Page 92 of South of Nowhere

Or you aimed for the ankle and missed, and the damn target shot back.

Foley wasn’t overly concerned, however. He was the best shot he knew of. While other kids in school were aimlessly running into one another playing football, swinging bats at baseballs, or getting hot and sweaty in the backseats of cars with Mary Jean Phelb, he was shooting.

In the army, shooting.

After the army, shooting.

Reloading his own ammunition, pouring lead for the bullets. Studying the physics of wind and gravity, the dynamics of airflow over copper and lead and Teflon.

Shooting…

At twenty-four Waylon Foley had gotten married. And it was okay. For a while. Until the desire to kiss his honey on her forehead and head out into the woods with his gun became aneedto kiss his honey on her forehead and head out into the woods.

He’d rather have been there than at the movies, or the dinner table.

Or bed.

The divorce was mutually agreed upon.

And so he began to spend nearly every weekend with the Savage rifle. He recalled an article he’d read once about the actor Daniel Day Lewis. While shooting the filmLast of the Mohicanshe hadreportedly lived the life of his frontiersman character so he could become the person he played. Part of that process was sleeping with his rifle.

Foley loved that.

He didn’t exactly sleep with the Savage, but he kept her in the bedroom, not far from his pillow.

He now pulled the caps off the Nikon scope—the one atop the rifle—and laid the crosshairs on his target.

Thinking: Shoulder, leg, hand, foot.

He mentally flipped a coin—if you could flip a coin when you had four choices.

Then circumstance, not chance, won. At this distance, the leg was probably best.

He’d take the risk of hitting the femoral artery.

In went his camo-colored earplugs.

Now…

Come on…

Would the manpleasestop moving?

Yes, at last. He must have received a text. He paused for a moment and fished his phone from his back pocket. He read the screen and sent a reply.

Foley worked the bolt with that delicious click-click sound, putting a long, narrow, golden bullet into the comfortable weapon’s receiver and centered the crosshairs on the man’s right leg.

All right, girl. It’s up to you.

A squeeze of the trigger, slow, slow.

Then the huge bang, a kick to his aching shoulder.

He peered through the scope.

The slug had gone directly where he wanted it to, into the man’s lower calf, and he tumbled down a low hillside, mouth wide with a scream Foley could not hear.

“Thank you.” Alone and not on a shooting range in front of anyone else, he planted a kiss on the warm blue-steel receiver of therifle. Leaving the spent shell inside—why help out the police?—he slipped the caps back on the Nikon scope and the rifle into its case. He rose.

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