Hunters (10 page)

Especially not now, not after he'd been
struck with the tremendous epiphany that had jerked his shot wide.
He had been vouchsafed a vision, not the vision of Ned Craig's head
flying apart, but of Ned Craig dying as he, Sheldon, might die, had
he not already made up his mind to take his daddy's way out.

No indeed, Mr. Ned Craig,
Sheldon
thought, trotting through the woods, heading toward his pickup a
mile and a half away over on Burdick Road.
No quick death for
you. Instead you're gonna know what's coming. You're gonna watch
for it, and get your tests, and pray to the Lord every time you
visit the doctor, and then someday you're gonna be that
HIV-positive, and then you'll know yeah, it's coming sure enough.
And finally you'll have it, and maybe you'll be man enough to blow
your brains out and maybe you won't. Maybe you'll just die slow and
painful, the way most of those faggots do. And maybe you got a
girlfriend or a wife, and maybe I'll pay her a little visit too. Oh
hell yeah, we got a long way to go, you and me, Craig. I'm gonna
pay you back good for sending me to prison. Good and long.

Sheldon didn't know how he was going to do it, but
he was going to if he had to die in the attempt. Come hell or high
water, he was going to give both Ned Craig and whatever woman he
loved AIDS. He was going to do it with his own blood, and he was
going to laugh and laugh while he did it.

T
im Carlton looked
up at the sky nervously. He could see little enough of it beyond
the tops of the pines, and what he could see he didn't like any
better than the surrounding trees that seemed to press in on
him.

Tim was not a hunter, but the senior partner
in his Altoona law firm was, a rabid one, and if Tim ever hoped to
become a
junior
partner, he had to at least make a noble
effort to kill a deer and show Walter Matthews "what he was made
of." It wasn't enough to have the most profitable client list of
any of the younger men, he also had to shoot a goddam
deer
,
for crissake.

Not that he had any compunction about
blasting one of the things. If a buck popped up in front of him
now, he'd fire away and hope for the best. What he was afraid of
was that he was going to spend all week getting his feet frozen
traipsing through these stupid woods and never see a thing.

He had to confess, though, that his feet
didn't feel at all cold. Walter had supplied him and the four other
attorneys well. The leather-topped, rubber-bottomed boots lined
with felt kept his feet toasty without feeling sweaty, and the L.
L. Bean jacket, pants, and thermal underwear kept the rest of him
warm.

The only cold parts were his exposed face and
his hands, which he kept jammed into his pockets, his rifle wedged
under his arm. "Light cotton gloves," Walter had said, "is all you
need. Got to be able to pull that trigger when the time comes."
Sure.
If
the time ever came. Walter had painstakingly told
the virgins just how they should hunt, moving slowly from spot to
spot, then waiting for a deer to show up.

Tim thought it was like fishing, boring as
hell. And it didn't make any sense either. The more ground you
covered, the more likely it was you'd eventually run across a buck,
right? So instead of still hunting, he practiced what he referred
to mentally as hike-hunting, just walking through the woods hoping
to finally run across an antlered sonovabitch.

He just hoped that it didn't snow the way the
weathermen said it might. It sounded like it could be a real
monster storm if the worst case scenario came true. Tim only liked
snow when you could ski in it. Walking miles through it looking for
deer sucked royally.

Skiing. Now there was a thought. Nice sunny
slopes, a big warm lodge with a Jacuzzi and a good restaurant, a
cozy room with a big fireplace and a sweet young thing who thought
a young lawyer would just be the greatest thing in the world to
screw. They'd all seen the movie of
The Firm
, even if they
didn't read, and knew that lawyers were the best catch of all these
days, now that Bill Gates was hitched. There were still girls who
didn't give a damn about sexual harassment, who loved to flirt, who
gave as good as they got, and who were capable of giving a helluva
lot more.

But up here in the wilds of Jefferson County?
Jesus, the only available girls he'd seen in the bar in Brookville
had been pitiful looking things, and invariably the handful of
women hunters he had seen had looked like those girls' pinheaded
sisters, the kind their families kept chained in the attic and let
out only at deer season to fill the larder for the winter.

And just as that thought crossed his mind to
make him snicker and shudder simultaneously, one of the best
looking women he had ever seen stepped from out of a tight grove of
trees with a white, pearly smile that turned that dark forest into
Aspen under the sun. Thank you Jesus, Tim Carlton thought as he
smiled back.

She was just the way Tim liked them, short
and petite, with big breasts that even a thick, down-filled jacket
couldn't hide. Red hair crept out from under a blaze orange toque,
but her skin belied her hair with its bronze, healthy tan,
accentuated by the rose in her cheeks. Christ, but weren't tanned
redheads just the foxiest things in the world, rare and
beautiful?

She carried a rifle under her arm, so she
was
a hunter, and that normally would have been a negative.
But for some reason Tim felt turned on by even that, as though he
had just come across a sexy and spirited tomgirl. And hell, if she
hadn't gotten her buck the first day, she couldn't be all
that
great a hunter.

"Hey," she said brightly.

"Hey yourself," he replied, trying to look
like less of a dweeb by taking his hands out of his pockets. Ready
for action. "How's the hunting?"

She shrugged. "I'm not dragging anything home
yet."

He gave her the Tom Cruise grin. "Maybe your
luck'll change."

"What, now that I've met you?"

Holy shit, he thought, she zinged it right
back. That was a come-on, sure as hell. Tim suddenly felt that he
had been dropped into a scene in which
Penthouse Forum
met
Field and Stream
. But now was most definitely not the time
to lose his cool. "Could be," he said. "Where have you set up
camp?" Good, that sounded macho.

"Real close by." That was good. "About a mile
down that hollow." That was better. "It's my boyfriend's
cabin."

That was bad. Tim felt his smile drift in
spite of his efforts to hold it. He snapped it back into place and
nearly winced as his chapped lips cracked. Christ, it was cold.
"You're both hunters then?"

"Well,
he
is. I'm just along for the
ride. Not really into it. You like it?"

He weighed the question like he would have in
court. Depending on what she thought, if he said yes, he was a
butcher, if he said no, he was a wimp. So he tried to make a joke
out of it. "Well, little lady," he drawled, "a man's gotta do what
a man's gotta do." She giggled, and he knew had chosen right, so he
extemporized. "Hunting's fine, but it's not my life."

She grinned then, a real dirty, almost nasty
little grin, and he thought he had a live one here, except for the
boyfriend. "It's
Billy's
life, that's for sure," she said.
"I was so darn excited, him asking me up to his cabin, just the two
of us, for four whole days, but he's too much into hunting to
even...well, be romantic, you know?"

He nodded as though he did know indeed.

"And a girl who's been expecting that kind of
thing can get pretty disappointed, you know?"

"I can understand that," Tim said with what
he hoped was an understanding smile, edged with just a touch of
lasciviousness.

"Now tell me the truth, would
you
do
something like that?" she asked, her pretty head tipped to one side
like a bird's. "Get a girl up here, get her all, you know,
expecting something, and then act like one of those monks or
something?"

"I'll tell you the truth," Tim said
gallantly. "If I had a girl like you up here in a cabin, just the
two of us...I'd never get outside long enough to even look for a
deer."

He felt himself get a hard-on like a rock
when she lost her smile and looked at him with smoldering eyes.
Holy shit, he thought, she looked like she wanted to do it right
then and there. "You ever do it outside?" she said. "In the
winter?"

Tim felt like jumping up and down with
excitement and horniness. This was every fantasy he had ever had
and more. But he kept his cool. It wasn't hard, considering the
temperature. "Not this cold, no."

"I'm willing to bet you won't even
feel
the cold." Not "you
wouldn't
," but "you
won't
," like it was a given, like they were going to be
doing the dirty in another minute. This girl was a gem, a
wonderful, wacko
gem
.

"I bet I won't either," he grinned. "And
neither will you."

"Come on," she said. "We won't go back to the
cabin, but there's a place just back in these trees..." She tucked
her rifle under her left arm and took his hand, then pressed it
against her breast. He wished his gloves were off, but he could
still feel enough of the soft roundness to stand him at attention
plus.

"I can't wait," he said. She pulled his hand
away then, and led him toward the grove of trees from which she had
so wondrously appeared. "What's your name, anyway?" he asked her as
they walked from gray light into pale darkness.

"Samantha," the girl purred. "But since we're
gonna get to know each other real good, you can call me Sam..."

It seemed to him as though he was in a blissful
dream as he took off his heavy coat and set down his gun on top of
it. He felt her hot breath against his neck, her hands fumbling at
the zipper of his trousers, then the cold knife sinking in, hot
blood pouring out over his bare flesh, something wet on his face
that might have been spit, then nothing at all.

L
arry Moxon answered
Ned's call on the second ring with his usual, clipped, "Moxon."

"Larry, it's Ned. I got...something else to
report."

"Oh Jesus, nothing bad?"

"A wild shot. I probably shouldn't even
bother, but—"

"A wild shot? Close to you?"

Ned looked through the windows of his Blazer,
but still could see no one nearby. He wished that he didn't feel so
damn nervous. "Right by my head."

"See who did it?"

"No. I called out, but nobody answered. The
guy probably realized what he'd done, and felt too stupid to own up
to it, so he lit out."

"Now listen to me, Ned." Larry's tone was
no-bullshit. "I want you to come in right now."

"Hell, Larry, it was just an accident, it's
happened before."

"I don't think it was an accident, buddy.
Somebody was looking for you. A woman."

"Attractive?" It wasn't the kind of comment
Ned normally made, but he felt the urgency to lighten the
situation. He didn't like the thought of two people trying to kill
him in two days.

"It's not funny. She called on the phone.
Said she wanted to know where to get in touch with you, that she
was a reporter for the
Banner
. Now, I don't have to tell you
that the
Banner
's only got two reporters, and only one
woman, and you know
that
lady well enough that she wouldn't
have to call me to interview you."

The news made Ned feel even colder, and he
was suddenly worried for Megan. "Did you tell her where I
lived?"

"No, but all she has to do is look in the
phone book."

"You think she's a friend of this guy I...I
shot?"

"I don't know
who
she is, Ned. But her
fishing around for you, and you just getting shot at isn't a
combination of things that would keep
me
out in the woods
today."

"Oh hell, Larry, if somebody was really after
me today, they could've gotten me easy with another shot. I'm sure
it was just an accident. And that woman who called was probably a
reporter from someplace else, maybe one of those tabloids or
something." Now that he had the leisure to think about it, it made
sense to him. He had been too uptight about what happened
yesterday, that was all. Nobody was after him. His earlier panic
had been a result of yesterday's tragedy, not today's peril. "I'm
staying out here, Larry. There's not a damn thing to worry about.
Believe me."

"It's dumb to take chance, Ned."

"I'm not taking any chances, honest. I'm
going to head over to the eastern entrance now."

"Ned—"

"Larry, if I thought there were any danger, I'd come
in. But there isn't. I'll fill out a report for the wild shot, but
that's all it was. Nobody's after me."

S
everal miles away,
Jean Catlett sat shivering behind the wheel of her jeep and watched
Ned Craig's house. It was a modest place, a rustic A-frame with a
large lot, and she thought that it couldn't be that big inside.
Maybe a couple of small bedrooms upstairs with one large room and a
kitchen downstairs.

It had been cloudy all day, and she had been
able to see into that downstairs front room just enough to detect a
large, gray stone fireplace and wood paneling. Typical outdoorsy
bullshit. Cars came and went frequently, and neighbors' houses were
near, so she didn't go any closer to Craig's house.

She had arrived there at eleven in the
morning, shortly after she talked to Larry Moxon, who answered the
number listed under "Game Commission: Law Enforcement Supervisor"
in the phone book. She had hoped to find Craig somewhere in the
field, and thought that if she did it would be easy to shoot him.
If she shot a game warden other than Craig, it would be no big
deal. They were all bastards anyway, helping to perpetuate a
barbarous slaughter that they called hunting. The game wardens were
as much to blame as the goddamned hunters. All they were there for
was to make sure that the right animals died, and that no one
cheated the state out of its blood money.