The Threateners Read Free Page B

was just pulling away. I frowned, watching it go. He seemed a nice enough guy, easy to get along with and comfortable to shoot with—you never had to worry that he’d let his gun muzzle wander carelessly in your direction—and he was certainly a fine marksman, but there was something lacking. Then I realized what it was: triumph. Hell, the man had won the damn match, hadn’t he? He’d beat out a dozen good local shots, and several more not-so-good ones like me, with a score that would have been nothing to be ashamed of in national competition; you’d have thought he’d be walking on air. Of course a little modesty is expected; but so is a certain happy glow, which had been conspicuously missing.
    Well, I wasn’t glowing much myself, even though I’d won my stumblebum class decisively and shot my best score to date in this type of competition. I was gaining on it, which was nice; but it was, after all, just a game. When you’ve been shot at for real and have shot back and survived, you may find target games enjoyable but you’re not going to be too depressed when you lose or too elated when you win. The stakes aren’t that high; your life isn’t on the line.
    It was a disturbing thought: maybe Mark Steiner wasn’t conspicuously, deliriously happy about his win today because he had, in the past, competed with firearms in other ways and in other places where the stakes had been higher. I stood there for a moment reviewing the past summer in my mind: Could the guy be something other than the simple citizen he seemed? Could he have been planted on me? The feet that we’d been assigned to shoot together today was probably of no significance, the luck of the draw, but we’d met with some frequency on the range on weekdays, apparently by accident; but was it? Well, I could think of other club members I’d encountered out here, sighting in their guns and practicing their shooting, almost as often. But he’d been very friendly and helpful and had invited me to his house and introduced me to his family. It made me feel disloyal to the guy, although we weren’t by any means bosom pals, but I found myself wondering uneasily if he could be another Spooky, Number Five, gradually moving in on me, fixing my rifle, plying me with beer, while his four associates kept watch on me from a distance. . . . Or maybe he was just a stolid gent who didn’t ever show much emotion and I was getting paranoid after weeks of being watched.
    It was still a clear, sunny, fell day, but up the Rio Grande valley white clouds were starting to form; eventually they’d pile up high and turn black, probably, and give us our usual afternoon thunderstorm. Spooky Three picked me up on the way home. Now that I’d finished shooting and the pressure was off, I felt kind of benevolent toward her; after all, I’d more or less saved her life, at least for the moment. Well, hers or one of her friends’.
    “I’ve still found no government organization that will admit to employing anybody fitting the descriptions you gave me,” Mac had told me when I checked back yesterday for the third or fourth time. “Or to conducting any operations in the Santa Fe-Los Alamos area. Of course, they do not have to be telling the truth; they seldom are.”
    “Some years ago we had another situation like this down in Mexico, if you’ll recall, sir,” I said. “I did my damnedest to find out if a certain dame I kept bumping into belonged to us, but nobody’d claim her, so I figured she had to be on the other side and wound up shooting her when she started waving a gun around. It turned out that she was working for a certain Washington would-be big shot who was concealing her identity for some dumb security reason; as punishment for her death, he wanted me skinned alive and roasted over a slow fire.”
    “Yes, I remember,” Mac said. “I have been careful to point out during my inquiries that if nobody admits responsibility for these people, we’ll feel free to