Hunters (8 page)

Sheldon had been assigned a public defender
who didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground, but at least he
was able to get the original assault with intent reduced to simple
assault, and the sixteen to twenty-four month sentence down to
eight months. Still, it had been hard time in a state prison, hard
enough to convince Sheldon that he never wanted to go back in one
again. Only that once, when he beat the shit out of Terry, had he
waltzed with the law, and that had been enough to get it out of his
system.

But now there was something in his system
that nothing could get out, only the death that was, he felt, now
creeping up on him with drawn knives.

Well, goddammit, if he went he wasn't going
alone.

He tossed down a bill, barreled out of the sports
bar, and ran to his car. As he backed out, he thought that his eyes
in the rearview mirror looked like the eyes of a dead man.

I
t took a long time
to make their plans for the next day, and it wasn't until midnight
that they started leaving Jean Catlett's room. They had decided
that each person would go to a different county bordering Elk
County, all except for Jean, who wanted to try and find Ned Craig.
Sam Rogers would go southwest to Jefferson County, Michael Brewster
north to McKean, Timothy Weems west to Forest, and Chuck Marriner
would head south to Clearfield County.

As they folded up their maps and left the
room, Chuck and Sam were the last ones out. "Excuse me, Chuck?"
Jean said.

He turned around and looked at her. Sam
stopped in the doorway.

"Would you mind staying a minute? I want to
talk to you about something." Her tone was pedantic, as though she
intended to berate him privately for his attitude. Still, he
shrugged, then turned and nodded to Sam, who gave him a smirk and
closed the door from the outside, leaving Chuck and Jean alone in
the room.

Jean remained standing, but Chuck flung
himself face-down on the bed nearest the door. "There are a few
things we need to get straight between us," Jean said.

Chuck grinned. "I can think of one
anyway."

"What?" She looked genuinely puzzled, as if
she couldn't believe that he would proposition her so soon after
she had lost her lover to a bullet.

"Nothin'. What's on your mind?"

She turned her back on him and walked to the
other end of the room. It wasn't far. "The success of our mission,"
she said, "especially now that Andrew's gone." She whirled on
Chuck. "He was our voice, someone with the leadership ability to
keep us all together."

"He was an asswipe, Jean," Chuck said
flatly. He took a perverse delight in watching the red suffuse her
cheeks.

"You
bastard
," she said. "How can you
say that?"

Chuck sat up on the bed. "He didn't give a
damn about animals, about what we were doing here, he never did.
What he gave a damn about was
you
. Maybe
your money, or..." He shrugged grudgingly. "...maybe you yourself,
I don't know, personally I thought that he was closer to that
character he played than the studley bud he was supposed to
be."

"You prick."

"Guilty. So what do you want me to do, act
like Andrew? Be your little Charlie McCarthy?" Her face went blank.
"Come on, babe, you're old enough to get that, hell, you even know
Candice Bergen, right? Well, I ain't gonna be yo' dog, mama. I'll
take 'em out and take 'em down, but I'm not gonna recite your party
line at every meeting and call for silent prayer."

He was standing up, and walking toward her
slowly. There was no teasing in his voice now. "But I'll tell you
what I
will
do—I'll be at your side with a gun, I'll kill
whoever you want killed, and I'll take a fucking bullet for you."
He looked down into her face, and his own was very hard, made only
of straight lines and angles. "I'm gonna give you whatever you
want, and I know what you want right now."

Sudden anger flared in her eyes. "I want
Andrew back, you pig. That's what I want."

"Uh-uh. If I could make Andrew walk through
that door right now, alive and whole, with no bullets in his head,
you wouldn't want it."

"I
would
."

"No. Because what you want right now is for
me to do to you what I've got every intention of doing."

The surprise in her face was so realistic
that he almost believed it. "You don't dare."

"What are you gonna do, call the cops?"

He wasn't exactly sure what happened then.
He thought that maybe he raped her. He didn't have to hit her, but
he did have to force her, and ripped her clothes in the process.
She didn't scream, and he thought that maybe it was because she
knew she couldn't draw the police to them, and she was too
embarrassed by her inability to control Chuck to bring in Weems and
Brewster from next door. Chuck knew he wouldn't have to worry about
Sam interrupting them, no matter how loud Jean might get.

And at the end, just before he came, he
thought that she was enjoying it despite her tears. The tears, he
thought, were probably for Andrew Kenton, but she didn't fool him.
She liked what he did. These domineering women were all the same.
They liked it when a man was turned on enough by them to make them
do it.

A few minutes later, when he was almost
asleep, he felt her stir beside him and get up. He opened his eyes
just wide enough to see her bare backside moving into the small
area off the bathroom where the closets were. Then he closed his
eyes against the lamplight and rolled over.

He opened them again when he heard a rifle
bolt snapping into place. She was standing naked by the side of the
bed, pointing the gun directly at his bare groin. He felt himself
shrivel in the chilly air.

"I'm not going to kill you," she said, and
her voice was trembling, "because that would end everything, and
because I still need you. But not for
that
." She gestured
with the rifle barrel at Chuck's midsection. "You don't touch me
again unless I say so."

He summoned up enough bravado to smile at
her. "You might."

"I might," she repeated. "
I
might.
Remember that. I want you to promise me that."

"That I won't touch you unless I'm invited?
Okay, sure."

"And one other thing."

"You're holding the gun. Name it."

"I want you to promise me that if something
should happen to me so that I can't see Ned Craig dead, you'll do
it."

"Hey, I don't even know the guy. But if it
makes you happy, Jean, it makes me happy." His smile faded. "He's a
dead man."

"Swear it."

He put his left hand on his crotch, his
right in the air. "I swear by all that I hold sacred."

"Fine. Now leave."

Back in his room, the lights were off, and
Sam was naked under the covers. "Sorry about that," Chuck said.
"You know how it is."

"It's not about sex anyway," Sam said. Chuck
heard humor in the tone. Sam understood. "It's about power,
right?"

"Hell, babe," said Chuck as he tossed off
his clothes, "it's
all
about power."

Sam reached for him to see if there was
still any passion remaining. It was a long time in coming, but they
both thought it was worth the effort.

C
huck Marriner felt
damned good, in spite of his few hours of sleep. He and Sam had
gotten up at 4:00 and hit the road. They had stopped for breakfast
in Ridgway, where Chuck ate a huge platter of steak and eggs,
washed down with three cups of coffee. At 6:00, he had dropped Sam
off at a trail leading into the State Game Lands near Clear Creek
State Park in Jefferson County, and then had headed east.

By 7:30 he was deep into the Moshannon State
Forest, but in Clearfield County, on the southern side of the Elk
County line. The air was colder than it had been the day before,
but Chuck's insulated underwear and Polar Tuff coat and pants kept
him snug and warm. The biting wind felt good on his face, bringing
him to even fuller wakefulness than had the coffee.

Damn, he thought, life was good. Sex twice in
one night with two different people, a good breakfast, and here he
was trekking through the woods, a rifle under his arm, hunting
again, just like he did when he was a kid. And although he had been
no stranger to guns in the years since his childhood, he hadn't
shot a rifle in years. The practice firing on the range at L.A.,
however, showed him that he had lost none of his previous skill. He
easily outshot the others, as well as most of the longtime members.
Some things you didn't forget.

Chuck had decided that he would have to get
his target early. If he was able to pick one out and down it
quickly, he could head back to Elk County and scout some more
around the camp he had found the day before. When he made certain
that it was perfect, as he suspected it was, then he could go to
the pickup point for Sam at 4:00. If his old bud couldn't nail a
kill by then, Chuck would be amazed.

He came across a small ravine, the kind he
thought that deer might be apt to wander down, and climbed to the
top of its eastern rim, so that the sunlight that filtered through
the sparse leaves was at his back. After walking several hundred
yards, he found an open spot where he could see a hundred yards
down the ravine in either direction. Then he pulled off his blaze
orange vest and turned his orange cap inside out, so that the dull
brown lining showed.

As the sun vanished behind clouds, increasing
the sense of cold, he waited, leaning on a low rock in front of
him, remaining very still. He didn't want to take the chance of an
anxious hunter spotting something brown in motion. Some of these
assholes would shoot at a cow.

They wouldn't have had to, though, if they
had been where Chuck was waiting. In the hour that he sat there, he
saw three deer pass by below, two of which were bucks. They walked
by unhurriedly on their branch-like legs, and Chuck smiled at the
sight of them. He liked animals, and hated to see them suffer,
though he couldn't say the same for people.

The wind was blowing through the ravine and
up into his face, so he knew the deer couldn't get his scent. For
some reason he couldn't name, he wanted them to know that he was
there, and had no intention of harming them.

"You guys are cool," he said to the deer,
loud enough that they could hear. They stopped as one, and the
heads went up in his direction. The only movement was their tails
flicking, as though the tails were making up their minds what to
do. "Got your brains in your ass, huh?"

That was enough. The first deer, the doe,
bolted, and went crashing through the brush up the other side of
the ravine. The two bucks followed immediately, and Chuck watched
the flag-like tails vanish in the brush across the ravine. He
chuckled to himself. "Yeah," he said softly. "Definitely cool."

In a half hour hunters came. There were three
of them, walking north along the ravine without stealth, as though
they had somewhere to be and wanted to get there as quickly as
possible. When Chuck heard the crunch of their boots on the dry
leaves, he crouched lower behind the rock. They never saw him as
they passed, and he had no urge to try for a triple kill. It would
be too dangerous. Jean Catlett's first rule might be to get the job
done, but Chuck's was not to get caught. If you were caught, you
couldn't do shit.

He waited another hour without seeing a deer
or a hunter. Throughout the morning, he had heard random shots,
most of them sounding as though they came from at least a half mile
away. But now he heard a shot that sounded much closer. In a few
minutes a deer came down the ravine from the north, the direction
in which the hunters had gone. It ran in a jerking stagger,
lurching from side to side, caroming off trees and rocks, falling,
getting up, and struggling on again. From its side a nearly
constant stream of blood jetted, leaving a crimson trail behind
it.

Chuck watched it helplessly as it made its
ragged way through the ravine, passing him where he now stood high
above, heading south, the path of least resistance to its
stuttering flight. Then he saw the man coming out of the brush, one
of the hunters he had seen before. The hunter was running in a
weary trot, his rifle at port arms position across his chest. Once
he stopped and aimed, but apparently could not center the buck in
its erratic flight, so kept running after it.

The shot wasn't as hard for Chuck as for the
hunter. The deer was broadside to him, and the next time it
stumbled and scrabbled for a foothold to run again, he caught it in
the crosshairs of his scope and pulled the trigger of his Remington
.30-06.

The bullet caught the animal low and behind
the shoulder, directly where Chuck knew the heart to be. The buck
never got to its feet. The legs collapsed, its head slapped the
ground chin first, and the body followed. Within two seconds it was
still, except for the front legs, whose movement was reduced to a
mere reflexive shadow of their previous pumping action.

Chuck lowered his rifle, worked the bolt to
put another shell in the chamber, and looked at the hunter, fifty
yards away from the dead deer. The man was looking up at him and
glowering furiously. "Goddam it!" the man yelled up at him. "That
was
my
deer. Another hundred yards and I woulda had him. He
was
mine!
"

Chuck let a wide grin split his face. "You
want him?" he called down to the man.

"
Yeah
. You're damn right I want
him!"

"Take him then. He's all yours," he
shouted.

For a moment the hunter looked at him as if
he thought he was crazy, then slowly walked toward the dead deer,
his eyes on Chuck, frowning as he went. When he got to the deer, he
looked down at it. The animal's feet had stopped jerking. There was
no movement at all. When he looked back, Chuck had his chest in the
crosshairs of the .30-06.