Soft Targets

'Not intentionally.' He swallowed with an effort. 'I'm not like you, Gina. I don't have the killer instinct very well honed.' He saw her start to protest and held up a restraining hand. 'I've seen you move in when you didn't have to, lady. And I'm grateful, I admire you for it. Wouldn't want you any other way. Okay?' She gnawed her lip and gave silent assent. 'But I think, I honestly think I wouldn't've pulled that trigger if I hadn't found myself within spitting distance of that Czech automatic. I was going to round the bastards up. I think.'

She began to tear small shreds of celery leaf, placing them atop corn chips like hors d'oeuvres. 'And I think we simply have differ­ent views of what constitutes self-defense,' she mused, voice low and calm. 'You defend only against immediate threat to your life. I have another view: when something has demon­strated that it is ready and willing to screw me good—and I'm wearing my Freudian half-slip there—I'm likely to defend against the possibil­ity; one demonstration is all I need.'

'Screw me twice, shame on me,' Everett quoted.

'Absolutely. I got screwed twice, 'way back when, and it left me with a sense of shame I don't want to feel again. Ever.' the last word intense.

A thin piercing tone stuttered from the Oracle detector. Gina flashed to it, flicked off the audio alarm and checked the tiny lamp glowing on the detector face. 'In back,' she whispered. 'Leave the lights alone but get down.' He followed in­structions, watched her check the Beretta before she closed the bathroom door. A musical laugh, barely audible from the bathroom: 'Come here a minute, Maury. This, you have to see.'

He found her peering through the back win­dow, the scene outside a dazzling blue-white against black. Twenty meters away, a sleek four-point buck stood quartering toward them, the long neck arched up, antlers stark against the sky. 'Testing our scent,' Everett breathed, lips brushing her hair. They watched in silence for a long moment. 'He doesn't want to get screwed, either.'

'Is he in season?'

'Not for me. Always, for a camera. Maybe we can track him tomorrow.'

'You're out of your mind,' she chuckled. The buck, startled perhaps by some faint transmis­sion of her voice, swung gracefully around, sprang away into the trees with vast heart-stopping leaps.

'Nijinsky,' Everett said. ^'They used to say his leaps were magic. Maybe he was just part deer.'

Moving back toward their catastrophic array of foods on the table, Gina paused to reset the detector audio. Everett found his wine, wrenched the cork out, found two coffee cups and poured, yawning as she sat down again.

'Did I understand you right?' She was smiling quizzically. 'You only hunt with a camera?'

'Don't let it get around. Some of my friends wouldn't understand.'

'Or maybe they would, which'd be worse.'

He swigged the wine, crooning happily. 'Much worse,' he agreed. 'Don't get me wrong: I shot an elk once, to get his hide for a pair of trousers. Could've just bought the goddam hide but if I really needed a set of elkhides I figured it was only right to get 'em the hard way.'

'How did you feel afterward?'

'Pretty good, to tell the truth. I packed a hindquarter down with the green hide. God, I was a bloody mess. The trousers turned out to be heavy as guilt, but I still have 'em. And if I ever need another pair, I'll go after another elk. It's all the shit we go after that we don't need; that's what puts my hackles up.'

She tasted the wine. 'Sherry? Wow.'

'Harvey's Bristol Cream,' he nodded. 'The dirty old men with their Madeira just haven't discovered this stuff.'

She slouched in her chair, feeling for the rungs beneath his own, and he moved his legs compan­ionably aside. 'You don't need a whole lot, do you,' she asked shrewdly. 'I mean, you don't chase after much. Women, trophies over your mantel, man-of-the-year nominations—'

'Mark of the year, maybe,' he snorted.

'Mr. and Mrs. Marks,' she said; 'I noticed that. But you're avoiding my interview, Commissioner.'

'Ah, yes.' Pompous clearing of his throat. 'I chase what I need, Gina. Well, hell, sometimes I don't even do that. When my wife left me a lo-o-ong time back, I needed her. It wasn't pride that kept me from chasing her. It was knowing she'd just leave again. I didn't have what she needed, you see. Someone who'd stay down off the timberline and build furniture, mix drinks, mow lawns, lust after a silk tie or a smoking jacket.'

That throaty laugh again. 'David Engels was right, then. You're solitary as a bear. No wasted effort, no chasing all the lady bears out of raunch season. And definitely, no learning to ride a bicycle just to be a circus bear.'

He sipped, took a bit of cheese. 'Yeah, Dave's probably right. I'd like to think of me as being like Nijinsky out there,' he nodded toward the back of the cabin, yawned. 'But deer are gregari­ous critters, full of grace and helium. And they don't hibernate, and I do.' He stretched until his joints cracked. 'You must've figured out some sensible sleeping arrangement.'

'The best. You under a sheet, me above 'em. Best-kept secret of the New England bundlers, or so Conklin tells me. But you go ahead. I'll stoke the fire later and set the detector up close.'

He undressed, wondering that he felt no par­ticular unease in her presence. Once she glanced toward him and smiled, raising her cup in a silent toast, then faced the fire again. He doused the lights and, scissoring his legs briskly be­tween the sheets to warm them, heard her low chuckle. 'Now what,' he asked.

'That's what I do,' she said. 'Go to sleep.' He rolled onto his side, faced the wall. Just parts in a machine, he insisted to the image of Dave Engels. You don't know everything, buddy. Yet the last image he recalled that night was the halo of yellow made by lambent firelight on the mane of Gina Vercours.

SATURDAY, 13 DECEMBER, 1980:

He awoke to the odors of omelet and coffee, sat up quickly, noting that Gina evidently slept in a loose culotte arrangement. 'Whoo,' he rubbed hands briskly over his face as she turned; 'for a second there, I forgot all this. Mind-bending.'

'Your friends in Denver wouldn't let me forget,' Gina replied. 'You had a call a few minutes ago. Agent Fulton; I promised to have you coherent when he calls again. Did I lie?'

'Nope, unless you promised I'd be decisive, too.' She gestured with a plate and he nodded, waving it to him with both hands. He took the steaming plate and settled it into his lap.

'Don't expect this kind of service every morn­ing,' Gina teased, going back for the coffee. 'I'm feeling sorry for you today, is all.'

Between mouthfuls of omelet: 'Why?'

' ‘Cause you're indecisive.'

'Did I talk in my sleep?' He had stopped chewing, the cup poised halfway to his mouth.

'No-oo,' she said, a full-octave drop within that one word managing to convey mild irritation, bewilderment, and desire to drop what had begun as banter. 'Or if you did, I didn't listen. What's got into you—or should I ask?'

He destroyed the rest of the omelet before replying; and when he did, it was with reluctance. 'I know what Fulton wants. And it isn't an easy decision. When I didn't respond to his hints yesterday, he finally laid it on the line. The FBI thinks I should drop out of sight, with a faked media release about my going into the river with those two men in the BMW.'

'You mean take a new identity? Pretty dras­tic,' she said, the hazel eyes unblinking over her cup.

'You have a real gift for understatement. But I've been thinking it out, and there may be an alternative,' he said, as the telephone rang.

The scrambler was not perfect, requiring him to speak slowly for clarity. 'Thanks, Fulton, I'm fine,' he said, grateful that Gina had chosen to take her shower during the call. 'Yeah, I've thought about it. God knows how you'd get total silence from that little cook, uh, Bohlen? And I couldn't very well continue to perform my Commission duties from the grave, so to speak.'

He listened, nodding as if into a videophone. 'I'll take your word for that, but look: what if I were listed as seriously injured?' Pause. 'I don't know; Walter Reade, San Diego Naval Hospital, Brook General maybe; whatever sounds con­vincing. You could say I'd been shot or whacked, and collapsed later. Internal hemorrhage, even a relapse from the licking I took at Pueblo. Hell, call a doctor and work it out; I'm open to sugges­tion, so long as it'd