THIRTY-TWO

Shit!” Mitch Whitman spat as he threw himself up the steep trail. A dense fog had arisen suddenly from the ground, clutching at his legs with wispy fingers. In ten minutes the world had gone from a clear, dark green to a nebulous gray.

Pausing to wipe the sweat from his forehead, he peered through the swirling mist until his eyes stopped on the next yellow-dotted tree. He climbed up the trail till he reached the tall pine, then he collapsed beneath it, happy to sit and let his lungs refill with air. It was only when he closed his eyes that everything came rushing back.

He hadn’t meant to kill the Real Life Cherokee. But before he could stop himself, he’d burst out laughing when he read Mary’s note scrawled on the rocks. From then on, things had gone downhill fast.

“What’s so funny?” The Indian had turned to him, his dark eyes flashing with suspicion. “Mary’s note says she’s in big trouble.”

Mitch took a step back and tried to explain. “I’m laughing because Mary’s so brave. It would be just like her to try and rescue her friend.”

“But she and her friend got hurt.” The Indian’s eyes bored into him. “Can’t you tell how scared they are?”

“The great Mary Crow wouldn’t be scared of a little rapist,” said Mitch. “She deals with scum like that all the time.”

“Bullshit,” the Indian replied. He reached down as if to re-tie his boot, then, quicker than Mitch would have dreamed possible, the Real Life Cherokee pulled a hunting knife and was pressing the sharp, cold point into the hollow of his throat.

“Turn around, Mr. Keane. I’m not sure what all you’re about, but your guided tour of the Smoky Mountains has just ended.”

Mitch froze as the damned hound began growling behind him, then, cautiously, he began to inch his hand toward the Beretta nestled under his arm.

“Move it, Keane,” the Indian said softly. “Me and Homer got you covered.”

“Fuck you, Tonto.” Mitch pulled the Beretta out and shoved it into the Indian’s gut, squeezing the trigger twice. Two muted pops sounded. For an instant, the Indian looked astonished, then his eyes focused inward and he crumpled to his knees. Mitch winced as the damned dog started licking the blood that gushed from his master’s wound.

The Indian groaned. With his knife still clutched in his right hand, he began to crawl toward the spring.

“I don’t think you’re in any shape for a swim,” Mitch taunted as the wounded man inched forward, leaving a slug-trail of shiny blood on the rocks. The dog yapped and ran circles around them. Mitch watched, amazed, wondering where the Indian intended to crawl with half his stomach blown away. He seemed determined to get to the spring, but just as he stretched out his hand toward the green water, the knife fell from his fingers and his legs lost their strength, merely twitching when they should have been pushing him forward.

“Tam?” said the Indian, his voice no more than a husky echo.

Mitch could not look away. Though he’d seen game dying in the field, this was the first time a man had bled out at his feet. Like a passerby who stops to gawk at some grisly accident on the highway, he could not pull his gaze away from the Indian’s quivering legs or his strange, mumbled words that could have been either curses or prayers.

Then as always, whether it was a moose fallen on the ground or just some dumb deer, there was that tingle that started in Mitch’s scrotum and made him weak with desire. He enjoyed the prickly warmth that spread through his loins, but it left as swiftly as it had come, rendering him angry and unfulfilled.

“Oh, come on,” he said gruffly, acting on his own discomfort. “Let’s put you out of your misery.”

He stuffed the gun back in his holster and walked over to the Indian. Grasping him by the seat of his jeans and the collar of his Tennessee Vols sweatshirt, he picked him up and flung him into the spring. He floated facedown, blood seeping into the water like ink from an overturned bottle.

Under the pine tree, Mitch opened his eyes. “Actually, not such a bad way to go,” he decided. “Certainly more heroic than poor old Sandy Manning.”

What had the Indian’s name been? Billy or Willy or something. Poor dumb fucker. He’d babbled on about his kid’s ears and his hocked fiddle, truly believing that a thousand dollars was going to turn his life around. Mitch chuckled. A thousand bucks might punch up your weekend, but turn your life around? Shit. Anyway, it didn’t matter now. For the Real Life Cherokee, getting his life turned around was no longer an option.

The damp, humid air had left a film of moisture on Mitch’s clothes that looked like dew. Around him, all he could see were tree trunks, poking up black through the mist like ghostly pikes on some medieval battlefield. Of all the places he’d hunted, this sodden, foggy country was the strangest. All these trees, all these mountains, and he’d only seen one owl and some kind of lizard. Not a rabbit or a chipmunk or even a squirrel. It was as if they had sensed his coming and just ceded him the whole half-million acres. Maybe it was just as well, he thought, remembering that turd-looking thing he’d shot the night before. Animals were not what he was hunting today, anyway.

He hadn’t done as well with Homer as he had with the Indian. At first he thought he might bring the dog with him, but when the Indian hit the water the hound started barking like crazy. Mitch had tried to call him, but the damned animal snapped at him every time he came within a few steps. That was the trouble with dogs. Kill their masters and they turned against you. Immediately and forever. Mitch had finally taken the Beretta out again and aimed at Homer’s head. Blood spurted after he fired, but the old dog didn’t fall. Instead, he bounded up into the rocks, bleeding and screaming like something mad. Stupid hound, Mitch thought. Though he knew it was unsportsmanlike, he decided to let Homer bleed to death on his own. “After all,” he chuckled, his warm breath vaporizing in the cool air, “who needs a coon dog when you’re out hunting crow?”

He considered Mary Crow and smiled. At last, she’d made her first mistake. Before he’d washed those messages scribbled on the rock away, he’d found out exactly what had happened to her and her friend and exactly what they were going to do about it. They’d even marked their trail, in case somebody came looking for them.

“You finally fucked up, Mary, girl,” he said as he unwrapped one of the food bars in his pack. “And you fucked up big-time.”

He finished eating and pushed on through the fog, finally breaking out of the thick woods into a narrow, level plain that seemed to have once been a kind of road. The feathery heads of pampas grass swayed from a field punctuated by small cedar trees that stuck up like exclamation points. A path of trampled weeds crossed the sward, then vanished into the forest above it. If he squinted, he could see a bright yellow dot on a tree about ten feet above the roadbed. Shifting the pack on his shoulders, he smiled. If the trail kept going as easily as this, he could probably have Mary Crow and company dead before breakfast.

“And what were you doing when Mary Crow was killed?” he mimicked aloud, parodying one of the last questions she’d hurled at him on the stand. “Hiking through the woods, your honor,” he replied. “Experiencing firsthand how the fittest survive.”