That was the quiet foundation under the smile. Not arrogance, not exactly, though it could look like arrogance from fifteen yards away through a phone screen. It was something sturdier and more dangerous: an untested certainty that the order of things at a range was a natural order. Certain people belonged at the centre of the firing line at the end of a final. Certain faces belonged in the photograph. He had watched the system prove him right so many times that he had stopped noticing it was a system at all. Coaches knew his name before he arrived. Officials greeted his father. Younger shooters asked for photographs, and he gave them photographs, generously, with an arm loose around a shoulder, saying the right encouraging things and meaning most of them. He was not a bully. If you had asked the boys he beat, most would have said Danny Mercer was decent, that he shook hands properly, that he once lent a spare sling to a rival in the rain. All of that was true. It was also true that his decency had never cost him anything he wanted, and a man's character, as his father's own coach used to mutter, is only ever really measured at the price.
By his late teens the cameras had multiplied. It was no longer one local photographer with a notebook. It was phones, always phones, held up by fathers, by girlfriends, by boys who uploaded clips with his name spelled correctly in the captions because his name was now the kind you spelled correctly if you wanted strangers to find you. A sponsor of outdoor clothing sent him shirts. A regional channel did a short piece called "Mercer Time," in which a presenter who had clearly never stood on a range in wind asked him to explain pressure, and Danny, nineteen and sunburned, said pressure was a privilege, which his father clipped and framed. The black open shirt over a grey t-shirt that he wore at ranges now, the blond hair cut short at the sides, the easy stance with his weight on one hip while he waited: these were not a uniform and Danny would have laughed at the word, but they were a signature. People recognised him from behind. He liked that more than he admitted, even to himself, because to be recognised from behind meant you existed in places your eyes were not looking, and Danny had organised a great deal of his inner life around existing in other people's attention without appearing to need it.
The standing final, though. Even Danny, in the small hours when a hotel ceiling made philosophers of athletes, respected the standing final in a way that had nothing to do with photographs. Standing was his father's sermon and, before that, as Ray liked to remind anyone who would listen, it had been old Tom Callen's sermon too. "A bench forgives," Ray would say. "Prone forgives more. Standing forgives nothing. Standing tells the truth about a shooter." Danny had repeated that as well, and believed it, and built his reputation precisely there, in the position where there was nowhere to hide. No rest, no sandbag, no bench to lean the weight of the rifle and the weight of the moment into. Just a man, a rifle, his own breathing trying to betray him in small rises and falls, and a target far enough away to make a mockery of certainty. Danny was, by any fair measure, superb at it. His hold was still. His timing had the patience of a much older man. Three titles were not an accident of birth or money. He had earned them in wind that sent hats rolling.
So why, on the morning of this final, did Danny Mercer wake at four in a motel room outside town with his heart going like a fist on a door?
He lay in the dark and listened to the air conditioner complain and tried, professionally, to name the feeling the way his father had taught him to name wind. Fear was too large a word and he rejected it. Nerves were normal; he filed them where they belonged. Underneath both, slower and older, was a thought he had carried for years and never said aloud to anyone, not to his father, not to the boys who travelled with him, not to the woman he had lived with for a year who left, partly, over the subject of what Danny would not say aloud. The thought was simple and it had no drama in it, which was why it scared him: one day someone nobody expected would stand up in the standing final and out-shoot him, and everyone would see it happen, and the order of things would turn out to have been only a habit. Not a rival he knew. He tracked his rivals. He studied their scores the way his mother studied accounts. Someone from outside the story he had been telling himself. A name read off a clipboard that made the officials pause. A face the cameras had to go looking for, instead of finding ready.
"You think too much before finals," his father said that morning, by phone, in lieu of hello. "You always did. Eat. Hydrate. Do the work."
"Sleep all right?" Pat asked in the background, and Danny said yes, because in the Mercer family yes was the answer you gave about sleep, food, and pain, until a doctor was required.