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angles, the kind of machine. Most of the news and some of the police choppers in the state were Eurocopter 350s. What he could hear of the rotor noise and the engine sounded like that’s what this one was. Nice fast machine.
    But light and thin-skinned.
    A flying egg.
    He leaned back against a tree trunk, eased the rifle in his lap, took a slow breath, and opened himself up to what was going on around him.
    In a stand of cottonwoods on the far side of the road a bunch of crows were bickering with another bunch of crows. The wind off the flatlands was stirring the pampas grass, making its shaggy heads bob and its brittle stalks hiss and chatter as they rubbed together. The afternoon sun was blood-warm on his left cheek. He looked up. The sky was a cloudless blue. Down the slope of the hill a possum was digging in the red earth, its tail showing like a curved black stick above the pale yellow grass. Three hawks were circling overhead, wings spreadand fixed, gliding in lazy circles, riding the thermals as the day’s heat cooked off the lowlands. The air smelled of sweetgrass, clover, hot earth, and baking tarmac. It reminded him of Billings and the sweetgrass coulees down in the Bighorn valley. In the distance, faint but growing, Coker could hear the wail of sirens.
    He looked down at the TV screen, saw the line of cars following Merle’s black Magnum, that dark blue interceptor weaving up through the pack, closing in on Merle as the two-lane started to rise up into the grassy foothills of the Belfair Range.
    Across the street the crows fell silent, as if listening, and then they exploded upwards in one swirling black cloud, amber light shimmering on their wings.
    He felt the drumbeat of a chopper, coming in low, hidden by the tree line, and then, under the siren wail, the squealing of tires as Merle pushed the Magnum through a curve a quarter mile away.
    The sirens grew more shrill, crazy echoes bouncing off the hills all around, mixed up with the snarling sound of engines racing.
    Coker hefted the rifle, put on a pair of ear protectors, let out a long slow breath, got into a seated brace, resting the rifle’s bipod on a stump in front of him, and depressed the stock until the squared-off muzzle brake was covering the top of the tree line.
    The rifle was a semi-auto five-shot. He had five rounds in the box mag, and three more full mags in the canvas bag on the ground beside him. Coker figured that if he needed those extra mags, he’d be dead by sunset.
    He did not put his eye close to the Leupold scope until he saw the shiny red ball of the news chopper appear above the trees. Then he leaned into the scope, set the stock in tight, braced for the machine’s mule-kick recoil, eased his finger onto the serrated ridges of the trigger blade, pressing down on it until he could just feel the sear begin to engage. Stopped. Held it.
    The chopper was slipping left, skimming the tree line, following the curve of the hills, intent on the chase, a steady glide, hardly moving at all, so the newsgirl could get a good smooth camera pan. Coker could see two pale figures through the canopy bubble. The newsgirl would be in the copilot seat, on the left side of the canopy, working the radio and the camera and talking her talk.
    The pilot would be in the right-hand seat, busy with the cyclic andthe collective and the pedals, his mind totally taken up with situational awareness, with thinking about power lines and tree branches and big dumb suicidal geese and all the other air traffic that might be zipping around in the pursuit zone.
    Even if the pilot had been looking right at Coker’s position, all he would have seen was a little scrap of tan cloth in a field of pampas grass, maybe a long black rod sticking up.
    Coker locked down on the sight image, inhaled, breathed out slow, held it at half, stilled himself.
    Squeezed the trigger.
    The Barrett bucked in his grip, slamming back into his right shoulder, the muzzle-brake gasses flaring out