Challis - 03 - Snapshot Read Free

questions later. Childrens
Court at thirteen, ward of the state at fourteen, sentenced to a youth training
facility at fifteen. Then the Navy, where for a few years he channelled all of
that energy into useful skills like long-range, technologically enhanced
killing techniques. He was discharged in 2003, an incident in the Persian Gulf,
the shrink who assessed him concluding: Leading Seaman Vyner possesses a
keen intelligence but is manipulative, lies compulsively and has demonstrated a
capacity for cruelty.

    Well, as Vyner had noted in his
journal this morning, No comet has showered sparks of joy and light over me. Life snapped at his heels even as he sought higher rungs of knowledge.

    Like now, what it meant to gun a
woman down in front of her kidfor there was a kid in the passenger seat,
should have been at school, given that it was a Tuesday. The kid not scared
yet, merely curious, but the woman was, the woman had seen the gun.

    She held both hands out, pleading, No,
please, it was just a joke, I wasnt going to show them to anyone, I wasnt
going to ask for money. Then she slammed the door on her kid and began to back
away from Vyner. Said a few other things, too, like Youve got the wrong
person and What did I ever do to you? and Dont hurt my daughter, but
Vyner was here to do a job.

    He strode on, and when the woman
turned and scuttled around to the front of the Volvo, Vyner didnt alter pace,
merely raised the pistol and closed in on her. She rounded the front of the
car, ducked back along the other side, towards the tailgate, so Vyner turned
patiently, retracing his steps to meet her. It was cat and mouse, the woman
whimpering, Vyner registering the measured rate of his own heart and lungs.
Lines for his journal: Today I was served by angels.

    Nathan Gent, behind the wheel of the
Commodore, came to a shocking realisation. Sitting there with his mouth open,
the Commodore shaking arrhythmically on about four out of the six cylinders, he
finally twigged that this was a killing hed been hired for. He closed his
mouth with a click of rotting teeth and goosed the accelerator a little,
hearing the motor idle more evenly. A bit of business, Vyner had said. Wont
take long. Vyneras hard, thin and snapping as a whiphad always been tough,
but Gent had never known him to kill anyone except maybe a few Iraqi ragheads.
Gent felt himself go loose inside. He watched, squeezing the old sphincter, and
saw Vyner and the woman reach the rear bumper of the Volvo simultaneously, from
opposite sides of the car. The woman jerked, ran back the way shed come, half
bent over. Vyner, all the time in the world, went after her.

    Then she broke cover. She knew the
end had come and intended to draw Vyner away from the kid trapped there in the
back seator so Gent hoped, an old bitterness rising in him as he flashed back
to his own mother, whod never sacrificed a thing for him. He watched the woman
dart away from the carport towards a little garden shed, a tangle of rakes,
shovels, fence pickets, whipper-snipper and mowerlooked like a Victa to Nathan
Gent, he could come back with a mates ute, load up, flog the mower for fifty
bucks in the side bar of the Fiddlers Creek pub.

    Maybe not. Crime-scene, police tape
around it, the cops wanting to know what business he had on the property.

    But a murder. Jesus, accomplice to a
murder. For comfort, Gent rubbed the stump where his right ring finger had
been, the finger torn off by a ships chain somewhere in the Persian Gulf.

    Again he remembered what Vyner had
said about stealing a car, and silently thanked God for the concealing fog. And
for the location: the house was below road level, the road winding along the
top of a ridge, the ground sloping steeply away on either side. Passing drivers
would have to get out of their cars and stand at the head of the driveway and
look down on the turning circle and carport in order to witness anything. No
neighbours to speak of. But Jesus, why hadnt he stolen a car