flashlight and clamped it against the foregrip with his left hand, then turned it on.
For an instant he saw them: the man on the left, the woman on the right. But the flashlight had an unforeseen effect. The woman seemed to pitch forward onto her face, and the man crouched beside her and fired. Earl saw the first bright flashes as the man fired the pistol at his flashlight.
Earl ducked low and switched off his flashlight. He heard the ricochets as the next two bullets pounded off the rocks behind him. Then, after one more shot, there was silence.
Earl thought hard. Hatcher had fired. Jane had not. It had been a reasonable shot—certainly the best they could hope to get. Why had she held her fire? Earl crawled a few feet away to a new hiding place and peered over the rocks. He could see nothing.
He steadied himself, aimed the rifle, and switched on the light. Hatcher leapt up from his crouch and ran, but Jane stayed on the ground. Hatcher dashed to the left, back toward the woods. Earl followed him in the scope, but suddenly sensed something was wrong: Jane could have sent Hatcher off to draw Earl’s attention while she rushed him in the dark. Earl held his fire and quickly swept the light toward the woman. She wasn’t dashing toward Earl. She was still lying there. When the light hit her, she rolled to her side and screamed. “Pete! Don’t leave me here!” There was no answer, and her voice came again, lower and with less hope. “Please!”
Earl swept the light along the slope of the mountain, but Pete Hatcher was gone. Then he turned the light back on the woman. She still didn’t fire, and she still didn’t get up. She began to drag her body along on the rocks, using her left leg and her hands to try to slither out of the beam that pinned her there. She couldn’t be faking it. She knew as well as he did that if the bright white beam could reach her, the bullet could too.
Earl’s heart beat faster. He knew exactly what had happened, because for two days he had been afraid it would happen to him. She had been startled when the light went on, turned her head to look at it, taken a blind step, and twisted her ankle in the rocks.
Hatcher had certainly emptied his pistol firing at the light. That could not be faked. When he had no bullets left and Jane was not about to do any running, there wasn’t much he could do but take off and hope Earl took his time killing her. No, Hatcher probably didn’t even have that much calculation in him. He had panicked, as they always did at the end. Now he would run until he was exhausted and lost before he remembered there was such a person as Jane.
Earl began to walk toward her. He could probably have bagged her from this distance, even in the dim light of the flashlight and with her lying down, but doing it that way made no sense. He had only ten rounds left, and after that the beautiful precision rifle would be seventeen pounds of useless metal. He began to relish the chance to look into her eyes before he killed her. He could afford to do that. Pete Hatcher was going nowhere. He would never have gotten this far without professional help, and now he was alone with an empty pistol in mountain wilderness with a snowstorm coming. There was a good chance he didn’t even have the map and compass. Jane never would have let an amateur do the navigating. Earl would search her body and find out.
When Earl was fifty feet away from her, he turned on his flashlight again. Her eyes squinted against the glare and she struggled to rise to her knees, but she didn’t seem to be eager to put weight on the ankle. Earl moved closer.
“Don’t bother to get up on my account, Jane,” he said.
“How do you know my name?” She could not keep the fear and shock out of her voice. How could he possibly know her real name?
Earl kept walking. “I know everything about you. You’ve been mine for months. Since June, I think.”
As he approached, he watched her. She fidgeted in the beam as though it were intense heat instead of ordinary light.
“What are you waiting for?” asked Jane.
“I was just trying to decide. One part of me says you ought to go just the way my dogs did—gutted and left to lie there for a while before you die.”
He could see that Jane had to force her mouth into that unconvincing skeptical smile. “We’re both professionals. You won, I lost. You can afford one bullet to the head and be on your way. Those are the stakes, not torture.”
He set his rifle on the rocks, took his pistol out of his jacket pocket, and came closer. He was within fifteen feet of her now. “Is that so? What you’ve been putting me through—is that just business? You’ve been slowly sawing my balls off.”
He began to pace on the rocks. The flashlight’s beam whipped across her face, then bobbed up and down on her body.
She tried to make her voice sound calm, almost cheerful. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It wasn’t personal. I don’t know you.” She could see that his agitation was growing.
He stepped quickly toward her. “Well, you’re going to, because I’m going to do just what he did to Linda.”
She tried to decipher the words, but her mind stumbled, and gave her nothing but the terror. “Who? Who’s Linda?” The grimace on his face and the abrupt, jerky movements of his body told her that whether Linda was a real person or “what he did to Linda” was just a slang way of saying something awful, what this man was planning was not a mere execution. She watched, mesmerized, as he bent his knees to set his lighted flashlight and pistol on the ground a few yards from her feet, where she could never hope to reach them.
As he stepped away from them toward her, his big silhouette caught in the dim aura of the flashlight, Jane brought Pete Hatcher’s pistol around her body and fired it four times into his chest.
Earl’s eyes squeezed tight with pain, then opened wide with knowledge. He knew why Hatcher had still been kneeling beside her in the dark after he had emptied the pistol, when he should have been running. It was to hand it to her, so she could reload it and lie there with her body hiding it.
He toppled forward across her legs.
The weight was smothering, confining. She used all her strength to lift his torso an inch and pull her legs out, then dropped him. It was not until she had stood up and taken a step backward that she was sure he was dead.
She took two deep breaths and heard Pete’s running footsteps, coming along the ridge. He had completed his circle to come up behind the hunter, and now he was carrying the sniper rifle. He sidestepped around the body, keeping his eyes on it, horrified at the body and still frightened that the man might be alive.
She bent and picked up the hunter’s flashlight and his pistol. She said, “I’m going to ask you two questions. No matter what the answers are, I’ll show you how to get out of here and leave you safe. But I have to know.”
He looked at her, uncomprehending. “Anything. Ask.”
She knelt beside the body, clutched the belt and the shoulder and rolled him over, then shone the flashlight on the face. “Have you ever seen this man before?”
Pete Hatcher stepped close and stared down at the blood that had soaked the front of the shirt. “Uh,” he grunted. Then he kept walking around to the man’s feet to see the face right side up. “No,” he said. “Never.” He seemed to shiver once to get the sight out of his mind.
Jane moved the light to Pete Hatcher’s face. “Do you know somebody named Linda?”
Pete’s shoulders came up in a shrug and stayed there. He seemed to search the night sky for a moment. “A few. Linda Horn. I dated her in college. Linda Becker. She used to do my taxes, but she married a lawyer and they moved to New York. I don’t know.… Give me a hint.”
Jane didn’t move the light. “We’re miles from anywhere, where nobody can hear. Obviously I’m not going to tell anybody about any of this, ever. Is there a reason somebody named Linda might wish she’d never met you?”
She could see he was genuinely confused, searching his memory over and over without finding an answer. “No. I don’t think so.”
Jane switched off the flashlight. She looked up. The moon and stars had never come out, and the cold wind was pushing low, dark clouds in an endless stream across the sky. “You’d better go find a soft place and start digging a hole for him.” She looked back down at the body and began searching the pockets.
“What are you looking for?”
“Hurry. Snow is coming.”
Jane searched the man’s pockets, pulled up his shirt and his pant legs to search for anything that might be strapped to his body, took off his jacket. She found a map like hers and a good compass, a magazine for the rifle
