by Neil Mcmahon
I decided the deadbolts could wait. She was only going to be here one more night. If she had something on her mind, that came first.
"Sure, if we can use your car," I said. "Where to?"
"You live out in the country, right?"
"Yeah?"
"Is there a place we could shoot your pistol?"
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
30
Renee's car, a tight, tough little Subaru Outback, easily handled the mud and ruts of the road up Stumpleg Gulch. When we got to my cabin, I made a quick check around the premises. Everything seemed fine in my little world, including the black tomcat, aside from him being pissed about my absence and loudly letting me know it.
Then I led Renee through the woods to the back part of the property. Like at Astrid's cabin last night, she wasn't dressed for the outdoors-she was wearing the same street boots and shearling coat-so I took an indirect route to pick the driest and easiest going.
But she didn't seem concerned about that or even to notice her surroundings, except to glance occasionally at the.45, which I was carrying in its gun belt, slung over my shoulder. She'd been quiet, her focus inward, all during the drive here, and had said just enough for me to glean that whatever unsettling revelation she was about to make was connected to Astrid and to firing a weapon.
Her capacity for keeping me off balance hadn't diminished, that was for sure.
As we walked, I kept an eye out for signs of my new neighbor bobcat. I didn't see any, but I was far from expert at that sort of thing and fresh tracks would be hard to pick up, anyway. The snow was still ankle-deep in spots but there hadn't been any recent fall, and while the surface melted slightly during the warming days, it froze to a crust again at night, with the underneath staying grainy. The result was that feet, paws, and hooves left clumsy outlines to begin with, which quickly blurred into vague depressions.
If he was around, he wouldn't be for long-as soon as Renee started blowing a window through this peaceful afternoon and into her past.
The landscape opened up when we came to the steep mountainside that formed my northeast border. It was a perfect backdrop for shooting; my father had set up a range with target stands and distances marked up to two hundred yards, which we'd used both for recreation and to sight in our rifles for hunting.
I set up one of the paper targets I'd brought along, a standard two-foot square with concentric rings. I decided to start Renee close in. The.45 could be reasonably accurate in skilled hands, but it was designed to knock a man down if the slug even touched him rather than for precision. I walked to the ten-yard marker, hung the gunbelt on a pine stob, and while I always kept the chamber clear until I was ready to fire, I did a routine check to make certain.
"Ever shoot a pistol before?" I asked her.
"Some, growing up. Daddy had a twenty-two he used for teaching my brother and me."
"I assume he talked about safety?"
"Over and over again. Assume it's always loaded. Never let the barrel point at anyone. Make sure everybody's behind you before you shoot."
"That's a good start. Did he show you a stance?"
She moved slowly, remembering body commands that had long since gone rusty, but she stepped into a correct firing range position-imaginary pistol in both hands, arms extended straight in front of her, feet shoulder-width apart.
"Good again," I said. "Next, this thing's a long way from a twenty-two."
"I shot a bigger one once-nine-millimeter, I remember."
"A forty-five's still got a lot more whack. Somebody as light as you, it's going to jolt you pretty hard, and the grip's made for bigger hands so it'll try to jump out of yours. Hang on tight, squeeze the trigger gently, and don't shoot again until you're fully under control. Oh, yeah, it's also loud."
I'd brought a packet of foam earplugs along with the targets and extra rounds. I dug it out of my shirt pocket and gave a pair to her. She brushed her hair behind her right ear and started to insert one. But she hesitated, then stopped.
"I don't want to dull this," she said.
That brought me out of my officious-instructor mode and back around to the weirdness of why we were here in the first place. I shoved the earplugs in my pocket. We wouldn't be shooting enough to risk long-term hearing damage-it would just be less comfortable.
"Okay," I said. "Step up to the plate."
She positioned herself facing the target. I placed the pistol in her hands, steadying them with my own, with the barrel pointed down and to the front. I jacked a round into the chamber and touched her thumb to the safety.
"As soon as you click this off, you're hot," I said. "You've got seven shots."
I let her go and stepped back. She raised the weapon and aimed for several seconds. I could see her hands wavering with its weight.
A boom ripped across the still afternoon and through my eardrums. Renee stumbled backwards into my hands, which were waiting to catch her waist. The barrel flew up to point skyward, but she held on and kept it in front of her.
"That's fine," I said. "Go ahead, you'll get used to it."
She fired the next six shots carefully, with increasing control. When she finished, she looked attractively disheveled-bright-eyed, flushed, breathing slightly fast. I took the pistol from her, cleared it, hung it in its holster, and went to check the target. She'd hit it five times out of seven, with two of the shots inside the dinner-plate-sized circle and another only a few inches away-pretty damned impressive for a novice who didn't weigh much over a hundred pounds.
I set up a fresh target and took the used one to show her.
"Annie Oakley would be jealous," I said.
Renee didn't speak. Her eyes still had that bright, almost glazed look.
"You want to go again?" I said.
She nodded.
I reloaded the pistol, wondering if it was time to try a couple of prompting questions that might start her talking.
As it turned out, I didn't need to.
"Stand behind me," she said. I hadn't expected the sound of her voice, and it startled me a little. It was subdued and shaky.
I stepped to where I'd been when I'd caught her waist.
"Closer. Right up against me."
Carefully, I pressed my chest against her back and put my hands on her waist again. I could feel her warmth through our coats, and the quick rise and fall of her breathing-even imagined that I sensed the tremor of her heartbeats.
She raised her hands and took aim at the target.
"That nine-millimeter pistol was Astrid's," Renee said. "She stood just like you are and touched my breasts while I shot it."
31
We spent the rest of the afternoon in bed in my cabin. Renee fell asleep before long, with the tomcat curled at her feet. He'd wasted no time in claiming her, and he was giving me looks that plainly urged me to get lost.
She had to be exhausted; she'd never gotten a chance to rest up from the stress and strain of the past days. The silence and the gray light through the windows were soothing, and maybe there'd been a catharsis in the secret she'd finally let out.
I was short on sleep myself, but too wired to drift off. I was entirely content to lie there, however, and I had a new blitz of information to process. In a way it was the most bizarre yet, but somehow it didn't even surprise me-maybe because it dovetailed into what I knew about Astrid. Just as she was a threat to Renee, the reverse was also true, so she had used seduction to establish control, the same as she would have with a man.
Or maybe it didn't surprise me because I was getting harder to surpise.
As Renee described it, the incident had happened during the summer when she was seventeen and visiting her father and Astrid in Helena. At first, the wicked-stepmother syndrome prevailed, but Astrid was shrewd about breaking through that; she treated Renee nonjudgmentally and like an adult, and was candid and amusing about herself. She was alluring, mysterious, exciting-irresistible.
Toward the end of the visit, on a day when Professor Callister was go
ne, Astrid confided that she loved to shoot. She showed Renee the nine-millimeter pistol and invited her to try it. Just the fact that she owned a gun was a little shocking, and for two women to go out shooting seemed almost improper. Their mood was conspiratorial, girlishly mischievous.
Astrid drove them to a wilderness area a few miles away. They hiked into the woods until they found a suitable clearing, away from any trails.
Then Astrid pressed up against her back. And cupped her breasts. The July afternoon was warm and sultry, Renee remembered. Feeling the voluptuous older woman touch her like that had made her almost dizzy.
She'd kept shooting until the clip was empty, then sagged back into Astrid's embrace. After a moment, Astrid released her. They went home as if nothing had happened and neither of them ever mentioned it again.
"I'm not hung up about the sex part. You know, because I was turned on by a woman," Renee had told me, talking quietly with her cheek on my chest. "I didn't want to be, I didn't not want to be. I just went completely docile-it was like she owned me. That's the problem."
"How so?"
"Because I loved it. It was so intense, so powerful."
"It's kind of supposed to be like that. Especially at that age."
She rose up on an elbow to gaze at me intently. "That's not what I mean. Ever since then, I've been craving somebody who overwhelms me like that-not a good, healthy kind of love where you give and take. I'm an emotional cripple. If somebody loved me, I don't know if I could really love him back."
That wasn't an easy thing to hear.
"What about your fiance?" I said. "Does he know?"
"Not about what happened with Astrid. I've told him the other part-that I don't know if I'll ever feel what I should for him."
"He's okay with that?"
"He thinks I'll get over it. He's so normal, and he assumes that will rub off on me. I guess it has-I've been with him almost two years."
"I don't think there's any such thing as 'normal,'" I said. "Not on that turf, anyway."
"Okay, I'll settle for 'less screwed up.'" She made it clear then that she didn't want to talk about it anymore. After giving me a sweet, lingering kiss that suggested regret, apology, and maybe good-bye, she turned away and drifted into sleep.
As for me, I was left in a bittersweet confusion that was deeper than ever. No way was I the kind of man who might arouse that blind, consuming passion in her. And, taken though I was with her, I wouldn't have wanted that.
Yet again, there was a whisper in my head that said maybe, just maybe, I was seeing this wrong-that Renee knew she could never change in the way her fiance expected her to.
So she was testing me to find out if I would accept her as she was.
32
We left my cabin around sundown and went to town to stay the night at Renee's. She was going to drive back to Seattle tomorrow, and she needed to pack and get an early start. She'd be returning in a few weeks; she still had business to settle in Helena.
But the question of whether we'd even see each other again remained in a silent limbo.
Her house was dark when we arrived there; neither of us had thought to leave on a light, not realizing we'd be gone so long. With no streetlamps nearby, the yard and surroundings were immersed in gloom, and the silhouette of the old mansion added a Gothic edge. I still felt a touch melodramatic climbing the porch steps with the.45 in my hand, but I was glad to have it. Finding the dead pack rat last night made the possibility of an intruder seem all too real.
I took the key from Renee, opened the door, flicked on the light switch inside, and stood there a few seconds, letting my eyes adjust. I started to step in, intending to take a walk around like we'd done last night.
Just as my foot crossed the threshold, I heard a sound come from the hallway ahead that divided bathroom, kitchen, and back bedrooms-a stealthy rustling, like a small animal might make. Those rats was the first thought that flashed across my mind-the little bastards had gotten in here, too.
Then came a distinct metallic click.
Along with it, the large figure of a man appeared in the hallway entrance, lunging into view from where he'd been hiding behind the wall. All I could grasp in that split-second take was that he was wearing a ski mask and combat fatigues, and that his hands were swinging up to point at me.
I threw myself back against Renee, knocking her out of the way as hard as I could, and tried to shout at her to get the hell out of there. The sound I made came out something like, "Gaaahhh!"
Gunshots exploded from inside the house and splinters from the doorjamb sprayed against my face.
I managed to chamber a round in the.45 and take rough aim at his shape, but I was still off balance and my vision was blurred. As I started pulling the trigger, he dropped into a crouch.
His next shot hit me like a sledgehammer to the right side of my ribs, spinning me around. I tripped over my own clumsy feet, crashed against the porch railing and down to the floor. For a couple of seconds I was too stunned to move. Then I rolled to face the door, forcing my body into position to again take shaky aim.
But the man inside the house had vanished.
I got hold of the porch railing, pulled myself up to my knees, and tried to stand. But Renee was beside me with a hand on my shoulder, firmly holding me in place.
"You just settle down," she said.
"Get out of here, he might still be inside."
"He ran out the back. I saw him."
I stopped struggling against her hand. "You sure?"
"Positive," she said. "And I called the police."
I coughed, or maybe wheezed. "He was running, huh?"
"Shhh."
"Not limping or anything?"
"No. Now shut up, dammit."
She helped ease me down onto my left side, as the first distant cries of sirens came to my ears.
33
Just about twenty years had passed since the last time I'd opened my eyes in St. Peter's Hospital. While I didn't have any clear memories of that experience, there was still a familiarity this time around-antiseptic smells, equipment hovering over my bed, tubes sticking out of me, and the feeling that my head was duct-taped onto my body.
Then I became aware of a Cheshire cat-like grin, floating in the vague distance across the room. It took me a few seconds to focus on the rest of Madbird around it, leaning against the wall with his arms folded.
"How's it going there, Hawkeye?" he said.
"You're just a bad dream," I muttered, and closed my eyes again.
"Must be the dope they been giving you."
"Have I been here long?"
"Overnight. It's Wednesday morning, about seven-thirty."
Several more seconds passed in silence.
"How many times did I fire?" I asked, with my eyes still closed.
"Four."
"Nothing?"
"I guess you took out a bathroom window and beat up on some plaster. But hey, it ain't all bad-if you'd hurt him, you probably would of got sued or thrown in jail."
"That was my plan all along. Just scare him off."
"Hell, yeah. Thinking on your feet like that, that's where you white guys got it over us. We'd shoot him, and then we'd be fucked."
But Madbird had far more important news than my marksmanship score. He had talked with Gary Varna.
Renee not only called the police while the shooting was going on, she'd stayed on the line and told them that the attacker had run into the woods behind the house. They'd arrived in time to cut off his escape, and found him hiding.
He turned out to be Travis Paulson. And it turned out that Paulson-who had never married, and lived alone-had a longtime hobby, which he'd kept carefully under wraps.
A search of his house revealed a sophisticated photography studio, along with an extensive photo stash of more than twenty women, ranging in age from late teens to forties, all posing nude.
The collection included a duplicate set of the prints of Astrid that we had found in the carr
iage house. Without doubt, Paulson was the photographer who had originally taken them.
Which went a long way toward explaining his fascination with Astrid's earring. The only other time he had seen it was sexually charged.
In the photos of Astrid, she obviously knew what she was doing and even appeared to be enjoying herself. That also seemed to be the case with most of the other women. But a few told a different story. In these, the models were obviously unconscious-and he was having sex with them.
He was insisting to the police that these encounters were also consensual-that the women had knowingly allowed him to give them a date-rape drug. But the cops knew that was bullshit, and it gave them a lot of leverage.
That was all the information that Madbird had at this point. But it carried a terrible, wonderful implication.
Although Paulson claimed to know nothing about the cache in Professor Callister's study-he insisted that he had given that set of photos to Astrid and never seen them again-the evidence now pointed at him as the one who had planted it there. He admitted that he himself was the photographer; he'd been friendly with Professor Callister and familiar with the layout of the carriage house.
From there, things fell into place. He'd known that Madbird and I had started tearing into the study, and when he saw Renee wearing the earring at the funeral, it was clear that the cache had been discovered. He'd tried to get Renee alone at dinner to find out how serious a threat this was. When she refused, he'd decided he couldn't risk letting it go any further, and he'd lain in wait to stop her.
Travis Paulson had stepped into the limelight as the murderer of Astrid and her lover.
34
I drifted in and out of sleep after that, occasionally aware of the monitors I was attached to and hospital personnel stopping in to check on me. The wound was a dull throb in my side; it didn't feel much different from broken ribs, although that was probably thanks to painkillers. I got a look at the front of it when a nurse changed the dressing-a ragged little hole where the bullet had entered, surrounded by a blackish purple bruise. The exit wound was worse, but I couldn't see that. Still, it wasn't too serious, she informed me; assuming I was able to get up and take care of myself, I might go home as early as tomorrow.
