Blood Trail

in her hightops the brightest spot of color in the room. "How much do you know about competition shooting?"

    "Not much," Vicki admitted.

    "Then tell me why you're asking that question, and I'll tell you if you're asking the right one."

    Vicki took off her glasses and scrubbed at her face with her hands. It didn't make things any clearer. In fact, she realized as the movement pulled at the bruise on her temple, it was a pretty stupid thing to do. She shoved her glasses back on and scrambled with her bag for the bottle of pills they'd given her at the hospital. There was a time I could make love to a vampire, walk away from major car accident, rush a client to the hospital, stay up until dawn, and spend the day arguing ethics with Celluci, no problem. I must be getting old. She took the pill dry. The only alternative was another mouthful of tea and she didn't think she was up to that.

    "Cracked my head," she explained as she tossed the small plastic bottle back in her bag.

    "In the line of duty?" Bertie asked, looking intrigued.

    "Sort of." Vicki sighed. Somehow in the last couple of minutes, she'd come to the conclusion that Bertie was right. Without knowing more about competition shooting, she couldn't know if she was asking the right questions. Her voice low to prevent the only other occupant of the clubroom from overhearing, she presented an edited version of the events that had brought her to London.

    Bertie whistled softly at the description of the shots that killed "two of the family dogs," then she said, "Let me be sure I've got this straight, five hundred yards on a moving target at night from twenty feet up in a pine tree?"

    "As much as five, maybe as little as three."

    "As little as three?" Bertie snorted. "And both dogs were killed with a single, identical head shot? Come on." Setting the teacup aside, she heaved herself out of the chair, pale blue eyes gleaming behind the split glass of her bifocals.

    "Where are we going?"

    "My place. One shot like that might have been a fluke, luck, nothing more. But two, two means a trained talent and you don't acquire skill like that overnight. Like I said before, there's damned few people in the world who can do that kind of shooting and this marksman of yours didn't spring full grown from the head of Zeus. I think I can help you find him, but we've got to go to my place to do it. That's where all my reference material is. This lot wouldn't know a book if it bit them on the butt." She waved a hand around the clubroom. The fortyish man sitting at one of the tables stroking the cat looked startled and waved back. "Gun magazines, that's all they ever read. I keep telling them they need a library. Probably leave them mine when I die and it'll spend ten or twenty years sitting around getting outdated then they'll throw it out. Did you drive?"

    "No ..."

    "No? I thought every PI owned a sexy red convertible. Never mind. We'll take my car. I live pretty close." A sudden flurry of shots caught her attention and she strode over to the window.
    "Ha! I told him not to buy a Winchester if he wants to compete this fall. He'll be months getting used to that offset scope. Fool should've listened. Robert!"

    The man at the table looked even more startled at being directly addressed. "Yes?"

    "If Gary comes up tell him I said, I told you so."

    "Uh, sure, Bertie."

    "His wife's down in the pistol range," Bertie confided to Vicki as they headed out the door.
    "They come by most evenings after work. He hates guns but he loves her so they compromised; she only shoots targets, he doesn't watch."

    Bertie's car was a huge old Country Squire station wagon, white, with wood-colored panels.
    The eight cylinders roared as they headed out onto the highway and then settled down into a steady seventy-five kilometers an hour purr.

    Vicki tried not to fidget at the speed - or lack of it - but the passing time gnawed at her.
    Hopefully Donald's wound would remind the wer of why they had to stay close to the house after dark, but she wasn't counting on it. As long as the wer insisted on their right to move around their land, every sunset, every extra day she spent solving this case, put another one of them in danger. If she couldn't convince them to stay safe, and so far she'd had remarkably little luck at that, she had to find this guy as fast as possible.

    A car surged past, horn honking.

    "I wanted to get a bumper sticker that read, 'Honk at me and I'll shoot your tires out' but a