Free The Knowland Retribution by Richard Greener Page B

student. He had no interest in price. Money meant nothing to him. Everything he bought was eventually shipped to Evangelical Missions Inc. at a private mailbox drop in Las Vegas, New Mexico, where he picked them up.
    Leonard had always heard that shooting comes naturally to some. When he first moved south he was not surprised to learn that so many sons of Dixie found it so. At Nina’s suggestion he found excuses to leave the room when talk turned to shooting doves. Of course, he never accepted an invitation to go hunting. He would say, “The only hunting I do is for lost golf balls.”
    But he found that he too had a knack for guns, and from the start he had a deeply comfortable sense that they belonged together. He liked the feel of the stock against his shoulder, the touch of the cold, metal barrel in his hand. His finger felt good gripping the trigger.
He quickly mastered the pulling, smooth and even. He liked the smell of guns when they fired, and when they had to be taken apart and cleaned with oil and rags, and when he held them reassembled, ready for use.
    He started slowly, took his time, mastered each phase before moving on. He spent months shooting simple and basic rifles, without scopes, at short distances. Ten yards at first, then thirty, then fifty. From August through Thanksgiving he fired thousands of rounds. Always, he studied and evaluated his efforts, learned about windage and elevation, the effects of temperature, humidity, distance. “Imagine the path of the bullet,” he told himself, “calculate the factors; at a thousand yards in a twenty mile-per-hour wind a bullet can veer ten inches off course. Even the round makes a difference; some ammunition is more accurate than others; some more powerful. Make choices. Make allowances.” When he could put enough shots into a twelve-inch target at fifty yards to disintegrate it, he moved on. Then he installed the scopes that allowed him to hit targets up to fifteen hundred yards away. He spent many weeks utilizing the scopes at shorter distances—two hundred yards; three hundred yards; five hundred yards. Finally, he set himself up and began firing at targets as distant as a thousand and fifteen hundred yards. He took aim slowly, adjusted his scope, corrected for the wind, elevation, all the conditions subject to change, and then squeezed the trigger and watched the bullet strike the target so far away. Time after time after time.
    As his skill increased, he swapped bulls-eye paper targets for life-sized cardboard humans. A year’s work and tens of thousands of rounds took him from hitting the center of a man’s chest at fifty feet to doing it from a half mile or more. By then he could take apart and reassemble every rifle he owned in less than sixty seconds. He learned the specs on every type of round: who manufactured it, what it could do; what kind of weapon and which particular ammunition was best for every possible circumstance.
    During the second year, Leonard’s weight leveled off at 170 pounds. The stubble-short hair on his head now matched his beard, steel gray with patchy reminders of darker days. At fifty-six years old he’d never felt nearly so powerful. He was also certain that few individuals had ever attained comparable accuracy with so varied a group of long guns. He’d put thousands of hours into his shotguns and rifles. He’d perfected his skills in the heat of the desert’s summer sun, in the driving rain, the cold and snow, and all this at morning light, high noon, and twilight. He had total confidence he could hit any target in any circumstance. He’d even achieved a high degree of mastery while practicing by standing on a small trampoline. The target and the shooter move, and then the moment arrives, the trigger is pulled, the bullet flies, and the target is hit.
    Two years alone can do strange things to a man, even a man so resolved in his purpose as Leonard Martin. He had