16
ST. PETERS, MISSOURI
Finding the right hide had always been Tom Miller’s biggest weakness as a sniper.
No more.
The bed on the Ram 1500 extended almost six and a half feet behind the cab. Miller was five foot seven in sneakers. Plenty of room for him back there, even with his Remington beside him.
At an AutoZone off I-90 in Spokane, he bought a tonneau, a fancy name for a pickup-bed cover. He chose one made of thick but breathable black mesh. It unspooled in seconds from a rod attached behind the cab. Extended, it hid the Ram’s bed and everything in it. Three hundred sixty-five dollars plus tax. Miller paid cash. Already covering his tracks.
Back home, Miller drilled a quarter-sized hole through the truck’s tailgate, left of the centerline, four inches above the bed. Then another hole above the first, this one the size of a half-dollar. The bottom hole for the muzzle of his rifle. The top for the scope.
Covering the holes proved trickier. Miller tried plastic first. He cut a tarp in strips, four inches long, two inches wide, and taped on the strips. But even from twenty feet away, they looked obvious and weird.
“Bumper stickers,” Allie said. “Two, one on top of the other. I peel them off when you’re back there and ready to shoot. Put them back on when you’re done.”
At the Walmart in Pullman, Miller bought a dozen bumper stickers: American flags, DON’T TREAD ON ME, LIVE FREE OR DIE, THE CLOSER YOU GET . . . THE SLOWER I DRIVE!
He slapped a HORN BROKE: WATCH FOR FINGER tag on the Ram’s bumper and a couple UNITED STATES OF AWESOME tags above them. “Going full redneck.”
“Full what?”
“Redneck.” He was surprised to see she still looked puzzled. “You know, a country boy. What’s thirty feet long and has sixty teeth? A bus full of rednecks.”
“Hah. Redneck.” She rolled the word around her mouth. “I didn’t hear.” She leaned over, put her lips to his before he could say anything. Her kiss was sweet and light. He stopped wondering why a woman who’d grown up in Texas didn’t know what a redneck was.
Miller spent the afternoon in the hills east of his trailer, making sure he had the rifle zeroed. His first two shots barely grazed the tree where he’d tacked the targets. He feared his concussions might have ruined his shooting. He forced himself to breathe deep, relax.
As the sun moved behind him, his training from Fort Benning came back. Adjusting his head to keep his cheek flush with the rifle, making sure his view through the scope aligned with the muzzle. You don’t have to know how to spell parallax long as you know how to make sure it doesn’t happen to you, one of his instructors liked to say.
Pulling the bolt back smoothly, popping it home firmly but not too fast. Haste makes an empty chamber. Squeezing the trigger on the pause between breaths. The sudden crack as the pin struck home. The gun kicking into his shoulder, the scope staying perfectly on target even with the recoil.
He remembered now. Sniping was beautiful. He’d been good at it, too. Lousy at finding cover, but not many guys could outshoot him. After four hours of fine-tuning, he put three straight shots within one inch at a hundred yards. He was ready.
But as he packed up the Remington, the world spun. He closed his eyes, sagged against a tree. He’d pushed himself too hard. The concussions had made him more fragile than he’d realized. His earplugs didn’t fully protect him from the thunderclaps that came with each shot. The pain was centered behind his eyes. He focused on the pine bark scratching his back. Anything to remind him that he existed as more than this agony.
After a while, the vise opened, and he stumbled home.
He found Allie vacuuming the trailer, a rumble that did his headache no favors.
“You look sick, Tom.” She brought him to their bed, pulled the curtains, turned out the lights. He must have slept, because when he opened his eyes he was alone.
“Allie?” He felt better, though still tired.
She came in, sat beside him. “Maybe you shouldn’t do this.”
He forced himself up. No way would he let her think he couldn’t protect her. “I shot great. Just wore myself out at the end.”
She nodded. He couldn’t help feeling that he’d passed.
“Good. Because I know where to start.”
She tilted her phone to him. Miller found himself looking at the web page for the Abundant Life megachurch, an evangelical congregation in St. Peters, Missouri, thirty miles west of downtown St. Louis. Join our twelve thousand members in joyful prayer this Sunday!
“Twelve thousand?” Miller said.
Allie scrolled through the website: pages titled Tales of Redemption, Sermons & Song, Abundant Life for Children, and Your Abundant Life! Video, too. A thirty-person choir belted out So much to thank Him for . . . as colored floodlights swung overhead. The place looked nice enough. Mostly white folk, but black and brown, too. Miller had never been the churchy type. The website made him wish he were.
Allie opened another screen, pointed at a handsome fiftyish white man, salt-and-pepper hair, striking blue eyes. Our Pastor: Luke Hurley. “His hair was black when I knew him. Otherwise, he hasn’t changed much. The Fountain of Youth, sex with thirteen-year-olds.”
Hurley looked nice enough, too. “You’re sure?”
“That smile, it’s a lie. He told me the pain would help me, Jesus suffered, and I needed to suffer, too.” Her voice rose. For the first time since she’d come back, she was losing control. “Want to hear what he did? Would that turn you on? It turned him on. He’d tell me what he was about to do—”
“Allie.” He put a hand on her back. She laughed, half hysterical.
“Even then I knew that’s not how the Bible worked.”
She found another photo of Hurley, standing at a table with a group of teenage girls, finger raised as he made a point. Pastor Luke drops by the Girls-Only Bible Study Class to talk about what we can learn from Mary Magdalene!
Allie magnified the photo. “Look at him.”
Miller picked up a gleam in the minister’s eyes, a curl to his lips that could have been a smirk.
Maybe.
Miller wouldn’t be the first sniper to use a vehicle as a rolling nest. In 2002, a two-man team had terrorized Washington for a month from a sedan with a hole drilled into its trunk. Lee Boyd Malvo and John Allen Muhammad—together known as the Beltway Sniper since authorities didn’t know at the time that two people were involved—gunned down ten men and women before police caught them. They had killed seven other people in other shootings earlier in the year, though those were only connected after their arrests in the Beltway case. Their run was especially noteworthy because they used an old Chevrolet Caprice with heavily tinted windows and New Jersey plates. It should have attracted attention. At one point, a police officer even stopped it near a shooting. But he let it go without a search.
Miller figured he and Allie had edges over Malvo and Muhammad. The Ram, clean and new, should draw less attention than the Caprice. And Malvo and Muhammad weren’t trained as snipers. They had used a Bushmaster, a civilian version of the Army’s M16 assault rifle, instead of a more accurate single-shot, bolt-action rifle like Miller’s Remington. As a result, they had needed to shoot from close range, less than a hundred yards. The fact that no one had noticed them at that short distance testified to the panic that sniper attacks produced.
Miller planned to shoot from a quarter mile away or more. Even trained soldiers couldn’t spot a sniper from that distance, not without binoculars or specialized radar to track shots. By the time anyone figured out what had happened, the Ram would be gone.
But Miller and Allie would be up against one big hurdle the Beltway snipers hadn’t faced. Since 2002, cameras had become ubiquitous in public spaces. Smartphones had video and zoom lenses. Big intersections had cameras to catch drivers who ran red lights. Bridges and tunnels used automated toll collection systems that tracked license plates. License plate readers were standard equipment on police vehicles, too. Simple ballistics would tell the police where Miller had been when he’d fired. They would start there and work outward, combing all the surveillance footage they could find.
A pickup truck with out-of-state plates and a covered cargo bed would stand out in the footage. Its mere presence wouldn’t be proof. Or even enough evidence for a bulletin. Not by itself. But when the cops ran the plates and found out the truck was registered to a former Army sniper, they’d want to talk to Miller. If the truck popped near a second shooting, they’d want to do more than talk.
Of course, Miller and Allie could always lift the plates from a Ram 1500 in Missouri. But that move came with its own risks. They had to assume the police response would increase as the shootings continued. Eventually, the cops might start locking down whole neighborhoods, running random roadblocks on highways. Stolen plates would grab their attention faster than anything else.
So Miller and Allie would have to try to avoid cameras, especially on the local roads close to the church. The good news was, they could get to an arterial highway quickly after shooting Hurley. Not just any arterial either, but Interstate 70, a crucial east–west highway. In the St. Louis area, I-70 carried thousands of cars and trucks every hour. Washington State plates wouldn’t stand out on it.
The other bit of good news was, they didn’t have to rush. They would have time to scout the best path once they reached St. Louis.
Allie wanted to leave the next morning. Miller told her he needed a dry run, taking shots from inside the cargo bed. He lay in the pickup bed as she pulled the tonneau over his head. She piloted the Ram to a railroad crossing a couple miles northeast. The nearest houses were nearly a mile away and hidden behind low hills.
When the Ram stopped, Miller flipped on a battery-operated lantern and pulled out the rifle and scope. He heard the driver’s door open. Allie pulled off the bumper stickers, allowing daylight into the covered bed, as Miller finished mounting the scope. He slid the muzzle of the Remington through the smaller hole until the rim of the scope was flush with the hole above. With the holes blocked again, Miller dimmed the lantern so it wouldn’t distract him.
He peered through the eyepiece of the scope. He had a clear view through it, plenty of light for targeting. But he couldn’t swing the rifle more than a couple degrees left or right. He would need to widen the muzzle hole to give himself more flexibility. No matter. The bumper sticker would still easily cover it.
For now, though, he focused on a red-and-yellow railroad sign mounted on a steel post a quarter mile down the tracks. He realized another problem he hadn’t anticipated. Being inside the bed made adjusting for the wind more difficult. In the Army, he worked with a spotter who carried an automated wind gauge and could give him the correct scope adjustments. Miller could have bought a gauge for Allie. But using it would distract her before the shot. He wanted her to focus on the area around the truck, make sure no one was watching them.
Even without the gauge, good snipers learned to read the wind, the biggest variable on longer shots. How did it feel? Was it gusty, swirling, broken by trees along the path the shot would take? Unfortunately, the walls of the truck bed insulated Miller from the touch of the wind. Instead, he had to depend on the scope, another trick he’d learned at Fort Benning. Anything but the lightest breeze would visibly move leaves and grasses. Today, they were rustling slowly but steadily, the wind coming from the west, left to right, through his scope. Miller put the breeze at five miles an hour, enough to push the shot seven or eight inches to the right at this distance. He didn’t bother to dial in an adjustment but instead simply ticked the muzzle left as far as it would go. He would settle for hitting the sign at all on this first shot.
They’d bought short-range children’s walkie-talkies at Walmart. Miller hit the push-to-talk button on his.
“Clear?”
“Clear.”
Miller clapped in his earplugs, chambered a round, counted to five, watched to see if the wind would pick up. It didn’t. He took a breath, exhaled slowly. And squeezed the trigger.
The explosion echoed off the metal walls of the truck bed. As if by magic, the sign quivered, and a hole appeared, an inch low, maybe five inches right of center. Not perfect, but most likely a kill shot against a live target. And once Miller opened the muzzle hole, he’d have more flexibility.
It worked. He could shoot from inside here. He felt weirdly proud of himself. One added bonus: If he needed to take a second shot, he wouldn’t need to worry about finding the spent shell. It would be stuck in here.
He heard Allie, faintly, through the walkie-talkie. He ignored her. She had no way of seeing the hole in the sign. He pulled back the Remington’s muzzle, telling her they were done. After a moment, the holes darkened as she reapplied the bumper stickers. Fifteen seconds later, the truck started up.
Back at the trailer, she unrolled the tonneau, and he slipped out and hugged her.
“You hit it, Tom?”
He nodded.
“It was loud.”
“Can’t help that.” The .308 rounds produced more than 160 decibels at the muzzle. Suppressors, also known as silencers, were a pleasant fantasy. Buying one took months and attracted the close attention of the Feds.
“It works,” she said.
“It works.”
At dawn the next morning, they packed up. Allie made peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and filled a thermos with coffee. The day was unseasonably warm, birds twittering, the sun glowing over the hills to the east. Miller felt almost festive. His headache was gone. His uncertainty, too. If Allie said Hurley had hurt her, he’d hurt her.
“I’ll miss it here,” Allie said.
“For real?” Miller had never thought of her as sentimental.
“It’s where we met.”
Miller locked up the trailer, vaulted over the tailgate into the Ram’s bed. Allie unrolled the tonneau, blotting out the sky. He wanted to get used to being in back for long stretches, just in case.
The truck bounced over the dirt roads for a while, stopped, turned left on 195, accelerated. Now the ride was smoother but colder. No surprise. This bed was unheated, meant for cargo, not people. Miller crossed his hands over his chest and let himself shiver. If the Army taught anything, it was how to handle casual discomfort.
A sliver of light leaked through the bumper stickers. Otherwise, the space was coffin-black. He wondered what would happen next. Maybe they’d wind up someplace like Nicaragua and live on the cheap. Hang out, teach English. For once, being brown would help him.
But probably not. Probably the police and FBI would catch them sooner or later. Yet as Miller lay in the dark, the pavement rushing by underneath him, he found the idea of being captured didn’t bother him. Not that he’d let the cops take him alive. No, he’d save them the trouble of a verdict, pronounce his own guilt with a single round.
Even if an eternity in Hell awaited him, he didn’t care. Not as long as he could be with her now.
He opened his eyes to find the tonneau rolling back. She’d pulled off the road at the Lewiston Hill Overlook, where the Bitterroots opened into the plains of western Idaho. The colors below were muted, a winding gray river cutting through brown-and-green hills. The sky was pure and blue, endless and ruthless.
“You’re shivering, Tom. I thought you would tell me when you wanted out.”
“Who said I wanted out?”
They stopped for the night in Wyoming. The motel was called the Hilltop. Miller didn’t see any hills, but he was too tired to argue. He lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, as Allie washed up. She closed the bathroom door. He thought he heard her phone buzz, the back-and-forth of texts. But the faucet was running and he couldn’t be sure.
“Can I borrow the truck?” she said when she emerged.
He tossed her the keys. “You okay?”
“Woman trouble. I need a drugstore.”
He didn’t believe her. But before he could say anything, she was gone.
After an hour, he started to worry. She didn’t trust him to do what she needed. She’d left for good—
The door swung open.
“Sorry, babe. Got lost.”
Whatever power he thought he had over her was an illusion. He might be the soldier, but without her, he was nothing at all.
He was afraid to ask where she’d really been.
In the rickety neighborhoods north of downtown St. Louis, they found a no-name motel that took a five-hundred-dollar deposit instead of a credit card. Allie rented a Chevy Lumina, and they drove around St. Peters, tracing routes around the church. Terrain mapping, Miller’s captains in Afghanistan would have said. Unfortunately, the terrain wasn’t ideal.
The Abundant Life campus included the church and four smaller buildings at the intersection of Eagle Rock Avenue and Oakhurst Drive. Eagle Rock was a six-lane boulevard that ran directly north to I-70. Along the way, it passed an intersection with red-light cameras, as well as two gas stations with surveillance cams.
Oakhurst was a curving two-lane road that ran east–west through subdivisions. Worse yet, the entire area consisted of low rolling hills, not the pancake-flat prairie Miller had imagined. And the church was set behind a huge parking lot. On a busy Sunday, the lot’s cars might block his field of fire. Miller worried, too, that they had no obvious place to park the Ram while they waited. The Beltway snipers had operated with one huge advantage. They had picked victims at random. They hadn’t needed to wait more than a few minutes.
“Maybe we do it at his house?” Hurley and his family lived a mile from the church.
“No. Here. On Sunday. After the eleven a.m. service, the big one.”
She was insistent. Almost pouting. “We can’t know he’ll come out through the main doors.”
“He will.”
“I thought you hadn’t seen him in all these years—”
“I know him. He’ll shake hands and listen to these people telling him how wonderful he is while he thinks about what he wants to do to their daughters. If this is too hard for you, let’s go back to Colfax.” She left the rest of the sentence unsaid: . . . until I take off again.
“We’ll figure it out, Allie.”
She put her arms around him and wrapped him up. That fast, she was his again. For now.
Finding the right hide came first. On the west side of Eagle Rock, three hundred yards north of the Abundant Life campus, was a more modest church, brick with a white cross in front. Past the church, a service road led off the avenue to an electrical substation that serviced the subdivisions to the west. The substation was a fenced, cleared area fifty feet in diameter, screened with trees so that the neighbors wouldn’t notice it. A razor wire fence protected the transformers inside. It had cameras, but they were focused only on the electrical equipment.
Allie parked the Lumina in the brick church’s lot while Miller walked to the substation and scanned through the trees with binoculars. Behind him, electricity hummed through the transformers, the sound strangely alive. The spot wasn’t ideal. Miller would be forced to angle his shot through the big trees. The stoplights on Eagle Rock produced predictable traffic patterns, but Miller still had to worry a car would cross his field of fire as he pulled the trigger. And if utility workers showed up while Allie was parked, she’d have no good excuse for her presence. At least the service road was paved rather than dirt, presumably so that utility vehicles didn’t get bogged down when they came in. Paved meant no tire tracks, no treads for the police to chase down.
Miller thought the spot was viable. Barely. It did have one big advantage. It wasn’t visible from Abundant Life. No one would immediately connect it with the shot.
He walked Allie over, showed her where to park. She brought the Lumina around, and Miller lay on the roof, which was roughly as high as the Ram bed would be, and made sure the angle was right. Start to finish, he was at the substation for forty minutes, longer than he would have liked. He waited for a nosy cop to come by, ask what they were doing. No one did.
Next step, finding a clean way out. By the end of the afternoon, they had one. Left—north—on Eagle Rock, left again on Hillside Drive. Four other roads followed, all with equally bland names. Finally, they reached Bryan Road, a big north–south boulevard about two miles west.
The route was tricky, but it reduced their risk of passing a police cruiser responding to the shooting. The cops would stick to the avenues, where they could speed. And Bryan Road was far enough from the church that the cops probably wouldn’t check its cameras, busy enough that the Ram shouldn’t stand out if they did. They’d head south on Bryan to Missouri 364, a state highway that merged quickly into I-64. Two miles westbound on I-64 and they’d hit I-70 at Wentzville.
By then, the cops would need more than camera readers to find them. They would need a psychic.
Friday. Miller and Allie had two days to fill. Miller couldn’t even give himself another round of target practice. He had to assume that after the shooting, the cops and FBI would check every range within a hundred miles.
Allie was even more impatient. At lunch, she pushed for them to go to Abundant Life and meet Hurley.
“I want to see him, see if he remembers me.”
“No.”
“Because you’re afraid.”
“Because the police will know this isn’t random. The first question they’ll ask: Did anyone new want to meet Pastor Hurley recently? We just spent a whole day trying to beat surveillance. Now you want to show up and wave.”
“Fine, we’ll go to the service Saturday night. We’ll blend in.”
As if beautiful twenty-something women filled the Abundant Life congregation. “Forget it.”
“If you won’t do it, then go home.”
“This guy’s only the first on your list. You want to get to the others or not?”
She registered his seriousness. She pouted for an hour, but this time he knew he had her. Again, he would only see what she’d done later. How she’d made him own the killing.
On Saturday an ugly midwestern wind kicked up, twenty miles an hour, gusts to forty. Wind this strong deflected shots by feet, not inches. If it didn’t drop overnight, they’d have to wait a week. The Weather Channel and the local forecasters said this front would pass sometime Sunday, but no one knew exactly when.
He didn’t say anything to Allie. He wasn’t sure her nerves could take another week of waiting. They stayed inside for most of Saturday, eating cheap pizza and clawing at each other. Until now, their sex had been respectful, even loving. Now Miller saw another side of her. She demanded he slap her, put his hands around her throat.
Miller stopped moving. “No way, Allie.”
“Sissy.”
“I can’t hurt you. I love you.” The first time he’d ever spoken those words. The worst possible time.
She pushed him off her as if he’d been hurting her against her will, the very opposite of the truth. She sobbed—big, silent heaves. Miller listened to the wind howl against the door and prayed to himself that Sunday would dawn sunny and windless.
It did. The front passed sooner than the forecasters had predicted. In the motel parking lot, Miller felt only a hint of a breeze. They ate breakfast and checked out. At 11:30 a.m., Allie parked behind a dumpster in a deserted downtown alley. Miller kissed her cheek, slid into the bed of the Ram. She pulled the tonneau down. If the mission went as planned, he wouldn’t see her again until Luke Hurley was dead. His headache was returning. With the pain came the sense that he was about to do something wrong. Something unforgivable. What did he know about Luke Hurley? Nothing. He hadn’t even googled the guy.
Miller dry-swallowed a half-dozen Advil and Tylenol. If he could beat his headache, maybe his doomed feeling would disappear, too.
The pickup stuttered through downtown, accelerated up a ramp. Half an hour passed before finally it slowed. It stopped for a light, and Miller knew they were on Eagle Rock. Very soon, Allie would turn onto the service road. They’d aimed to be in position about twenty past noon. Miller’s watch said they were going to be right on schedule.
His heart raced. He’d never felt this way, not even on the mid-summer patrols that he and everyone else knew were headed for Taliban ambushes. Not even when he woke up in those clean white sheets at Kandahar Airfield and couldn’t remember his own name. He was about to kill a man because he couldn’t say no to his girlfriend.
You are whipped, he heard Willie Coole, his old platoon sergeant, say. Whipped as whipped can be. Out loud. So real that Miller looked around, wondering if Coole had somehow snuck into the pickup with him.
I’m protecting her.
How can you protect her when you don’t know nothing about her, Miller? Call me a hick if you like, but I know when a man’s thinking with his—
The pickup swung right, rumbled over the pebbled asphalt of the service road. Angled back and forth and stopped. The engine cut. The driver’s door swung open. Miller flicked on the lantern, pulled out the Remington and the scope, just as he had in Colfax. Moving automatically now. Focus on the details. Let the mission take care of itself.
Too late to change his mind, anyway.
Outside, Allie peeled off the bumper stickers. Sunday light flooded inside. Miller slid the muzzle through, until the scope was flush with the higher hole. Everything happening with the fluid logic of a dream. Seeing a dragon through the scope wouldn’t have surprised him.
But instead: trees, parking lot, road. The Abundant Church lot and the white façade of the central church building. It looked more like an arena than a traditional church. Allie had parked a couple degrees off-line, but Miller wriggled the muzzle of the rifle, focused the scope on a pair of smoked-glass doors, tall white crosses painted on them. The main entrance. He had a clear field of fire.
He scanned the lot, looking for security guards or cops. He saw one police cruiser parked at the south end of the lot, but it was empty. Maybe the officer was inside. A bald, beefy man in a white dress shirt and jeans stood at the front door. Miller guessed he was an off-duty cop who watched the parking lot during services.
The doors swung open. A trickle of people emerged, then more and more. The service must just have ended. Husbands and wives walked hand in hand. A white teenager pushed an old black woman in a wheelchair. A handsome young Hispanic man whose legs stopped mid-thigh swung himself ahead on crutches. Miller would have bet his life the guy was a vet. The folks walking out seemed happy. Could they all be so wrong?
Then Miller remembered all those Catholic priests who’d raped little boys. You couldn’t trust anyone. Just because Hurley had followers didn’t mean anything. Miller trusted Allie or he didn’t. That simple.
Don’t have to do this, Specialist. Coole again.
Willie—
It’s Platoon Sergeant Coole to you. And you know somewhere in that shook-up head of yours that this whole thing is FUBAR. This girl is trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for—
Miller’s head was hurting, he’d been looking through the scope too long. He closed his eyes, tried to think.
Abort the mission, Specialist. Turn around, go home.
Coole couldn’t know, but he’d made exactly the wrong play. Home was nowhere. Colfax was an empty trailer. Allie’s scent on every sheet.
Miller came back to the scope. The talk with Coole had taken only a few seconds in his head, but minutes seemed to have passed. The flood of parishioners had thinned. Miller wondered if he’d missed Hurley already.
The doors opened, and the minister stepped out. Tall and handsome, blue suit, white shirt, red tie. A blonde in a modest flowered dress walked beside him. Two kids followed. Hurley stopped outside the doors, as Allie had promised he would, and chatted with a knot of men and women. His arm rested on his wife’s shoulder.
Miller tapped his walkie-talkie. “Clear?”
He didn’t know what he was hoping to hear, but after a few seconds, his receiver squawked. “Clear.”
The rules of engagement haven’t been met, the risk of civilian casualties is too high—
Miller pushed in his earplugs, but Coole kept talking. Miller didn’t know if he could do this with Coole yapping at him. He watched through the scope as Hurley’s wife raised her hands in a Can you believe this guy? gesture. She stepped close to him and kissed his cheek.
Miller cursed softly, waited. Hurley’s wife reached into her purse and came up with what looked like car keys. She held them over her head, jingled them. Hurley laughed again. Then their son grabbed them and tossed them to his sister. Hurley raised a hand, and father and son high-fived. Somehow, Miller had stumbled into an episode of America’s Happiest Family. Seeing them like this infuriated him. He couldn’t blame Allie—he hated them. No one got to be this happy.
Who did this kid think he was to have a father—
Miller’s pulse pounded in his throat. He made himself breathe deep. The shot comes if you’re ready, the instructors at Fort Benning liked to say. If you’re in place, zeroed, your breathing is right. It always comes. Patience, grasshopper.
Hurley’s wife kissed him once more, stepped away. The kids followed. Hurley turned to the parishioners. He was in three-quarter profile to Miller, not perfect, but at this range, on a windless day, Miller knew he could land the round. Anyway, he was sure Hurley was going to turn, sure as he’d ever been of anything.
Don’t, I’m ordering you, Specialist—
A last yelp from Coole. Miller ignored him. Hurley turned to his right, offering his chest to Miller, a perfect target—