Harlan's Race

happened?”
    “Hang on, Billy,” I said without thinking. “They’re coming.”
    “Billy?” he said, dazed.
    Runners poured on by, glancing at us curiously. A couple stopped. I shielded Jacques from their eyes with my body, so nobody saw the blood. We didn’t need panic and a crowd of rubberneckers.
    “Keep running, assholes,” I yelled at them in the voice of a Parris Island gunny gone mad.
    The guard was speaking into his walkie, calling the squad car, the ambulance.
    I knew. I knew.
    ELEVEN
    Chino had grabbed the next nonstop flight from Los Angeles. Harry hadn’t come — H-C had landed their first job in a while. As I met Chino by the athletic building, I had done everything possible to calm myself down, after the rage and hysteria and near loss of control of yesterday. But my voice was still unsteady.
    ‘The doctors took a dozen bits of bullet out of Jacques’ shoulder,” I told him. “The police say it’s probably a .22 hollow-point that fragmented.”
    “Are you surprised, man?” Chino drawled.
    Alone, we walked that service road into the woods. It was an unseasonably hot day, so my pants and polo shirt were sticking to me. But Chino, with his old fanaticism about keeping clean in the jungle, looked like he’d just stepped out of the shower. As always, he was dressed to blend in—khaki pants, and a brown T-shirt showing off his strong arms with veins pumped by the heat. His ebony hair was sleeked into a rubber band, and I noticed a white hair or two.
    Chino gazed along the crowded tree trunks and thick brush that overshadowed the road.
    ‘The maze of green,” he said softly.
    We stood listening. At the moment, no police were around. A late-season bird song rang through the deep woods. Somehow those few notes, and the trickle of falling leaves everywhere, made the woods feel intensely alive, mysterious as an ocean, impenetrable as any cloud forest on the equator.
    Chino, with his clothing in somber autumn hues, was part of that mystery.
    “Rest your eyes,” Chino added, “and you can see all the movement there. Everything that moves is something.”
    My scalp was prickling.
    Chino listened to my update. The police swore it was the case of the careless hunter. They had arrested two hunters inside the Prescott property line. One, a kid, was carrying an old .22 rifle and hollow-point ammo. The ballistics people were convinced this would probably be the gun. One local newspaper was in full cry against the evils of firearms.
    “There was a shot right nearby,” I added, “less than a minute before Jacques was hit. But it must have been a hunter. There wasn’t an actual crack, bang, in the few seconds before Jacques was hit. Just a funny sound, then the slap and the echoes.”
    Crunching over dead branches and leaves, Chino used my information to locate the hide where the sniper had fired.
    It was in a different location than the police had thought
    — a little natural hole among some granite boulders, under a fallen oak trunk. The site was not a place where hunters would walk through, and was well-camouflaged with brush and fallen leaves. Behind the hide was a ridge piled with more boulders. From here, the sniper commanded a clear view of the service road, 40 yards away. The spot was well within range of a .22 rifle whose performance was cut somewhat by a silencer.
    “Very smooth,” said Chino. “LEV. planned his ‘op’ to blend with weekend hunting. He came in here the night before, and parked himself. For camouflage, he probably covered himself with a little net cape with cloth strips sewn on it. Went for the heart shot this time. Probably Jacques made a bobble just then. Avoiding a pothole, or something. When you’re shooting that far at a moving target, the tiniest movement out of the pattern can throw you off. He probably analyzed old film footage of you guys running ... each of you has your patterns.”
    Chino coughed a deep cigarette cough, and added, “He used the boulders to scatter echoes and confuse everybody about his location. After the shot, he probably stuffed the camo net in his knapsack, and just walked right out, using those boulders for cover. He probably wore ordinary hunter’s clothing. Nobody would have looked at him twice.”
    We followed his supposed route, and found that the property line and paved road were just 100 feet away. Hunters parked their vehicles in wide spots on the shoulder. I imagined the sniper getting into a pickup and coolly driving