Reamde

He and Jones were now no more than four feet apart, separated only by the log wall of the cabin.

Richard could squat there and wait and hope that Jones would move into just the right position so that Richard could fire through a gap between logs. Or he could go out the way he had come in, move around the side of the cabin, and try to shoot around the corner. Or he could present himself in the window again and just fire from point-blank range.

He was cocking the revolver again when Jones opened fire with his Kalashnikov. Richard’s whole body flinched, and he very nearly let the hammer slip. But no rounds seemed to be passing through the cabin. Nor could they, really, given Jones’s location. So what the hell was Jones shooting at?

It came to him then that he was overthinking this.

This was a shoot-out. Nothing could be simpler. But he was making it too complicated by trying to use his wits to work the angles, figure out some clever way to dodge around the essential nature of what was happening, to get through to the other side without getting hurt. His opponent, of course, simply didn’t give a shit what happened to him and was probably a dead man anyway—which gave Jones an advantage that Richard could match only by adopting the same attitude. It was an attitude that had come naturally to him as a young man, taking down the grizzly bear with the slug gun and doing any number of other things that later seemed ill-advised. Wealth and success had changed him; he now looked back on all such adventures with fastidious horror. But he had to revert to that mind-set now or else Jones would simply kill him.

All of this came simply and immediately into his head, as though the Furious Muses had chosen this moment to give up on being furious for once—perhaps forever—and were now singing in his ears like angels.

Richard stood up in the window, holding the revolver in one hand now, and swung it out and down.

Jones was right there, sitting on the ground, leaning back against the wall of the cabin, aiming his rifle, not up at Richard, but out into the open space beyond. He had been shooting in that direction for some reason.

He glanced up into Richard’s eyes.

“It’s nothing more than a great bloody cat!” Jones exclaimed.

Richard pulled the trigger and shot him in the head.

He cocked the revolver again and stood poised there for several seconds, looking at the aftermath to make sure he was not misinterpreting the evidence of his eyes, out of wishful thinking. But Jones was unquestionably dead.

Finally he raised his gaze from what remained of Jones and looked up and out over the field of weeds and overgrown scrub beyond. It was by no means clear what Jones had been marveling at in the last moment of his life. For fresh green leaves had not yet begun to bud out, and the hue of the place was the tawny umber of last year’s dead growth. Finally, though, Richard’s eyes locked on something out there that was unquestionably a face. Not a human face. Humans did not have golden eyes.

The eyes stared into Richard’s long enough for Richard to experience a warm rush of blood to his cheeks. He was blushing. Some kind of atavistic response, apparently, to being so watched. But then the eyes blinked, and the cougar’s tiny head turned to one side, ears twitching in reaction to something unseen. Then it spun around, and the last Richard saw of it was its furry tail snapping like a whip, and the white pads of its feet as it ran away.

THE FORTHRAST FARM Northwest Iowa

Thanksgiving

Richard had been spending a lot more time at the farm lately, mostly because he had been named executor of John’s will. Since Alice was still alive, this was much less complicated than it might have been—he didn’t have to sift through all his older brother’s property, only the bits that were of no use or interest to Alice. This meant tools, weapons, hunting and camping gear, and some clothing. Richard distributed all of it among John and Alice’s four sons and sons-in-law. Only a few odds and ends remained. Of these, the most difficult for Richard to deal with—speaking here of emotional difficulty—were the artificial legs. Owing to Richard’s habit of buying John a new pair whenever he read about some fresh innovation in that field, there were a lot of them, piled up like cordwood in a corner of the attic. During a weepy afternoon of sorting through them, Richard hit on an idea: an idea that might not really make that much sense on a practical level, but somehow felt right. He got in touch with Olivia, who said that she “knew how to reach” Sokolov. A few emails passed back and forth containing measurements and photographs. The finding was that Sokolov’s height, weight, leg length, and shoe size were a close match for John’s, and so by the end of the day Richard was down at the local UPS depot shipping several very expensive carbon-fiber right legs to an address in the United Kingdom. Custom stump cups and other modifications would, of course, be needed, but the result was that Sokolov got something a bit nicer than what he would have been issued by the National Health Service.

At eleven in the morning, after they had all come back from the memorial service—a ceremony honoring not only John but Peter, Chet, Sergei, Pavel, the bear hunters, the RV owners, and two of Jake’s neighbors—Zula hooked her laptop to the big flat-screen on Grandpa’s porch, and they made a Skype connection to Olivia in London. She had just returned to her apartment after work and was looking every inch the smartly turned-out intelligence analyst. Once the connection was made, she insisted that Zula put her face up to the little camera above the laptop screen and display her new artificial tooth, which was indistinguishable from the one that had been knocked out, and the lip in front of it, which bore a hairline scar and a little notch. The notch, Zula explained, was fixable, but she had decided to keep it. Olivia heartily approved and pulled back her hair—which she’d been growing in—to show off what she described as the “Frankenstein” scar that had been incised on her scalp in Xiamen.

These preliminaries out of the way, Zula backed away from the camera. Olivia made some approving remark about her church dress. Zula responded with a mock-demure curtsy, then smoothed the garment in question under her bottom as she settled into the couch right next to her grandfather. “My goodness, who are all these fine gentlemen?” Olivia exclaimed. “What company you keep, my dear!” For sitting on Zula’s other side was Csongor, dressed up in a hastily acquired black suit from the big and tall section of Walmart. With the timeless awkwardness of the suitor embedded deep in enemy territory, he reached one arm around and laid it on the back of the couch across Zula’s shoulders. A slapstick interlude followed as his hand came down on Grandpa’s oxygen tube and knocked it askew. Fortunately Richard had had time to read all the instruction manuals for Grandpa’s support system and get trained in how to make it all work, so he jumped up in mock horror and made a comical fuss of getting it all readjusted and then offered to perform CPR on his dad. It was unclear just how much of this Grandpa was actually following, but his face showed that he understood that it was all meant to be amusing.

“How about you?” Zula asked, when things had calmed down a bit. “What sort of company are you keeping, honey?”

Olivia seemed to have set her laptop up on a kitchen table. She rolled her eyes and sighed as if she had been caught out in a great deception. Her hands got big as they reached for the laptop. Then her apartment seemed to rotate around them, and they were greeted with the sight of Sokolov, dressed in a bathrobe, drinking a cup of coffee and reading a book through a pair of half-glasses that made him seem oddly professor-like. This elicited a cheer from the group in Iowa. He lifted up his coffee mug and tipped it toward them, then took a sip.

“Isn’t it a bit late in the day, there, to be getting out of bed and having your shower?” Richard asked lewdly. Sokolov looked a bit uncertain, and off-camera they could hear Olivia feeding him some scraps of Russian. When he understood the jest, he looked tolerantly into the camera and explained, “Just came back from gym.” He then leaned back in his chair and heaved his leg up onto the table. It occasioned a moment of silence from those watching on the sofa. Finally Richard said, “It suits you.”

“Is small price,” Sokolov said. “Is very small price.” The workings of the video chat linkup made it difficult for them to know who he was looking at, but Zula got the sense that the look, and the words, were intended for her.

“We all had some things to pay for,” Zula said, “and we paid in different ways, and it wasn’t always fair.”

“You had nothing to pay for,” Sokolov said.

“Oh,” Zula said, “I think I did.”

The silence that followed was more than a little uncomfortable, and after giving it a respectful observance,