AIM FOR THE HEAD, I REMINDED MYSELF AS I LINED up the sights. The center of the head-the surest kill. The gun felt solid in my hand, more solid than I felt within myself. As I took aim at the shadowy figure, I hoped I could borrow a bit of steadiness from the heavy weapon in my right hand. Sweat trickled down my forehead, pooling in my eyes and clouding my view, and I squinted to squeeze it out. Focus. Center of the head. Don’t rush your shot. My finger tightened against the trigger. Could I really shoot Garland Hamilton? Don’t forget what he tried to do to you, I told myself, yet still I hesitated. Don’t forget what he did to Jess, and what he might have done to Miranda. It was Hamilton, I felt sure, who’d attacked Miranda-the police had interviewed both Latham and Garcia, and had found their arms uninjured-so that left Hamilton the likely source of the assault and of the flowers that had preceded it. That did it. I pictured Jess’s body tied obscenely to another corpse, and Miranda laid out on the gurney, and the gun jumped in my hand as I yanked the trigger. “Die, you son of a bitch,” I hissed, “die.” I fired again and again, until the gun had nothing left to fire. My arm dropped to my side. I was trembling, I realized, and tears were streaming down my face.
“Press,” said a voice behind me. “Press. If you jerk the trigger, you jerk the gun. And if you jerk the gun, you miss the target. And if you miss the target, you end up getting shot.”
I turned. Steve Morgan and a TBI firearms instructor-John Wilson-stood together just behind my lane of the KPD firing range. True to his word, Morgan had gotten a permit for me to carry a weapon, and he’d even loaned me one of his own spares, a nine-millimeter Smith amp; Wesson. The permit apparently hadn’t been too difficult to arrange, since I already carried a TBI badge as the bureau’s forensic-anthropology consultant. The bigger hurdle, it appeared, would be qualifying with the gun. To qualify, I’d have to shoot with an accuracy of 70 percent-that is, 70 percent of my shots had to strike the kill zone, the smaller shaded areas within the upper chest and head of the target, a thuglike male outline whose right hand pointed a pistol directly at me.
Morgan, Wilson, and I walked the thirty feet to the target to see what damage I’d done. It wasn’t much. I’d yanked off eight shots. The paper had just three holes in it, and two of those lay outside the lines of the body: Only one of my eight shots would actually have hit Garland Hamilton if this had really been him. That one shot, though, pierced the shaded area of the head, just left of the target’s midline, in what would have been the region of the right nostril.
Morgan pointed to it. “Doc,” he said encouragingly, “if that was your first shot, he’d be a dead man.”
“Actually, that was his first shot,” said Wilson. “His barrel crept up a little higher after every shot, which is why these two other hits are above the head. Those last five shots probably landed somewhere up in Kentucky.”
“Well, here’s hoping Garland Hamilton was walking around in southern Kentucky just now,” I said.
“If you can just remember to press the trigger instead of yanking it and remember to keep the sights lined up, you’ll nail this by the end of the day.”
I had my doubts, but Wilson was right. After unloading that first, emotional magazine, I managed to separate myself from the issues of life and death and vengeance and instead to immerse myself in the physics of shooting a gun and acquiring a feel-a muscle memory, Wilson called it-for the precise amount of force needed to trip the trigger, and the slight lowering of the barrel required to realign the sights after each jump of the barrel. Over the course of three sweat-soaked hours, I fired nearly three hundred rounds. My forearm and shoulder ached from holding the two-pound weapon aloft at arm’s length, but I qualified.
If I were taking aim at Garland Hamilton, would I be able to hang on to my newly acquired muscle memory-remain calm and focused as I pressed precisely and grouped my shots into his head? I didn’t know that. I also didn’t know whether to hope I’d get the chance to find out-or to pray I didn’t.