’s important to me that I understand you.”

  Marcia’s heart gave an odd little flutter at that, and she cursed herself for it.

  But he went on. “You are extremely attractive.”

  She rolled her eyes and let a breath out through her teeth. “Please.”

  “I’m not trying to insult you,” he said. “It’s an advantage—an enormous one—and you’ve shown me that you’re aware of it, at least in certain circumstances. If you can confuse a person at lunch, you can get a client to hire you. You can charm a jury, make a judge want to help you. It would seem to me that it’s a gift, like being born intelligent or healthy or strong. In fact, beauty—sexual attractiveness—is made of those qualities.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “You have these advantages, but you complain. It would seem more sensible for someone to complain who had been deprived of them.”

  Marcia’s eyes narrowed. “If I succeeded, people would think I batted my eyes at a judge. If I was promoted, people would think I slept my way to the next level, or just that my boss hoped I would be grateful for the favor. No matter what I did or didn’t do, I could never get credit for earning it with my work. Is that fair?”

  “That’s a false question,” Parish said. “It’s probably possible to figure out which lawyer won a case, even if her side consisted of a team of three or four. But it’s not possible, even for her, to determine exactly how she won: what proportion of her victory was caused by the cold logic of her presentation, what proportion by how appea
ling she looked while she was giving it. In every instance, it was both.” He paused. “The only place where fairness comes in is whether she—a person—gets rewarded for using what she had to win.”

  “But part of the reward should be the respect. You shouldn’t win and then have people feel contempt for you.”

  “People don’t feel contempt in that situation. The only negative feeling is jealousy,” he assured her. “The women feel you don’t deserve to have what you’ve been given. The men see that you have powerful magic that’s not available to them.”

  “I earned what I have.”

  He looked at her, his expression intrigued, but said nothing to contradict her. His eyes refocused, and she knew he was studying Mary O’Connor again. At first Marcia was relieved. But after a time, she realized her irritation would not let her leave the subject. She needed to deliver a rebuttal.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you why it was unfair. I was interviewed by the senior partners, and they asked difficult questions. I was hired, and was given no special privileges that I know of. I worked for three years, as hard as anyone. By then I thought I had become an important part of the team, a member of a group that valued me because I knew some things that the others didn’t, had experience that was different from theirs, was willing to devote as much effort as anyone did to succeed on a case. It was a shock to learn otherwise. It was a sudden dose of reality that I’d never had before. And do you know what? When the time came, my reaction wasn’t ‘They have it wrong.’ It was ‘Of course.’ It had never happened before, but it felt familiar, as though it had happened a hundred times. I’m bitter, but what I’m bitter about isn’t the world we live in. It’s the loss of the brighter, better, fairer world I imagined and lived in before.”