Anna's brain screamed to her fingers: shoot the cat, please God damn it, shoot. But her hand opened and the revolver dropped to the ground.
Harland let go of the lion. Dead weight, the animal fell to the stones. The bones of its jaw or skull cracked audibly against the rock. Anna winced. 'You son of a bitch,' she whispered.
Harland laughed. 'It's not nice to call an armed man a son of a bitch,' he said.
'Fuck you.'
'Anna, Anna, Anna, your vocabulary is disintegrating under pressure. Obscenity is the last resort of the ignorant. Didn't you learn that in Sunday school? I expected better from a woman willing to lay down her life that a lion might live a couple hours longer.' Harland kicked the lion with an indifference more cruel than hatred. 'That's what you've done, you know.'
Anna had thought that one's mind would race at a time like this, that it would whirl and spin, dart at solutions probable and improbable. It didn't. It was as clear as the desert night, as still. 'Well?' she said and smiled. She was not afraid. It wasn't that she was ready to die there among the Texas stars; she merely felt invulnerable, out of the normal realities of flesh that could rip, bones that could break.
Fleetingly, she wondered if she were going into shock. Or overdrive. How long would this detachment last before terrible fear, deep enough to be a bone sickness, would flood through her and she would understand that now, tonight, she was to die?
'Well? Are you going to shoot me or not?'
'Oh, I'm going to shoot you all right. Bury you here in the Pattersons under enough rock the coyotes won't drag you out at an embarrassing moment.' Harland stepped over the lion and moved several steps closer. Not close enough she could grab the rifle; close enough he could see her face. 'And damn you for making it necessary, Anna. You're more fun than I've had in years.'
'More fun than big-game hunting?' Anna jerked her chin toward the crated rifles.
He didn't look away from her for an instant. 'I told you, I don't hunt anymore. No challenge. I like my prey to have an IQ higher than your average two-year-old. Most of the elk these hotshots pay Paulsen to shoot I could club to death with a baseball bat.'
'Park elk,' Anna said flatly.
'Some of them. I'm an equal-opportunity employer.'
'You stole the radio frequency from the Resource Management office, used it to pinpoint the location of the lions we collared, didn't you? Big game to order.'
'You're playing for time, Anna,' Harland said, clearly amused. 'Okay. Play. But the game will have to be short. You can live just until I hear Jerimiah D.'s helicopter coming back with the hunters. Can't have the clients upset either by your presence or your corpse. The silly SOBs get dressed up in camo and carry big guns but the poor bastards just can't get it up if the quarry can fight back.'
Till the helicopter returned with its second load. Ten minutes-maybe fifteen-for something to happen, to even the odds. 'What do they pay you for a kill?' Anna asked. Harland didn't reply. He seemed to be thinking better of letting the game go on. 'If I've got to die,' she said, 'don't make me die curious.'
He laughed then. She could feel him relax. 'Seventy-five hundred dollars. For that they get dinner at Paulsen's, the hunt, a guaranteed kill, the lion's head, and-the best part- they get the story. The 'battle of wills,' the 'ultimate challenge,' 'man against the elements.' Trophies. Cheap at twice the price.'
'Trophies. You used them to make Drury's death look like a lion kill, didn't you? Severed her spinal cord with an icepick or something, then bit her with dead jaws, raked her with severed claws.'
'Ah, Anna,' Harland sighed. 'We could've been beautiful lovers, you know that? Our minds work alike. Our bodies would be a concert. If we must spend your last minutes on this earth playing 'you show me yours and I'll show you mine,' you must take your turn. How did you guess?'
'I didn't guess,' Anna retorted. 'You fucked up. One of the neck punctures, the fatal one, was too deep; deeper than any living lion's tooth.' Anna hoped he would become annoyed. Maybe, if she was lucky, tempted to close the distance between them to strike her.
Harland laughed, seemingly delighted with her cleverness. 'And what made you think of me? Or do you often think of me?'
She ignored the second question. If his face was the last sight she was to see on earth, she didn't want to read satisfaction there. 'Everything. You had access to the radio frequency, you use ketimine in your work, you'd worked with reptiles, led hunts, had too much money for a government employee, and you called Paulsen 'Jerimiah D.' Only his old friends call him that.
'You made a lot of mistakes, Harland. You lowered the body into the canyon from the helicopter. Right into a saw grass swamp. But you forgot to scratch the body up, forgot to put any water in the pack. Not very clever.'
'Clever enough to stay alive, my dear. Clever enough to stay alive.' He smiled, the rifle he held never wavering so much as a fraction of an inch from her heart. He was, she realized, truly enjoying himself. A hunter who'd lost his taste for the easy kill, finding in murder, in the covert and illegal taking of game, in the fleecing of fools, a spark of the old feeling.
'Why the ketimine?' she asked.
'Didn't want to kill her till the last minute. Time of death and all. Didn't want marks of a struggle on the body. There's not a problem with needle marks using ketimine: the stuff is so strong you can administer it in eyedrops.'
'Eyedrops. Fitting. She had seen something. What?'
'Just what you're seeing tonight, but on the other end. Our brave hunters dividing up the spoils,' Harland said. 'And with the same unfortunate-and rather fatal-results.'
Behind Harland, Anna saw a faint flicker of movement pale against the stones. The lion had flicked its tail.
'Kitty is waking up,' she said.
Harland looked merely annoyed. 'That didn't work the first time, Anna.'
'The first time it wasn't true.'
As if responding to a stage cue, the lion growled, a low threatening cascade of gravelly notes.
Harland turned-not far, maybe half a turn-toward the cat. The barrel of the rifle moved eight inches to the left of Anna's heart and she sprang. It was utterly without thought. Mind at one with muscle, as countless animals had sprung at their prey since there had been a difference between the quick and the dead.
Her hands hit the rifle; both hands, hard, like a gymnast on the uneven parallel bars. Harland's considerable strength went into holding onto the gun and it stayed rigid in his grasp. Rigid enough Anna used it for leverage. Pulling against Roberts, she let her center of gravity sink to her butt and with all of the muscles of thigh and fanny, she drove her knee into Harland's groin.
Harland, protective instincts born of years of painstaking care of 'the family jewels,' pivoted and her knee struck the inside of his thigh. Pain forced a grunt from him but he did not collapse and Anna knew, with her first rational thought since the lion's tail had moved, that the fight was not over.
Banking on the surprise of sudden reversal, she let all pressure off the rifle, turned her energy with his, and he helped her to shove the gun hard against his chest.
A round fired into the air. The powerful recoil jerked them both off-balance. Stumbling back, Harland tripped over the goods he'd dropped at her first command. Anna felt herself falling with him. Neither dared relinquish their hold on the weapon to break the fall. The rifle butt struck first and another round ripped down the barrel just as Anna's shoulder pounded into the hard earth.
The report was muffled. Flesh and bone had silenced the bullet. Anna didn't know whether it was she or Harland who had been hit.
'Oh no…' she heard him whisper.
There is a God, she thought. And She is on my side. With renewed energy, she pulled herself to her knees, her fingers still locked tight around the weapon.
'Give it up! You're dying!' she screamed, willing him to believe, to die. 'You've been hit. You're bleeding to death. Give it up. You'll die.'
With a suddenness that caught her off-guard, Harland wrenched the rifle from her grasp. Anna lunged across him, slamming her weight into the arm that held the Sako and heard the rifle skitter downslope into the black ravine.
Harland closed her in a deadly embrace. 'I'm not dead yet.' The words were harsh and hot in her ear, more air
