Kat and Paco had obviously hunkered down somewhere together. But where?
If Cantu were right in his search, and he was going straight for her now, Marcus must shadow the deadly psycho’s movements to be prepared to fire at the exact right moment.
*
Katrina still wanted so much to call out to Marcus, to determine if he were all right, and to let him know her position. She’d in fact found a wonderful natural fortress. It was a huge mass of granite with three sides, like a perpendicular cradle. She hid now behind its lovely wall-face. The huge outcropping was so large that entire trees had sprouted from it. No doubt as old as this forest.
She could not ask for better cover, and she instinctively felt Cantu’s approach. She could hear him catlike out there in the dark, making his way closer and closer still.
She’d brought an ample supply of blanketing tape, ostensibly for Cantu, but she now ripped a long piece of it off and fashioned a muzzle around Paco’s snout to keep him quiet. As Cantu had a hold over the dog, as Paco answered to the man’s orders. Paco might turn on her or bolt at any moment. She hoped Cantu would call the dog, and if and when it happened, she’d follow on Paco’s heels, and the moment dog and monster held their reunion, she’d carry through with her plan to incapacitate Cantu so completely as to render him helpless and vulnerable. She realized that now she too was not above using the dog as a lure.
Regardless of all that’d happened, she still held out a glimmer of hope for her initial plan, and she recalled how her shooting instructor had explained how he would incapacitate a man if he didn’t want to kill him outright—“Shoot the kneecaps,” he’d said. Of course, if she must, she’d go for the heart, the head, anything fatal but only if need be.
She heard him coming toward her…coming dead on, snakelike to be sure, using a zigzag pattern in the underbrush but coming straight for her nonetheless. She imagined him crawling toward her on all fours, slithering on his belly, itching closer…closer. A worm. A maggot. Lesser than a snake. The sound of him so close now she imagined she smelled the accelerant clinging to him, the odor of burning flesh from his victims— Grimes and Schramick. She imagined him within a hundred yards of her with night-vision looking straight at her natural fortress. But he can’t see through it, she assured herself. No matter what, he’s not a supernatural being. However, he was cunning and his instincts honed to animal sharpness.
He might well imagine anyone would take up the wide rock wall for cover. The little cocoon of safety had instantly turned into a place of sure danger, and she realized she may as well be waving a flag as be standing back of the rock. Cantu’s onto me. He was within seventy yards, coming straight for her, now. She searched about for an escape, realizing that if she could get Cantu’s profile against the rock, reverse position on him, she could indeed carry through with her plan to sink two steel-tipped arrows in each of the psycho’s kneecaps.
It would take two successive rapid fire shots from the bow, but she’d gotten the thing operating perfectly for her size and weight. It can be done, and I’m just the one to do it, she reassured herself.
She questioned which way to move, away from the lake or go left, deeper into the forests still. Cantu seemed to be coming up from the forest side; perhaps the lakeside would prove a safer distance from which to observe and fire when the moment came.
She heard more twigs, more near imperceptible sounds like the scurrying vermin of the underbrush rushing ahead of Cantu. She knew this meant human vermin on the way. Marcus had said that marines like Cantu were trained in jungle warfare and would be undetectable out here. That was a joke. She had him following her bread crumbs.
She worked her way deeper into the forest trees, moving away from the granite wall. She now watched from an angle so as to position her shot at when Cantu came slithering to this side of the rock face. At her heels, Paco, obviously trained to this sort of dance, had followed, keeping low.
Then she saw a shadowy figure emerge from the brush and move toward the stone wall. Cantu carefully checked overhead for anyone atop the massive boulder. She aimed for the knees, selecting the right knee when a blistering, ear-splitting shot rang out and stone pieces flew from the wall, and the shadowy figure dove for dirt.
She sighted at the prone figure, realizing through the scope that she could put a steel tip into the cranium at this angle but not the kneecaps. A cat’s whisker from letting her arrow fly, Kat saw not Cantu’s but Marcus’s forehead and eyes in her bow scope. At the last moment, she saw that the figure she was about to kill was Rydell.
She watched him scuttle crablike to the safe side of the rock.
“Got your woman out here, Rydell!” shouted Cantu, taunting Marcus. “Got her trussed and ready for barbecue. You wanna parlay?”
Kat held her silence, realizing that Cantu was trying to draw Marcus out, and that he’d be killed for certain if he showed himself again.
“You hear me good, Marcus. I’ve got Katrina Mallory.”
She wanted to scream out, to tell Marcus it was a lie, to keep him safe, but she also wanted her chance—as slim as it might be—at Cantu’s kneecaps. She wanted to inflict as much pain as she could; she wanted to carve him up while still alive. Nothing short of it would suffice for what he’d done to Terry four years ago and his more recent victims.
She realized in order to put the fiend at ease long enough to get a shot, she’d have to gamble with Marcus’s life, to use him as bait. While she debated whether or not she could do this, Marcus shouted back, “Kat! Kat if you can hear me, let me know where you are! I know he’s lying. Give me a signal!”
She kept silent. Debating.
She continued to debate.
“She can’t talk right now, Rydell. A bit ahhh…incapacitated, you might say. Broken bones is painful shit. People faint out. Even a big guy like Officer Grimes—boom, right out. Like a light.”
“How do I know you have her?” came Marcus’s reply, and Kat could hear the excruciating anguish he felt at this moment.
I gotta let him know I’m OK, she told herself, but another voice kept screaming, no. In fact, it sounded like Marcus’s voice in her head. No, you have to go slow… patience. The moment the freak shows himself, then Marcus will know the truth and at the same time, I’ll have put the animal down.
“How long you going to drag this out, Rydell?”
Marcus failed to answer, no doubt, weighing his options, looking for some way out, struggling with himself, just as Kat struggled with herself.
“Come on, Marcus!” Cantu cried out. “Give it up. After all, I let Miersky’s family go. Least you can do is give me this.”
Again Marcus remained mute.
“Marcus, old friend? Didya black out again? Back of that rock? Or are you just playing possum, huh? First time I ever laid eyes on you, I thought you were doin’ just that. Put my gun to your head. Was about to blow your brains out with the rest when it occurred to me the hell I could put you through if you lived.”
Again Marcus made no answer.
“It worked, too. Made your life a living hell, didn’t I?” Cantu’s diabolic laughter wafted over the still lake.
The story as retold by Cantu here in the empty stillness of the forests made Kat want to cry, and the matter-of-fact tone made it all the more chilling.
“Give me a minute or two, will you?” It was Marcus’s warm, rich voice now filling the woods.
Cantu’s maniacal laughter continued. “Take three.”
The dog whined and the sound went out between the two men.
“You got my dog, Marcus? Hey, Big! Come to Papa now boy! Come on!”
“I’m callin’ your bluff, Cantu, you lyin’ sack of shit!”
“You need to hear her scream, heh?”
Marcus fired at the general area from which Cantu’s voice emanated. Three successive explosions that reverberated across the lake. He must be convinced that Kat was not in the same vicinity; he must realize that if Cantu did not have the dog at his side, neit
her had Kat. That it’d all been bluff.
It was the kind of slip up Marcus had been waited for. Marcus came from behind the rock firing and racing toward his enemy and then dropping to his stomach but there was no return fire. Cantu had retreated. Invisible again.
From her vantage point, Kat watched Marcus take pursuit, rather fearlessly and recklessly, and she worried he was rushing to his death.
Terry’s murderer never showed himself; she didn’t get any opportunity whatsoever at a shot, and now Marcus was between her and Cantu.
*
Katrina pursued from her position, and as she did so, she realized that Paco’s muzzle had been torn away. The dog barked freely now, creating an audible beacon to them. Cantu wanted them to follow the dog; he was using the dog as bait now as he raced ahead of them. Kat’s hair lifted and waved now in a sudden wind that’d come up. It was a grabbing wind made of the errant bony fingers of am angry ghost that’d crawled up out of the lake.
No choice now. She had to join forces with Marcus. For one, he was in her line of fire. Secondly, he needed to know that she was alive and not under Cantu’s control. To this end, she shouted, “Marcus! I’m here! Slow down and wait for me.”
The sound of Kat’s voice stopped him cold, and he turned to rush back to join her. They converged from their respective paths.
“Following Paco!” she said. “Cantu’s called Paco to him. I’d say electronically. Apparently your retooling of that damned bug didn’t work.”
“I told you to get clear of this place, Kat. What the hell’re you doing back here?”
“We had a deal from the outset, remember?”
“That’s gone by the boards. This is kill or be killed, no room for any gray area when hunting a predator like Cantu, and that bow and arrow’s very gray, so I want you back of me at all times.”
“I’m not a child or a movie heroine!”
“Do as I say!”
“I’m not taking a backseat here, Marc.” She pushed past him, not slowing in the pursuit.
“Slow down,” he commanded, catching up. He then grabbed her by the arm to stop her. They’d arrived at a clearing. “We can’t cross in the open here, Kat,” Marcus cautioned. “This is another trap he means to spring on us. I can smell it.”
At the other end of the clearing, they watched Paco’s heels disappear into the trees and into a cavernous depth of green blackness. Paco continued barking and romping as if it were all a great frolic.
Marcus pulled her aside when he thought she was about to leap into the breach. They fell behind a stand of trees to sniper fire that splintered bark and pinned them down. “For a sniper, his aim sucks,” she muttered.
“He doesn’t want to kill us outright,” Marcus replied, “not like we want to kill him, right?” He was favoring his arm that continued to pump blood over his clothes. “And-and speaking of killing, you damn near got me killed back there.”
Close on now, she realized the dark purple stain covering his shoulder was a bloody wound. He appeared soaked in blood. She began to worry him about it, asking how he felt, if he were OK, if he felt faint.
“I’m all right,” Marcus insisted. “One of his damn arrows got me. Had to push the shaft through the shoulder and out the back. Hurt like helll.”
“You’re bleeding badly.” She tied it off using a strip of material ripped from her pocket where she’d found a rent in the camouflage pants she wore.
As she worked to secure his arm, Kat realized that Marcus had no idea just how close he’d come to an arrow through his skull, and she decided this was not the time to tell him. Nor did she feel any great urgency to inform him of her debate with herself while Marcus had been ciphering whether to give himself up to Cantu or not in an effort to get close enough to the fiend to ostensibly save her from his clutches.
“I’d just so love to put an arrow into this bastard,” she said.
“Kat, we’re beyond wounding him and taking him alive for your pleasure and your scalpel. I hope you know that.”
“But Marcus—”
“Ah-ah! Put that idea outta your head. If we get any clean shot at all, make it a kill shot. He’s wearing body armor. Use that Luger of yours and go for the head.”
“I don’t have the gun. ‘Fraid I lost it earlier back at the deck, which leaves me with what I have.” She shook the bow at him.
“Here, take mine.” He handed her his handgun.
She reluctantly took it from him. “You sure?”
“Forget about the bow and arrow. It’s too much of a gamble.”
“But Marc—”
“Ah, ah, ah!” He held up an index finger to her eyes. “And hey, I’m sorry but I ahhh put a hole through your Mac laptop.”
“You what?”
“He got hold of your Mac, and he’d’ve hacked into it for certain. Moment I saw it in his hands, I blew a hole in it.”
“Do you know how much that’s going to cost you?”
“Shit, I didn’t have a choice.”
“But to shoot my Mac?”
“Said I was sorry.”
“Nora’s called for help by now,” she replied. “Pretty soon, this entire place’ll be crawling with cops, and Cantu’s got to know that. You needn’t’ve blown a hole in my computer.”
“Sorry,” he repeated. “No choice,” he repeated, eyes beneath the night vision wear darting back and forth. “Right now, we need to concentrate of Cantu, not your dead computer.”
“The SOB needs putting down.”
“We take no more chances. As it is, we’ve been lucky. Leave the bow and arrows here. Use the Glock.”
“I think Cantu’s fleeing, Marcus, and if he gets away, it’ll be another four years before we see or hear from the bastard again. We can’t stay pinned down here.”
“You willing to risk everything going across that clearing?”
“Are you?” she asked.
“Then I go. You hold back,” he replied.
She swallowed hard at this. Here was a man, she thought, the first sign of true bravery she’d known since Terry.
“I don’t want to lose you, Marcus,” she said now.
“And I can’t lose you; if I do, I lose everything…again.”
She clasped his hands in hers, abruptly stood and ran, the bow still strapped to her back. She raced across the clearing with him after. She had good instincts. Cantu was indeed on the run. Like some preternatural vampire, with the light coming on, he had to know he’d run out of time.
Ahead of them, they heard Paco’s yelping at his master’s heels until suddenly there came a loud single yelp of pain followed by abrupt silence. They feared that Cantu, with no more use for the dog, had perhaps stoned it to death as no gunfire had erupted. Paco’s ominous silence continued to be a worry until they came on his prone form close to the road.
Kat had not abandoned the bow and arrow to the forests but had held onto it along with the Glock, but she laid all aside now where she kneeled over Paco. “He’s bleeding from the head. Maybe hit with the stock of Cantu’s rifle, but I think he’s going to be OK. Breathing deeply.”
But Marcus was busy scanning every inch of darkness via his goggles, turning about in a 360-degree reconnaissance. “Another trap, kiddo. I feel it. Dog’s bait set by a sinister heart for a sensitive heart like you.”
As he said it, he turned to her, and she saw the wrecking-ball coming at Marcus’s back, realizing in an instant that it was Schramick’s dangling remains. “Look out!”
Marcus turned, brought up his rifle to fire just as Schramick’s still smoldering body hit him full force, sending him down, grappling for the rifle, but Cantu’s foot had stomped down on Marcus’s weapon.
In the same instant, Kat had pulled her bow into position and had loaded it, snatched back the wire and let fly with an arrow that plunged through Cantu’s right knee. The shot shattered bone and sinew and sent Cantu into instant crippling pain when she let fly with a second steel shaft that tore through his left kneecap, leav
ing the monster paralyzed and screaming in excruciating agony. With an arrow through each kneecap, Cantu was plunged into so much torturous pain that he’d been unable to hold onto his high-powered weapon, much less fire it, but he reached for his handheld weapon, whipping it out, aiming at Kat’s eyes when Marcus, using his Bowie knife sliced through the rope holding Carl’s remains. Schramick’s body, the now dense, heavy package of death that it was, crashed straight down over Cantu, causing him to misfire. Cantu, now in pain and left stunned personified helplessness.
Marcus kicked away the man’s gun and stripped him of any additional weapons, including a huge machete.
Kat now stood over him alongside Marcus, a third arrow poised at Cantu’s face. Marcus held his weapon pointed at the devil as well. Even helpless and vulnerable, Marcus wondered even now if it were a trick. They had the monster at bay and in torturous pain—all to the good. The arrows had been sunk deep, the two shafts halfway through each knee, sticking wildly from either side of the legs. As he thrashed about, Cantu broke off the shafts, and with each such break, he sent up a terrible howl that rivaled those of Grimes and Schramick together. In fact, Cantu’s screams of pain from his shattered knees was so horrendous that the sound of it got Paco back on his feet.
Marcus wanted to put a bullet through the monster’s head. He put the muzzle against it but thought of how any halfway decent crime scene unit guys could figure the gunshot residue from such a shot translated to cold-blooded murder. Despite all the animalistic behavior and all the horror caused by this man, murdering him outright this way was not an option for Marcus and Kat, unless they wanted to end life in separate prison cells. The legal ramifications here weren’t so different from the little girl in the apartment overhead who’d murdered her monster.
“Want to blow his head off, I know,” she said to Marcus.
“For Tim, for Stan, for all the others, and for the terror he’s caused you.”
“I paid you well for your help, Marcus.”
“You can’t go through with your original plan, kiddo.”
“And why not?”
“It’ll come back at you.”
Dead On Page 26
