He sat at the end of the woods and listened, then quietly pulled the plastic sacks over his hands to fend off the mosquitoes. Moving slow as a glacier, he crept through the woods to a point directly behind Bunton’s house, watched, listened, waited, then crossed the dark backyard to the outer wall of the house.

NO AIR-CONDITIONING, nothing between the shooter and the target but some screens-and two other people. A television was going inside, and two men and a woman were talking a rambling, desultory conversation as they watched a rerun of American Idol. At one point, the woman said, “Hey, Ray? Could you get that?”

The shooter didn’t know what that was, but there was at least one Ray in the house. He settled down to listen, against the wall of the house, like a lump, or a boulder, next to the electric meter, listening. The mosquitoes came for his eyes: he put on the sunglasses and bunched the fabric around them. He couldn’t see much, but there wasn’t much to see. A few cars went past, but not many. There wasn’t much down the road. The woman inside, he learned, was named Edna; Ray called her Ma. The other man was Olen.

The shooter wondered if there were poisonous snakes in Minnesota…

SOME TIME LATER, he wasn’t sure how long, but long enough to get stiff in his bones, he heard Ray say something about “Going to get some toilet paper. Want anything else?”

“Oatmeal, for breakfast… maybe some eggs, if you want scrambled eggs.”

The shooter broke cover, eased around the back of the house, crawled up the far side, watching the end house, looking for people who might glance out a window. Two of the windows had no curtains, but the others were closed off. He saw no one, no movement.

He made it to the front of the house, the side next to the garage. He’d been there two minutes when the front door opened, and Ray and the cop came out on the porch, and the cop stretched and said, “Cold,” and Ray said, “Let me get my jacket,” and he went back inside the house. The officer lit a cigarette and ambled down to the car, and the shooter processed it all: two men, one dark street, getting darker as it went through the woods. No traffic.

If he took them here, he had to think about the woman: if she saw him, he’d have to take her, too. It wouldn’t be the odd dead officer, it’d be a massacre. The bodies were already beginning to stack up, beginning to get intense coverage from the media.

He decided, and turned, and moved as silently as he could back down the garage wall, across the backyard and into the trees, and then, using a tiny button flash, he ran as best he could through the trees toward the van. Behind him, he heard the police car start, and he ran faster, and he heard the car door slam and he crossed the trail to the lake, ran down to the van, climbed in, tore the jacket from his head, and threw the van into a circle and banged back to the main road.

The cop car was taking it easy, and the shooter caught them a mile down the road, in the dark, coming up fast. On the way, he’d called the scout: “Come in now,” he said. “North on that road.” Nothing to identify location.

When he caught them, he began flashing his high beams, blasting them through the cop car’s back window, and the cop turned on his flashers and pulled over, and the shooter pulled in behind him and jumped out of the car and ran to the police car, as if he were looking for help, and the cop, not thinking, cracked the door and the shooter shot him in the head and yanked the door open and pointed the gun at Ray’s face and said, “Get out. Get out.”

The cop had collapsed in his seat and now slid out the open door, and Ray, eyes staring, fumbled at the door handle. The shooter kept the gun on him, the muzzle pointing at his eyes, and pushed the door open, and the shooter, fast as a snake, vaulted the hood of the car, sliding across it, to Ray’s side.

Ray lurched back into the car and slammed the door and fumbled at the cop and the shooter realized he was going for the cop’s gun and he fired two quick shots through the window into Ray’s legs and then slid across the hood again and thrust the pistol into Ray’s face and said, “I’ll kill you now. Get out.”

Ray said, “I’m hit.”

“Get out. Get out.”

Ray got out, holding on to the door, and screamed when his feet hit the ground, and he called, “I’m hit; shit, I’m hit bad.”

When Ray was well clear of the door, the shooter pulled back and ran through the headlights, keeping the gun trained on Ray, who was holding himself up on the far door, and the shooter came around and said, “Walk to the van.”

Ray said, “I can’t walk.”

“Then crawl.”

Ray turned to look at the van, and the shooter stepped closer, worried that he was about to fall, and then Ray slammed the door and charged him, head down, legs working fine, and Ray caught the shooter’s shirt in one hand and yanked on him and the shooter thrust him aside and Ray twisted and came back for him and the shooter fired and hit him in the heart and Ray went down and died.

THE SHOOTER was counting time in his head. The whole thing, at this point, had taken perhaps thirty seconds, from the time he killed the cop until he killed Ray. He needed time to move. He ran back around the police car, pushed the cop back inside, scanned the controls, killed the light bar. The car was still running, and he shifted it into gear and pushed it farther to the side of the road, got it straight, turned off the engine, and slammed the door.

Bunton.

He spent five seconds looking up and down the long dark road: nothing but the lights of his own van. He dragged Bunton to the van by the collar of his jeans jacket, threw him in the back.

Wiped his hands on his pants: what was he forgetting?

Nothing that he could think of.

Except the error. Another mistake. Another dead man, but no name. These people were tougher than he’d been led to believe. Utecht had been soft and easy, and that had misled them.

Cursing, he got on the phone. “Abort it. Two down. Coming out.”

THE SHOOTER rolled through the dark, fast but careful, putting Red Lake behind him. Only one name left now. The scout had needed to speak to Bunton. Needed to isolate him, to work on him. But what could you do in a place like this? The scout had told him that if he spent one hour on the res, in the open, everybody would be looking at him, everybody would know the van.

The group had one more target that they knew of: the next target they had to isolate, they had to talk to, or the game was over.

He followed his headlights through the dark, now sickened by the smell of raw blood in the back. He reached across to the grocery sack on the seat, took out the lemon, scratched the rind, held the lemon to his nose to kill the scent of the blood.

The lemon didn’t work.

The smell of blood, the shooter realized, had soaked into his brain: it was there forever. He would never escape it. Never.