Darkness peering by Alice Blanchard Page A

focused.
    She imagined the perp several yards away, pointing a gun in her face.
She needed to remain calm. She bent her knees, turned to the left and
dumped her speed loader, slammed in a new one. Trigger control. Take
it easy. She fired off six rounds.
    Rachel liked her gun, liked the feel of it in her hand, the weight of
it. Her gun was an extension of her sense of safety. She carried
eighteen rounds of ammunition at all times: six rounds in the revolver,
six in each of the two speed loaders she kept inside her purse.
    Now she aligned the rear and front sights, then allowed her vision to
refocus on the front sight and the distant target, choosing the Weaver
stance, placing her feet in a professional boxer-type

    position and keeping a forty-five-degree angle to the target. More
shots. The acrid smell of gunpowder. Two rounds supported, four
seconds. Combat-unload and reload with the speed loader. Align the
target in your rear and front sights. Squeeze the trigger.
    She'd always wanted to be a cop, ever since she could remember. She'd
loved her father's uniform, his gold shield, his shiny black shoes. He
kept his gun loaded in the bedside table and she was forbidden to go
near it, but sometimes she snuck into her parents' room and played with
the ammunition he kept in his sock drawer.
    Now she took a step back and arched her neck. Squinted at the target.
Good grouping, probably in the high nineties. Not bad.
    "Why the Weaver?" It was McKissack, coming up behind her on Charley
Range. She'd know that voice anywhere. It crept up her spine and
curled her toes.
    "There's less of me exposed to my adversary. Greater mobility while on
the run."
    "Disadvantages?"
    "Difficult to perform while under stress."
    He squinted at the target. "Good grouping, Storrow."
    "Thanks, Jim."
    He flashed her a look that made her jump inside her own skin.
    "I'm sorry," she whispered, and his features softened. "I don't know
what to call you anymore. Not even when we're alone. Should I call
you Chief?"
    "Frankly, I don't know what I want," he admitted.
    She reholstered her weapon.
    "In a gunfight," he said, "you have no way of knowing when you're about
to be fired on. So you take cover wherever you can find it. You have
to respond quickly. There's not much time to establish sight
alignment, and you usually end up returning fire instinctively, by
pointing and shooting."

    She gave him a puzzled look.
    "Some things you can never prepare yourself for, Rachel," he said and
walked away.
    since ozzie rudd's daughter attended the school for the Blind, Rachel
had made an appointment to meet him inside the Main Building on Friday
afternoon around three o'clock when classes let out. You weren't
supposed to drive your vehicle over twenty miles per hour inside the
campus gates. Rachel parked he hind the Main Building and entered the
front lobby, where she greeted the receptionist, a large woman with
navy blue nail polish and vamp irish eye shadow whose nametag said
    Cassandra.
    "I'm supposed to meet Ozzie Rudd here."
    "Oh yeah." Cassandra removed a can of Static Guard from her purse and
sprayed her clothes with it, a plume of toxic chemicals misting the
air. "Cut through the library. Take any door on your right and
proceed all the way down the hall to the very end. Room 138."
    "Thanks," Rachel said with a dry cough.
    In the library, a crystal chandelier illuminated what many of the
children could not see--glass cases full of stuffed animals and shelves
crammed with Braille books. The library's interior brick walls had
been polished smooth from decades of handling by sightless children.
The Venetian blinds were dented at about the same height--that of a
child's groping hand. The white walls were also smudged, a dirty gray
trail leading from one end of the room to the other.

    Rachel passed a small group of children gathered in front of one of
the glass cases, where a boy with deep-set eyes was counting the fangs
on a Bengal