She seemed to satisfy herself
after a minute. He heard her footsteps begin to quicken, and then the
bigger, heavier steps came faster too.
Earl took his hands out of his
pockets, where he had been warming them, then slowly rolled onto his
belly and pushed the A.W. against his shoulder. This was the sort of
shot he had waited for. They would be moving away from him with their
backs fully exposed.
He listened and strained his
eyes to see, but he could not quite tell where they were. He picked
up the flashlight and clamped it against the foregrip with his left
hand, then turned it on.
For an instant he saw them: the
man on the left, the woman on the right. But the flashlight had an
unforeseen effect. The woman seemed to pitch forward onto her face,
and the man crouched beside her and fired. Earl saw the first bright
flashes as the man fired the pistol at his flashlight.
Earl ducked low and switched off
his flashlight. He heard the ricochets as the next two bullets
pounded off the rocks behind him. Then, after one more shot, there
was silence.
Earl thought hard. Hatcher had
fired. Jane had not. It had been a reasonable shot – certainly
the best they could hope to get. Why had she held her fire? Earl
crawled a few feet away to a new hiding place and peered over the
rocks. He could see nothing.
He steadied himself, aimed the
rifle, and switched on the light. Hatcher leapt up from his crouch
and ran, but Jane stayed on the ground. Hatcher dashed to the left,
back toward the woods. Earl followed him in the scope, but suddenly
sensed something was wrong: Jane could have sent Hatcher off to draw
Earl’s attention while she rushed him in the dark. Earl held
his fire and quickly swept the light toward the woman. She wasn’t
dashing toward Earl. She was still lying there. When the light hit
her, she rolled to her side and screamed. “Pete! Don’t
leave me here!” There was no answer, and her voice came again,
lower and with less hope. “Please!”
Earl swept the light along the
slope of the mountain, but Pete Hatcher was gone. Then he turned the
light back on the woman. She still didn’t fire, and she still
didn’t get up. She began to drag her body along on the rocks,
using her left leg and her hands to try to slither out of the beam
that pinned her there. She couldn’t be faking it. She knew as
well as he did that if the bright white beam could reach her, the
bullet could too.
Earl’s heart beat faster.
He knew exactly what had happened, because for two days he had been
afraid it would happen to him. She had been startled when the light
went on, turned her head to look at it, taken a blind step, and
twisted her ankle in the rocks.
Hatcher had certainly emptied
his pistol firing at the fight. That could not be faked. When he had
no bullets left and Jane was not about to do any running, there
wasn’t much he could do but take off and hope Earl took his
time killing her. No, Hatcher probably didn’t even have that
much calculation in him. He had panicked, as they always did at the
end. Now he would run until he was exhausted and lost before he
remembered there was such a person as Jane.
Earl began to walk toward her.
He could probably have bagged her from this distance, even in the dim
light of the flashlight and with her lying down, but doing it that
way made no sense. He had only ten rounds left, and after that the
beautiful precision rifle would be seventeen pounds of useless metal.
He began to relish the chance to look into her eyes before he killed
her. He could afford to do that. Pete Hatcher was going nowhere. He
would never have gotten this far without professional help, and now
he was alone with an empty pistol in mountain wilderness with a
snowstorm coming. There was a good chance he didn’t even have
the map and compass. Jane never would have let an amateur do the
navigating. Earl would search her body and find out.
When Earl was fifty feet away
from her, he turned on his flashlight again. Her eyes squinted
against the glare and she struggled to rise to her knees, but she
didn’t seem to be eager to put weight on the ankle. Earl moved
closer.
“Don’t bother to get
up on my account, Jane,” he said.
“How do you know my name?”
She could not keep the fear and shock out of her voice. How could he
possibly know her real name?
Earl kept walking. “I know
everything about you. You’ve been mine for months. Since June,
I think.”
As he approached, he watched
her. She fidgeted in the beam as though it were intense heat instead
of ordinary light.
“What are you waiting
for?” asked Jane.
“I was just trying to
decide. One part of me says you ought to go just the way my dogs did
– gutted and left to lie there for a while before you die.”
He could see that Jane had to
force her mouth into that unconvincing skeptical smile. “We’re
both professionals. You won, I lost. You can afford one bullet to the
head and be on your way. Those are the stakes, not torture.”
He set his rifle on the rocks,
took his pistol out of his jacket pocket, and came closer. He was
within fifteen feet of her now. “Is that so? What you’ve
been putting me through – is that just business? You’ve
been slowly sawing my balls off.”
He began to pace on the rocks.
The flashlight’s beam whipped across her face, then bobbed up
and down on her body.
She tried to make her voice
sound calm, almost cheerful. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“It wasn’t personal. I don’t know you.” She
could see that his agitation was growing.
He stepped quickly toward her.
“Well, you’re going to, because I’m going to do
just what he did to Linda.”
She tried to decipher the words,
but her mind stumbled, and gave her nothing but the terror. “Who?
Who’s Linda?” The grimace on his face and the abrupt,
jerky movements of his body told her that whether Linda was a real
person or “what he did to Linda” was just a slang way of
saying something awful, what this man was planning was not a mere
execution. She watched, mesmerized, as he bent his knees to set his
lighted flashlight and pistol on the ground a few yards from her
feet, where she could never hope to reach them.
As he stepped away from them
toward her, his big silhouette caught in the dim aura of the
flashlight, Jane brought Pete Hatcher’s pistol around her body
and fired it four times into his chest.
Earl’s eyes squeezed tight
with pain, then opened wide with knowledge. He knew why Hatcher had
still been kneeling beside her in the dark after he had emptied the
pistol, when he should have been running. It was to hand it to her,
so she could reload it and lie there with her body hiding it.
He toppled forward across her
legs.
The weight was smothering,
confining. She used all her strength to lift his torso an inch and
pull her legs out, then dropped him. It was not until she had stood
up and taken a step backward that she was sure he was dead.
She took two deep breaths and
heard Pete’s running footsteps, coming along the ridge. He had
completed his circle to come up behind the hunter, and now he was
carrying the sniper rifle. He sidestepped around the body, keeping
his eyes on it, horrified at the body and still frightened that the
man might be alive.
She bent and picked up the
hunter’s flashlight and his pistol. She said, “I’m
going to ask you two questions. No matter what the answers are, I’ll
show you how to get out of here and leave you safe. But I have to
know.”
He looked at her,
uncomprehending. “Anything. Ask.”
She knelt beside the body,
clutched the belt and the shoulder and rolled him over, then shone
the flashlight on the face. “Have you ever seen this man
before?”
Pete Hatcher stepped close and
stared down at the blood that had soaked the front of the shirt.
“Uh,” he grunted. Then he kept walking around to the
man’s feet to see the face right side up. “No,” he
said. “Never.” He seemed to shiver once to get the sight
out of his mind.
Jane moved the light to Pete
Hatcher’s face. “Do you know somebody named Linda?”
Pete’s shoulders came up
in a shrug and stayed there. He seemed to search the night sky for a
moment. “A few. Linda Horn. I dated her in college. Linda
Becker. She used to do my taxes, but she married a lawyer and they
moved to New York. I don’t know…. Give me a hint.”
Jane didn’t move the
light. “We’re miles from anywhere, where nobody can hear.
Obviously I’m not going to tell anybody about any of this,
ever. Is there a reason somebody named Linda might wish she’d
never met you?”
She could see he was genuinely
confused, searching his memory over and over without finding an
answer. “No. I don’t think so.”
Jane switched off the
flashlight. She looked up. The moon and stars had never come out, and
the cold wind was pushing low, dark clouds in an endless stream
across the sky. “You’d better go find a soft place and
start digging a hole for him.” She looked back down at the body
and began searching the pockets.
“What are you looking
for?”
“Hurry. Snow is coming.”
Jane searched the man’s
pockets, pulled up his shirt and his pant legs to search for anything
that might be strapped to his body, took off his jacket. She found a
map like hers and a good compass, a magazine for the rifle with six
rounds in it. There was a knife stuck in the belt at the small of his
back. The coat was stuffed with jerky and crumbled biscuits. When she
had taken them out, she felt a stiff spot in the lining, so she
sliced it open with his knife and found a thick plastic packet full
of money and identification cards.
Jane picked up her flashlight
and searched the plateau carefully and methodically, beginning with
the spot where she had first seen the man, then the hiding place
where he had opened fire, then backtracking until she found the
tracks where he had come up out of the valley, then simply walking
back and forth to sweep the rocky, windblown expanse with her light.
When she returned, she found
Pete waiting for her. They each took an ankle of the corpse and
dragged it to the hillside. Pete had rolled some big stones aside and
dug in the soft earth beneath them, filling his jacket with dirt,
then dumping it out and filling it again. He had managed to dig about
three feet down before he had hit bedrock. Jane helped Pete drag the
body into the hole and push all of the dirt over it, then roll the
big stones into place.
They walked back to the spot
where they had left their packs, and Jane began to redistribute the
gear. She put all of the money and most of the food in Pete’s
pack with his pistol and his ammunition. Then she handed him the dead
man’s map and compass. He said, “Why are you giving these
to me?”
She turned on her flashlight and
held it on the small pile of belongings the dead man had been
carrying. “Besides the map and compass, he had identification,
money, biscuits and jerky, bullets.”
“So?”
“Think about what he
didn’t have. No tent, no bedroll, no pack, not even a change of
socks. No car keys. There’s somebody else, coming along the
trail carrying the heavy stuff.”
“Then let’s get
moving,” he said. “If they’re carrying all that
stuff, it should be easy to keep ahead of them.”
She handed him his pack. She
pointed north along the ridge. “Go as straight as you can, to
the north. In an hour, maybe three at the most, you’ll be able
to see a lake below you on the right. That’s Cameron Lake. It’s
in Canada, and at the end of it is a big, modem road.”
“But I can’t leave
you out here alone, waiting for some killer.”
“You can’t do
anything else,” she said. She put on her pack, stuck the
killer’s .45 pistol in her jacket pocket. “I don’t
work for you anymore. I quit. If you walk in that direction until
dawn, you can be in Lethbridge by noon, and on a plane by dinner
time. Head for Dallas. Rent a place like the one I told you about. If
you use the papers in your pack, you’ll be safe.”
He held her shoulders. “Come
with me,” he pleaded. The next words came out as though he
thought they would be a surprise. “I love you.”
She bobbed up on her toes and
kissed his cheek. “I love you, too. You’re my brother.”
She slung the big sniper rifle over her shoulder, turned away, and
began to walk.
Pete Hatcher stood and stared
after her as long as he could, a tiny human form diminishing along
the dark, rocky plateau. Twice he watched her drop onto a lower shelf
where he could not see her, then reappear, climbing the next one. The
third time, he did not see her again.
Lenny
made his way along the trail with difficulty. It had been hard enough
to walk ten miles a day carrying a hundred and fifty pounds of gear
along a rough trail, but during the night a steady snow had begun to
fall. The rocks and tree roots had acquired a thin glaze of ice and a
covering of feathery snow that could turn an ordinary step into a
broken leg. The path was getting harder to see, and in a few hours it
would look just like the sparse pine forest around it. He stopped
frequently to consult his compass and look for identifiable
landmarks, but the snow whitened the air and hid the crests of the
mountains like a fog. He was beginning to feel more and more uneasy.
At six in the morning he had
calculated that if he kept to the trail, he would make it to the
campsite at Goat Haunt by eight. Now it was after ten, and he was not
sure he was even on the trail. The scraggly evergreen trees were
beginning to look ghostly and unclear. A packing of white along one
side of each trunk had made them begin to fade into the stillness of
the landscape.
The fact that he had allowed
himself to be put into this predicament was a source of amazement to
him. He tried to follow the logic of events backward, but his mistake
– his share in the blame for this disaster – could not be
found in the recent past. It wasn’t anything he had done. It
had only been his vulnerability to people like Earl.