Roy Rockingham bunked at nights in the barracks of
the logging camp. Someone shook him awake at three o'clock Friday morning
and told him to catch the phone. His cell phone had gone dead. It took ten minutes to throw on some
clothes and rush to the foreman's office, but his party had been patient.
The voice was hoarse and almost too soft to catch. "This is Callavier, a mutual friend. Now would be a good time. We can
have you back before dawn."
Roy gave the offer a moment's thought. Despite his
misgivings, he couldn't back out now. "I'm ready."
"There's a clearing just north of the camp. Be
waiting there in twenty minutes."
The phone clicked dead.
Roy felt suddenly weak-kneed and sick at his
stomach. He had volunteered to kill a man. He had seen dead men in Iraq
during Desert Storm, but he had never killed anyone. He had never seen
anyone die.
But he had hunted. He had seen game go down,
sometimes still alive and fighting briefly, more often than not dropping
like dead weight with a carefully placed bullet. How much worse would it
be with John Hartman?
He wandered out to his truck to pump up his flagging
courage and retrieved Kahl's handgun from a spare bedroll. He slapped the
clip of ammo into the handle, chambered a round, and held the cold metal
out at arm's length, wondering what it would feel like to have human game
in his sights.
It would feel good, he decided. Hartman had made a
fool of him. Hartman had taken Joyce away from him. God only knew what he
had done to her. Kahl had convinced him of what needed to be done in
retaliation. It was something he had to do for both himself and for
Joyce.
He walked on foot through the forest lit by a
crescent moon. A swath of trees had been cut to provide the camp with a
crude runway suitable for light planes and choppers. The chopper came
down minutes later with a fierce roar and the glare of a spotlight. With
his chrome-plated semiautomatic tucked in his belt, Roy climbed into the
bucket seat alongside the helmeted pilot and was whisked into dark and
cloudy skies.
The agile chopper whirled about dizzily in the dark
void. The spotlight played across the treetops below. The pilot used it
to seek out the coastal highway, then turned north to Eagle Junction and
within a half hour swooped low over the Ridge.
The darkened, forest-enshrouded crater of Spruce
Valley dropped away beneath him, taking his stomach with it. For a short
time, they flew in darkness. And then Roy saw the lights of the Kahl
estate approaching directly ahead. As before, the little machine sat down
on the round concrete helicopter pad in a flurry of whirling blades.
Roy had met two men at Kahl's
estate, Silverstone, the servant, and the man now waiting at the edge of
the helipad, probably Callavier, the man on the phone. Roy recognized the
voice climbing from the chopper. Callavier pointed to a waiting Land Rover and
led the way. Roy climbed into the passenger's side. Callavier, a
gaunt man with a shaved head, glanced at him as they drove though a gate
swinging open by itself at the chain-link fence surrounding the grounds. "The sheriff has the Ridge under surveillance. Stay close to the cover of
the houses."
Roy had poached game in Spruce
Valley and knew the sparse web of fire roads by heart. Callavier drove the Land Rover at
neck-breaking speeds with nothing but the running lights to show the way. A final lurch brought the truck to a stop. Ahead, lights from the Ridge
twinkled through the trees.
A heavy hand fell on his shoulder. "Do a clean job
and Kahl can trust you to be discrete. Muck it up and you become a major
liability. Take my word for it. You don't want to be a liability in Mr. Kahl's
book." Callavier handed him a wristwatch with a glowing face. "One hour. This spot. Or not at all. If you have no
opportunity tonight, we can try again another time."
Roy was all but shoved from the vehicle. The truck
drove away, but the engine died before the hum of the exhaust had faded
away completely. Confident that Cavalier had parked and would be waiting
for him, he pocketed the watch and crouched in the cover of the trees
until his eyes adjusted to the greater intensity of darkness. He then
crept low to the ground through the underbrush and emerged into the open
as close to the houses as possible. He guessed by his own military
experience that Gene might be watching the slope with night scopes, so he
crawled through the waist-height grasses until the back yard of John
Hartman's doll house and its scrolled woodworking appeared dead ahead.
With a clear view of the darkened kitchen through the
patio door, he pulled out his pistol and made himself comfortable in the
wet grass. If he needed further motivation to commit murder, he had only
to glance at his own dark and abandoned house and imagine Joyce lying
naked and dead in a shallow grave somewhere nearby. He had done nothing
much to hurt the woman in his drunken rages. Hartman, though, was a madman.
Lights came on inside Hartman's house. Knowing the
location of the bathroom off the kitchen, and judging by his own drinking
habits, he had guessed that John would get up to use the can before dawn. He wouldn't have to wait for long.
Hartman's sick kid made an appearance first,
stumbling through the house half-asleep to the can, and then back again. John made his visit a few minutes later. He sat at the kitchen table in
plain view afterwards, nursing a beer, twirling the bottle with his good
left hand and staring off into space. Unshaven and disheveled, he looked
a mess, and Roy raised the pistol and squeezed off a round thinking that
he was doing the bastard a favor.
The pistol cracked. Its crisp sound rang in his
ears, then echoed off the far side of the valley. John's head snapped to
one side as the bullet struck just above his ear. Roy saw the tiny
entrance hole make its appearance, and the spray of brains and bone
fragments splatter across the back wall. Prepared to spring to his feet
and make good his escape, Roy waited in morbid fascination for the body to
topple from the chair.
John Hartman did not fall. The entire right side of
the skull was gone. What remained inside sloughed onto the man's shoulder
and down one arm.
But he did not fall. His ruined head turned. One
remaining eye darted wildly about. And stopped when it spotted him. And
stared at him.
Slowly, one side of John Hartman's lip curled into an
obscene grin.
Roy's sanity shattered on the spot. His trust that
the world around him would always behave in predictable and logical
fashion collapsed and left him stranded in a waking nightmare. He
screamed. Not entirely aware that the shrill sound in the night was
coming from his own throat, he raised his handgun to obliterate in a hail
of bullets the madness staring back at him through the shattered glass of
the patio door.
A woman's bare foot and leg stepped into view,
blocking his aim. His eyes rolled up into their sockets to take in the
sight of Joyce Blair standing over him. She wore the same
blood-splattered nightgown of the night John had rescued her from his
drunken rage. She clutched a butcher knife in her right hand.
"John warned what would happen if you pushed too
far."
Roy brought the pistol up and to fire point blank at
the specter of the woman he had thought to be dead, except that the cold
metal clutched in his hand turned abruptly soft, warm, and sticky. Roy
Rockingham opened his hand and looked in horror at what the nine
millimeter semiautomatic pistol had become. His mouth opened wide in a
scream so violent that it locked tight in his throat.
Draped across the palm of his bloodied hand lay a
severed part of his own anatomy, memory of John’s warning strong among the
panicky flight of his rational thoughts, the last of which was awareness
of the need to go for medical help and have it sewn back where it
belonged.
Novels by
William G. Tedford