Hunting Season (41 page)

In summer this immense monument was green, emerald green, covered completely in a thick carpet of grass and tiny wild flowers. This night the mound was cloaked in such darkness that Anna felt rather than saw it, a looming presence in the night. As ever with ancient structures imperfectly understood, modern imagination had speculated that the highest point was reserved for human sacrifice. Stumbling toward the first steep incline, the winter grass slippery underfoot, Anna wondered if she was destined to reenact the role of the hapless virgin.

The path grew suddenly steep, the dirt trail augmented by sections of four-by-four timbers set flush to provide steps. Anna's booted foot hit the first of these. Sleet had turned to ice on the wood. Slipping, she fell to one knee. Arms and jacket were jerked hard, and she was on her feet again.

Snippets from years of inadequate training and no practice flipped through Anna's brain, cue cards to be read and discarded. If she tried to kick back, hit a knee—the best way to cripple a big man—she would die. If she tried to jerk an elbow free to strike she would die. Reasoning with him would heighten his hatred of women in charge and she would die. Many stories, and Anna did not like the end of any of them.

Grunting, his breath coming hard from exertion and tension, Randy pushed her uphill. Several times he slipped, and Anna was jerked roughly one way or another as he used her as ballast to regain his balance.

A vision of herself laughing, excited, safe with Zach's arms around her, whipping through Space Mountain in Disneyland, a roller coaster in darkness, each turn a spine-snapping surprise, surfaced from nowhere. Seeing Zach in her mind's eye made Anna suddenly sad. Self-pity washed up and threatened to unman her. Maybe the meek inherited the earth but the pitiful inherited only a six-by-three-foot plot.

Anna pushed the vision and the weakness aside. The effort of doing so caused her to cry out, a muffed squeak very like a whimper. The grip on her chain and coat seemed to loosen a little. Maybe.

Abruptly they reached the level tabletop of the man-made mesa. Black plain, black rain, yet Anna could see after a fashion, enough to put one foot in front of the other, enough to discern the earth from the sky. Even on such a night as this, ambient light leaked through and the miracle of the human eye gathered and used it.

Anna realized how acutely aware she was of life, past, present and bleak future: how clean and cold the sleet burning her face, the air sliding into her lungs, the faint singing of the rain on her jacket, the pull of water-soaked trousers over her thighs. She couldn't but wonder if this overwhelming sensitivity and appreciation heralded coming death. She did not welcome it. Neither did she fear it sufficiently. Perhaps the poet was wrong and one should go gently into that good night.

Not by this bozo's hand,
an outraged voice reverberated through her brain.

Randy had set a course straight ahead to the foot of the wooden stairs set into the hillock that rose above the rest of the mound. The back of this rise was steep, falling seventy feet or more into the dense tangle of woods below. He would shoot her there and let her body tumble into the massed shrubs. By the time she was found, if she was found, the woodland critters, four-, six- and eight-legged, would have done their best to destroy any evidence of who had pulled the trigger. Not that there was any. Anna would die without defensive wounds, no DNA of the perpetrator beneath her fingernails.

Killed by Randy fucking Thigpen.

Anna whimpered again experimentally and said, "Please, please," in a broken voice. Thigpen's hold did loosen, if only a fraction. It hadn't been an isolated phenomenon. Female helplessness, degradation, soothed and comforted her erstwhile field ranger. Able by alchemy of familiarity and truncated eyesight, Anna saw the wooden steps a dozen yards ahead forming out of the sleet-driven darkness. For all the progress she'd made on any half-formed plan to better her situation, they might as well have been the steps to a scaffold.

Bidding final farewell to John Wayne, Anna burst into tears, pleas for her life riding brokenly on sobs. Thigpen talked over her snivelings. As she wept and begged, he shoved her forward, letting the invective of what he viewed as his months of servitude under her reign flow and voicing the bigotry he'd held in imperfect abeyance during that time. over the slosh of their boots through the wet grass, the hard rain on her jacket and the wet sounds of her own weeping, Anna heard him listing the rights women had robbed him—all men—of: promotions, training, dignity, pride, decency. Through it he used her as living proof of his theories, vilifying her for her tears, her begging, her cowardice, her small frame and inferior strength.

The more he talked the braver he became, brave and relaxed, full of his superiority and confident in his control over the sniveling hank of hair and bag of bones that Anna had become.

With a curse and a jerk, he started her up the steep wooden stairs leading to the highest point on the mound. Ice was forming on the wood. Anna shuffled in her abjection, guaranteeing she wouldn't lose her balance.

A little over halfway up she reached the step she'd been hoping for. Ice covered the surface. Anna shuffled carefully over it and stepped to the next. When she felt Randy put his full weight on its slippery surface, she cried out loud and wild and hurled herself backward with all her might and jammed the fists he held clamped at her shoulder with chain and collar back into his face.

Thigpen gave way in an avalanche of noise and flesh. Instinctively flinging his arms out to recover his balance, Randy moved the pistol from the back of Anna's head. The barrel, pressed so long and so hard into her skull, left a hot place behind when it was moved. As she fell with him she heard the shot as his trigger finger convulsed and he fired a round into the storm.

Falling seemed to take a long time. Anna felt her feet push off as she kicked away from the hillside, driving back into Randy's gut. She was aware of the small bones in her neck crackling when she slammed her head back, smashing the hard part of her cranium into his face. Then they seemed to float downward. Icy rain on her face, universal nothingness filling her eyes and mind.

Randy struck the ground. She smashed down, unbruised, onto his great soft belly. Time abandoned its petty pace. Anna had succeeded in knocking him down, but she wasn't free. He was still armed, still outweighed her by two hundred pounds.

Instinct took over and a sudden bone-deep desire not only to survive but to win or, failing that, wreak as much havoc as possible took over. Screaming, spitting, hissing, Anna wrenched her chained wrists free and rolled off, kicking back to inflict what damage she could on shins and knees. Randy had lost control of her hands but still held on to the hood of the jacket. Cloth caught her around the throat. Instead of fighting against it, Anna rolled back toward Thigpen scratching, biting, butting, knees and elbows punching.

He let loose with a startled cry. She straightened her limbs and began rolling like a log, as she and Molly had done down summer-warm grassy hills. Shots rang out but darkness and speed were on Anna's side. Dizzy, but unhurt, she came to a stop several yards from the foot of the hill. on elbows and knees, she crawled another ten or fifteen yards, then stopped and listened.

At first she heard only the pounding of her heart and the rush of the blood past her eardrums. Willing herself to breathe deeply, regularly, she listened past the raucous celebration of life in her veins. Rain. A huff. A splash. A booted foot on wood. Randy was up.

Mathematics was the first skill to vanish when guns were fired but Anna tried: two shots to cut her free of the shoulder strap in the Crown Vic, two—or maybe it was only one—when he'd fallen. Make it one. Safer. If he'd not lost the revolver in the fall, he had three shots left before he'd reload. Ideally a law-enforcement officer would take this down time to replace the spent shells with live ones. Gun battles were seldom ideal. Randy wouldn't risk reloading till he had to. Moving with care, she levered herself to her feet. Her keys were in her trouser pocket. The handcuff key was the smallest, the most difficult to maneuver with cold numb fingers and a mind shot full of adrenaline. Anna chose not to try it. Thigpen believed her to be unarmed. She had nine shots to his three and a second magazine. The first lay in the mud down by the car.

Anna unsnapped the keeper on her holster and, two-handed, lifted the semi-auto from the leather. It probably wasn't personal, merely leftover body heat trapped between her hip and the raincoat, but the butt of the weapon was warm, welcoming, more comforting than a father's hand.

Anna stood still a moment, letting dizziness pass, enjoying being free and alive. Clatter. Huffing. Randy running down steps. Wild-eyed Anna stared into the rain and darkness till she made out a piece of it that moved differently from the rest.

"Drop it, Randy. Give it up. The game's over," she yelled. The report of his pistol and a flash of muzzle fire were her answer. Anna threw herself to the ground and rolled, this time on level ground. Two more shots. Both wild. Randy was running, he'd fired at the sound of her voice.

Six shots, if she'd counted right. His gun was empty. Anna was on her feet running toward him yelling.

"Down. Down. Down. Get down, you son of a bitch."

Randy remained standing, a black hole in the night. Ten feet from him she stopped. "Give it up, Randy. I'm armed. Give it up."

"Bullshit." A glint gathered from the wan light of the house below the mound and across the road shone dully as he raised the pistol.

Firing wide to make her point, Anna squeezed off a shot.

"You lying bitch," Randy screamed.

Such was the shock in his voice that while being kidnapped prior to murder she would have the unmitigated gall to lie to him, Anna laughed.

"There's something wrong with you," Randy said again.

"Drop the gun, Randy. There's no bullets in it anyway. No sense getting yourself killed. Drop it now."

"Fucking lying bitch," he said, unable to get past her deceit. He dropped the gun.

Rangers weren't in the habit of carrying backup guns. It wasn't authorized, necessary, or more to the point, it wasn't the vogue. Still Anna was taking no chances. "Put your hands on your head. Interlace the fingers. You know the drill."

Randy didn't move. "Yeah," he said. "I know the drill. I'm unarmed. No threat to myself or anybody else. I'm not attacking you.

"Like you said, I've never killed anybody. Ol' Doyce fell by himself, Badger said. He and Martin left him hanging while they cleaned that doe. Thought it was funny. When they came back and found him dead they called me. I never killed anybody. I'm no danger. You can't use deadly force." With that he began backing away, his outline beginning to blur into the night.

Technically he was right. Probably he wouldn't get far. The highway patrol or the local police department would pick him up in a few days. Until then Anna could sleep with the doors locked and her gun on the nightstand.

He turned, began lumbering toward the trail that would take him down off Emerald Mound. Anna took her radio from her belt and called dispatch. "This is five-eight-zero," she said evenly. "I need backup and an ambulance at Emerald Mound." She dropped the radio into her pocket. Took careful aim and pulled the trigger.

For predators, compassion has never been an evolutionary advantage.

21

Randy was down, screaming. Anna felt no remorse. Chances were good he'd live. She'd aimed for a leg. Unless she'd gotten luckier than she'd intended and the bullet had severed the artery in the thigh, he'd survive. Given the breadth of the man's thighs, Anna thought a direct hit was unlikely.

Staying where she was, thirty feet from the shrieking lump of ranger meat and cloaked by the night, Anna put her gun in the pocket of her raincoat and, taking her time, retrieved her keys from her trousers and unlocked the cuffs with which Randy had fettered her.

That done, she took her little Mag light from its place on her duty belt and, holding it away from her body, clicked it on. Randy was curled up on his side in the fetal position, clutching his right leg above the knee. In the black on black of the nearly lightless night, the beam of her flashlight sparked startlingly beautiful red from the blood oozing between his fingers and over the backs of his hands.

Anna closed the distance between them, stood over him looking down. Anger, malice, even the cold precision of the predator abandoned her. If she felt anything it was only a sense of detachment, of being there without form or matter. "Boy, that must really hurt," she said.

Randy started screaming again; this time pain wasn't the driving force but rage. When he'd run out of gender-specific invectives he yelled, "I'll sue your ass. You won't have a pot to piss in by the time my lawyers are done with you."

Anna believed him. He might well win a lawsuit. Juries were notoriously unpredictable. But she didn't think so. "You ran the wrong way," she said. Had Randy run for the woods, Anna might have let him go, knowing he'd not be on the loose for long. He'd run toward the road, the patrol car and the shotgun therein.

Till the first car arrived bearing Clintus Jones and Andre, Anna did what she had to. Confident he wouldn't go far if he moved at all, she left Randy lying in the muck, ran down to the car and brought back a larger flashlight and the first-aid kit from the trunk. Good sense and personal preference told her to let Randy bind his own wound. The pain was acute, color was gone from his face and sweat streamed amid the rain on his face, but he was sufficiently conscious to remember the rudiments of his EMT training. She hadn't tried to handcuff him, nor would she. From various bits of horseplay she'd overheard between him and Barth she knew Randy was too big. The metal bracelets would not circle his wrists. The leather bellyband more recalcitrant persons were chained to would not fit around his middle.