At the range the heat was already a fact by nine. The gravel shone. The banners snapped in a wind too light to trust. Danny arrived early, deliberately early, in a clean black shirt left open over grey, and set about being Danny Mercer in public with a thoroughness that looked like ease. He shook the sheriff's hand. Sheriff Ellis Grant, tan shirt, gold badge, name plate catching the light, received him with the neutral courtesy of a man who had policed other people's importance for thirty years and was immune to all of it. "Mercer," Grant said. "You're on the list where you think you are." Danny laughed, as expected. He posed, when asked, which was often. He signed a boy's cap. He walked the line and looked at the steel plate far out in the sand, small and rusty on its two legs, with its famous central pin that no one had struck clean in thirty-one years of this challenge, and he felt the old tightening of appetite that he trusted more than any pep talk. The plate looked, as it always did, entirely indifferent to him. He liked that. Indifference was a worthy opponent. People were more of a problem, because people kept arriving with expectations on their faces.
He first heard Willa Callen's name properly that morning, although of course he had heard it before, the way you hear weather in another county. Callen. The instructor's daughter. Tom Callen's girl. Old Tom, dead some years now, who had taught at this range as a volunteer and had a saying for everything and a notebook he carried like other men carried a wallet. Danny had been a teenager at one of Tom's open mornings, once, dragged there by Ray because Ray believed in collecting other men's wisdom even when he intended to out-argue it later. Tom had watched Danny shoot, nodded once, and said, "Lovely hold. Mind it doesn't make you vain." Danny had remembered the insult, as he filed it, for years, and had only in his twenties begun to suspect it had been a kindness aimed with unusual accuracy. Willa he remembered as a shape rather than a person: a girl in an oversized shirt at the side of the range with a stopwatch, or handing out scorecards, or being told by somebody's father, with a hand on her shoulder, that she was a credit to her dad. That phrase followed her everywhere in Danny's memory of those years, the way a label follows luggage. A credit to her dad. Never, in his hearing, a finalist. Never a name on a board in its own right.
"She came through the semis on Saturday," one of the range hands told him, carrying a case past the benches. "You didn't see? Clean card. Wind got up and half the line fell apart and she just — " He shrugged, admiring and slightly puzzled, the way people did when a result did not fit the story they owned. "Stood there."
Danny said, "Good for her," and meant perhaps half of it, and hated the half he did not mean with a suddenness that surprised him. He found himself, over the next hour, inventing reasons to cross the officials' table. Grant's clipboard lay there between a pen and a water bottle sweating onto a scoresheet, and Danny, who had never once in his life needed to steal a look at an entry list, looked. There it was, in Grant's square, unhurried hand. Callen, W. Standing final, last group. His own name sat above the group like it had been printed there by the event itself. Under his name, the order of things. Under hers, in pencil, a question the day had not yet answered.
A sponsor's man in a polo shirt chose that moment to clap him on the shoulder and say the thing sponsors' men say on final mornings. "Just do what you do, Danny. Cameras love a three-peat. We've got the release ready." Three-peat. Ray had warned him about people who planned the celebration in the hearing of the contest, but Danny smiled the smile, because the smile was his job too, and said, "Plan on it," and as he said it he heard, somewhere behind the words, how much he needed them to be true, and need, in a shooter, is a tremor by another name.
He told himself the feeling was respect. A good final needs a story, he told the sponsor's man and the two boys with phones who had drifted into earshot. A defending champion and a dark horse. The instructor's daughter, for heaven's sake, it practically wrote the captions for them. He could be generous about it now, publicly generous, and the generosity would photograph well, and if the order restored itself by three o'clock, as orders do, everyone would remember that Danny Mercer had been gracious to the girl before he beat her. He practised graciousness the way he had once practised his hold in a garage in winter. It felt, while he was doing it, indistinguishable from virtue.
Then he saw her arrive, and the day rearranged itself in a way he would spend a long time understanding.
She came through the gap in the barrier alone, on foot, carrying nothing at first, in a plain khaki button-up shirt with two chest pockets and a dark belt, her dark hair pulled back in a low bun, small studs in her ears, no entourage, no father with a stopwatch, no sponsor's polo shirt at her elbow. People greeted her, and that was the telling thing, Danny thought later. They greeted her the way you greet somebody's relative at a place they have a right to be. "Morning, Willa." "Your dad would've liked this weather." "You've got your mother's ticket, has she, for the phone thing?" Nobody said finalist. Nobody moved aside in the way people move aside, instinctively, for the person the day might belong to. She thanked them, each one, by name. Danny, who was greeted everywhere by his surname like a small national anthem, stood by the officials' table with a water bottle he did not want and felt the morning's fear stop being abstract. It had a khaki shirt and a low bun and it thanked the range hand by name.