“Are they shooting?” Murray asked.
I wasn’t sure what it was. I’d seen no flash, and it didn’t sound like gunfire. “Keep moving,” I said.
Fifteen more feet into the woods, I stopped behind a tree and listened. Murray leaned close enough to me so that I could smell his breath. Coffee mixed with faint whiffs of garlic.
“Now what?” he whispered.
“Hush.”
It was an old forest with thick-trunked trees excellent for hiding behind or being snuck up on from. I made sure we were not silhouetted against any of the lights, no matter how dim, from the complex we’d run from.
Right after the boom the night went silent, but now an owl felt a need to comment, a few crickets annoyed the night, a raven complained, mosquitoes whined. The symphony of insects of a summer night in the woods surrounded us. I stood frozen until I was sure I hadn’t heard anything out of place. I inched my head around the tree first left then right peering into the darkness both ways. I felt a few mosquitoes begin to land. I squashed them without making noise.
The shooter could be as likely as we were to be using the forest for cover. I heard tree limbs rustling and fits of a breeze interrupting the repose of summer leaves. The lights of the complex illumined bits of condo walls. I neither saw nor sensed any human movement.
Murray whispered, “Somebody must have heard those booms. What were they?”
“I don’t know. They came from the front of the complex. If someone heard them and called the cops, it’ll help. We need to circle around through the woods.”
“What if we run into the shooter circling around the other way?”
“If he doesn’t kill us, we’ll know who it is.”
“That’s not comforting.”
“I have a gun.”
“It hasn’t done a lot of good so far.”
“We’re not dead yet.”
Flitting, listening, and limping from tree trunk to tree trunk, we described a quarter circle around the vast complex. Sometimes for yards the ground squished under our feet, the leftovers of the swamp that had been mentioned. We stumbled on occasional rocks left over from when the last glacier visited. When we could see Murray’s car, the front and rear windshields looked like a thousand stars glinted off them. All four tires were flat.
“What the hell?” Murray asked.
I shrugged. I didn’t need to detail the obvious. There was no one in sight. I stopped to let my breathing ease back to normal. As near as I could tell, we were about where the shots had come from. It was a small rise and this vantage point gave the killer a view of the front and back parking lots. If he’d climbed a tree to shoot, his view might have been unobstructed for miles. Skeen’s condo had been at the near end of the complex with other condos beyond it. Since the booms, I’d heard nothing but the sounds of nature.
Murray spoke up. “You may be used to this kind of thing, but I’m not.” His voice had an unpleasant whine in it. “What are we waiting for?”
I said, “I’m trying to decide if it’s safe. This is the spot where the shooter most likely fired from. I didn’t hear or see anything human all the way around to here. Did you?”
“No.”
“But I’m not sure we’re safe yet.”
“Why don’t we just walk through the woods the other way?”
“How many miles is it to safety that way?”
“I don’t know.”
“The shooter would have complete cover. We could be stalked for miles.”
“How much longer do we wait?”
I said, “You don’t have to wait at all. You can leave any time you want.”
“You don’t have to get sarcastic,” Murray said.
“You don’t have to ask impossible questions.”
A Butterfield cop car pulled into the parking lot and began making a reconnaissance. It stopped next to Murray’s car. The cop flicked on his spotlight and shone it on Murray’s damaged windows. When another police car drove up and stopped. Both cops got out. They walked around Murray’s car. I put my gun away. “Let’s go,” I said.
I figured if the shooter was patient enough to wait this long and crazy enough to shoot with cops present, it wasn’t going to do us much good to wait until dawn when it would be easier to see us. Murray and I linked up again. We hurried across the lot as best we could.
The cops spotted us and drew their guns. Great, now we were going to be slowed by the cops and made perfect targets for the shooter, but we slowed. Worse the gun you can see.