Page 91 of South of Nowhere

The newly formed river took their entire attention, hands on hips, eyes down.

One thing they didn’t seem the least curious about were colorful items of fabric lying on the ground and in the branches of two nearby pines, as if articles of women’s clothing descended from the heavens onto their route on a regular basis.

He walked back to the bike, fired it up and returned to where the drowned Camaro lay.

He assessed the forest and rock formations around him, noting that not a single officer had yet responded to Millwood’s 911.

No problems there. In fact, he was pleased by their absence.

Colter Shaw always worked better alone.

39.

Time to pull the trigger for real.

Waylon Foley had enjoyed eyeing the poor assholes in the command post with the spotter scope, aiming at Motorcycle Man in particular (his shoulder still stung, his nose still ached).

But the circumstances that he found himself in hadn’t allowed him to actually take a shot.

That had changed.

Foley was presently in a wall of rocks dotted with pine and scrub oak, aiming at his target and reflecting that his task was not going to be that easy.

Because his intent was towound. Not kill.

Destroy the man’s knee or ankle. Take him out of commission.

This would also slow down the others, keeping them on edge, worried that they’d be next.

Foley had been hired to murder sixteen times in his career (and he was successful each time). In the service of committing those crimes he had wounded or badly injured around forty people (no exact number because twice he hadn’t stayed around to count body parts after the bombs).

Every one of those victims except the magic sixteen had been collateral damage.

Now, hilariously, Foley was thinking, since he was intending only to injure, killing a target would make thedeathcollateral damage.

Topsy-turvy…

Using the spotter scope, he was watching the man follow a trail up a rocky hillside.

Foley burrowed into an indentation in the rocks and trees. In the tan and green camo, he was nearly invisible, though he scanned the area to make sure no one was nearby. He was above that part of Hinowah known as Misfortune Row. Apparently, it was where the silver miners in the mid-1800s moved after their claims dried up and they had to downsize to a tent city on the site and make their living serving miners who were successful.

And, good news, there was nobody to witness the shooting; the neighborhood was deserted.

He watched the target make his way around rocks, over paths, looking at dirt and mud at his feet.

When hunting game, you never wounded, of course.

And if you did, by accident, you moved heaven and earth to track the creature and put it out of its misery. Youneverlet an animal suffer. Animals had no concept of the future. They had no hope, they had no fear of disappointment. They didn’t live past the next leaf or groundhog or salmon. So taking their life was nothing to them. But pain they experienced for as long as pain persisted.

Foley had once cut off a man’s little finger because he’d caught him throwing stones at a dog (later reflecting that making him swallow the digit was probably over the top, but he was just in one of those moods).

He pulled a piece of gray polyester cloth from his pocket (cotton and burlap left telltale fibers) and rolled it into a thick shooting rest for his rifle. It was an old one, a Savage, and it had been in his father’s inventory of weapons when the man died. Foley had descendedon Dad’s house just after hospice called and he grabbed this particular weapon before his brother even knew the old man had passed. Twenty thousand in cash too, but it was really the gun he wanted.

Windage, gravity, a muscle tremor (because some asshole took your shovel away from you, for instance)…all of those factors and a dozen others could conspire to make the mission to wound problematic.

You aimed for the shoulder, you hit the heart.

You aimed for the leg, you hit the femoral artery.

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