Hunters (12 page)

He tried to grasp the edge of rock that his
other hand clung to, but it was too small, and now he reached
toward her, his hand twitching like a wounded bird. "Meggie..." he
croaked. "Help..help me..."

There was none of the monster in him now,
only a little boy, fiercely frightened and in peril of his life, a
stupid little boy who was suddenly afraid of pain and death and
falling. Megan's feet were on a granite outcropping wide and strong
enough to support them both. She dropped to her knees, twisted her
body, and began to reach down toward Butch's hand. But what she saw
in his eyes stopped her.

It was not gratitude or relief she saw there,
but a glare of triumph, of winning once again, of
beating
her one final time. It was a look that said,
Pull me up, you
bitch, and I'll kill you and tear out your guts to climb back down
again.

She knelt there, looking down at him until he
knew that she was not going to help, that she was going to let him
die. "Help me!" he cried, not fearfully now, but angrily, as if he
feared the loss of his power over her more than his own death.
"
Meggie! Help
me!"

She couldn't move. She could only watch him
as his free hand struggled upward to meet her in some way, if only
to grasp her and drag her down with him. It was not like a bird
now, but like a crushed, thrashing snake, and she pulled away from
it.

Megan stood up, and watched for what seemed like
hours until his white fingers finally weakened and slid on the
moist rock, and he fell, shouting as he flew away from her, words
that she did not then understand, and even though she had heard
them a thousand times since, waking and sleeping, had never
understood.

A
fterward, and even
now, she did not know whether the hatred she saw in her husband's
face as she started to reach for him was really there, or if she
had put it there herself, if, tired of the beatings and the rapes
and the words that hurt even more, she had let him die rather than
saved her own life.

The police were more forgiving. Butch had a
reputation, and although she had never pressed charges, enough
people had witnessed Megan's humiliations that no time was lost in
pronouncing the death accidental. It helped that the district
magistrate's wife was a friend of Megan's mother, who had told her
tales of her daughter's woe at length.

And though it had all happened years before,
and half a state away, Megan still kept it with her every day,
wondering what she had done, and why she had done it. Her life was
far better now, that much was true. She had a man who loved her and
never touched her except with gentleness, love, or passion. But she
always had Butch as well, walking just behind her, breathing around
the corner, hanging beneath her on the cliffs of her dreams,
falling away until his grin was only a speck of white in the
darkness, and his cry the faintest murmur of night wind.

She thought she heard that cry today, in the
madman's
I'll be seeing YOU
. She wondered if it was true,
and feared that it was.

Afraid to stay in the house any longer, she left Ned
a note telling him that she had gone down to the newspaper office,
and that he should meet her there. On the way out the door, she
thought about getting a pistol from upstairs and putting it in her
purse, but decided against it. It had been a gun, after all, that
had started all this. If this crazy man hadn't been a friend of the
butcher Ned had killed the day before, then who the hell else could
he be?

"G
oddam, goddam,
god
dam!
That was great!" Sheldon Lake crowed as he drove. He
steered the car with his right hand, and squeezed a white
handkerchief in his left. The blood soaked into it, making it
red.

He thought he had never seen as beautiful or
as dangerous a color. His blood was as deadly as a bullet or a
knife blade, and he giggled at the thought. He wondered what would
happen if Ned Craig's bitch cleaned up her porch and got some of
his blood in a cut or something. Would she get AIDS right off? Or
would it just be that HIV at first?

Hell, probably nothing would happen at all.
She'd probably be careful. That was all right, though. He'd get
them both together, get them so they'd know what was happening
because he'd goddam well
tell
them, and he'd laugh his ass
off while he did, and then he'd do what they called that
coop de
grace
thing, what his daddy had done to himself. He'd blow his
own fucking head off right in front of them and splatter the both
of them with even more of his blood, show them what was waiting for
both of them now, show them that a real man wasn't afraid to
die.

But first, he was going to have a hell of a
night, or maybe even two, depending. He turned his pickup west
toward Pittsburgh. There were places in the city he could get
stoned out of his ass with whores who would be willing to screw a
guy with enough money and not make him put on a rubber. Hell, if
they caught it from him, that was their lookout, wasn't it? Risky
business all around. You look at it that way, just living was risky
business, when punching a faggot in the mouth can get your ass
killed deader than taking on a bar full of niggers with a
stick.

He shook his head once more at his fate, and
wondered if there was anyone else he ought to visit one last time.
He remembered one more person he should say goodbye to, made a
mental note, and switched on the radio. It was news, and he changed
it quickly. He didn't like news. Instead he found a country
station, and let Alan Jackson sing about some goddam river Sheldon
would never see as he drove west toward a darkening sky.

M
ichael Brewster sat
and waited for his kill, and hoped it would come quickly and
easily. He was not used to waiting, especially with the kind of
patience the hunting of men required.

Other things came easily enough to Michael,
except for one, and that was winning Jean Catlett back into his
bed. Now that Andrew was gone, maybe it could be done. After all,
his only rival on this trip at least was Chuck Marriner, an utter
boob who was already screwing that vicious little Rogers bitch. And
as for Tim Weems, athletic as he might be, Michael thought that he
had no romantic interest in Jean, and even suspected that he might
be gay.

He had to admit, though, that Weems had not
shown the least bit of interest in him in the few nights they had
been rooming together. Michael could step out of the shower naked
without catching Weems's glance, and once the light was out and
Weems said goodnight, there was no further talk in the dark about
life and love and purpose and why they were there. Those questions
had all been answered long before. If not, they would have been
back in L.A., Michael with his father's entertainment law firm, and
Weems running his Beverly Hills outdoor gear shop.

But they were here instead, in the freezing
heart of Pennsylvania's forests, spread out today in different
counties to widen the web of terror they hoped to weave around the
hunting community. Yesterday was a start, although it had been a
waste of one of their lives.

Andrew was a fuckup through and through, a
pretty boy with more ego than brains, a typical actor who had
played a part too realistically and gotten himself stupidly killed
as a result. That was Andrew, always going for the grand gesture.
What had he been doing, writing an animal rights manifesto on the
dead hunter's skin with a pocketknife? He probably thought it would
impress Jean, get him into her good graces all the more. Instead it
had gotten him into a body bag.

Well, not Michael. The movement was not worth
such a risk. And while Jean Catlett's sweet body and father's
empire might be worth more, he wasn't going to do anything
foolhardy to impress her. He would conduct this deal like he did
all his others, coolly, thoughtfully, and with minimal risk to
himself and his interests, be they his clients or his own ass.

He had dropped Weems off at a state game
lands to the west in Potter County at seven in the morning, and had
arrived in McKean County's area of the Allegheny National Forest
shortly after eight. He had headed directly west from where he
parked his van, following the compass wherever it took him, knowing
that no matter where he went, all he had to do was follow the
needle back due east to make his way out of the wooded labyrinth
when his job was done.

That simple view changed when he began to
encounter impassable brambles, steep drop-offs, and swampy patches
that were just starting to glaze over with a tan coating of ice
that crumbled beneath his heavy boots, lodging him in slush to his
ankles. Still, he tried to maintain the concept of
west
, and
trudged on until he found what he thought was the ideal place.

A tree stand perched a dozen feet above the
forest floor at a spot where Michael thought what might have been
two deer paths crossed. Seven two by fours spiked into the huge
maple led upward, and Michael slung his rifle over his back and
climbed them, carefully testing each makeshift rung before
entrusting his weight to it. The platform at the top was plywood,
and seemed weak in spots, but sagged only a bit as he sat slowly
down.

Then he waited, trying to be patient. It was
difficult. In one sense, patience was no stranger to him. The mere
formalities of law, especially when dealing with the intricacies of
entertainment law, could stretch cases out for years, but while one
simmered, another boiled. There was always plenty to do. But here
there was nothing except to sit in the cold and wait, which Michael
did for hours.

He ate his lunch and even took out a
paperback and read the parts of it an associate had marked as
having litigious possibilities, but he couldn't keep his mind on
the words. Every sound of a branch moving in the wind drew his
attention away, and finally he returned the book to an inner pocket
of his warm coat.

Just before three in the afternoon, his
quarry arrived. A man in his thirties brought the blaze orange
target of his chest down one of the deer paths from the southwest.
When he saw Michael he raised a hand and gave a short wave,
remaining silent in hopes, Michael thought, of not scaring away the
deer he assumed Michael sought as well as he.

Michael waved back, traded a smile as he let
the man pass beneath him, then, from ten yards away, aimed down at
the man's retreating back and fired his rifle into it.

The man jerked for a second, surprising
Michael, who had expected him to go down immediately, then fell
face down with a nasty, wet sound like an egg hurled into mud, and
lay still.

Well, Michael thought, that was easy
enough.

He scanned what he could see of the forest,
but found no other movement. Then he slung his rifle and climbed
down from the stand. The man was dead, and Michael watched for a
moment as the fast flowing blood darkened the ground beneath him.
In comparison, only a little blood came out of the entrance wound,
which, Michael presumed, had gone straight through the heart and
probably made a big hole on the other side. He had neither the
desire nor the time to turn the body over and look.

Instead he crouched by the dead man, took out his
knife, and made the mark on the body that they had decided the
night before would be their sign, a large notch on the left ear.
The knife swept through the cartilage as easily as through butter.
There was hardly any bleeding, and Michael wiped the blade on the
dead man's jacket, stood up, opened his compass, and headed west.
He hoped that things were going as easily for the others as they
were for him.

T
hey were not, at
least in Timothy Weems's case. He should have known things would be
miserable when he read about Forest County in their brochures. It
was perfectly named. There were no traffic lights, no four-lane
roads, no TV or radio stations, not even a daily newspaper, and
they
bragged
about it, a bastion of primitive ignorance
secure in its inferiority.

Hunters. That was all it was good for. And
hunters were bad for everything else. He hated them all, and, at
the beginning of the trip, he couldn't wait to kill as many as
possible. But now he found that he was a different man than he had
thought.

Today he had three,
three
of them in
the sights of his scope at different times, all alone, and had been
unable to pull the trigger. He had been absolutely safe, and could
have gotten away with shooting any of the three. What had he been
afraid of? Being caught? Or the killing itself?

The damned thing was that he was
never
afraid. The things he had done in his life had proven that. He had
sky-dived, bungee jumped, climbed rocks, taken his life and offered
it to whatever gods of gravity might choose to splatter him on the
ground. He could
not
be afraid. What hung uselessly between
his legs would not let him.

Dickless wonder
. The words came to him
again, the words that had never been used against him by anyone
else, but which had always been at the back of his mind, pushing
him, making him the success that he was today, so that every
upscale climber, packer, jumper, and diver in L.A. knew his name
and patronized his shop, and theorized about his sex life.

Some thought he was straight and discreet.
Others thought him gay and even more discreet. And a few,
correctly, thought of him as purely monastic, living a life as
sexless as a bishop's. This latter was the case, though he had no
choice in the matter. It had been made for him years before.

He had been fourteen years old, hunting mule
deer with his father and two of his father's friends in the
mountains of Colorado. It was Tim's first time afield, and he was
excited and careless, a carelessness that led to a tangle with one
of his father's friends while crossing a rail fence. They fell, a
rifle discharged, and just as quickly as that, Tim received a
bullet in his groin. It tore away most of his scrotum and half his
penis, and the loss of blood nearly killed him.