Random Violence by Jassy Mackenzie Read Free Book Online Page A

She didn’t have the strength or experience to hold the big gun still. But she could judge the circles. The crosshairs moved in a pattern. Up, around and down. Up, around and down. As they came down, they passed straight over the blurry outline of the can.
    As the hairs came down, Jade squeezed the trigger.
    The gun exploded in her arms and bucked against her shoulder, thrusting her backwards along the dirt. She clutched the barrel and closed her eyes against the dust.
    Doppies took the rifle from her. “Well done, my girl. Well done. Let’s go and see if that Coke can took any damage.”
    She could sense he was humoring her. But she didn’t care. The proud smile her father gave her was enough. She had tried. She’d dared to do it.
    They walked down the path, all the way to the bottom of the valley. Then they walked up the other side.
    The ranger started looking anxious. He couldn’t see the can in the dirt ahead of them. He shaded his eyes and peered into the distance. He shook his head. He knew where he had put the can. There was no point in walking any further. Then he looked over at the grass on the left-hand side of the track. Jade looked, too. A glint of red and white caught her eye.
    Doppies picked up the can. The impact of the bullet had flung it off the track and into the grass. There was a hole directly through its middle. The bullet had pierced it twice. Once on the way in and once on the way out. He held it up and shook his head in disbelief. The sun flashed at Jade through the double hole her bullet had made.
    “Keep shooting like that, you’re going to be a dangerous woman when you’re older,” Doppies said, stunned.
    And Jade kept shooting like that. Straight enough to beat her father’s score when they practiced together. Accurate enough to win the provincial combat pistol-shooting cham-pionships three years in a row.
    Since then, she’d never gone more than a few weeks without practicing, because that was another rule of her father’s.
    The practice range she chose while she waited for Dean Grobbelaar to return her call was owned by one of Robbie’s contacts. He was a no-questions type of guy, which suited Jade fine. She didn’t want a friendly type who would engage her in conversation, request a copy of her identification, ask where she was from and where she’d got that handsome gun. Rob-bie’s friend was the exact opposite. He actually looked pissed off to see a customer, as disoriented as if he had just surfaced from a heavy freebasing session. He had dark shadows under his eyes, and wore a string vest that defied the cold and showed off his substantial belly.
    She reloaded with lead-tipped ammo and spent an hour firing off a hundred rounds, ducking and diving, sprinting and crouching. She clicked fresh magazines into place on the run, double-tapping the metal targets and hearing them clang onto the uneven ground as they fell. On every target, she pictured Viljoen’s face. When she spun and fired, she imagined him behind her. Would she be fast enough when the time came?
    By the end, she was sweating under her long-sleeved shirt. Her hands and arms were sore from the gun’s recoil and her ears rang despite the protective earmuffs.
    She got back to her car to find that Grobbelaar still hadn’t returned her call. Just what kind of an investigator was he?
    She thumbed the last of the lead-tipped bullets out of her gun’s chamber and inserted a magazine of copper-jackets. Real targets needed penetration and stopping power, not loud noise and surface splatter. Especially real targets that stopped their car outside her house in the middle of the night, engine idling and lights off.
    She shivered as she thought about that nighttime surveil-lance. How had Viljoen known she was back in the country less than twenty-four hours after her flight had landed? While he was locked up in prison, serving the last few days of a ten-year sentence which he surely wouldn’t want to jeopardize.
    There were