Good Day to Die (35 page)

“What happens after I do it? After I fire the gun?”

“After you fire the gun, you duck.”

“I thought you said you could see in the dark with your … your night-thing.”

“Look, Lorraine, Kennedy could be anywhere, even behind us. Imagine a point maybe three hundred yards away, then draw a circle with us in the middle. That’s an awful lot of area to scan, even with a nightscope. Me, I feel a lot better than I did half an hour ago, but that doesn’t mean I’m anything like back to normal. In fact, I think what I’m doing is living on borrowed time and that I’ve got to find Kennedy right away. I’ve got to find him and kill him while I’m still strong enough to walk out of here. What I’m after is one clean shot when he’s least expecting it. When he’s standing up, shooting at you.”

I was lying, of course; I had no intention of letting Kennedy off that easy. I wanted to look behind his eyes. To see if I was hiding there. I wasn’t afraid of dying; didn’t give it a second thought. (Though I
did
give it a first thought.) Maybe it was the fever doing the thinking. Or maybe it was just my own Brockian obsessions finally taking control. Either way, it amounted to the same thing.

“How much time to do you need, Roland? And how will I count it off?”

“I need enough time to get up to that little road. I should have a clear view from there. It’ll take maybe twenty minutes.”

“There’s no way …”

“I know that, Lorraine. Once I get in position, I’ll take a rock and toss it into the water. Maybe we’ll get lucky and Kennedy’ll open up then and there. I doubt it, because he grew up in these woods, and he’ll know it could be an animal, maybe a beaver slapping its tail against the water. If Kennedy doesn’t respond, you have to go to work. Remember, shoot the gun down into the mud. If you shoot up into the air, he’ll see
your
muzzle flash.”

“What if he doesn’t respond at all?”

“You could always stand up and wave.” I smiled, but, of course, she couldn’t see the smile. Or the joke, either. “If he doesn’t respond, I’m gonna have to go and look for him. I don’t know how long it will take or what direction to go in. You can wait for me or walk out and take your chances. If you go straight ahead and up the slope, you’ll hit the road. From there it’s about half a mile, mostly downhill, to Kennedy’s house. Then it’s another quarter of a mile along his driveway to the main road. He’s got two dogs tied in his backyard. When they smell you, they’ll come to the end of their leads, and they’ll be making plenty of noise. Imagine it as a half-circle and go around them. There’s probably a phone in the house if you want to try that route.”

There wasn’t much more to be said. I was thirsty again, but there was nothing to drink, not unless I cut back to the stream. But that didn’t make much sense. The stream flowed into the pond which, in turn, flowed into the stream again. If I could drink from the stream, I could drink directly from the pond. Unfortunately, the idea never crossed my mind. The stream was clear and moving, the pond was dark and murky, and that was the end of that. I didn’t remember the water purification tablets in the daypack either, which would have rendered the whole thing academic.

“I’ve got to go,” I said. “My head’s starting to spin.”

She reached out and put her fingers on my face. “I think you’re going to take chances.” She waited for me to respond, but there wasn’t much to say. It was up to me to handle Kennedy; how I did it was none of her business. “Don’t let yourself die, Roland Means. I need to see you again. I’ll never be finished with this if you die.”

Her face was composed, her small mouth free of tension. I’d just finished telling her that she might have to make her way up a very steep hillside, then follow an obscure track half a mile through a stream to a house with two vicious dogs in the backyard. All without being able to see. Yet there were no hysterics, no denial of her abilities; instead, she was worried about
me.

I slipped the .22 over my shoulder and turned away.

“Roland?”

“I have work to do, Lorraine. If I don’t get it done, the healing part is just so much philosophy.”

“Listen to me, you jerk. There’s a cabin at the end of the road. If you can’t make it out, go there and I’ll send help.”

I leaned over and kissed her. “My hero,” I said.

It was very dark out there. The hills surrounding the pond were black shadows, only visible because they held no stars. Instead of pushing straight through the reeds, I worked back toward the pond, then began to crawl along the edge, where the reeds met deeper water. I wasn’t heading for the hillside, as I’d told Lorraine. My view from the road would be extremely limited, blocked by the sharp angle of the surrounding hillside as well as the trees and shrubs. I needed open ground, and the beaver dam, while it wasn’t exactly ground, was high enough to provide me with cover, yet low enough to give me a clean field of vision.

I pulled myself along the edge of the reeds, my feet trailing off into the cool water, congratulating myself on my hunting prowess and my rapid progress. The dam was in sight, now, odd black sticks poking out of a solid black mass. As I edged closer, looking for a rock to toss into the water once I was in position, I sensed movement ahead of me. For just a moment, I thought I heard the click of a released safety, thought I saw the barrel of a rifle coming up and around. Then a mass of white feathers exploded upward, clearing the cattails before the wings opened. It was a snowy egret, a very pissed-off snowy egret. His angry scream was echoed once, twice, three times as birds began to rise in front of me, pure white even in starlight. The only thing I could do was watch, open-mouthed, as they began to slowly beat their wings, slowly rise, thinking this was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

Kennedy opened up with a tremendous barrage, pulling the trigger as fast as he could. As the rounds began to smack into the mud, birds rose from all parts of the marsh, a dozen quacking mallards, wings beating madly; a single panicked loon running across the water in search of altitude; two great blue herons, fully four feet tall, going almost straight up, then slowly turning away from the gunfire. The herons passed directly over me, flaunting seven-foot wingspans as they, too, screamed their annoyance and their fear.

I could hear bullets falling around me, but I never moved. Chalk it up to the fever, chalk it up to pure joy—the birds escaped and I would escape. It was inevitable.

But Kennedy wouldn’t escape. I had him now, and the truth of it filled me with happiness, like a child granted one wish after a lifetime of deprivation. Or a sinner saved at the last possible moment. I began to laugh out loud, watching the AK47 spew orange flames as Kennedy, about two hundred yards away, worked through the clip. I put the nightscope to my eye, sighting in through the greenish glow. It would have been so easy to kill him; he was the kind of hunter who set baited traps, then came back to finish off his crippled prey. Never imagining his own leg in the jaws of the trap.

I waited for him to finish, kept the scope on him in case he decided to move his position. He didn’t, of course. His arrogance wouldn’t let him. He changed the clip, set the AK47 against a tree, lit a cigarette, settled back to await further developments. I moved to the edge of the bank, taking my time, then began to angle toward him.

My mind was clear and focused, but my body refused to follow suit. I recalled how I’d once trotted through the forest, moving from trail to trail with the relentless determination of a hungry coyote. Now my legs felt like tree trunks, rising and falling as if their only desire was to remain rooted to the earth. The rifle slung across my back weighed less than ten pounds, but it threatened to pull me over on the steeper slopes. After the first few minutes, my body was covered with sweat right down to my fingertips. I was going to be very cold as soon as that sweat saturated my clothing, and I knew it.

But I also knew that I had to accept the conditions. The worst thing I could do was push it, demand that my body perform the way it did in my workouts. Somehow, I settled on the belief that the whole thing had been scripted—me, Kennedy, Bouton, Lorraine … every bit of it, and the only thing that mattered was the play itself. As long as I pursued the part assigned to me, nothing could go wrong.

I moved from tree to tree, stopping every twenty-five yards or so to make sure Kennedy was still in place. Each time I looked, I found him leaning against the same tree, cigarette in hand. Once, I caught him peering through a huge pair of binoculars. I remember wondering what he expected to find. Enlarging a black hole doesn’t make it visible.

When I was close enough to see the glow of Kennedy’s cigarette, I eased my already snail-like pace. It was foolish, really. There was no wind, and the forest itself would muffle any sound. Even if I did make a noise he could hear, if I sent a rock tumbling down the slope or cracked a dried branch, he wouldn’t be able to see me. The worst he could do was fire blindly into the trees, fire at what could easily be a raccoon or a skunk.

Nevertheless, I moved cautiously, letting the sole of my boot drift over the forest floor, listening to the messages it sent. Never letting my weight settle until I knew what was under my foot. When I was less than thirty yards away, I put the cross hairs in the center of his forehead, thought about ending it on the spot, then raised the scope three inches and blew a chunk of bark out of the tree he was leaning against.

The script—my script, anyway—called for him to make a stand, to set up behind a rock and return fire. That’s not what he did. Instead, he screamed, the sound echoing behind the crack of the .22, and ran.

A good hunter must anticipate the reactions of his prey; this is a given. Animals live or die by habit, and Robert Kennedy was no exception. He lived by roads and houses and automobiles. The darkest thickets spelled terror for him, not safety. I was sure that his van was parked somewhere up on the mountain, maybe next to that cabin Lorraine told me about, and equally sure that he’d go for it. That’s was why I’d kept between him and the narrow track he’d built. And why, slowed down as I was, I beat him to the road.

I had enough time to set up behind a tree, to listen to him stumble over the deadwood, falling, rising, unable to deal with a world that wasn’t flat. When he appeared, rifle clutched in both hands, breath whistling in his smoker’s lungs, I fired a round into bare rock just to see his reaction to the whine of a ricochet.

He reacted by going down on his face. Instead of bringing the AK47 to bear, he hugged it to his chest like it was a magic wand. Maybe it made him feel powerful. Or maybe he wasn’t thinking at all. Maybe he was so frightened he couldn’t do anything but lie there, a child surrounded by his deepest fears. After all, he couldn’t see me, couldn’t hear me, couldn’t escape me.

“Are you gonna use that gun?” I called, surprised to find my voice little more than a hoarse squawk.

“Who are you?” His head lifted slightly, but the rest of his body remained on the ground.

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m King Thong. Who do
you
think I am?”

I fired a round into the dirt about two inches from his nose, then began to move up the slope. He was going to have to fight soon (I could feel him working up the courage), and if I was in his line of fire, I’d have to kill him.

“Why are you doing this? Why don’t you kill me? If you’ve got the guts.” A long pause. “But you don’t have the guts, do you? You’re that Indian cop—I remember you—and cops aren’t allowed to kill people. Are they?” Another pause. “Say something, you bastard. You half-breed cocksucker. Say
something.
”

By the time he opened fire, I was already behind him. Knowing that he’d eventually run away from where he thought I was. That he’d come toward me. Still, I waited until I was sure, until he’d actually begun to climb, before I began to trudge up the mountain.

If I’d been tired before, I was exhausted now. Kennedy should have been able to catch me, to force my hand. Only his panic prevented a confrontation. I could hear him running toward me, hear his ragged breathing as he fought for oxygen. He couldn’t seem to get more than twenty yards before stopping to catch his breath. Each time he paused, he’d fire half a dozen shots back down the mountain. Once, he screamed his defiance into the night, a long, eerie howl that raised the hair on the back of my neck.

I maintained a steady pace, picking them up and putting them down, just like I’d been taught in basic training. Remembering that night when Sergeant Belardi decided to teach us a lesson about limitations and how to overcome them. He woke us at midnight, loaded us up with full packs, then led us on a forced march. The march, Belardi explained, wouldn’t be two or three or four hours long. No, we “assholes” were going to hike through those swamps until
he
decided to call it quits. If any of us “fairies” was stupid enough to collapse, the entire squad would pass the next two weeks doing close-order drill instead of eating breakfast.

Belardi had picked the perfect night for his lesson. The sky was overcast, and a misty rain locked our eyes onto the backs of the soldiers in front of us. We’d been forbidden to wear our watches, and with no visible moon, we couldn’t know how long we’d been at it. An hour? Two? Ten? It seemed like we’d begun at the beginning of time and were expected to continue for all eternity.

Pick ’em up; put ’em down. Pick ’em up; put ’em down. Toward the end it was as if I’d run out of thoughts. I was no longer angry or resentful. The body marching under that gear had no more volition than a moving belt on an assembly line. It wouldn’t stop until someone turned off the juice.

When I finally stepped into the little clearing around Lorraine Cho’s prison, the moon, a sliver short of full, had climbed over the rim of the eastern ridges. It bathed the clearing in pale light, glinting in the windows of the tiny log cabin, flickering on the tumbling waters of a small stream. The glowing spring leaves of an enormous sugar maple seemed almost luminous, a reflection of the pure white starlight overhead.

I stood for a moment, open-mouthed, then had my first coherent thought in the last forty-five minutes. Water! I’d stopped sweating a long time ago. Not because my fever had dropped—if anything, it’d grown worse—but because I’d become thoroughly dehydrated. Nevertheless, I didn’t cross that open, moonlit space; I stayed at the edge of the forest, concealing myself, as I’d done all my life, in the safety of shadows. When I reached the stream, I turned around to look for Kennedy, saw nothing, then buried my head in the water.