Hunter's Moon

by Dana Stabenow

  Still she waited, listening, the memory of the assault at the lodge fresh in her mind, making her wary of coming out over the edge of the ridge and into the open.

  Again, she heard nothing, saw nothing, smelled nothing.

  Except—she thought for a moment she heard a muted groan off to her right.

  Nonsense. But—

  No, she had definitely heard a groan, because she had just heard another.

  Flattened to the ground, she slithered over the brush, soaking up quantities of water with the front of her shirt, Jack’s shirt, trying to peer through the mist that had closed in around the top of the ridge.

  The moan came again. “Hello?” she said in a low voice, conscious of the way sound carried in a fog. “It’s Kate. Who is that?”

  In the next moment she bumped into a body.

  It was Dieter. He was lying with his head twisted at an odd angle, eyes open and staring at nothing, all the arrogance and bombast drained away, leaving only the empty shell behind, a shell someone hadn’t had even the decency to bury.

  Again she felt the welcome flicker of rage, but the flame seemed much dimmer and less powerful. She put out a shaking hand and closed his eyes. She looked for his rifle and couldn’t find it.

  The moan came again, galvanizing her into action, crawling through the brush, getting wetter and wetter until at last she ran into another body.

  It was Old Sam this time. He lay still, unmoving as Dieter. “Uncle?” she said, her voice quavering. Her hand went to his shoulder.

  Quick as a snake his gnarled old hand flashed up to grab her. Pain radiated down her arm from the broken skin of her wrist, and she only just managed to bite back a whimper. Still, she was so glad to see him that she almost burst into tears. “It’s me, it’s Kate, uncle.”

  He blinked at her. “Ekaterina.”

  “Yes. Let go, you’re hurting me.”

  His grip relaxed. With a fair imitation of his normal acerbic style, he said, “Where the hell you been, girl? It ain’t like I’m having a whole hell of a lot of fun lying out here getting pissed on by Mother Nature.”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  He shifted. A spasm crossed his face. “Leg’s broke, I think.”

  His right leg was broken, just below the knee. Kate could feel the lump beneath his jeans. “It’s a closed fracture,” she said, relieved.

  “Gee, that makes me feel a whole hell of a lot better.”

  “Less chance of infection.” But his leathery brown skin looked flushed. She put the back of her hand to his cheek. It was hot. “What else is wrong with you?”

  He gestured toward his left arm. “Got shot.”

  The bullet had passed through the flesh of his inner arm, punching holes through shirt and T-shirt on both sides. “You were lucky, uncle. Missed your humeral artery and didn’t hit your chest.”

  He grunted. “Yeah, well, I was moving fast enough. Was probably only luck she got me at all.”

  “Senta?”

  He nodded.

  I will kill her for this, Kate thought. Among other things. It was a vow, and it steadied her. “What happened, uncle?”

  “Beats the hell out of me,” he said.

  “Sssshhh,” she said. “Keep it low. I don’t know who else is around, or what side they’re on.”

  He looked at her, awareness sharpening his eyes. He noticed the blood on her shirt. “What happened to you, girl?” He struggled to rise. “Are you hurt?”

  She pushed him back firmly. “No. You first. Tell me what happened. I want to get to the spike camp as soon as possible and get you a sleeping bag and some food. Did you go to the ridge?”

  He let her push him down, which frightened her, and answered her question without prevarication, which frightened her even more. “Yes. Rode the four-wheelers all the way up. Took damn near three hours, because we had to stop every five minutes for Hubert to pick his friggin’ plants.”

  Kate remembered the jar on the table next to Hubert’s computer. “He’s into herbs.”

  Old Sam met her eyes. “He was.”

  She took a deep breath. “I see. I found Dieter, uncle.”

  “He dead?”

  She nodded.

  “Figured. Anyway, it didn’t hurry us along any when Senta started following old Hubert into the brush. Helping him, she said.” Old Sam snorted. His voice grew stronger in the telling, and Kate had to shush him again.

  “We all knew what kinda help she was offering. He wasn’t buying though, old Hubert wasn’t. The first time she followed him he came a-roaring outta the bushes like a nun with a crusader on her tail, his shirt unbuttoned and his glasses crooked and his face all flushed.”

  “She made a move on him.”

  “She tried.” Even Old Sam, who boasted all the moral fiber of an alley cat on his eighth life, appeared slightly scandalized by Senta’s blatant behavior. “And then they argued the second time, and he came out of the brush even faster. That was the last time he made us stop.”

  “What were they arguing about?”

  “They were arguing in German, so I don’t know. I thought I heard Hendrik’s name, though.”

  Kate thought. “Fedor and Hendrik were a couple. Fedor worked for Klemens in finance, Hendrik with Hubert in research and development.”

  Old Sam shifted. “Whatever. I thought I heard his name. I don’t know for sure.”

  “So you get to the ridge. What happened then?”

  “Everybody got out their cameras. Somebody opened the knapsack and passed out the snacks and drinks. It was windy, but the clouds were holding off in the east, and you could see Denali, big as life and twice as natural. There was a lot of oohing and ahing, as you might expect. Myself, I went up the hill a ways to take a leak.”

  And to get a better look at the view, Kate thought, but Old Sam would never admit to taking a purely aesthetic pleasure in anything, fearing that it would downgrade his status as one hundred percent manly man.

  “I wasn’t gone that long, maybe ten minutes or so, when I hear shots from the ridge below, three of them. One’s that Weatherby of Eberhard’s, the other two sound like they might be from that elephant gun of Dieter’s. I hadn’t seen any game on the way up, but you don’t figure to when you’re roaring through the woods on a four-wheeler, so I come on the run, thinking something four-legged snuck up on Demetri and he might need some help.”

  He stopped. “Are you cold, uncle?” Kate said. Her hands went to the buttons of her shirt. Jack’s shirt.

  One gnarled fist closed over both of hers. “I’m fine. Let me finish, and then I want to hear what happened to you.”

  “All right,” she said, letting her hands fall.

  “Like I said, I come on the run, but I must of went higher up than I thought because before I get all the way back I hear one of the four-wheelers start up and somebody else start to scream in German. Sounded like a man. Then I hear this godawful crash, bang, thump, crunch and some more screaming, and what sounds like somebody beating on somebody else. Well, hell, Kate, it was beginning to seem like I might maybe oughta slow down a little, but by then I was going so fast I couldn’t stop.

  “So I bust out of the bushes and Senta’s standing there with Dieter’s gun and one of the four-wheelers and its trailer is just going over the side of the ridge and Eberhard’s throwing Hubert after it.”

  He paused. “Goddamndest thing I ever saw,” he said, not without admiration. “Just stiff-armed him up and over, pitched him the way you or me would pitch a fish. That is one big tough son of a bitch.”

  “I know.”

  The sharp old eyes examined her face, but he didn’t comment, not yet. “So I managed to put some turn in my forward motion and kept on going, right over the edge of the ridge about twenty feet from where the four-wheeler went over.” His lips tightened. “I woulda made it, too, except for that goddamn blonde. She shot me just before I got over, and I fell and broke my goddamn leg.” He fumed.

  “You’re alive,” Kat
e said. “Right now, I’ll settle for that.”

  The lack of animation in her tone alerted him. “What happened your end?”

  She told him, voice flat, face expressionless. When she got to where she’d been knocked unconscious, Old Sam noticed her missing braid for the first time. “What the hell happened to your hair, girl?”

  “I cut it off,” Kate said.

  Old Sam was very old and very wise. “Jesus,” he said with a disgusted look. “Women. I get shot up right, left and center and you take time out for a new hairdo.”

  “When I woke up, I had my hands and feet tied with duct tape. Someone had dumped me next to the log. Jack was lying in the middle of the yard. He had been shot. I thought he was dead, but he wasn’t. Senta and Eberhard showed up then, in a celebratory mood. They invited me to join in. Jack tossed a box of cartridges into the fire and when they went off, Jack and I lit out.”

  Old Sam frowned. “I underestimated that old gal,” he said finally. “I figured she was just another pretty face.”

  So did I, Kate thought.

  Never again.

  “How the hell did they think they could get away with it?” Old Sam demanded.

  “If they’re the only ones left alive, uncle, who’s going to say any different? If Senta had Dieter’s gun, they must be thinking of framing him for the whole business. It makes a weird kind of sense, if you don’t have any evidence to the contrary—his company is being sued by everybody and his brother for what sounds like everything under the sun. Jack—” Her breath caught. “Jack,” she went on evenly, “Jack said Dieter wasn’t the most stable person at the best of times, partying with the jet set, stuff like that. My guess is they’re going to say he lost his mind and started shooting everything that moved.” She added, still in that odd, flat voice, “They’ll probably sue George for not providing adequate safety measures on the hunt.”

  “Where is Jack?” Old Sam said bluntly.

  “Let’s see to that break, uncle.” She found an alder limb of the right length and size and used his boot laces and Dieter’s shirt to splint his broken leg. “There.” She sat back. “You hear anything I should look out for?”

  He shook his head, disgusted with his own weakness. “I been in and out. All I been hearing is my ears ringing.”

  She looked up. The rain was tapering off but the mist was becoming thicker and hanging lower. “Stay here, uncle. I’ll get you that sleeping bag.”

  “Kate? Where’s Jack?”

  She left him without answering.

  It took ten minutes to gain the ridge, and by the time she did the mist had closed in, a solid, disorienting pall. A couple of times she had to stop and think which way was up, and when she at last emerged on level ground it took another five minutes to feel her way to the group of fifty-five-gallon Chevron barrels that constituted the spike camp. They were only twenty-five feet away and stood next to the largest tree on the bluff, to make it easy to find. It was only easy if you could see the tree, and she couldn’t.

  She was shivering uncontrollably, wet, cold, a hunger too long ignored gnawing at her stomach like acid. Somehow she was at the barrel, somehow her numbed hands were unclipping the lid. She raised the flat circular metal disc and grabbed the first thing she found, which was a sleeping bag.

  A voice said chidingly, “My, how cold you look, meine kleine Katerina.”

  She looked up and saw Eberhard emerge out of the mist like a ghost traveling between dimensions. He had in his hands what Kate now recognized as not his own Weatherby but Dieter’s Merkel. It was the same gun he had had the previous night at the lodge, the gun whose appearance had bothered her so fleetingly.

  “At least you’re alive,” Eberhard said. He smiled. “I was afraid you were dead. That would have spoiled all my fun.”

  Sixteen

  Who knows what goes on in the mind of a man like that?

  SHE LET THE SLEEPING BAG fall back into the barrel and stood very still, hands grasping the lid so tightly that the edges cut into her skin.

  “How did you get here so fast?” she said stupidly, the first words to come to her mind.

  He shrugged, that terrifying grin unimpaired. “When I got back to camp last night, I doctored Senta’s back. She is not happy with you, Katerina. She doesn’t want you for a toy anymore, she wants you dead, and dead right away. So I took the four-wheeler and drove here and camped. I knew you would come here to look for your friends, food, a weapon.”

  “Where’s Senta?”

  His smile was rueful, his shrug self-deprecating. “Senta does not camp. She says such things are not good for the complexion. So she gives me her blessing, in a manner of speaking, and sees me off.” He eyed her slyly. “She has taken a dislike to that man of yours. I pity him.”

  Kate couldn’t stop flinching at the words, but she was shivering so hard it was undetectable.

  “What have you done to your hair?” He looked at her critically. “I liked that braid. I shall have to punish you for cutting it off without my permission.” He gestured with the rifle. “Now come here. We have some unfinished business.”

  “What happened here?” Kate said, trying not to let her teeth chatter. “Yesterday? What happened?”

  “An accident,” he said piously. “One of the four-wheelers drove too close to the edge of the cliff. And poof!” He demonstrated, one hand arcing a graceful, swooping swan dive that ended with a flat smack of palm on palm. “That Dieter, he was always a little—what is the word for the temperature? Mercurial, yes. The legal problems were increasing, and the stress was beginning to show. He has been very depressed. And then poor Fedor, and Hendrik. They were so young, such valued employees, so close to him. For them to die in such horrible accidents. I blame myself. I should have been watching him more closely.”

  He shook his head sadly, a gesture belied by his unrepentant grin. “But now Senta, as the nearest blood relative, will inherit control of the company, until his sons come of age.” The grin widened. “Somehow I feel neither one of them will make it that far.”

  Kate felt sick, and knew she looked it. Good. The last thing she wanted was for Eberhard to think she had heard this before, and to go looking for who had told her. “All of the party went over? Everyone?”

  Eberhard nodded cheerfully. “Everyone.” He grinned again. “Eventually.”

  “What about us? What about the guides? Why kill us, too?”

  Eberhard shrugged. “Like I said, Dieter was depressed. I am sure we can find a doctor to say that he was verging on the insane. Who knows what goes on in the mind of a man like that?” He motioned with the rifle again. “Enough talk. Come here.”

  Instead she threw the barrel lid, slicing through the air like a discus to catch him squarely in the chest with a solid thunk.

  It was hard to tell who was more surprised, him or her, but he dropped his rifle and it gave her time to run and she did, and that wonderful fog closed in behind her as if someone had drawn a curtain, thick and enfolding, like a lover’s arms.

  The edge of the bluff was reached in a dozen giant steps and she launched herself into the air blindly, going into a tuck and praying for a nice thick stand of brush wherever she came down. As she dropped the rifle boomed and a bullet passed close enough for her to feel a hot rush of air against her cheek. A lucky shot; he couldn’t see her, he could only hear her, and he was running, too.

  The ground came up and hit her in the knees. She ducked head and shoulder and continued to roll until she came up hard against a sharp-edged, lichen-covered boulder. The breath was knocked out of her, and she lay where she was just long enough to get it back and no more. She heard footsteps above, along with some swearing in German. They halted abruptly, and in the resulting silence Kate couldn’t understand why Eberhard didn’t hear her heartbeat and zero in.

  In the few brief seconds that followed, Kate realized two things: one, that Eberhard must not be allowed to learn that Old Sam had survived, and, two, that he must therefore be led away from the
ridge. There was also three, she’d better do it quick before Old Sam decided to take a hand.

  She stood up and kicked the rock deliberately. “Ouch!” she said, raising her voice, and began to run straight down the hill. The fog parted before her and swirled together again behind her.

  Behind her, she heard the footsteps again, hurried, crashing through brush, stumbling over rock, but always, always in pursuit.

  She eschewed the switchbacks and ran straight down the steep side of the ridge, taking great leaps and horrible risks in the enclosing mist, barking her shins on boulder and branch, catching her shoulders and arms against the limbs of trees. She let the angle of the slope guide her. He was bigger and stronger and probably faster than she was, and he had undoubtedly eaten and drunk well both the evening before and that morning.

  Kate was smaller, dizzy with pain from her throbbing head and faint from hunger, but she was lighter on her feet, she knew where she was and she had a plan. It depended on him following her, so she made as much noise as she could and when she couldn’t, deliberately made more by breaking branches and kicking rocks loose as she ran. He started a dozen mini-avalanches of his own, dirt and rock tumbling down with him.

  As the ground began to level out, the fog began to thin, so that she could see maybe twenty feet in front of her. A regular line of brush indicated that she had stumbled on the last of the switchbacks and without pause she jumped a rock, yanked her sleeve free when it was snagged on a branch of white spruce and pounded down the road.

  There was a crash and a curse behind her and she paused at the turn, gasping for some much needed air while he disentangled himself and got back on his feet. It wouldn’t do to get too far ahead of him. By now he knew he had no choice but to follow, that he would never find his way back up the ridge until the mist cleared. And Kate was headed toward the lodge, and Senta was at the lodge. He had to come after her.