Hunters

by Chet Williamson

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.

  THE SECOND DAY

  Chuck 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.

  The hunter's mouth fell open. His jaw waggled for a moment, and then he said, just loud enough for Chuck to hear him, "Hey, you want it, you can have it."

  "Asshole," Chuck whispered as he pulled the trigger.

  The man jerked once, and continued to stand for three seconds as the blood started to pour from the hole in his stomach. Then he sat down hard with what Chuck thought was a satisfying whop as his buttocks smacked the dead vegetation. Chuck held the image of the man in his sight picture for a moment, relishing the surprised look on his face. He waited just long enough for the expression to change to one of pain, and for the hunter to start his first wailing cry, which sounded pathetic with no diaphragm to support it.

  Chuck worked the bolt again, noting where the empty shell had fallen. Then he centered the whimpering mouth in the crosshairs, and pulled the trigger for a third time. The lower half of the hunter's head came apart like a melon smashed by a sledgehammer, and Chuck couldn't help but think of the last time he had seen Gallagher at the Comedy Club.

  There was no need to work the bolt again. A second shot was not required. The man was deader than O. J. Simpson's movie career.

  Chuck picked up the two bullet cases, scuttled down the side of the ravine, and made the agreed upon mark on the corpse. Then he climbed back the way he had come and walked to the east, away from the ravine and the two dead animals. He had done what he had needed to do, and now it was time to get the hell away before anybody stumbled across the scene. Besides, the man was dead. There was no more fun to be had here.

  Tomorrow, however, he would have one helluva time, as long as the others didn't wussie out. He wondered how they all were doing. He was especially curious about Jean and the warden. Had she taken the guy out yet? He didn't know if she had the stones to do it, but thought she probably did. She'd been pretty crazy about old Andy, and Chuck had to admit the guy had been a looker.

  With bitches as shallow as Jean, that was all it took sometimes. They pretended that they were looking for something deeper—one of those "meaningful" relationships with a "sensitive" guy—when all they were really after was a handsome mug and a solid dick that didn't give out too soon.

  He had shown her last night that he had at least one of the requirements, though he doubted he would take Andrew's place in her life. In her bed, maybe. She had liked it in spite of that act with the gun afterwards. But would Jean Catlett ever be seen in public arm in arm with a crude and straight-to-the-point guy like Chuck knew himself to be? Hell, not on your life.

  It didn't matter, though. There were a whole lot of reasons why Chuck Marriner couldn't afford to be seen by a wide, paparazzi-served public. Too many people were looking for him who had less than good wishes for his future health and liberty. But he was content in his present role. He'd be happy to keep on banging Jean Catlett, and use that bottomless pile of Catlett money to have a lot more fun than that dry and unimaginative sex would provide. And maybe when it was time to walk away, Chuck could do so with a lot of that green filling out his pockets. Hell, he thought as he made his way through the woods back to where he'd parked the Bronco, weirder things could happen. They might even be able to rain down this shitstorm and get away with it.

  And Jean Catlett might even be able to whack that boyfriend killing Boy Scout without help.

  Ned Craig thought he had made the right decision. It was good to be out in the woods. The alternative had been hanging around the house, and if he had done that, he would only have thought about the still unidentified dead man who lay in the medical center's morgue.

  Instead, he had gotten up long before Megan had even stirred, and, for the second morning in a row, had had a real hunter's breakfast, this time at Sally's Restaurant. It was loaded with saturated fats and cholesterol, and he enjoyed every greasy bite of it. A couple of hunters Ned knew asked him what exactly had happened the day before, but all he had said about it was, "It was bad, but it's over." It wasn't the detailed recitation they had been looking for, but Ned didn't feel he owed the story to anyone who wasn't wearing a badge.

  He had decided not to go back to State Game Lands 25, where the shootings had occurred, so Larry assigned him instead to 293, a much smaller tract of land northeast of St. Mary's. Ned saw only a few cars at the dirt road that led back to the hunting grounds, and thought that the hunters here were probably locals who kne
w what they were doing. Game Lands 293 was loaded with buck, but because it was not as expansive, most hunters alien to the area thought it would be overcrowded, and went to the larger tracts, leaving 293's rich harvest of game to those who knew better.

  Ned felt lighter today as he walked through the woods in the early morning haze, and then he realized why. He had left his pistol with the St. Mary's police, who needed it for evidence at the upcoming hearing. He could have taken another of his three handguns, but had not.

  It must have been his subconscious at work, he thought, since he remembered making no decision whether or not to take one, and it was the first time he could recall that he had gone without it. They had told him he would get the gun back, but he wondered if he would ever feel comfortable carrying it again. Maybe he could sell it to someone who didn't know or care about its history. Or maybe he'd just throw the damned thing away. He normally didn't believe in such things as curses, but as he trod through the leaves, he couldn't help but feel that the gun was unlucky.

  Or was it? After all, it had saved his life. If he hadn't been carrying it, or if it wouldn't have shot true, he wouldn't be walking through the woods this morning.

  "Bullshit," he mumbled to himself. Luck, curses, all of it. It was just the way things were, it was what had happened, that was all. It was stupid to think what if. Just accept what had happened, and then do what you felt you should do.

  Ned jammed his hands in his pockets and trudged on, stopping every now and then when he heard the faraway sound of gunfire. He came across a hunter he recognized. The man was in a tree stand, and gave Ned a short wave. Ned waved back, but did not call out, and walked past him, then behind him so that he would not scare off any deer that might be moving in the hunter's direction. The man in the stand smiled and nodded in thanks, and Ned moved on.

  Just before noon, Ned met a hunter field dressing his kill. He complimented the man on the buck's rack, a wide eight points, and then asked to see his hunting license. The hunter responded happily, and Ned found that everything was in order. He chatted with the man for a few minutes, then moved on, ate his lunch seated on a large, flat rock, and turned back toward the south, where his Blazer was parked several miles away.