The girl had been dead a long time before he finally stopped killing her.
Finally, the prey Decatur had been hunting all morning came into focus. His real prey. His trophy. He squeezed the trigger - half from instinct, half from conscious decision. The explosion shattered the early morning silence.
Decatur instinctively knew, as the gun punched into his shoulder and the target in his scope disappeared in the blur of the recoil, that the perfect shot he'd been waiting for all these hours was his. One hundred and fifty yards away, the bullet drilled the 23-year-old woman in the head and tunneled downward through her spine. She was dead before she collapsed face down into the stream.
"Well, well, looks like we have us another winner!" Decatur amusingly said to himself as he watched the water turn different shades of red. Enthralled, he couldn't wait until next summer.
