I'm not Annie Oakley. It took six rounds. But it also served to pin them down since they didn't know I wasn't shooting at them. At the first gunshot
Pearl sat straight upright, at the second round she bolted out through the still-open sliders. I opened my mouth to yell and closed it. It wouldn't do any good, a gun-shy dog will run no matter what, and she was probably bet ter off in the woods than she was going to be in here pretty soon.
Everything was quiet for the moment. Beaumont must have kept his car stashed on the rutted track behind the house. I never heard it start up, never saw it leave. For all the outfit outside knew, I was Beaumont, still in the house.
I had six rounds left in the Browning, and no spare clip. I hadn't thoughtStockbridge would require it. There were seven bad guys left. One of them was Gerry Broz. If I shot each of them with one bullet, I would still have
Gerry to strangle. It didn't seem good odds. From behind the Buick there was movement and then my window shattered and the shotgun boomed. The odds weren't getting better. The shotgun fired again and I moved to another window in time to see two bad guys crouched low, running right, and two more doing the same thing in the opposite direction. They were going to close me in from all sides. Anyone would. I smashed another pane out and nailed one of the low-running bad guys with my eighth round, and rolled back against the wall as the glass billowed out of this window with the boom of the shotgun. Hard upon the shotgun was the chatter of some kind of smallbore automatic weapon. I had five rounds left and was badly outgunned.
Pearl had the right idea. I crouched as low as I could and ran for the open patio door, my feet crunching on the scattered shards of window glass. I felt something slap my left leg and then I was through the door and into the woods. I was maybe thirty yards in before the automatic fire stopped behind me. Behind me there was silence again. And then more automatic fire.
The gunfire ceased. All I could hear was the sounds of my own breathing, steady but deep, and the sound I made, moving as quietly as I could through the fall foliage, heading west. My left leg was starting to throb and I could feel the warmth where it wasbleeding. I stopped and peeled off my jacket. I ripped the sleeves off my sweatshirt, put my jacket back on. I folded one sleeve into a pad and tied it in place over my jeans, using the other sleeve. It was a bulky bandage and unsightly, but it seemed to suppress the bleeding.
Behind me I heard a yell that was nearly screaming. I knew it was Gerry.
'Richie, you're a dead man! You hear me? We're coming, you motherfucker. We got a tracker, asshole, and we're right behind you.'
And then I didn't hear anything.
CHAPTER 24
As l moved into the woods it got thicker and the going got harder. There was still green on the trees, mixed with yellow, and the combination gave a soft dappled effect to the forest. I didn't feel soft and dappled. And as the afternoon dwindled it got darker. After about a mile I limped up a low swale and settled in behind a rock to take stock. Behind me the woods had thinned into some sort of meadow; maybe a fire, maybe a homestead, long since consumed by the slow fire of decay. Whatever it had been caused by, it made an open space where I could see anyone following me.
I was wearing New Balance running shoes, jeans, a blue sweatshirt, now sleeveless, and a leather jacket. I had five rounds in my gun, my car keys, a wristwatch, and Pearl's leash still stuck in my hip pocket. My leg was very sore and the pain pulsed steadily along it from hip to ankle. There was a Buck knife in my jacket pocket, and two packets of matches wrapped in foil to keep them dry. I always carried the gun, the keys, and the watch. The knife and the matches were for when I went west of the Charles River. The minute I noticed that I had no food, I started getting hungry. The sun was setting. That would be west. I could keep going until dark without getting turned around. I'd have to stop at night. The sun I could figure out. I couldn't read the stars to save my ass, which was not, in this case, a metaphor.
I needed a plan. First I had to figure out if Gerry and his troops really were after me. Or Richie, which is who they thought I was. If they weren't
I could simply backtrack to Stockbridge and wait for Pearl. But if they were behind me, between me and Stockbridge, and if any of them knew how to function in the woods, and if they really had a tracker, then I'd need to take the long way home.
The way to find that out was to sit here behind these rocks, while I still had some ammo, and see if they showed up. They'd leave somebody behind to clean up the shooting scene and call Vinnie Morris and get some new tires.
Unless someone came by at the wrong time, or somebody had heard the shoot ing and called the cops, they'd be okay. They had no way to know that
Beaumont had bailed out with Patty and Paul, and that, in a while, Hawk was going to be coming out looking for me.
It didn't figure for Gerry and his posse to blunder around in the woods for several days looking for me. Ordinarily I figured to outrun them even if they did. But my leg wasn't going to improve. And Gerry was crazy. I settled in to wait. The late sun was warm enough on my back, but above me and moving slowly westward was a mass of dark clouds. And as the evening crept in from the east with the clouds,
I could feel the edge of cold that was going to come with darkness.
They could have a tracker. They could have picked up a couple of shooters in Pittsfield. One of them could be a woodsman. Or Gerry could have made it up because he'd heard the word once on television.
The woods through which I'd edged my way, and the ones which stretched out behind me, were mostly hardwoods, oak and maple, with some birch clumps scattered among them, dark-ringed white trunks that gleamed among the drabber trees like hope in the midst of sorrow. Sprinkled among the hardwoods were evergreens-a lot of white pine, now and then a good-looking fir tree. The forest floor was a tangle of roots, and fallen trees, and creeping vines. Many of the vines were thorny and would not only trip, but clutch. There were chokecherry bushes, many of them with caterpillar tents stretched across the more comfortable crotches near the trunk. In a pinch,
I knew you could eat chokecherries, though they were pretty sharp. You could eat acorns too.
The combination of rain clouds and evening fell darkly across the little open space in front of me. In the woods it would be quite dark. There was some wind. I had already zipped my jacket and turned up my collar. It left me out
