unmistakable aroma of barbecued meat. There was almost no wind, just enough to carry the tangy scent. From which direction? He bent and cracked open a milkweed pod, plucked a piece of fluff from inside, let it go. The fluff drifted lazily northwest. The man and his barbecue were somewhere southeast. Cork adjusted his line and crept ahead.
Ten seconds later the silence around him was shattered by a scream that was followed by a thrashing in the underbrush and the grunting of a desperate struggle. Cork abandoned stealth and rushed ahead, afraid for Ren.
In the dim evening light, Cork stumbled onto a nightmarish scene. On the ground a man wrestled to free himself from the grip of a cougar, whose powerful jaws were locked on the back of his neck. The man flailed and screamed, but the cougar, larger and heavier, held tight. A few yards away Ren hung from the branch of a tree, his wrists high above his head, his feet just inches off the ground, his eyes wide as he watched the horror of the attack.
Cork swung the Glock toward the struggle on the ground, but the two figures were so tightly enmeshed, he couldn’t risk a shot.
Dina and Charlie appeared beside Ren. Dina sighted down the barrel of her carbine but didn’t fire.
The cougar, intent on its kill, hadn’t seen the others arrive. Cork raised his Glock and fired into the air, hoping to distract the beast, to startle it into breaking off its attack. The cougar spun, teeth bared.
Cork, Dina, and Charlie all held dead still, but at the sound of the gun, Ren had begun to kick his legs wildly, crying out through the tape over his mouth a muffled “No!” It was a plea, Cork understood, not to kill the animal.
All that movement, which Ren meant to save the wild cat, in the end spelled its doom. The cougar, confused and threatened, focused on Ren and his wild legs. The animal’s ears lay back. As it gathered on it haunches, Dina moved instantly between Ren and the cat.
The animal launched itself and Cork fired twice.
The cougar cried out like a kicked housecat, turning awkwardly in midair as if its internal gyroscope had been destroyed. It fell far short of Dina and Ren and lay on the ground, stunned. After a moment, it tried to struggle to its feet but, failing, became still. For a minute, the quiet of that small circle of woods was broken only by the animal’s labored breathing.
The man groaned and rolled onto his back. “Help me,” he rasped.
“Keep him covered,” Dina told Cork.
She wrapped her arms around Ren and lifted him free of the branch. Charlie already had her pocketknife out and she cut the tape from his wrists. He pulled the strip off his mouth and the first thing he said was “We’ve gotta save the cougar.”
“I’m hurt,” the man on the ground pleaded.
“Cover me,” Cork said to Dina. “I’ll pat him down.”
“Fucking gun’s in my belt,” the man said. “Take it. Just get me to a hospital.”
Cork pulled the gun, a nine-millimeter Ruger, from the man’s belt and ejected the clip. He went over the rest of his body but found no other weapon and stepped back.
“The cougar,” Ren repeated, edging near the downed animal.
“Stay back,” Dina said firmly.
“But it’s going to die.”
Dina put the Motorola to her lips. “Jewell, do you read me?”
“I’m here. What’s going on? What were those shots?”
“Ren’s safe, but we need you up here and bring your medical kit.”
“It’s not Ren?”
“No. A couple of wounded animals. A cougar and a rat.”
“Ned’s here. He’s coming with me.”
“I’ll meet you at the cabins and guide you over.” She lowered the walkie-talkie.
“I’ll go,” Charlie offered. “I’m faster.”
“All right,” Dina said. “And, Charlie? You did a good job today.”
The girl flashed a big smile and was gone, bounding swiftly and gracefully toward the distant cabins.
“You okay, Ren?” Cork put his arm around the boy’s shoulders.
“Yeah, I guess.” He sounded distracted, his attention focused on the wounded wild cat.
Dina walked to the man on the ground, looked down at him, and shook her head. “Vernon Mann.”
“You know him?” Cork asked.
“ ‘The Mann who would be king,’ we used to call him when I was with the feds. He was DEA back then, full of delusions of grandeur. Went private like me. Not nearly as good or as principled, however. Still overachieving, Vern? You’re way outside your comfort level here, schmuck, but I bet for five hundred thousand dollars you’d slit your own grandmother’s throat.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mann said.
“On second thought, you’d probably do it for a lot less. Who clued you in, Vern?”
Vernon Mann didn’t answer. Dina bent down, drew him up roughly into a sitting position.
“Let me take a look at those cougar wounds,” she said.
Mann leaned forward slightly.
“A couple dozen well-placed stitches and you’ll be fine, Vern.”
Cork couldn’t see exactly what Dina was doing, but Mann suddenly arched his back and screamed in pain.
“So how ‘bout it, Vern? How’d you find us?”
“All right, all right,” he cried. “I got a buddy at the Sun-Times . Somebody called him from up here looking for information about O’Connor. He called me. I did some digging, came up with a relative, Jewell DuBois.”
They heard the vehicles rumbling up the lane to the cabins. Through the trees, Cork saw the Pathfinder and Hodder’s Cherokee stop where Charlie waited. Jewell jumped out, ran to her Blazer, and grabbed her medical bag from inside. Hodder joined her. They spoke briefly with Charlie, then followed her at a jog toward the trees.
The moment she saw Ren, Jewell wrapped him in her arms. The boy didn’t pull away from his mother’s public display of affection.
“Can you save it, Mom?” he asked, nodding toward the downed cougar.
“Hell, what about me?” whined Vernon Mann.
“Relax,” Dina told him. “You’ll live. And, Vern, I heard Michigan prison food isn’t all that bad.”
Ren started toward the cougar, but his mother put her hand on his shoulder. “I’m going to try to sedate him. Then we’ll see.”
As Jewell opened her bag, the cougar’s rasping breathing ceased and a terrible moment of quiet followed.
“No,” Ren cried. He tried to move toward the animal, but Dina held him back.
“Don’t go near him, Ren,” his mother ordered. “Don’t anybody go near him. Let me check him first.”
Cork watched Jewell approach carefully. He still had the Glock trained on the animal. It was a beautiful creature of sand-colored fur and strong muscle. Its eyes were open. Cork, who’d hunted all his life, knew the dead look in them, but he found himself hoping he was wrong, that Jewell would discover some sign of life.
She stayed clear of the big paws and the long teeth and gingerly touched the animal’s side near its haunch. Her hand drifted slowly up the sleek body, pausing here and there to feel. She drew a stethoscope from her bag, slipped it under the front leg, and pressed it to the cougar’s chest.
Cork glanced at Ren. The boy stood rigid, waiting. His eyes, which had already seen so much horror, were half-closed in anticipation of the truth.
“He’s dead,” Jewell pronounced at last.
The boy broke.
It wasn’t just the cougar, Cork told himself. It was the strain of all that had gone before. Ren knelt and sobbed bitterly over an animal he’d never seen before.
“You killed it,” he accused, his dark eyes attacking Cork. “You murdered it.”
Cork lowered the gun that had been trained on the cougar. “I’m sorry, Ren.”
“It’s not right,” Ren insisted. “It’s not right.”
