Hunters

by Whitley Strieber

  The rhythm was that of a helicopter blade, but it was too quiet. Way too quiet.

  A moment later, the light in the front yard changed, and he saw why. The curtained room had just gone dark. The piano had fallen silent.

  The lion, also, was gone, slipping away in absolute silence.

  He stood still, listening, watching. Could it have jumped up on the roof? Carefully, moving slowly and as little as possible, he raised his head. There was no telltale shadow along the roofline. So it had retreated, backing down the porch until it was out of sight.

  Was it trying to escape him or was it still hunting him? Since he couldn’t know, he had no intention of going around the corner of that porch. He needed some spot where he could still see the house, but which would give him protection for his back.

  Fifty feet to his left was a tree, its trunk thick enough to enable him to lean against it, making attack from behind much more difficult. The lion would have to charge him from some point that he could see, and it would need to start far enough away to make the pistol useful.

  The snow in the yard looked deep, and the slower he had to move, the greater the risk. But if he stayed here, the lion could get behind him.

  He raised his gun up beside his shoulder where it could be aimed and fired in just over a second, then plunged off the snow-covered sidewalk and into the deeper drifts of the yard itself. He was at his most vulnerable now.

  An enormous splash of snow hit him in the face, temporarily blinding him. He pulled a gloved hand across his face to clear his eyes.

  The lion was beside the tree and it was already crouched, ready to leap at him.

  Once again, it had outmaneuvered him. Yet again, he was too far away to risk a pistol shot. It, however, was close enough to take him.

  Years ago, Menard had recorded a case of a mountain lion stealing a three-year-old out of the bed of a pickup, but he’d never heard of anything like this.

  He’d probably been damn lucky to have seen it when he had, or he would have suffered the same fate as Louie.

  He took deep, careful breaths, centering his attention on his body, letting his emotions race off down their own frightened path. “You’re here, you’ve survived so far,” he told himself. “You can win this.”

  How had the lion ever gotten over to the tree? How had it concealed itself in the snow? He was having a hard time believing that an ordinary puma could function like this.

  Once again, he had to fight the impulse to turn and run.

  The lion moved off past the tree, carefully keeping the trunk between itself and Flynn, and once again he had the uncanny sense that it understood guns.

  He asked himself, “Do I have any chance at all of getting to the house?”

  From where he now stood, the tree was thirty feet away, the porch and front door twenty.

  The door had a glass window in it backed by a curtain. Breaking in would take ten seconds.

  When a path looked easy, that was usually because it wasn’t.

  The moment he started back up onto the front walk, he had to assume that the lion would know his intentions.

  He made a quick survey of the scene. The house was now completely quiet and completely dark.

  Could it be that the lion was trained? Because another way of looking at this situation was that it was not only trying to kill him, it was also trying to keep him from getting to the house.

  No, don’t even go down that road. The perp didn’t have a damn pet lion with a genius level IQ. The creature was bad luck, nothing more. Had to be.

  Nevertheless, his cop’s intuition screamed at him: secure your position. You don’t know where that animal is and you don’t know what it is, not really.

  Once again, he tried the radio. Once again, there was no response, which was completely unacceptable. When this stakeout was concluded he was going to file a red hot report with whoever was in charge of this outfit, about its leadership and its shitty procedures and its worthless equipment.

  Six feet to the left of the front door, the porch ended. Beyond it were lumps along the side of the house that indicated the presence of a flower bed. Behind the house, just visible, he could see the dark bulk of what must be the garage.

  Somewhere back there Diana and Charlie and Mike were deployed—unless, of course, their radio silence was unintentional.

  He would need to find them, but not right now. There was another thing that had to be done, which was that the Hoffmans needed to be warned and they had to be offered the close protection they should have been given in the first place.

  Angrily jabbing the transmit button on his radio, sending out call after unanswered call, he approached the house.

  He pushed his fist through one of the small panes of glass midway up the front door. Working fast because he had lost track of the puma, he pulled the remaining shards of glass out of the bottom of the frame, then leaned in, twisted the deadbolt, and opened the door.

  The alarm sounded its warning buzz, but he didn’t even try to cut it off. He wanted it to trigger. Surely that would bring Diana and Mike and Charlie in on the run—assuming, of course, that they were still alive. But surely—surely—they were. No matter how clever, a mountain lion simply could not slaughter four police officers. Someone was going to get to his gun in time.

  The buzz of the alarm rose to a warble. Thirty seconds to go. “Miss Hoffman, Doctor Hoffman, police! Please disarm your system! Police!”

  No reaction. They could have retreated to a safe room. They could be waiting there, guns at the ready. Hopefully, they were calling the locals.

  His first order of business was to find such any safe room they might be in. It would most likely be in the basement, so where was that door?

  He went into the living room. In the big stone fireplace, the fire that had blazed up earlier still sparked and muttered. Beyond this was the music room. With its drapes still closed, it was pitch black. Inside, he could see the darkly gleaming surface of a grand piano, its keyboard a pale grimace.

  The alarm triggered, its horn blaring up from under the stairs. Returning to the front hall, he opened the door of the understairs storage, then waited another full minute before disconnecting it. If it was set to make a distress call, he wanted to make sure that happened before he disabled anything. Finally, he pulled out its power line. Silence followed.

  “Is anybody here?”

  He detected not the slightest sense of movement, not the whisper of a footstep or a breath or the faintest creak of shifting weight from upstairs.

  The wind rose in the eaves and snow swept past the windows.

  He examined the alarm system’s control box and was horrified to see that the jack socket was empty. It had no phone connection.

  Stepping into the hall, he tried his cell phone, but there wasn’t even the hint of a bar. In the kitchen he snatched up the receiver of a wall phone, but there was no dial tone. Lines were down, of course, in weather like this.

  If that flash of light had been the perpetrator in some sort of helicopter, no matter how incredible it seemed, the brilliant puma had been part of it, deployed as an assassin and a decoy.

  He looked out the kitchen window, across the bleak pale desert of the backyard.

  He shifted frequencies on the radio, emergency calling again and again, but nobody came back. Field communicators like these were adjusted to a range of just a couple miles. You didn’t want them being picked up on bad-guy scanners.

  To be certain that he was right about the Hoffmans, he went through the house checking bedrooms, closets, bathrooms, even under the beds.

  He pulled down the attic door. As soon as the stairs unfolded, though, he knew they weren’t up there. Nobody had trod on these dusty steps in a long while. Still, he shone his light up. “Doctor Hoffman, police! Miss Hoffman!”

  No reply.

  He climbed the old steps, feeling the slanted ladder give under his weight. “Doctor Hoffman, I’m a police officer. I’m here to help you.”

&nbs
p; If he was wrong and they were up there, he might be about to get his head blown off. “Doctor Hoffman!”

  Shining his light ahead of him, he went up two more rungs. He spotted a couple of cardboard boxes, but mostly the space was filled with loose insulation. Turning, he shone his light to the far end. The house had two wings, but there was no point in crawling any deeper. Anybody coming up here would have disturbed this insulation.

  He backed down and closed the stairs, then spent some time in the master suite. The bed had been slept in, but it was cold now. The master bath revealed that this had been Doctor Hoffman’s room. It also revealed missing items. There was no toothbrush in the holder and a shelf of the medicine cabinet was empty.

  There were too many clothes in the closet to tell if any were missing, but the way that the hangars had been pushed back, it looked possible. He observed no luggage, so that was another question.

  He went down the hall to Gail’s room and found a similar situation. The bed was undisturbed, but there was evidence that cosmetics had been removed from the bathroom.

  In the hallway, he found a closet that held luggage, but it was unclear if any had been taken.

  Still, the evidence was sufficient to at least suggest that these people had left of their own accord. Nobody was going to believe that, though, because their cars were still going to be in the garage and there were no tracks around the house.

  He knew damn well what had happened here. The Hoffmans had been taken. No question, it was exactly the same as all the other cases. So the kidnapper had managed to take the third sister right out from under the noses of a stakeout team, which was damn well amazing.

  That most criminals were stupid was part of the shorthand of police work. The vast majority of them were going to be too dumb to get away, but also too dumb not to shoot. Catching the average crook was like herding a bull—dangerous, but not exactly what you’d call an intellectual challenge.

  What they had here was a lurid genius with a bizarre imagination. To even think of training a big cat the way he had was extraordinary. To succeed was phenomenal.

  He went downstairs and looked out the back door. He needed to locate the remaining members of the team. He observed the snow-packed back garden carefully, but saw no sign of any human presence. But he wouldn’t, not from here. They’d be back in the tree line.

  That damn cat was probably still out there, but he had to do this. He unlocked the kitchen door and drew it open.

  The wind-driven snow slammed him so hard that he lurched off balance and had to grab the doorframe to keep from being swept backward.

  There were major gusts in this thing, fifty, sixty miles an hour.

  Lowering his head, he pushed his way out into the storm.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The brief shafts of moonlight that had helped him earlier were now gone, replaced by scudding clouds and a literal wall of snow being driven directly in his face by the brutal wind. Out much more than five feet, he was blind. So what about the cat? Was it blind, too?

  Despite this, the perp had come in here and taken his victims. Flynn knew when, too. It had happened just after Gail had stopped playing the piano and just before he’d entered the house—when Flynn had been dealing with the puma. It had disappeared because the kidnap had been accomplished and the perp had called it back.

  The whole thing had taken roughly ten minutes and had been accomplished without a sound, without a trace of anything being left behind and without a hitch. In this.

  He reached the garage and shone his light through one of the small windows that lined the two doors—and felt a shock with the power of a fist in the face. There was blood everywhere, blood and ripped clothing. He saw a hand, a leg—pieces of two people, maybe three.

  The Hoffmans? The team? All of them?

  He raised one of the doors, which came up with a massive creaking and a tinkle of shattering ice.

  This door hadn’t been opened in at least an hour, and the other one was caked with ice. So who were these people?

  Stepping in, gun in one hand and flashlight in the other, he went to where a bloody jacket lay against the door of an old pickup.

  North Face, black. High-intensity penlight in the right pocket.

  Mike had worn a black North Face. The light was the same one all the team members carried.

  Against the back wall, there was an old-fashioned pitchfork. On it was a rounded mass of bloody hair. It was Charlie, his distorted face just barely recognizable in the mess.

  The perp may have originally intended to take the Hoffmans in the usual way, leaving behind evidence that they’d departed on their own. Flynn’s best guess was that these two men had somehow succeeded in surprising him—whereupon they had paid the same price as Louie.

  So this was now a major crime scene. There could be forensic studies done here. Maybe there would be prints, bits of hair, even blood. DNA, even.

  Looked at one way, this was a scene of extraordinary violence and tragedy. Looked at another way, it could be a treasure-trove of evidence, the first one in the history of this case.

  A quick survey of the remains turned up evidence of only the two men. Diana was not here. He made a quick decision to report this crime first and worry about her later. His guess was that she was beyond saving anyway, probably back there in those woods right now, in the form of frozen remains.

  His duty was very clear. He had to get out of here alive and give the state criminal investigators all the help he could.

  But how to accomplish that? The perp was going to definitely want him dead. He had effective weapons, including the lion, and probably skills and capabilities that Flynn knew nothing about. Given that he was able to train a wild animal to near-human hunting skills, it had to be assumed that he was well provided with extraordinary assets.

  Could Flynn manage to walk out of here? No, the perp would not let that happen. At some point, the lion would reach him or something else would reach him.

  Even if he did reach the Cherokee, which was half a mile back along the road, he didn’t have keys. So he would need to wire it. Not difficult, but it would take a few minutes that he was unlikely to have.

  He was trapped here, that was clear. But he wasn’t going to give up. That was also clear. The odds were against him though, seriously against him. In fact, he didn’t really think he had any measurable odds. So what he had to do was to leave a record behind, giving all the details of the crime as he had observed them.

  A moment’s thought brought him an idea. He set about searching the ruins of the two men for a phone. He could use it to record a detailed account of the crime as he had seen it unfold. He’d return it to the pocket it had come from. At some point, forensics would find the recording and listen to it.

  Handling the corpse of a person who has just died is as intimate an experience as there is. Not many people do it—nurses, policemen, emergency medical service personnel—and those who do never get used to it. It’s as if a living person has surrendered himself to you so completely that he is lost to your touch.

  Largely because Charlie’s corpse was the least maimed, Flynn approached it first. He’d taken a shattering blow to the head and sustained deep gouges. A man had delivered the blow, but the rest of it had been done by the lion.

  The body lay at a twisted angle, its face turned away as if in some eerie excess of modesty. One arm lay across the chest, the other angled backward, obviously broken. Long gouges had reduced his heavy parka to rags that bulged with tufts of white wool insulation. Mike felt in the pockets, soon coming across the familiar shape of an iPhone. Grasping it, he withdrew it and turned it on.

  It took a long time, but finally the opening screen appeared. Charlie didn’t use a password, which was useful but not smart for a man who obviously dealt with a lot of classified material.

  As Flynn pressed the logo of the recorder app, he found himself watching the battery indicator with increasing amazement. The phone got hot, quickly becoming almost painful to
hold. He tried to turn it off but it was no use. He watched helplessly as the battery indicator moved across the face of the thing, reducing it in a matter of seconds to a dead, useless brick. Immediately, he pulled out his own cell phone and found it to be hot, also, its battery drained.

  He went to Mike’s shattered remains, dug his fingers into a blood-soaked pants pocket, but did not find his phone. He patted the other pocket. Same result. Had it been lost in the battle that had taken place in here? He shone his light around the room.

  Mike’s jacket was so badly ripped apart that the contents of the pockets had been strewn all over the room. After a few more moments of searching, he found his MindRay under the truck. On the far side of the vehicle was a small black object, which proved to be not his cell phone, but an old Police Special. Flynn pocketed it.

  At that moment, he heard a sound, a fluttering in the rafters.

  He braced his pistol, but saw nothing. He used his flashlight. Still nothing. Could have been a possum or a coon. Not a lion, though, thank God, not up there.

  Continuing his search, he soon located another pistol, this one a Magnum. At least one of these guys had been decently armed. The pistol had been fired until it was empty.

  Charlie and Mike had fought for their lives in here. He hadn’t heard the shots, so the battle must have taken place while he was still on the rise overlooking the house. That would have been at least half an hour ago.

  He thought the situation over. Louie had been done by a big cat that had been expertly trained. Best trained animal in the world, no question. It hunted like a master tracker of the human kind, not like an animal. What had happened in here was that the lion and its human minder had worked together.

  The shadow dropping down from above was almost on him by the time he saw it. There were eyes—huge, glaring—and he was firing his pistol again and again, aware that he was emptying it just like Mike had.

  Then silence. Nothing was there but a wreath of smoke.

  He took a long step toward the truck—and saw something moving on the far side. Reflex made him brace the empty pistol.