“One!”

Morwood turned to Corrie and spoke quietly and rapidly: “I’m authorizing deadly force. I’m going to the right to get a side angle on him. Cover me. If you get a clear shot—and I mean absolutely clear—take it.”

“Sir.”

“Two!”

The Glock felt like a block of heavy wet plastic in her trembling hand. Calm down and focus, for fuck’s sake. She peered over the hood and then took a low shooting stance, bracing her arms. It exposed her, but the guy couldn’t aim worth shit. She repeated it in her head: The guy can’t aim worth shit.

She carefully drew a bead on the man’s head and placed her finger lightly on the trigger. He was holding the girl in front of him, and ten yards was too far for a positive shot.

Morwood bolted from behind the truck and scrambled to a pi?on tree thirty feet to the right, throwing himself down into a prone shooting position.

Corrie kept the man square in her sights. A head shot at this distance with her Glock 19M was still way too risky for the child. She glanced to her left and noted that Khoury and Martinez were behind their SUV, guns trained. Now she could hear the faint sirens of the SWAT team coming up the road.

Thank God—they were almost there.

“Three!”

Morwood fired his weapon, but Corrie instantly understood it was a decoy shot to distract the man, stop him from shooting the girl—and distract him it did. He pulled the gun from the girl’s head and returned fire, two wild shots. And in that moment the girl twisted away and broke free of his grasp, lunging for the door but slipping and falling short.

In that moment the man was isolated, alone, and perfectly silhouetted against the netting. The girl was on the floor. Corrie had the man dead in her sights.

She squeezed the trigger.

The gun bucked, and the round, missing the head shot she was aiming for, smacked into his right shoulder instead. The hit spun him to the side; he swung his weapon around to return fire but was off-balance and aiming wildly. Corrie saw the flash and kick of the weapon just as the girl scrambled up, grabbing at the flimsy door of the camper. She tumbled down the steps to the ground, pigtails whirling, Princess Leia hair clips flying.

“You bastard!” Before she could think of what she was doing, Corrie charged the camper. Simultaneously, a fusillade of shots rang out from Morwood and the other agents. The rounds connected, and the man jerked back, his body a macabre imitation of a Raggedy Ann doll as he was thrown through the rear netting of the camper.

In a second Corrie had reached the girl and scooped her up, turning her own back to the shooter. The child was motionless, covered in blood. And then the SWAT team was suddenly swarming everywhere. Corrie looked up to see an ambulance screeching to a halt in a cloud of dust, the paramedics leaping out. She ran toward them, and they surrounded her, gently removing the girl from her arms and putting her on a stretcher.

One paramedic held Corrie’s arm as she staggered. “Are you all right, ma’am?”

Corrie, paralyzed and heavily blood-splattered, merely stared at him.

“Are you injured?” He spoke loudly and distinctly. “Do you need help?”

“No, no, not my blood,” she said angrily, shaking his arm off. “Save the girl.”

Morwood was suddenly at her side, arm around her, supporting her. “I’ll take over,” he told the paramedic. Then he turned to her. “Corrie, I’m going to walk you back to the truck.”

She tried to move her legs and stumbled, but he held her up. “Just one foot after the other.”

Out of the corner of her eye she could see the paramedics madly working on the girl.

She followed Morwood’s murmured instructions as best she could, and he eased her into the front seat. She realized she was hyperventilating and sobbing at the same time.

“Okay, take it easy, easy now, Corrie. He’s gone. Take a deep breath. That’s it, a deep breath.”

“I fucked up,” Corrie said, choking. “I missed. He killed the girl.”

“You just take a deep breath now...Good...Good...You did nothing wrong; you took your opportunity, you fired, and you hit him. We don’t know the girl’s condition.”

“I missed the head shot. I missed—”

“Corrie, just take a moment to stop thinking and breathe. Just breathe.”

“He shot the girl. She’s—”

“Listen to what I say. Stop talking, stop thinking, and just breathe.”

She tried to follow his directions, tried to breathe, tried to stop thinking, but all she could see was the man’s shoulder turning, turning, while he swung the muzzle of his gun to fire at her, the premature shot going straight into the girl instead … and then the little body sprawled on the ground, bloody Princess Leia hair clips lying in the dirt.

2

Two Weeks Later

AS SHERIFF HOMER Watts reached the pass at Oso Peak, he paused to slip his canteen off the saddle horn and take a swig of water. The view from the pass was spectacular: the land fell away through pi?on-clad foothills to the desert many miles away and thousands of feet below. September had brought a pleasant freshness to the mountain air, redolent with the scent of pine needles. It was Watts’s first day off in a while, and it was a gorgeous one, a gift from the gods.