Dead Watch

beams were only eighteen inches over the ground, and in a few uneven places, even closer than that. Animals had been under the porch; he could smell them on his hands, in his face, and still he scrambled and dragged himself, ignoring his leg, out the other side, and then he was running toward the trees, staggering, his left leg weakening, the cabin between him and the assassin.

In the course of the scramble, his brain had processed the cabin as a trap. It provided immediate cover, but that wouldn’t last. He had to get out. If he could make it to the trees . . .

He didn’t think about being hit again. There was a bright flash to his right, and he dodged, thinking it might be a muzzle flash, but then he registered it as too bright, and a second later plunged into the tree line. As he did, there was another snap-whack four inches from his face, as a slug tore into a tree trunk.

Jesus!

He went down, on his belly, slithered into a depression, damp with dew on moldering leaves, and then he stopped.

Listened, trying to suppress his heavy breathing, his heart pounding. He could hear the other man—had to be Winter. Jesus Christ, he’d set them up, he must’ve known about the bug, how long had he known, what had he fed them? He groped into the leg pocket on his injured leg, took out a cell phone, looked at the connection bar. No connection. He was too deep in the valley. He’d had a solid link at the top of the ridge, three hundred yards away. He had to get to a spot where he could link up, had to move quickly.

Winter wasn’t alone. There was at least one more guy in the cabin, then there’d been the flash on the hillside when he was running, so there might be two more. The fag group? Was Winter working with Barber’s guys? No time to think: had to move. Couldn’t let them pin him down.

He slid one hand down his injured leg, probing for the wound, came away with a wet red-stained hand. No first-aid kit. Still, he had to do something about the bleeding, soon.

If he could get to the top of the ridge, he could make a call, hunker down, wait. If they came for him, he could make them pay.

He pushed off from the depression, nearly groaned with the pain, and using his arms as much as his legs, began moving as quietly as he could toward the west side of the bluffs south of the cabin.

Jake heard him, but at first couldn’t see him. The second man was probably no more than a hundred yards away, but the woods were so thick that he simply couldn’t see more than a few yards into it. A good thing: the other man couldn’t move quietly.

So Jake tracked him by the sound of his movement, and after two or three minutes, realized that the other man didn’t seem to be getting closer. He seemed, instead, to be working toward a neighboring bean field, though that was five or six hundred yards away to the southwest, not far from where Jake had set up during the turkey season. Away from the car park, from the direction he’d come in from.

Why would he go there?

The walkie-talkie vibrated in his pocket, and he slipped it out, gave her a single beep of acknowledgment. “The first one is gone. There’s blood on the ground where the second one jumped.”

Jake muttered, “Okay,” then, as quietly as he could, “You’re out? Go back in.”

“I’m okay here, I just came out to check. The runner was hurt.”

“Get back in. I’m tracking him, he’s well south of you.”

And getting farther south, Jake decided a minute later. Then: high ground. The other man was looking for a place to make a cell-phone call.

He had to move. He slipped out of the makeshift blind, risked walking on the grass on the edge of the food plot, exposed, but too far from the second man to be seen, he thought. Still, the hair rose on the back of his neck, and some danger gland in his brain was shouting at him to get out of sight.

He paused inside the tree line. Listened, heard just a bit of movement, still heading up. Found a game trail, worn leaves and slightly thinner brush where deer had cut across the slope. Passed an old buck-rub, made a mental note. Moved slowly, slowly, still-hunting.

Stopped every six feet. Listened. When he heard nothing, he froze. When he heard movement, he moved. Five minutes into the stalk, he saw a tree limb shake; a little jiggle of new bright-green leaves, like a squirrel might make, but too low. Sixty yards out, two-thirds of the way to the top of the bluff.

From experience, he knew that the other man would have to get nearly to the top before the cell phone would work. Jake watched until he saw another leaf-jiggle, and then moved, sideways, across the hill, until he found a seam in the trees. Not a trail, not a gully, but simply a seam, the result of random seeding . . .

But it gave him a shooting lane.

He eased down, put the scope on the last spot he’d seen movement, and glassed the area.

He saw the first hard movement a minute later. Watched, watched . . . green, brown, black: camo.

He fixed the scope on it, pulled the trigger.

Goodman heard him coming. Couldn’t see him, but thought the footfalls were a man’s—the sky was too bright, and the sound wasn’t explosive enough to be a large animal. He was being stalked. He couldn’t pick out an exact direction; but there was only one. Had he been wrong about another man in the woods, in addition to whoever was in the cabin?

He could feel that he was still losing blood, he was weakening. He had to do something.

Moving slowly, he slipped the weapon off his shoulder, cocked it, clicked it onto full-auto. There was a downed branch a few feet away. He edged over to it, pulled off his camo hood, snagged it over the tip of the branch, and