And in the centre of the plate there was a point of light.
Not a mark as he expected a mark to look. Not a spread of bright disturbances, not a cluster to be argued over at a table by men with rulers and the pleasurable blood of controversy in them. One point. Single, round, bright, clean as a new coin held up in a dark room, sitting dead centre on the rusty face of the plate where the small raised pin — the dead-centre bonus mark of this old and slightly foolish and entirely beloved challenge, the pin that had outlived thirty-one years of finalists without ever once being struck clean — where that pin had been.
His mouth opened.
He would be told about that too, afterwards, by a nephew who had been filming, because in the economy of the day the chief's face would become nearly as valuable as the shooter's stillness, and he would have to live with the knowledge that his disbelief had been documented at an unflattering angle with somebody's thumbprint on the corner of the screen. Hargrove, through binoculars, with his face slackening out of its official arrangement, his teeth showing on an inhalation that was not quite a word. He did not know he was making the face at the time. The face was simply the body's faster reporting. Before language, before record, before the forms of the day could be assembled, his face announced to the officials' area, to Grant, to Danny, to the first rows of the crowd who could see him at all, that the lenses were showing Walter Hargrove a thing he had not come prepared to believe.
"Walter?" Grant said.
Hargrove did not lower the binoculars. He could not have lowered them just then for a reasonable request; for Grant's voice, which was a reasonable request with a badge on it, he managed a single shake of the head, not meaning no, meaning wait, meaning the particular emergency of a man whose eyes and whose memory of a thousand targets were in the middle of a disagreement and neither party was yielding honourably.
Because the bright point, examined, refused to become several points. That was the second stage, and it was worse, in the best way, than the first. The first stage could have been a trick of heat, a reflection, the adjustment, an old man's hope hallucinating at a piece of rust. The second stage was steadier. He held the glasses as still as age had left him able to hold them, and breathed around the holding, and the plate stayed, and the light at its centre stayed with it, one and one only, bright against the rust, a disturbance so precise it had nearly cancelled itself out. Shot upon shot, if the young woman's shooting was what it plainly must have been, had not decorated the centre of the plate. They had occupied it, in succession, at the same address, so thoroughly that after a certain point the steel had stopped registering them as separate events to an eye at range distance, and registered them instead as a single shining insistence: here. Here. Here. Again, and in the same place.
He found himself, to his complete annoyance, counting remembered echoes. It was an unprofessional occupation for a chief with binoculars to his eyes and a sheriff waiting for his voice, and he did it anyway, because memory was the only lens he owned that was older than the glass. The shot, then the bolt — he had heard her rhythm without attending to it, the way a man hears rain on a roof in a house he is visiting, only to find, when the roof becomes the subject, that he has been keeping an account of the rain all along. Again, and again, and again. The same measured interval. The same refusal to be hurried by whatever was growing behind her, the phones, the murmurs, Danny's commentary losing its edge as the string went on, Danny's silence. A lesser shooter grouping tightly somewhere on a plate was an achievement the day could have digested comfortably. A champion like Danny grouping tightly was the story the banners behind the firing line had already been printed for. But this — a woman standing alone out there, shooting into a point so small that separate shots were declining to be separate — this required a new column in more than Grant's clipboard.
"Walter." Grant again, nearer now. Grant had come around the officials' table, which witnesses also remembered, the clipboard finally set down, the pen put away — a serious sign, in a man whose pen had been in his pocket or in his hand like a badge of office all day — and he spoke quietly under the general noise that was beginning, dangerously, to guess at itself in the crowd. "Tell me what you've got, Chief, so we do this right."
"Give me the plate again," Hargrove said, which made no sense, because nobody had taken the plate from him and the plate was a mile of sun and sand away with his whole attention already on it, and Grant, to his credit, did not point that out. Grant waited.