He thought he had never seen as beautiful or as dangerous a color. His blood was as deadly as a bullet or a knife blade, and he giggled at the thought. He wondered what would happen if Ned Craig's bitch cleaned up her porch and got some of his blood in a cut or something. Would she get AIDS right off? Or would it just be that HIV at first?
Hell, probably nothing would happen at all. She'd probably be careful. That was all right, though. He'd get them both together, get them so they'd know what was happening because he'd goddam well tell them, and he'd laugh his ass off while he did, and then he'd do what they called that coop de grace thing, what his daddy had done to himself. He'd blow his own fucking head off right in front of them and splatter the both of them with even more of his blood, show them what was waiting for both of them now, show them that a real man wasn't afraid to die.
But first, he was going to have a hell of a night, or maybe even two, depending. He turned his pickup west toward Pittsburgh. There were places in the city he could get stoned out of his ass with whores who would be willing to screw a guy with enough money and not make him put on a rubber. Hell, if they caught it from him, that was their lookout, wasn't it? Risky business all around. You look at it that way, just living was risky business, when punching a faggot in the mouth can get your ass killed deader than taking on a bar full of niggers with a stick.
He shook his head once more at his fate, and wondered if there was anyone else he ought to visit one last time. He remembered one more person he should say goodbye to, made a mental note, and switched on the radio. It was news, and he changed it quickly. He didn't like news. Instead he found a country station, and let Alan Jackson sing about some goddam river Sheldon would never see as he drove west toward a darkening sky.
Michael Brewster sat and waited for his kill, and hoped it would come quickly and easily. He was not used to waiting, especially with the kind of patience the hunting of men required.
Other things came easily enough to Michael, except for one, and that was winning Jean Catlett back into his bed. Now that Andrew was gone, maybe it could be done. After all, his only rival on this trip at least was Chuck Marriner, an utter boob who was already screwing that vicious little Rogers bitch. And as for Tim Weems, athletic as he might be, Michael thought that he had no romantic interest in Jean, and even suspected that he might be gay.
He had to admit, though, that Weems had not shown the least bit of interest in him in the few nights they had been rooming together. Michael could step out of the shower naked without catching Weems's glance, and once the light was out and Weems said goodnight, there was no further talk in the dark about life and love and purpose and why they were there. Those questions had all been answered long before. If not, they would have been back in L.A., Michael with his father's entertainment law firm, and Weems running his Beverly Hills outdoor gear shop.
But they were here instead, in the freezing heart of Pennsylvania's forests, spread out today in different counties to widen the web of terror they hoped to weave around the hunting community. Yesterday was a start, although it had been a waste of one of their lives.
Andrew was a fuckup through and through, a pretty boy with more ego than brains, a typical actor who had played a part too realistically and gotten himself stupidly killed as a result. That was Andrew, always going for the grand gesture. What had he been doing, writing an animal rights manifesto on the dead hunter's skin with a pocketknife? He probably thought it would impress Jean, get him into her good graces all the more. Instead it had gotten him into a body bag.
Well, not Michael. The movement was not worth such a risk. And while Jean Catlett's sweet body and father's empire might be worth more, he wasn't going to do anything foolhardy to impress her. He would conduct this deal like he did all his others, coolly, thoughtfully, and with minimal risk to himself and his interests, be they his clients or his own ass.
He had dropped Weems off at a state game lands to the west in Potter County at seven in the morning, and had arrived in McKean County's area of the Allegheny National Forest shortly after eight. He had headed directly west from where he parked his van, following the compass wherever it took him, knowing that no matter where he went, all he had to do was follow the needle back due east to make his way out of the wooded labyrinth when his job was done.
That simple view changed when he began to encounter impassable brambles, steep drop-offs, and swampy patches that were just starting to glaze over with a tan coating of ice that crumbled beneath his heavy boots, lodging him in slush to his ankles. Still, he tried to maintain the concept of west, and trudged on until he found what he thought was the ideal place.
A tree stand perched a dozen feet above the forest floor at a spot where Michael thought what might have been two deer paths crossed. Seven two by fours spiked into the huge maple led upward, and Michael slung his rifle over his back and climbed them, carefully testing each makeshift rung before entrusting his weight to it. The platform at the top was plywood, and seemed weak in spots, but sagged only a bit as he sat slowly down.
Then he waited, trying to be patient. It was difficult. In one sense, patience was no stranger to him. The mere formalities of law, especially when dealing with the intricacies of entertainment law, could stretch cases out for years, but while one simmered, another boiled. There was always plenty to do. But here there was nothing except to sit in the cold and wait, which Michael did for hours.
He ate his lunch and even took out a paperback and read the parts of it an associate had marked as having litigious possibilities, but he couldn't keep his mind on the words. Every sound of a branch moving in the wind drew his attention away, and finally he returned the book to an inner pocket of his warm coat.
Just before three in the afternoon, his quarry arrived. A man in his thirties brought the blaze orange target of his chest down one of the deer paths from the southwest. When he saw Michael he raised a hand and gave a short wave, remaining silent in hopes, Michael thought, of not scaring away the deer he assumed Michael sought as well as he.
Michael waved back, traded a smile as he let the man pass beneath him, then, from ten yards away, aimed down at the man's retreating back and fired his rifle into it.
The man jerked for a second, surprising Michael, who had expected him to go down immediately, then fell face down with a nasty, wet sound like an egg hurled into mud, and lay still.
Well, Michael thought, that was easy enough.
He scanned what he could see of the forest, but found no other movement. Then he slung his rifle and climbed down from the stand. The man was dead, and Michael watched for a moment as the fast flowing blood darkened the ground beneath him. In comparison, only a little blood came out of the entrance wound, which, Michael presumed, had gone straight through the heart and probably made a big hole on the other side. He had neither the desire nor the time to turn the body over and look.
Instead he crouched by the dead man, took out his knife, and made the mark on the body that they had decided the night before would be their sign, a large notch on the left ear. The knife swept through the cartilage as easily as through butter. There was hardly any bleeding, and Michael wiped the blade on the dead man's jacket, stood up, opened his compass, and headed west. He hoped that things were going as easily for the others as they were for him.
They were not, at least in Timothy Weems's case. He should have known things would be miserable when he read about Forest County in their brochures. It was perfectly named. There were no traffic lights, no four-lane roads, no TV or radio stations, not even a daily newspaper, and they bragged about it, a bastion of primitive ignorance secure in its inferiority.
Hunters. That was all it was good for. And hunters were bad for everything else. He hated them all, and, at the beginning of the trip, he couldn't wait to kill as many as possible. But now he found that he was a different man than he had thought.
Today he had three, three of them in the sights of his scope at different times, all alone, and had been unable
to pull the trigger. He had been absolutely safe, and could have gotten away with shooting any of the three. What had he been afraid of? Being caught? Or the killing itself?
The damned thing was that he was never afraid. The things he had done in his life had proven that. He had sky-dived, bungee jumped, climbed rocks, taken his life and offered it to whatever gods of gravity might choose to splatter him on the ground. He could not be afraid. What hung uselessly between his legs would not let him.
Dickless wonder. The words came to him again, the words that had never been used against him by anyone else, but which had always been at the back of his mind, pushing him, making him the success that he was today, so that every upscale climber, packer, jumper, and diver in L.A. knew his name and patronized his shop, and theorized about his sex life.
Some thought he was straight and discreet. Others thought him gay and even more discreet. And a few, correctly, thought of him as purely monastic, living a life as sexless as a bishop's. This latter was the case, though he had no choice in the matter. It had been made for him years before.
He had been fourteen years old, hunting mule deer with his father and two of his father's friends in the mountains of Colorado. It was Tim's first time afield, and he was excited and careless, a carelessness that led to a tangle with one of his father's friends while crossing a rail fence. They fell, a rifle discharged, and just as quickly as that, Tim received a bullet in his groin. It tore away most of his scrotum and half his penis, and the loss of blood nearly killed him.
He spent two and a half months in a Denver hospital, where surgeons reconstructed what they could. It was not much. A series of operations over the next five years corrected the cosmetic appearance of Tim's genitals, so that he could pass scrutiny in a locker room, but when he became old enough to make the decision for himself, he declined penile implants. He did not want a bulb and tube installed in his plastic decoys. If there was nothing to pump, no sensation to be achieved, why bother? Besides, by the time that decision needed to be made, Timothy Weems was a different person from the fourteen year old boy who had wanted sex, a marriage, children, and the safe and happy life his father had before he had let his son's balls get blown off by a so-called friend.
The accident and resulting surgery had thinned and paled him, made him the subject of talk and speculation among his friends, and caused a depression in his parents that eventually led to their divorce once Tim left home. The accident also caused Tim to try and prove to himself and the world that he was a man, no matter what the configuration or efficiency of his sexual organs. He found the key in an old R&B song he heard just before his final operation.
The lyrics went, Flip, flop, and fly, I don't care if I die, and it seemed true enough to him. What did he have to live for anyway? So he took the life he cared so little about and risked it. He drove boldly, played the most brutal and dangerous sports he could find, and constantly looked for new ways to test himself and raise his standing among his peers. But despite his courage, he always felt pity and sometimes mockery in the eyes and words of his friends. He knew he had to leave Colorado if he was ever to escape it.
So after his graduation from the University of Colorado, he came to L.A. There, family money and the force of his own single-minded personality established him in another five years as the darling of the upscale daring. His shop and social calendar flourished, and both beautiful women and men made many offers, all of which he declined, fueling the fires of speculation.
Adding to his monastic image was the fact that he would never take recreational drugs of any sort. It was a refusal that lost him no friends or customers, since, to everyone else, Tim Weems was the last person in the world to have to prove he had balls.
The one outdoor activity that Tim Weems would neither engage in nor approve of was hunting. He sold no guns nor hunting equipment, and when people occasionally came into his store and asked to be outfitted for bighorns or mulies or bear, Tim told them that his shop didn't have any hunting gear at all, because hunters were not sportsmen.
It was only natural that he would gravitate toward Jean Catlett's arm of animal rights activity, for Tim was more virulently anti-hunter than he was pro-animal, and it provided a chance to directly confront what he considered the enemy that had taken away his manhood.
But today, as he viewed that enemy through crosshairs, he could not shoot. The first opportunity had come only a half hour after he had secreted himself in the brambles where he was completely invisible to passersby. He had removed his orange patches and reversed his jacket to camouflage, and had even darkened his face with mud so that it would be only another shadow in the shadows.
But when the hunter had come by, looking as stealthy and as treacherous as Tim had imagined, he had not been able to kill him. The man had entered his sight picture, stood there while Tim slowly started to squeeze the trigger, and then stopped as though he sensed something nearby. It was the perfect opportunity, a still target well within range, but Tim had done nothing, only frozen in place until the man moved on.
He knew then that he could not shoot, that there was nothing that could make him pull a trigger against a man who was not threatening him with harm. Still, he remained in the brambles, waiting for hours, thinking that his mind might somehow magically change, and that the next hunter might bear so strong a resemblance to the man who had shot him fifteen years before that he would have no option but to pull the trigger.
But the next man was old, with a droopy moustache that made him look more like someone's kindly grandfather in a fairy tale than a bloodthirsty stalker of the woods, and a woman came by in another hour, looking tired and disinterested. Tim wondered if she were patronizing a husband who was a more avid hunter. Whatever her situation, she did not deserve death.
Finally, at 4:00 in the afternoon, Tim Weems ejected the cartridges from his rifle, slipped them into his pocket, and pushed his way through the brambles that hid him, moving slowly and carefully so that he would not be torn by the tiny spikes. He continued to think, as he had for several hours without coming to a conclusion, what he would do next. He knew he could not share in tomorrow's slaughter, but at the same time he could not betray his friends. He still felt that what Jean had planned and the rest of them were carrying out was valid, but he could no longer be a part of it.
There was only one way out, and he decided on it as he pushed the last tangled wall of brambles from his path. He would tell them tonight that for reasons of his own he could no longer be part of the group, would swear to silence and hope they would believe him, and then leave. If they did not want to let him go, well then, Flip, flop, and fly, he didn't give a damn.
He felt lighter now that the decision was made, and stepped from the thorns into the light, and into the path of a high velocity bullet.
Ricky Willis was starving for a deer. He had been hunting for five years and had never even gotten a good shot at one. His campmates, with whom he worked at the Marienville Tool and Die, had made Ricky's deer deficiency a running gag, and Ricky was getting damned sick of it. Even Lefwich, the little mousy guy who handled the accounts, had bagged two in five years, and the ragging was getting on Ricky's nerves.
Two of his six companions got their bucks the first day, so it wasn't all that bad this year, but there was even money down that Ricky would still be buckless by the end of the week, and a hundred of it was his. Now he had more than meat and antlers to worry about. He also might have Peggy wondering where the hell a hundred bucks of her house money had disappeared to.
So when Ricky heard something moving stealthily through the brambles he lifted his rifle. He couldn't tell what the animal was, but from the amount of space it took up, it was big, and was moving left to right. There wasn't a lick of blaze orange on it, so he knew it wasn't a hunter, and by the time it got out of those brambles it might start moving so fast he wouldn't be able to get a bead on it, like that eight-point he had lost two years before.
So when he saw what looked like a brown
texture emerge, he thought fuck it, it's a doe, I'll stick it back in the brambles, and fired.
It wasn't a doe, though. It was a man, which Ricky realized right away when he heard the strangled moan, and saw arms fly as the force of the bullet shoved the man back into the brambles.
"Oh Jesus," Ricky said. "Oh shit shit shit..." He stood there for a moment, not knowing what to do, then realizing that he couldn't run away, not because he was scared of being caught, but because he had just done something stupid big-time, and couldn't walk away from it, not when a guy was hurt bad and might be dying.
So he ran up to the man, babbling, "Oh jeez, mister, I am so sorry, jeez, are you okay, oh Christ, man..." The man was lying on his back in the brambles, and Ricky was surprised to see that although he was breathing shallowly, as if he couldn't take in a good breath, he also seemed to be laughing. Ricky wondered if maybe he was crying instead, but when he looked at the muddy face as carefully as his panic would allow, he saw the man was indeed grinning as his breath chuffed, bubbles of bloody froth forming at the corners of his mouth.
"Now just stay still," Ricky said, thinking the pain must be making the man lose his marbles. He could see that the wound was in the man's chest, on the lower left, maybe a few inches below the guy's nipple. Ricky must have missed the heart. Hell, if he'd hit him in the heart, the guy'd be dead, right?
Ricky unzipped the man's jacket, then whipped off his own and pressed it against the man's chest. He couldn't see the wound well, but at least it didn't seem to be spurting blood. "You hold this against you now, you hear? I'm gonna go get some help..." Then he remembered that firing three shots was a distress signal, and he picked up his rifle and fired three times in the air. "That'll get people here. They'll help you while I get big help. You tell 'em I went, you hear?"
The man grinned wider and nodded slightly.
"You got friends around here?" Ricky asked. "Where your friends huntin'?"
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