Chapter 10

"How do you feel?" Taylor asked him.

"Dizzy."

She let him lean on her while she took a bottle of water out of her backpack. He drank, and she examined his leg and saw that fresh blood had soaked through the bandages and the shirt she had tied around his thigh. He finished the bottle of water, and they continued hobbling through the underbrush.

"We're going to get you out of here. Just tell me where we need to go," she said.

"What about the other crime scene? Where you found the notebook?"

"I'm not worried about that. We need get out of these woods so I can radio for help. I still can't reach anybody out here."

He checked his map and compass and alterred their course slightly.

Five minutes later, he starting slumping, and Taylor was not able to keep him from falling over.

"David," she said.

His eyes were open but heavy. His breathing was shallow. He did not reply.

"David," she said again and lightly slapped his cheek.

He looked up at her. She bent down and helped him put his arm around her shoulders. He bent his good leg underneath him and set his foot into the ground. He pushed up while she pulled up him by his torso. She noted with distress that his face was very pale and damp with cold sweat.

"You could leave me here," he said. "I could tell you where to go."

"I am not going to leave you here."

"You could leave me here and go get help. I don't think we're gonna make it back before dark as slow as I'm goin."

"Then we'll walk in the dark," she said.

"I think he might've cut an artery."

She knew it to be true but didn't want to acknowledge it.

"We're gonna get you some help."

"You can leave me. I still have my gun."

"No."

"Yes."

And he stopped trying to walk and started to slump again.

"Jesus, David, no."

But she knew that she would have to leave him. If she didn't, he was absolutely going to bleed to death before they even got close to getting out of the woods.

"I have my gun," he told her again. He put his hand on the holster.

She knelt down beside him.

He took out the map from his back pocket. He studied it, then marked it with a dark X, tracing over it several times so it stood out obviously from the other lines and Xs he had drawn that day. The X indicated their current position. He handed her the map along with his compass.

"Go straight south and you'll run into the trail. When you do, mark the spot with something. Tie something to the tree. Hang a bottle of water from a branch. It doesn't matter what you do. Just make sure you can find that spot again. Then follow the trail back to the house. When you get help, come back up the trail till the marker. Then head directly north, as straight as you can. You should find me easy."

She looked at him in the eyes. He smiled a little.

"I'll be here. Maybe if I'm lucky I'll have that son of bitch ready to put in a bag."

"Only if you have to. Only shoot to defend yourself."

"I ain't gonna get him by running him down. Not anymore."

She leaned over and took his face between her hands and kissed him on the forehead. Then she stood up and started running south by the compass.

He watched and listened to her vanish among the trees until it was quiet again. He dragged himself along the ground to the nearest tree—a large pine—and sat with his back against the trunk. The endeavor left him exhausted, but he wasn't in much pain. The numbness in his leg was slowly creeping up his body.

He pulled the Smith & Wesson ACP from the holster at this waist while he still possessed the strength to do so. He switched off the safety and laid his hand on the ground beside him with the gun in it.

And very suddenly, he fell unconcious.

He awakened a few minutes later with his chin against this chest. His head felt like it weighed a hundred pounds as he raised it. A broad ray of sunshine found its way through an unlikely gap in the network of overhead branches and touched his face. It felt warm and wonderful. He turned his face up to it, closed his eyes, and saw red.

He heard a low whistling noise and then heard, rather than felt, the thump on his chest. He opened his eyes and looked down at the wooden pole protruding at a ninety-degree angle from his body. He looked up and saw Jason walking toward him from many yards away. David recognized the unhurried confidence in his stride. He had walked that same way himself after fatally wounding game with an exceptional shot.

He looked down at the pistol tried to raise it. It was extremely heavy in his hand.

Jason saw it and stopped about twenty feet away.

David lifted the pistol.

Ugly son of a bitch, he tried to say, but it came out as a breath with no tone behind it.

He could barely feel the gun in his hand, let alone squeeze the trigger with his index finger. The pistol slipped from his weakened grip and briefly dangled from his trigger finger before falling to the ground. And his hand fell on top of it.

The last thing he experienced was something that happened many years ago. Suddenly he was twelve-years-old again, and his dad was there. David had just hit the bulls-eye on the side of the old paint can with the .243 Winchester rifle he got for his birthday. His father grinned at him and leaned down and pulled him into a hug. It happened right as Jason leaned over him and pulled the spear out of his body. Then the memory, along with the rest of his world, went dark.

A quarter mile away, Sheriff's Deputy Robbi Taylor was running south by the compass as David had told her to do. The terrain made it difficult to maintain a straight course.

She took the radio from her belt and slowed to a fast walk while trying to establish contact with the dispatcher. Static. She was still too damn deep in the woods. She put away the walkie-talkie. She took the mobile phone out of her pocket and knew that it was useless even before she saw the words "No Service" appear on the screen.

And then there was a sound off to her right that made her think of a deer bounding through the underbrush. It was distant, moving past her and ahead of her. A deer? She didn't stop moving.

Her watch indicated almost 3 p.m. How much farther was the trail?

She heard a whistling noise and, for a split second, had the absurd notion that David had caught up with her and was trying to get her attention. Then there was a single loud knock, and a long wooden pole was suddenly sticking chest-level out of the tree trunk beside her. It vibrated just like in a cartoon.

It took her less than two seconds to understand exactly was it was and what it meant. She drew her gun from her belt. She didn't bother trying to pick him out among all the trees. The bastard blended in too well and it would take her too long. She aimed along the long handle of the spear and fired off a shot. And just to show that she wasn't screwing around, she fired three more times in a spread from left to right. If he had thrown the spear from that general direction, then the bullets shouldn't have missed him by much. She hoped that the deafening reports had scared him off. Moving forward cautiously now with her gun leveled. Scanning the trees for any sign of movement. Looking for something that resembled a human figure. Scanning left-to-right, right-to-left.

She wouldn't have felt comfortable resuming her course unless she found him on the ground with a bullet hole in his head. But she had to keep moving, comfort be damned. She started to run.

The sound of a deer again. Behind her and to the right. Except that she knew it wasn't a deer. She glanced behind her and couldn't see anything. He's like a goddamn ghost, she thought and faced forward and sprinted hard.

She finally caught glimpse of him off to her right. He was pacing her at a distance of twenty yards and was moving laterally toward her position. She fired twice in his direction and, seeing that he did not break his stride, immediately regretted having wasted ammunition at this distance. Her magazine contained seven more rounds. Because the killer didn't seem to shy away from warning shots, she intended to wound or kill him with the next ones.

He had closed the distance to ten yards. Navigating the trees and shrubs didn't seem to cost him much work, whereas she was going as hard and as fast as she could.

The killer moved laterally through the trees again as if they weren't even there and came right at her. A brief flash of reflected light drew her eyes to something in his hand. A knife.

She turned and raised her gun and tripple-tapped the trigger. Bam-bam-bam. Exploding trees. Obliterated leaves.

And then she was rolling over and over on the ground with him.

She was up and on her hands and knees looking for the gun that fell out of her hand. There it was in the grass. She hustled for it, not even on two legs yet. She turned around, saw him already up, standing between the trees and looking at her. She fired. As loud as the discharge was, the sound of the round penetrating wood was even louder. Pieces of bark hit her in the face and got in her hair. She saw him again and fired. He was there and he was gone. He's a ghost, she thought. Two more shots left.

She was still looking for him dead ahead when he came at her lightning-quick from her extreme left side. The surprise and fear of seeing him there made her pull the trigger prematurely, just shy of completing the swing of the muzzle in his direction. Now he was winding up to cut her throat open like a baseball player winding up for a pitch. She fired her last bullet and saw him spin and fall away. She was off and running before he hit the ground.

When she felt OK about the distance she had covered, she stopped to reload her weapon. It took her several tries with badly shaking hands before she successfully inserted the new magazine into the gun. The radio was gone from her duty belt. It had fallen off during the tussle. So had her backpack. The compass was gone too.

There was no movement or sound from the forest. She thought she may have killed him. He was right up on her when she fired the last shot. Point-blank range. She wondered about going back to look for the radio and the compass and the backpack with the evidence in it. She knew she ought to, but she was terrified.

She felt her bearings slipping away. Everything looked the same to her. Which way had she come from? Which way was she supposed to go? A great, awful wave of dread loomed at her back, and she knew that if she let it crash, she would be done for. So she continued running.