behind him.
Inside the fence, and not too far off. There was no question in
Howard's mind that the reports came from weapons, and they sounded like
handguns. Two shooters, close together, using different calibers. The
second of them, he was almost certain, was a .357 Magnum, a round with
which he was very familiar, having fired tens of thousands of them
himself. Two shooters firing at the same target?
Or at each other?
Almost reflexively, he reached down to where the new revolver rode back
of his right hip, to touch the gun's butt and reassure himself it was
still there.
It could have been a lot of things--spot lighters doing some illegal
hunting, drunks blasting at beer bottles, maybe even a couple of
campers attacked in their tent by a bear and cutting loose at it--but
knowing there were U.S. Marshals serving an arrest warrant on a man
suspected of involvement in multiple deaths, Howard had to consider
that maybe something had gone wrong with the operation. And what would
campers or hunters be doing inside the fence?
He pulled the door open and slid back into the rental car, started the
engine, and hit the light switch. The entrance gate was ahead of him,
and that was the way to get into the compound, but he spun the wheel
and the car into a one-eighty and headed back the way he had come.
When guns go off, that's where you find the action.
It was half a mile away when things got tricky. Because it was so dark
and he was moving and watching the fence to his left, and because the
black SUV was parked off to the right in the trees, he almost missed
it. A glint of light off the windshield--the SUV was facing the road
at a right angle--was what he caught, and a fast glance didn't give him
much more. He took his foot off the gas pedal, but managed to keep
from hitting the brakes, so his taillights didn't flare. He kept
going, considering his options.
The SUV could have been parked there empty for days, for all he knew.
Maybe it belonged to those hypothetical campers shooting at the equally
hypothetical bear. For some reason in that moment, an old memory
popped up:
An Alaskan hunter he'd known had once told him that if you had to stop
a really big bear, you needed a heavy rifle or a shotgun with slugs to
do it. He said that when newbies to the tundra asked about which
caliber handguns to carry, they were told it didn't really matter, but
that they should file the front sight off nice and smooth--that way it
wouldn't hurt so much when the bear took it away from them and shoved
it up where the sun didn't shine ... Options, John, options!
He could keep going and do nothing. He could keep going, use his
virgil, and call for help. Of course he was hours by road or even air
from any law to speak of, and that was too long. Besides, until he
knew what he was facing, he couldn't risk using his virgil. There was
a chance that the perpetrators, whoever they were, would pick up his
call. They wouldn't be able to decode it, but they might trace his
location--and at the very least they would know he was still out
there.
