41
I stepped into the forest on the side of the trail opposite the pond. Not wanting to show a defined profile, I kept to the trees as I would have hunting deer. The Armasight scope was not a thermal imaging model: it didn’t show heat signatures. But the other assailants might be better equipped.
The man I’d taken down had the bulked-up physique and lack of training I associated, right or wrongly, with correctional officers. Which made sense. I had to believe that Rancic was here. He seemed to have had tactical training, and after what I’d seen him do to Darius Chapman, he struck me as the kind of stone-cold killer who lived for this sort of stealth operation.
But who is he working with?
At the moment, the question didn’t matter.
What I needed to figure out—and fast—was their mission.
It started with neutralizing me. Only once I was off the board would they proceed to the next step. If their goal was to lure Billy out of hiding, they would seek to take Aimee and the kids hostage. I wanted to reassure myself that the Cronklets were needed alive as potential bargaining chips, but knowing the collateral damage they’d been willing to inflict to kill Pegg, I couldn’t take the risk.
Those popcorn gunshots I’d heard earlier, the ones that had distracted my pursuer, puzzled me. Aimee had told me she was unarmed. Then I remembered the musty box of birdshot shells Peter Landry had found behind one of the walls.
As a distraction, she’d thrown them into the woodstove, where the gunpowder had combusted and the tiny ball bearings had careened harmlessly around the inside of the cast-iron furnace.
Smart woman, Aimee Cronk.
I heard a rustle to my left and froze. Slowly, I swung the rifle barrel around. I caught a split-second glimpse of an armed man moving into a mass of head-high evergreens. Something about seeing the world through the hazy green of the scope ratcheted up my heartbeat even more.
He was heading toward the outhouse, I realized.
I remembered Emma having asked Aimee if she could use the toilet before we heard the car horn. Had she and her brother returned to the cabin? Or might they be sheltering in place there now?
The evergreens were short, dense balsams that would make perfect Christmas trees in eight months. I could hear boughs being bent and twigs being snapped underfoot. The thicket was too dense. I would have to find a way around it.
Suddenly a man’s voice spoke through my earpiece: “Gamma, come in.”
The person in the trees ahead of me froze.
I carefully set my foot down, heel first, on the sodden fir needles.
“Gamma, this is Alpha. Report.”
The voice sounded familiar, but between the whispered tone and the radio distortion I couldn’t be sure.
“Beta, this is Alpha. Do you copy?”
“Copy, Alpha.” It was another male voice. Again familiar.
“I think Gamma is down.”
So now I knew that there had been, at least, three of them to start: Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. Probably only three.
The tree boughs ahead of me swooshed again, then went quiet as if someone was turning around to listen.
“Alpha, this is Beta. I think I’m hearing a radio behind me.”
I had turned off the transmitter but must have been close enough to Beta that he’d heard his own transmission come through my earpiece.
“Fuck yeah,” said Beta, “we’re compromised. Bowditch has got Gamma’s radio. What do you want to do here?”
Alpha came back, “I want you to run a drag route. Got it? Then move to radio silence until my say-so.”
“Copy that.”
My earpiece went dead as the two men simultaneously turned off their radios.
A drag route in football is when a receiver runs straight over the line of scrimmage, then cuts parallel across the field. What the hell did that mean in this context?
It didn’t take me long to find out.
Beta broke from the evergreens on the opposite side of the thicket. Instead of continuing toward the outhouse, he made a ninety-degree change in direction. I couldn’t see him through the cover, but my gut told me he was making a run for the backside of the cabin.
So where was Alpha?
Waiting to ambush me, I wagered. He was hoping I would pursue Beta and step out into the open where he would have a clean shot.
As quietly as I could, keeping to the trees, I took three steps in the direction of the dooryard. When I had a bead on the front steps, I knelt down and steadied my rifle barrel by bracing my left elbow against my knee.
From the sounds of things, Alpha and Beta hadn’t discovered where the Cronks were. Aimee might have led the kids on a flight into the forest. Or she might have left the door open as misdirection while the family remained hidden inside the building. Sooner or later, someone was going to need to go up those steps—the only way inside the building—and have a look.
These men thought of themselves as the aggressors in this scenario. I needed to flip the script.
How do you defeat an ambush predator? By waiting him out.
Patience, alas, has never been one of my virtues. It was why I preferred stalking deer to sitting in a tree stand. It was why Charley Stevens chided me for giving up too quickly on riffles that held trout.
What I would have given to have Charley with me now.
But no one was likely to come to my rescue tonight. Tantrattle Pond was so far from anything that the shots that killed Peaslee would have been heard only by owls, raccoons, and fishers. The she-wolf. My fellow nocturnal hunters.
Water from the branches above me dripped onto my head and shoulders.
The wood frogs had been joined in their singing by a few spring peepers.
My right quadriceps began to burn.
Then to my left I heard an expulsion of breath. “Fuck it.”
Alpha was leaving his place of hiding. If I held still
