Authors: Matt Hilton
Our bullets must have crossed midway; because I was knocked back against the tree at the exact same time he folded over my round in his gut. I’d been hit higher up; attesting to that was the way in which my body was spun by the impact and my left arm swung out to compensate. I smacked up against the tree, and then fell on my side, landing badly because my arm wasn’t able to break the fall. The initial shock of being shot was bad enough, but the pain hadn’t hit yet. It would come and when it happened it would be debilitating. Had to stop the hunter before he could turn his attention on Billie. I fought to a good shooting position, even as the man cursed and struggled with the bolt on his rifle. In his shadowed face, his eyes rolled white and his teeth flashed. His concentration was on me as he fired and the impact on my left shoulder made me jerk the trigger of my SIG so that my return shot missed. Blackness edged my vision, and I barely saw the man take an extra step forward, firming his rifle against his shoulder. A hot wetness was pooling in my shirt and my breath hitched in my lungs. So this is it then, I thought, the place I’m going to die?
I pushed the thought aside. I’d reconciled myself to violent and uncompromising death long ago, also resolving that when the time came I wouldn’t lie down and give in to the inevitable.
‘Bastard,’ I snarled as I squeezed my trigger again and again.
The rifleman’s gun flashed, but my hearing had compressed to register only the rush of blood through my veins. He danced a jig, a dark crimson halo puffing around him as my bullets struck repeatedly. I felt the solid thud of his round slam me, and the strength required to pull my trigger fled.
The smell of cordite wafted past, replaced by the coppery tang of spilled blood: whether the gunman’s or mine I couldn’t be sure.
My hearing was still muffled, and a heavy fog descended through my field of vision. Billie clawed herself free of her foxhole, began crawling towards me. I showed her my empty palm. Droplets of blood peppered the back of my hand.
‘Leave me,’ I said. ‘Go back the way we just came. Try to get to the road.’
Perhaps the words were only in my head, or she was more spirited than I’d already thought, because she didn’t run away. She went down on her knees beside me, and I realised I was lying on my back, peering up at her. She’d found my knife. Her hair whipped round her face as she slashed and stabbed in an arc around her, her voice screeching a challenge.
‘I . . . I’m done. Get away before the others come.’
Between killing the rifleman and Billie grabbing my knife, I must have passed out. I’d lost time. There were already men standing around us, pitiless in the way they aimed their guns down at us both.
Billie shrieked something at them, lunging with the knife.
One of the silhouetted figures grabbed her by an elbow and yanked it away. She fought to break loose. Her captor struck her across the face and she slumped. I tried to struggle up, but if anything only my astral form moved, because I wasn’t going anywhere. My arms were numb, as were my legs. My body felt as heavy as a mountainside. Only my eyelids had the ability to move, but even that strength was slipping away.
Someone crouched close by my side. A hand roughly patted me down, checking for other weapons. I’d no idea where my SIG was.
‘So who the hell is this guy?’ a voice asked, the words coming to me as if from a great distance.
‘Doesn’t matter now,’ said another. ‘Finish him, Danny.’
My lids flickering, I tried to face death.
I saw the metallic gleam of a gun barrel.
A flash.
That was all.
2
Days earlier . . .
Billie Womack loved her home. It was a ranch-style, two storeys, with a peaked roof and stone chimney stack at one end and a flower garden out front. A porch ran the length of the front of the house, with a pitched roof to sluice off the frequent rain showers, or for depositing the accumulated snow during the winter months. Beyond the house was an old double-width garage, a reclaimed barn from the days when farming was the primary occupation in the region. In the garage she kept her father’s ancient Chevrolet pick-up truck and her smaller runaround, a VW Jetta SportWagen, as well as a quad bike for when she needed to get around her land on maintenance chores. The house stood on a spit of land above a pebble embankment marking the southern shore of a lake known locally as ‘Baker’s Hole’. A stream plumed from the higher hills to the south of the house, disappeared beneath the access road, then wound a narrow path past her front garden and emptied into the lake. Tree-capped hills dominated the horizon whichever way she looked.
She’d inherited the house and fifteen acres of land on the southern side of the lake years ago, but never tired of standing on her porch viewing the changeable hills as each successive season passed. She recorded the passage of time with the hues of each season, painting them in oils and acrylics, occasionally in the sombre hues of charcoal and pencil when her mood plummeted from longing to regret. She was certain her daughter, Nicola, would have loved her home too, but Nicola was no longer there to appreciate it.
These days her paintings were Billie’s main source of income. She’d earned herself a name in the art world, and occasionally sold her creations to buyers over the Internet, but most she sold to tourists from a boutique gallery she ran in the nearby town of Hill End, Washington State. Her artwork was a reason she’d held on to her dad’s old pick-up, as temperamental a vehicle as it was: carting her easel and paints and all the attached paraphernalia around wasn’t easy in her Jetta, particularly when she went off-road to capture the scenery from a higher vantage point than the lakeside. On occasion she used the back of the pick-up as a platform on which she erected her easel, usually when the ground was thick with snow or boggy from rainfall.
She’d used the pick-up to get to a high point on the western hills, from where she could barely make out the roof and chimney stack of her house in the distance. On most days she’d have had no view of her home but today the weather was clement. Although the sky was pale grey, the clouds were insubstantial and very high. A little of the sun’s heat made it to the valley floor, but it wasn’t warm enough to shed her coat and boots yet. She was painting the undertones on to canvas; readying a landscape view she’d later take indoors and finish by memory in the attic bedroom she’d converted to a studio. It was important that she lay down the basis of the painting, not so much that the detail was exact later on. She took delight in inventing facets of her artwork that did not exist in the real world, and also by leaving out those that did. In that way she could paint the same scene over and over but each would be unique. Her current work showed the rock-strewn shore of Baker’s Hole, the still waters stretching half a mile to an undulating forest. For undertones she was using a sepia palette. But then she dipped her brush in the cadmium red and directed a single vertical stroke near the water’s edge. That was where Nicki would stand in the finished painting. Nicki featured in all her paintings without exception. It was her way of keeping her daughter’s memory alive.
In her paintings Nicki’s features were always left blank. It wasn’t through lack of trying that Billie couldn’t bring to mind her child’s face, and she had no desire to do so wrongly. She had any number of photographs of Nicola, digital and regular, but refused to refer to them for inspiration. The featureless girl had become her trademark and she preferred things to remain like that. She doubted she could have done her daughter’s beauty justice anyway.
She wasn’t maudlin as she applied the red paint to canvas. Nicola had been dead more than four years, the first raw flush of grief behind Billie now. When she thought of her daughter these days it was with a smile, and not the soul-devouring rage that once drove her to slash at the canvas with charcoal.
Finished for now, she stepped back, measuring the proportions of her creation, judging angles and depth, the play of shadow and weak sunlight, and she nodded in something approaching satisfaction. Never full satisfaction, because like all artists she was never confident that her creations were as good as they could be. It would do, she told herself, and washed out her brushes. She loaded her kit in a purpose-built lock-box, and placed it on the back of the pick-up with her collapsed easel. The canvas she set on the passenger seat for safety. After a half-dozen turns of the ignition key the old pick-up started, belching blue smoke. Driving back down the hillside, she took it slowly, and not just because she barely trusted the vehicle to complete the journey; she had no wish for the still-wet canvas to fall against the dashboard and smear.
A narrow track wound between trees, before the woodland opened up to the valley and lake. Birds broke from the tree line, startled to life by the sputtering growl of Billie’s vehicle. The engine noise and the cawing of birdlife carried far across the still waters, before echoing back from the line of hills. Billie part-squinted at each high-pitched call of the birds, sensing that if they continued it would herald the onset of a migraine headache. She had no desire to retire to a darkened room to stave off the pain and nausea, so instead elected to wind up her window and block the shrieks. She urged the pick-up along the road, seeing again her lovely house heave into view. The rise and fall of the road made it impossible to see all of the property in one go, and at first she could only make out the gable, the chimney stack and the garage; then when only a quarter-mile from home she saw something that was out of place.
‘Who’s that?’ she wondered aloud.
Parked in front of her house was a gunmetal-grey sedan car. Occasionally she received visitors, but they were few and far between. Generally it was a neighbour who called by, or someone interested in purchasing her artwork having been guided to the house by Hilary Bartlet, who worked part-time at Billie’s shop in Hill End. She wondered if this latest arrival had come in search of a particular piece of art, or to commission work, because the grey car wasn’t a vehicle she recognised. Billie craned to make out a figure inside it, but from this distance the windows were opaque, as blank and formulaic in colour as the car’s paintwork.
A man of similarly bland colours was standing on her porch.
That of itself wasn’t surprising. Someone who’d made the effort to drive all the way out to Baker’s Hole might decide to wait for her on receiving no reply when they knocked. Even as she figured the visitor had come to such a decision, he straightened and spied back at her. The man then turned briefly, and from the way he snapped his attention back on the approaching pick-up she guessed he’d hailed someone else. She followed the direction in which he’d turned and saw a second man walk out from the front of her garage. For obvious reasons, Billie experienced a twinge of concern. Hilary wouldn’t have sent these men to Billie’s house like this, not to the home of a single woman out in a remote corner of the hills. There was no formula to spotting an art lover, but Billie doubted the men in suits and raincoats were the type to while away the hours in any gallery – other than a shooting gallery. They looked like cops, or maybe FBI.
Billie fumbled her cell phone from her coat pocket and checked for missed messages. There were none. Hilary would have warned her if the men had been at the store enquiring after her whereabouts. She put the phone away. She didn’t take her foot off the gas. Momentarily she considered bypassing her house, keeping going until she was in Hill End, where she would feel less intimidated by facing the strangers. But what if she was worrying about nothing? The appearance of the men – cops, FBI agents or whatever – might have nothing to do with her former life. And, if it had, trying to run wouldn’t make any difference. Better to face things than have the grey car chase her along the valley.
She slowed, then pulled the Chevrolet into the drive. By now the first man she’d noticed was leaning on the porch rail, smiling faintly as she drew up alongside the sedan. His friend had stalled midway between the garage and house, and looked mildly embarrassed that he’d been caught snooping where he’d no right. She gave him a disapproving squint through her bug-encrusted windshield as she turned off the ignition. The engine continued to sputter a few beats after she withdrew the key.
As she climbed out of the pick-up, she looked at the two men in turn, before settling on the one on the porch. It was obvious from their manner that the one on her porch was the senior, in age and in rank. She directed her question at him. ‘Who are you people, and what the hell do you think you’re doing trespassing on my land?’
On the porch, the man adjusted his raincoat so that Billie got a look at the official shield clipped to his belt. ‘We’re looking for Wilhelmina Womack.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m Agent Brandon Cooper. I need to speak with her concerning her husband.’
Billie scowled at the man. ‘Why would a federal agent be asking after a dead man? You do know that Richard died?’
The agent snorted, before approaching the steps and moving down them at a leisurely pace. Billie waited. She folded her arms, a defensive posture. On her right forearm was a smudge of paint which she rubbed at with her opposite thumb, then allowed her arms to swing down by her sides. She felt awkward and knew that the agent would recognise her ill ease.