Page 22 of Safe Enough

“It’ll be okay today. Nobody scouts here anymore. They all know this horse. They all know it can win in its sleep.”

We walked on in silence. Reached the stand of trees. It was oval shaped, thin at the northern end. We stepped back and forth until we had a clear line of sight through the trunks. Dawn light was in the sky. Two hundred yards away and slightly downhill was a broad grass clearing with plenty of tire tracks showing. A thin gray mist hung in the air.

“This is it?” I said.

My guy nodded. “The horses come in from the south. The cars come in from the west. They meet right there.”

“Why?”

“No real reason. Ritual, mostly. Backslapping and bullshitting. The pride of ownership.”

I took the Barrett out of the golf bag. I had already decided how I was going to set up the shot. No bipod. I wanted the gun low and free. I knelt on one knee and rested the muzzle in the crook of a branch. Sighted through the scope. Racked the bolt and felt the first mighty .50 shell smack home into the chamber.

“Now we wait,” my guy said. He stood at my shoulder, maybe a yard to my right and a yard behind me.

The cars arrived first. They were SUVs, really. Working machines, old and muddy and dented. A Jeep, and two Land Rovers. Five guys climbed out. Four looked poor and one looked rich.

“Trainer and stable boys and the owner,” my guy said. “The owner is the one in the long coat.”

The five of them stamped and shuffled and their breath pooled around their heads.

“Listen,” my guy said.

I heard something way off to my left. To the south. A low drumming, and a sound like giant bellows coughing and pumping. Hooves, and huge equine lungs cycling gallons of sweet fresh morning air.

I rocked backward until I was sitting right down on the ground.

“Get ready,” my guy said, from above and behind me.

There were altogether ten horses. They came up in a ragged arrowhead formation, slowing, drifting off-line, tossing their heads, their hard breathing blowing violent yard-long trumpet-shaped plumes of steam ahead of them.

“What is this?” I asked. “The whole roster?”

“String,” my guy said. “That’s what we call it. This is his whole first string.”

In the gray dawn light and under the steam all the horses looked exactly the same to me.

But that didn’t matter.

“Ready?” my guy said. “They won’t be here long.”

“Open your mouth,” I said.

“What?”

“Open your mouth, real wide. Like you’re yawning.”

“Why?”

“To equalize the pressure. Like on a plane. I told you, this is a loud gun. It’s going to blow your eardrums otherwise. You’ll be deaf for a month.”

I glanced around and checked. He had opened his mouth, but half-heartedly, like a guy waiting for the dentist to get back from looking at a chart.

“No, like this,” I said. I showed him. I opened my mouth as wide as it would go and pulled my chin back into my neck until the tendons hurt in the hinge of my jaw.

He did the same thing.

I whipped the Barrett’s barrel way up and around, fast and smooth, like a duck hunter tracking a flushed bird. Then I pulled the trigger. Shot my guy through the roof of his mouth. The giant rifle boomed and kicked and the top of my guy’s head came off like a hard-boiled egg. His body came down in a heap and sprawled. I dropped the rifle on top of him and pulled his right shoe off. Tossed it on the ground. Then I ran. Two minutes later I was back in my car. Four minutes later I was a mile away.

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