Эдвард Хох - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, No. 1. Whole No. 791, July 2007

“It was more than that. Landry and your sister were planning to get rid of you and lay the blame on me. To make it work, they vandalized my home, and one of them, probably Landry, fired a crossbow bolt through my den window. It could have killed somebody. And it was dusted with blue chalk.”

“Dana, most likely. I taught her to shoot a few years ago. Thought hunting might make her more self-sufficient. It didn’t, though. Some people don’t have what it takes to cut it in this world.”

I couldn’t tell if the irony was intended or not. “What happens now?”

“A hunting accident,” Chan said coolly. “Poor Jerry stumbled into my line of fire, got himself killed. His family will collect a nice settlement, the department will avoid a scandal, and my sister will stay out of jail.”

“She meant to kill you.”

“She’s still my sister. My responsibility.”

“What about me?”

“Nothing about you, Dylan. You were never here. Any problem with that?”

“No. I’ve got troubles of my own.”

“So I understand. I made a few calls about you after your visit the other day. I’m sorry about your wife.”

“So am I. I have to get back. Do you... need anything from me?”

“Take your gun with you, it'll save me some explaining. Do you have a cell phone with you?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. I hate the damned things, especially in the forest. Ruins the atmosphere. When you get home, would you call nine-one-one for me? Just tell them where I am. I’ll take it from there.”

“You can’t really believe you’ll get away with this.”

“Sure I will. I can handle Stan Wolinski, and as for the rest, well, I’m used to coping. Been doing it all my life. No choice. When I tell people I’m not really handicapped, I’m dead serious.”

“Yes,” I said. “I can see that now.”

Retrieving my gun, I headed out, half expecting a crossbow bolt in the back with every step. But it didn’t happen.

When I glanced back, Sinclair was where I left him. A half-man with withered legs and barely functional arms, sitting in his chair ten yards from the corpse of a man he’d killed. Talking quietly to his sister, enjoying the afternoon sun.

He was right. Despite the chair, he really wasn’t handicapped. He could cope.

And if he could do it, maybe I could too.

I was losing my wife. But not forever. I believe in a hereafter. I will see her again.

Meanwhile, I have our sons to raise. And maybe some growing up to do myself.

As I left the woods, I noticed an eagle circling high in the autumn sky. Free and magnificent. A pure predator. Like Chan Sinclair. Or like most of us when you rough away the veneer of civility.

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. As I scanned the trail ahead, my vision seemed sharper, my senses more alert. For danger. Or prey.

Perhaps it will fade after a few weeks back in the classroom. If I let it. But I don’t think I will.

Someday soon, I’m going to bring my sons out here, to show them the countryside their mother loved so much.

And I’ll teach them to hunt. With a camera or a weapon, their choice. I’ll teach them to move silently, and listen. And track. And show them whitetail bucks battling over turf. And foxes stalking rabbits, and soaring hawks scanning the fields for mice.

I’ll show them how the world really works.

So that later on, if they happen to meet Hitler? They’ll know exactly what to do.

© 2007 by Doug Allyn

Zoë Sharp’s writing career took off in 2001 with the publication, in the U.K., of the first book in her Charlie Fox series, Killer Instinct. The series was later picked up by St. Martin’s Press in the U.S., with the sixth book, Second Shot, due in September '07. Ms. Sharp describes Fox, who appears in this story, as “tough, self-sufficient... with a slightly shady military background...”

I watched with a kind of horrified fascination as the boy climbed onto the narrow parapet. Below his feet the elongated brick arches of the old viaduct stretched, so I’d been told, exactly one hundred and twenty-three feet to the ground. He balanced on the crumbling brickwork at the edge, casual and unconcerned.

My God, I thought, he’s going to do it. He’s actually going to jump.

“Don’t prat around, Adam,” one of the others said. I was still sorting out their names. Paul, that was it. He was a medical student, tall and bony with a long, almost Roman nose. “If you’re going to do it, do it, or let someone else have their turn.”

“Now, now,” Adam said, wagging a finger, “don’t be bitchy.”

Paul glared at him, took a step forward, but the cool blond-haired girl, Diana, put a hand on his arm.

“Leave him alone, Paul,” Diana said, and there was a faint snap to her voice. She’d been introduced as Adam’s girlfriend, so I suppose she had the right to be protective. “He’ll jump when he’s ready. You’ll have your chance to impress the newbies.”

She flicked unfriendly eyes in my direction as she spoke, but I didn’t rise to it. Heights didn’t draw or repel me the way I knew they did with most people, but that didn’t mean I was inclined to throw myself off a bridge to prove my courage. I’d already done that at enough other times, in enough other places.

Beside me, my friend Sam muttered under his breath, “Okay, I’m impressed. No way are you getting me up there.”

I grinned at him. It was Sam who'd told me about the local Dangerous Sports Club, who trekked out to this disused viaduct in the middle of nowhere. There they tied one end of a rope to the far parapet and brought the other end up underneath between the supports before tying it round their ankles.

And then they jumped.

The idea, as Sam explained it, was to propel yourself outwards as though diving off a cliff and trying to avoid the rocks below. I suspected this wasn’t an analogy with resonance for either of us, but the technique ensured that when you reached the end of your tether, so to speak, the slack was taken up progressively and you swung backwards and forwards under the bridge in a graceful arc.

Jump straight down, however, and you would be jerked to a stop hard enough to break your spine. They used modern climbing rope with a fair amount of give in it, but it was far from the elastic gear required by the bungee jumper. That was for wimps.

Sam knew the group’s leader, Adam Lane, from the nearby university, where Sam was something incomprehensible to do with computers and Adam was the star of the track-and-field team. He was one of those magnetic golden boys who breezed effortlessly through life, always looking for a greater challenge, something to set their heartbeats racing. And for Adam, the unlikely pastime of bridge swinging, it seemed, was it.

I hadn’t believed Sam’s description of the activity and had made the mistake of expressing my scepticism out loud. So here I was on a bright but surprisingly nippy Sunday morning in May, waiting for the first of these lunatics to launch himself into the abyss.

Now, though, Adam put his hands on his hips and breathed in deep, looking around with a certain intensity at the landscape. His stance, up there on the edge of the precipice, was almost a pose.

We were halfway across the valley floor, in splendid isolation. The tracks to this Brunel masterpiece had been long since ripped up and carted away. The only clue to their existence was the footpath that led across the fields from the lay-by on the road where Sam and I had left our motorbikes. The other cars there, I guessed, belonged to Adam and his friends.

The view from the viaduct was stunning, the sides of the valley curving away at either side as though seen through a fish-eye lens. It was still early, so that the last of the dawn mist clung to the dips and hollows, and it was quiet enough to hear the world turning.