He did not walk quickly. Ellis Grant had been a sheriff long enough to know that hurrying toward an unverified thing was a good way to arrive at it out of breath and out of judgement, and he had a further, private reason for slowness that he would not have admitted at the table. In his fifty-odd years he had written a great many things down. Arrests, accidents, names of the dead given to him over telephones, results, times, statements taken in kitchens where the kettle had boiled dry. He believed, in a way that was almost a religion and entirely a habit, that the world held together because someone, somewhere, was willing to write down exactly what had happened, in order, without ornament. What had happened out here, if it had happened, deserved a slow walk.
Hargrove fell in beside him, half a step behind, then, annoyed at the half step, drew level.
"You saw it," Grant said, low.
"I saw something," Hargrove said.
"Walter."
"I saw something I am not going to describe to you in the sun with four hundred phones listening through their pockets. Walk, Ellis. Look with your own eyes when we get there. That is what eyes are for."
Behind them, Danny Mercer had come to the edge of the line and stopped with his boot on the painted edge of it, as if the paint were a cliff.
"Sheriff," Danny called.
Grant did not turn. "Stay back, Danny."
"Sheriff, I should come."
"That is not how this works."
"I am the other finalist."
"That is exactly why it is not how this works."
Danny's blond head stayed very still against the glare. He was wearing the black open shirt over the grey t-shirt and he had dressed that morning as a man dresses when he expects photographs, and now the photographs were all being taken of somebody else's back. Willa could feel his attention on her, a pressure between the shoulder blades no different, she told herself, from the sun. Weather.
She risked, at last, a small movement: she shifted her weight from one foot to the other, and the gravel spoke under her boot, a dry, private sound. Her whole body was asking her questions and she was postponing all of them. Was it possible. Was it possible. Was it possible, in the rhythm of her pulse. Her father had once told her, on a morning when she was fourteen and furious about a bad card she had shot and furiouser about the kind voices afterwards, that the most dangerous moment in any competition was not missing. It was doing something so well that other people needed to explain it, because explanations were where a result went to be taken away from the person who had made it.
"They will find a way to make it smaller," she had said at fourteen, with the complete bitterness of a girl who has understood one true thing early.
"Then let them have to walk all the way to it," Tom Callen had said. "Small gets tired on a long walk."
At the time she had not thought it was much of an answer. Now, watching two old men cross the lane she had just shot down, she understood that it had been the whole answer, the only one he had.
The walk down to the plate was longer than it looked from behind the line, which was the first honest thing about it.
From the officials' table the plate had been a toy, a rusty rectangle in a picture of mountains. On foot it withdrew. The lane was pale gravel giving way to sand, and sand giving way in places to hard, cracked earth that rang faintly under a boot heel. There was no shade anywhere on it. The heat came up off the ground as well as down out of the sky, so that a man walking felt himself to be the filling in a bright, dry sandwich, and Grant, who had planned to think clearly all the way, found for the first stretch that he could think of nothing but water, and the particular sound the cooler by the officials' table made when somebody lifted its lid.
Hargrove walked with his hands behind his back, his cap square, his black jacket absorbing the sun in a way that made Grant privately furious on his behalf.
"Take the jacket off," Grant said.
"No."
"Walter, you will fall down and I will have to write that down too."
"If I fall down on the way to that plate it will be the most interesting thing that has happened to me in eleven years, and I include two grandchildren and a pacemaker consultation. Keep walking."
Their shadows went with them, short and dark at this hour, barely longer than the men themselves. Behind them the range had gone into the particular quiet of people who have been told not to talk over something and are talking anyway, at the volume of insects. Grant could hear fragments whenever the air shifted. Did she. No way to. My cousin says. If you zoom. He let the fragments pass. He had spent a career listening to the first version of events and he knew the first version was a foal, all legs, not yet able to stand.
Halfway down, Hargrove stopped.
He did not stop dramatically. He simply stopped walking, and Grant took two more paces before he understood that the boots beside him had gone silent, and turned.
Hargrove was looking not at the plate but back, the way they had come. From here the firing line was a low, crowded horizon: the covered stand, the banners moving very slightly, the dark shapes of rifles at rest, the crowd, the officials' table with the binoculars on it like a black animal asleep. And at the centre of it, small with distance and completely alone in the open space in front of the line, a figure in a khaki shirt with her hair in a bun.
"She is still standing exactly where she stopped," Hargrove said.
"She was told to hold her position."