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bed. Or so he claimed.
    ‘My head might be full of shit, man, but those babes will be full of me as soon as you finish this job, you know what I’m saying?’ His shoulders shook with laughter. ‘Four-four-seven, man. No pressure.’
    I wasn’t going to bite. ‘No, mate. No pressure.’

7
    Your bones are your weapon platform. Your muscles are the cushioning. I made a tripod of my elbows and the left side of my ribcage. The Mauser didn’t have a stand so I had to use the conventional method of support: left hand forward on the wooden stock with my forearm resting on a log. A bipod would have allowed me to bring it across my body and into the butt, but you have to work with what you’ve got.
    I peered through the sight, making sure there was no shadowing around the edges of the optic. I took aim at the centre of the door, emptied my lungs, stopped breathing, and closed my eyes. I relaxed my muscles slightly, started to breathe normally, and looked through the sight again. My point of aim had shifted to the left-hand edge of the door.
    While Dino delved deeper into his can of luncheon meat and store of fantasies, I swivelled to the right to correct, then repeated the whole procedure until I was comfortably aligned to the target. It’s pointless trying to force your body into a position that it doesn’t want to adopt. The weapon has to point naturally towards the target.
    Dino hadn’t given up trying to get a rise out of me. ‘That wife of his, hombre , she’s … hot … Hot – and loaded . She’ll be a vulnerable widow soon …’
    My eye never left the optic. ‘Any wind out there?’
    The spotter is like the co-driver in a rally car. All the heroic stuffis done by the guy behind the wheel – changing gears and sliding round corners, waving to the girls; all that shit. But without the co-driver telling him what’s ahead, when to turn into the next bend, what sort of bend it is, they’d both be history. Under the canopy, there was no wind. But out there, on the edge of the village, there might be. And that would affect my round at this distance. I needed my co-driver. Even if he was the world’s biggest dickhead.
    ‘None out there, hombre . Only what’s leaving your ass.’
    I glanced up as a shiny black thing with far too many legs for its size made its way along a leaf just above my arm in search of breakfast. It could smell me and was getting very excited. A raindrop knocked it onto my hand. It was probably still feeling pretty pleased with itself – right up to the point when I squeezed tight around its middle and broke it in two.
    ‘Hey, hombre … We got movement.’

8
    My eye shot back to the optic as Dino began his running commentary. ‘I’ve got the door open – you copy? It’s on, hombre , it’s fucking on .’
    The lens steamed up. I rubbed it with my thumb. ‘Yep.’
    ‘I’ve still got no wind. And I’ve got movement inside.’
    I watched through the curtain of rain as the Wolf’s two little girls tumbled out onto the veranda. They had their hair in pigtails. Both wore shorts and Disneyland T-shirts and were barefoot. They ran straight to the rail and stuck their hands out into the torrent cascading from the roof, playfully flicking water at each other.
    ‘Nick, I got the target. It’s fucking on …’
    A pair of adult sandals appeared at the threshold. The Wolf had rolled up his baggy jeans above the knee. A very hairy gut hanging out between his waistband and a blue T-shirt completed the look.
    ‘Yep.’
    I eased the aiming post up to where his collarbones met, a centimetre or so higher in my sight picture than the two little heads bobbing up and down in front of him. The Wolf took a cigarette from his mouth and flicked it past them into the mud.
    My finger took first pressure.
    Holding the post level on the centre of his chest I let out my breath and held it. Then his wife entered my sight picture. TheWolf scooped her up in his arms and they kissed. Her loosely tied hair