His private terror, the one from the motel ceiling, had never had a face. It did now, and the face was entirely calm.
"Willa Callen," he said, when she came within range of politeness, and put out his hand. "Danny Mercer."
"I know," she said, and shook it. Her hand was smaller and much steadier than his, which was a thing he noticed the way you notice a score before you have decided to look at it. "Thank you."
"For what?"
"People keep telling me who everybody is," she said. "You saved me a job." There was no edge in it. That was the problem. An edge he could have parried and enjoyed and used. There was instead a composure so complete it seemed to lower the temperature around her by a degree, and Danny, who fed on reaction the way other athletes fed on applause, felt suddenly and absurdly like a man shouting in a room where someone else was listening to music in another language.
The draw, the order, the small ceremonies of a final: all of that flowed on around them on rails laid by thirty-one years of officials. Grant read the names from his clipboard in his level sheriff's voice. Chief Walter Hargrove took his position in his black jacket, binoculars on their strap against his chest like a medal from a war against surprise, and looked out at the plate with the air of a man who expected it to keep its secrets one more year. The earlier shooting made its noise and its dust. And Danny, who should have been doing nothing but becoming quiet inside his own skin, kept finding his attention pulled sideways to where Willa sat, not fidgeting, not performing stillness either, just waiting in the shade of the stand with her hands loose in her lap, watching the wind move in the banners as if it were a conversation she could hear and he could not. Twice he caught himself wondering what she was thinking. A champion is not supposed to spend the morning wondering what the last name on the list is thinking. A champion is supposed to be the thought in everyone else's head.
So the handover, when it came, was not an accident, and if Danny was honest later — and the day would make an honest man of him eventually, at the standard price — it was not entirely kindness either.
The rifle for the final group was presented by rotation; a good tradition, meant to say that the line was a shared place. This year the rotation had put the presentation in Danny's hands. The rifle itself was a wooden-stocked bolt-action competition piece with a scope, handsome in the old way, the kind of rifle Tom Callen himself would have approved of for a standing final because it did not flatter anybody. Danny lifted it in front of the crowd, felt the phones go up the way corn lifts toward weather, and turned, with the sun behind him, toward Willa. He was smiling his camera smile, wide and knowing. Inside the smile, several Dannys were having an argument at speed. One of them, the decent one, the boy who had lent a sling in the rain, simply wanted to hand a fellow finalist her rifle properly. Another, louder, wanted the photograph: the champion, generous, arming the instructor's daughter for her big afternoon, a picture that would be charming when he won and magnificent about him either way. And a third Danny, the one from the motel ceiling, the one he never fed in public, wanted something colder and smaller and far more human. He wanted, by handing it to her with that smile, to settle in advance what the afternoon meant. He wanted the moment of the handover to be the story, so that no later moment could overtake it. He wanted her to take it, in front of everyone, as a gift from the order of things.
"All yours," he said, loud enough for the front row of phones. "Mind her. She kicks if you're not ready."
The crowd made the small, pleased sound crowds make when a star has given them a line to take home.
Willa stepped forward and took the rifle in both hands, correctly, without hurry, and settled its weight as if she and it had already had the only conversation that mattered. She did not smile back for the cameras. She looked at the rifle, then, briefly, at him, with an expression he could not file under gratitude or defiance or nerves, and said, very quietly, so that only he and perhaps Grant, pen poised, could hear it:
"Thank you, Danny."
Then she turned away toward the line, and left him standing in the sun with his smile still on and nothing in his hands, feeling — for the first time in a career built on being watched — that he had just been seen through, politely, completely, and without the slightest malice, by the person he had most needed not to see him at all. His father, on the phone that morning, had told him to do the work. Standing there with empty hands, Danny Mercer understood, with the clarity that usually only arrived after a shot, that the work today might not be the shooting. It might be whatever came after, if the order of things failed to do what it had always done for him, and a girl in a khaki shirt with her father's notebook learning in her bones made the last name on the clipboard into the only name anybody remembered. He swallowed, found his smile, and gave it to the cameras, because that was what he knew how to do. Then, because some part of him was still the boy in the garage who respected the truth of a position with nowhere to hide, he stopped smiling, shaded his eyes, and watched the line.