The Perfect Instinct by Christopher Metcalf

Author:Christopher Metcalf [Metcalf, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780988601642
Publisher: Tree Tunnel Publishing, LLC
Published: 2017-01-21T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Scraggly beard gone, he looked at his reflection in the dirty mirror and nodded. Lance continued to nod. One of his favorites by U2 was into its final chorus. The rousing and rising ending was coming. This live version of the song was right there at the top of his list of all time favorites.

Wonder why it played now? It usually only came on in his jukebox brain when the action was hot. The tune was playing in his head in Juarez and before that in Lisbon. Both times he was running, moving, shooting, killing.

He'd been lost in thought while shaving. He was thinking about lanugo, the soft downy layer of hair that covers the baby in the womb. The lanugo should have fallen off their baby this week. An with that soft hair falling away, the pasty white vernix caseosa that protects the baby's skin is growing thicker. Funky stuff going on in there.

He tossed the cheap razor and shave foam can into the trash and pushed it down under paper towels and other garbage. He put the sunglasses and gloves back on, pulled the brim of the hat down and turned from the mirror. He stepped outside into the mid-morning sunlight and knew right away why his favorite U2 song was playing.

He'd been careless walking the street during the day. Someone spotted him this morning. Positioned in the parking lot at 45 degree angles were two police cars. A third was on the street 60-feet away. Three officers stood behind open car doors with guns drawn and aimed at him.

Split-second. No delay. U2.

Without forethought or consideration of the movement, he dove to the right into a shoulder roll followed by another forward dive and roll once he came back to his feet. He heard the shouts of the men closest to him. Right behind the shout, he heard and then felt the shots. Years and years of reading up on the subject of sound and sound waves gave him an ultra-detailed map of the living world around him.

Preacher did the math. Way back when, during his first stint at Harvey Point, the secret and secretive CIA spook training facility in the marshlands along North Carolina's coast, he read the research on bullet velocity and human muscle response. Muscle twitch, some refer to it. The answer is always the same. Bullets win.

A projectile propelled forward by an explosion inside a tight metal tube does so at a speed of approximately 3,200-feet per second. That's fast. A human given a visual cue at the speed of light still has to send a signal from brain through nerves to muscles which then have to pull on tendons attached to bone in order to move, even just a tiny bit. The well-aimed speeding bullet is always going to win.

But Lance also knows the secret to beating this universal law. Movement. Any movement at the time of the firing of the weapon will do. The more, the better. An expert marksman still must adjust aim and predict next movement to keep the target within his or her sights.

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