He looked around, found a handy tombstone, and sprawled beside it. He was six feet back from the bluff, and a rifle, he thought, would set up perfectly for a shot at the school. A senile cottonwood tree stood twenty yards down to his left; he movedover to it. The trunk was big enough that he’d be invisible from the street that ran along the front of the cemetery, and the slope below was sharp enough, and the hospital far enough away, that he couldn’t be seen from below, either.
But it was an extremely long shot; with a moving target, almost impossible for a man of his limited skills. The target would have to be motionless.
He spent a few minutes walking around the cemetery, zeroed in on a crumbling wooden shed, which probably once held yard tools. The shed was sitting on patio-style concrete blocks, each three inches thick, two blocks to each stack. He knelt and looked at them, and on one side of the shed found a loose block. He used his pocketknife to pry at it, careful not to make any obvious scratches. When it was loose, he pulled it out, and peered under the shed, then stuck his arm under. There was enough space, he thought, to hide a rifle.
He put the block back in place.
—
HE LEFT THE CEMETERYin the dark and walked back to his car. At home, he loaded Google Earth, which had a fairly accurate measuring tool, called up a satellite image of the school, and measured the distance from the cemetery cottonwood to the back of the school. Four hundred and ninety-six yards.
He thought about that and a question popped into his head. Was it necessary to actually kill the kid? Or only hit him? And maybe, not even hit him, if the bullet hit close enough to frighten him. It now occurred to Dunn that the important thing was that the right people knew that the kid had been shot at.
Better if he was actually hit, because then there’d be no doubt, but a close miss might be good enough. He thought about it that night, in bed, and decided that he needed to find out exactly how bad a shot he was.
And the next day was Saturday, the job site closed down.
—
HIS WEST VIRGINIA CABINwas deep in the woods and more than rustic: it was primitive, and for that reason, had never been broken into, although somebody had peppered the outhouse with a .22.
The cabin itself was a prefabricated metal shed with four windows and one door, which was locked with a heavy padlock, and all of it set on a concrete slab. Inside was an old wooden table with two metal folding chairs, a waist-high shelf that served as a kitchen counter, and a wide wooden rack that would keep an air mattress off the floor. There were fluorescent lights hung overhead with a plug-in cord that dropped to the floor at one side of the shed.
All of that could be seen through the windows, which was why nobody had ever tried to break in: there was nothing to steal and breaking in would be a pain in the ass.
When he went to the cabin, Dunn brought from home a Honda generator, a compact microwave, five gallons of gas, twenty gallons of water, an air mattress that was double-bed wide and five inches thick, and quite comfortable when inflated, and a sleeping bag. The generator would sit outside, with a single cord running through a hole in the side of the cabin to amulti-socket extension, where he’d plug in the lights and the microwave. He did have cell phone service.
Primitive, but snug.
—
ON THIS SATURDAY, he took along his total station, the tripod that supported it, and the reflector that bounced the distance-measuring laser beam back to the instrument.
Dunn had bought the land a couple of years after it had been clear-cut, and was therefore cheap—it no longer had harvestable timber and wouldn’t for a couple of decades, and was useless for agriculture, too rough and, in places, too swampy. A few hundred yards from the cabin, a narrow creek wound across the property and he thought if he shot a line along the creek he might find a place where he could set up a five-hundred-yard shot.
He spent an hour finding the spot, lasing various possibilities with the total station, until he found a place on a hillside not quite as high as the cemetery in Tysons Corner, shooting to a creek bank over a patch of cattails. He stapled a target to a tree trunk and carried his .308 back to the spot on the hillside. A rotting log made a convenient rifle rest. The rifle mounted a 5-25 variable-power scope; he went with 25 power and began shooting.
He fired six times, taking his time, then carried the rifle down to the target, and found that he’d missed the entire eighteen-by-twelve-inch target all six times. He couldn’t even find a place in the creek bank where the shots might have hit.
He had to think about that for a while. He wasn’tthatbad a shot. Maybe the scope had gotten bumped. He marched backtoward the spot where he’d started shooting, but only a rough-paced hundred yards back. He found a place to shoot, braced the gun against a tree trunk, and fired three shots. Back at the target, he found a half-moon hole at the bottom far-right edge of the paper. He was shooting low and right.
He gave the scope four clicks of left windage and eight clicks of elevation, went back to his hundred-yard spot and fired three more shots. At the target, he found all three shots on the paper, but all over the face of it.
“It’s not the gun,” he said aloud. It was his shooting.
He marked the three shots with a Sharpie pen and went back to the five-hundred-yard stand. He’d have to hold very high at that range, but he didn’t know exactly how high. He started by holding one paper-height—eighteen inches over the center of the target—fired a shot, held about twelve inches over, fired another, held on the top of the paper, six inches above the bull, and fired a third. He tried to do it all correctly, as was taught in the rifle magazines: good hold, steady trigger pull, breath held with the squeeze...
At the target, he found no new bullet holes at all. This would get tedious. He walked the five hundred yards back, fired a single shot, holding what he estimated was two feet over the target. No hole. Held about three feet over. No hole. He stapled another target face with the bull four feet over the primary target, to use as an aiming mark. No bullet hole. Maybe he’d overcorrected to the left, he thought. He gave the scope two clicks to the right. Nothing.
“It’s not the gun,” he said again. He thought he might be unconsciously flinching, yanking the trigger in anticipation of therecoil. At five hundred yards, with good gun support, plenty of time to shoot and no stress, he couldn’t hit a target as big as a grown man’s chest.
He needed analysis, and it occurred to him that he had a handy little computer in his pocket. He took out his phone and went out on the internet. After browsing for a while, he found a simple .308 ballistics chart and was astonished to find that he should be holding a fullsix feetover the primary target.
He restapled the aiming marker at six feet, and fired three more rounds at five hundred yards. This time, he found two holes on the extreme right side of the target, one five inches above the other; the third, he thought, was probably farther right.
He corrected the scope to shoot farther to the left, fired three more shots, and finally placed all three on the target, but not neatly grouped. His shoulder was getting sore from the repeated recoil, and he walked to the cabin to gather his gear and return home. On the walk back, another thought struck. While it wasn’tentirelythe rifle, some of it might be. And, he reminded himself, he didn’t necessarily have to kill the kid, just hit him or come close.
At the cabin, he sat in his truck and went back to his iPhone. If he were to shoot a fairly high-powered .223 round, from a good rifle made for target shooting, he might be able to tighten his groups, and the much-reduced recoil might help prevent any tendency to flinch.
