Breaking Point

hailstorms around the state and into Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota, when he first heard about long-distance shooting from the foreman. They’d been sitting on the peak of a roof eating their lunches in Lovell, Wyoming. The foreman said he still competed around the country, using high-end custom rifles to hit targets hundreds of yards away. Sollis got excited about the idea of it, and the foreman showed Sollis some of his rifles and agreed to take him to an event outside of Rock Springs.
    Sollis was enthralled. He’d never been much of an athlete or a scholar, but something about propelling a small cylinder of polished heavy metal through the air to hit a target got him excited inside. It got him
hard
.
    He learned about calculating windage, elevation, altitude, velocity, determining grains of gunpowder, learning how to breathe . . .
    At the events he attended with his foreman, Sollis collected business cards from custom gunmakers who had booths set up, and started saving chunks of his paycheck—and supplementing his income by dealing meth to roughnecks on the side. His first long-distance rifle, a Sako TRG-42 chambered for .338, won him $2,500 at the Orem, Utah, Invitational—and he was off. He’d reinvest his winnings into more precision rifles, because a man could never have enough rifles. He sent the rifles away to custom gunsmiths who tweaked the weight of the trigger pull and equipped the weapons with specialized scope rings and high-tech optics. Sollis found he had a natural ability to calculate velocity, drop, and windage. He could hit what he aimed at.
    But he wanted more. Sollis had listened to a couple of books on tape written by Marine snipers, and he desperately wanted to use his newfound skill on Iraqis, Iranians, or Afghanis. He had no strong feelings about which. So he signed up for the U.S. Marines, telling the recruiter in the White Mountain Mall in Rock Springs they were getting a blue-chip player, that they didn’t realize the LeBron of snipers was standing right in front of them, actually volunteering to join their playground pickup team.
    The Marines rejected him because of his rap sheet of drug-related arrests, and because of that sexual assault charge with the underage cheerleader back in high school. Furious, he tried the Army, then the Navy. But the word was out among the recruiters and he was black-balled. The foreman told Sollis about private defense contractors who might be able to use his skill, and Sollis was interested. Anything was better than roofing for a living.
    So when ex-Sheriff McLanahan drove up that morning before dawn as Sollis crossed from his rental house to his pickup to go to work and offered him a chance to go with him, Jimmy Sollis jumped at it. The opportunity to use his skills for the good of humanity and on the right side of the law? He was all over that.
    He had no idea that it would result in a gut-shot hunter from Maine, or a desperate hike down a mountain in the middle of the night. And all because McLanahan hadn’t warned him off before he pulled the trigger on the wrong man.
    It burned Sollis how McLanahan had acted once that son of a bitch Roberson had shown up. Suddenly, it was all Sollis, as if McLanahan hadn’t recruited him and given him the signal to fire.
    It just wasn’t right.
    —
    T O MAKE matters worse, that phone Roberson had hidden in his daypack kept ringing and he couldn’t even answer it. He thought:
He’d had his nine-thousand-dollar rifle taken away from him;
He was lost;
If he somehow made his way back to Saddlestring, he’d likely be arrested for gut-shooting a hunter from Maine;
His belly was filled with rotten dead deer seepage;
Mosquitoes were feeding on the back of his neck where he couldn’t reach;
His cheek ached from the bullet that had creased it;
    And . . .
Nobody loved him.
    And now he couldn’t even answer the goddamned phone.
    —
    J IMMY S OLLIS PAUSED near the middle of a small clearing in the trees. He realized the hairs on the back of his neck and his forearms had pricked up because he’d seen, heard, or
sensed
something that was off. He stood still until his breathing returned to normal from the exertion of the trek through a long jumble of down trees and branches.
    When he could hear again over the rhythmic pounding of his own heart, he slowly turned his head to the right, then the left. He wondered what it was that had made him stop, made the hairs prick up. Sollis had a creepy thought that