Ren hung by his arms from a tree branch. His wrists had been duct-taped together, then he’d been lifted and hung up like a side of beef. A strip of tape sealed his mouth.
“Insurance,” the man had said in the cabin. He tried to sound friendly and he smiled a lot, but the gun in his hand spoke differently to Ren.
“Where’s O’Connor gone?” he’d asked.
Ren told him he didn’t know.
“Any idea when he’ll be back?”
Ren shook his head.
That was when the man produced the roll of duct tape. “Relax, kid, you’re just my insurance if things go south.”
He’d marched Ren outside into the trees, hung him up, and sealed his mouth. He had already set up a scoped rifle on a tripod low to the ground, the barrel pointed toward the cabins. He lay down, checked the scope, and made an adjustment. Then he sat up and looked no more at Ren.
He wasn’t anything like Ren had imagined a hit man to be. He had a bald spot on the top of his head over which he’d combed a few strands of mouse-brown hair. He wore wire-rimmed spectacles that he slipped to the top of his head whenever he sighted through the scope. He was dressed in a brown corduroy sport coat with a tan turtleneck beneath, blue jeans, white sneakers. From a stained white paper bag near his feet came the smell of barbecued meat.
It was twilight now. Through the branches directly above him stripped half bare by the storm the night before, Ren saw the faint gleam of an emerging star. The woods were a murk of tree trunks and low brush gone gray or black in the failing light, still and indistinct as images in an underdeveloped photograph.
Ren’s shoulders and arms ached from the hanging weight of his body, but he tried to ignore the pain and think if there was some way to warn Cork and the others. Because there was nothing else he could do, he tried kicking, hoping to break free of the branch. His legs struck at empty air and the effort only made his shoulders hurt even more. He considered the quiet of the evening, the dreadful calm, and thought hopelessly how easy it was going to be to hear the cars coming up the lane. Occasionally from the woods around them came the rustling of a squirrel scampering among the fallen leaves beneath the undergrowth. At first the sounds had startled the man, but he quickly learned to ignore them.
In a while came the distant whir of a vehicle on the main road, the engine winding down. Someone was coming. The man moved to a prone position, his eye to the rifle scope. Ren tried to think what he could do. He decided when the others drove up, he’d make the loudest sound he could behind the seal of the tape and maybe, just maybe, they would hear and be warned. The man would probably get mad and do something horrible to Ren, but he’d take that chance.
Amid the stillness all around him, he suddenly saw movement out of the corner of his eye. Had he been looking straight on in the dim light, he might have missed it. He swung his gaze left. For a few moments he didn’t see anything. Had he been mistaken? Then he spotted the soundless slide of something large, pale, and horizontal against the vertical darkness of a tree trunk. Only a second of motion, then nothing. Ren strained to see clearly, but the mottled shading in the woods made it difficult to distinguish anything.
Motion again, a brief creeping movement, and now Ren recognized the stalking behavior of a cat. He discerned the outline of the cougar moving stealthily—creep, pause, creep—toward the man, whose attention was on the cabin and who had no idea of the danger at his back.
What Ren understood from the reading he’d done after he first discovered the animal’s tracks was that cougars preferred to attack from behind, allowing their prey to pass where they crouched before pouncing. Attacking a man was unusual, but this was a desperate beast, hungry, maybe half-crazed because it had been wounded by Calvin Stokely.
Then Ren had another thought. Maybe the cat wasn’t coming for the man. Maybe the cat was interested in the easy meal hanging from the tree.
He held his breath, felt the terrible ache of his shoulders, the kicking of his heart. He hung directly between the beast and the man, and Ren couldn’t tell which of them was the prey. He wanted to close his eyes to keep from seeing what he couldn’t stop—the long claws, the deadly teeth—but he couldn’t force his eyelids closed. He hung there powerless, damned to see the end as it came.