Chapter 4 - Consistency Is King
Dennis’s chest hitched beneath his olive overshirt. His neck flushed a dark, angry crimson, the blood vessels along his temples throbbing against the brim of his ball cap. To be humiliated in front of his squad—in his own backyard, on his own range, by the girl whose career he had spent eleven years dismissing—was an intolerable wound to a fragile, aging ego.
“That was a lucky jerk!” Dennis snarled, his voice rising in an ugly, defensive bellow that broke the stunned silence of the spectators. “You anticipated the beep! You jumped the gate, Sutter! Anybody can twitch on a buzzer and hit paper by accident!”
He stepped back, furiously resetting the memory on the digital display with a jerky stab of his thumb. He raised the yellow box once more, holding it out with a hand that was visibly shaking with suppressed rage.
“Do it again!” Dennis barked. “Do it again right now, hotshot! Let’s see what happens when your nerves have to hold!”
Willa didn't argue. She didn't roll her eyes.
With a movement so fluid and practiced it looked entirely automated, she rotated her weapon inward, swept the muzzle safely down toward the dirt, and slid the black handgun back into the molded hip holster. The mechanical CLACK-CLICK of the Level Two retention hood snapping into place sounded like a steel vault door locking shut.
She let her hands fall back to her sides. She stood loose, upright, balanced.
Behind the tables, two of the retired detectives exchanged an uneasy, silent glance. They weren't stupid; they had seen enough recruits on department qualification courses over thirty years to know the difference between frantic luck and muscle memory etched into bone. The girl wasn't guessing. She wasn't even breathing hard.
Dennis glared at her, his finger white on the button. He intentionally varied the delay, holding the timer silent for three agonizing seconds, then four, then five, trying to force her to flinch, trying to induce a false start that would allow him to reclaim his authority.
Willa remained still as a marble pillar.
BEEP.
The mechanical tone had barely cleared the plastic speaker when the air exploded again.
CRACK.
The motion was an exact, carbon-copy clone of the first. Her hand drove down, cleared the hood, presented straight out, and broke the shot with terrifying, mechanical perfection. The spent casing arced through the sky, landing with an identical metallic ping on the gravel six feet to her right.
Downrange, at fifty feet, the paper target shuddered.
There was no new hole in the paper.
The original nine-millimeter perforation in the dead center of the X-ring had simply expanded by the width of a pencil lead, the edges blackened and torn as the second round passed cleanly through the exact same path carved by the first.
Dennis froze. His jaw dropped, his sunglasses slipping slightly down the bridge of his nose as he stared at the digital readout on the yellow timer.
His thumb hovered paralyzed above the reset button.
His eyes dilated. On the screen, in bold black digital segments, the numbers read:
0.87.
One-hundredth of a second faster.
May you like
Two identical rounds through a single ragged hole in less time than it took for an ordinary man to blink.
The silence that blanketed the range was now absolute, total, and terrifying. The breeze rustled the nylon stripes of the American flag overhead, but not a single man under the tin roof dared to take a breath. The smell of the barbecue seemed to have turned sour in the heat, while the six retired officers stood frozen, their eyes locked on the girl who hadn't moved an inch from her firing point.
