Nelson DeMille - Spencerville

He shut off the lights in the living room so he wouldn't be backlighted and slid open the glass door that led from the living room to the elevated deck.

Baxter dropped to one knee behind the deck railing and raised the rifle, sighting through the scope and adjusting the infrared image with the focus knob. His right eye was still fuzzy from where Landry had jabbed him, but the magnification helped.

He looked out into the woods that started about a hundred yards across the open space around the house, and scanned along the edge of the pine trees, but didn't see anything.

Baxter wasn't certain which dog barked, or why, so he walked in a low crouch around the continuous deck, looking through the variable-power scope at the woods that surrounded the house on three sides, then scanned the shoreline of the lake, which, like the woods, was about a hundred yards away across open terrain. He focused on the waters of the lake itself but didn't see any boats.

One of the dogs, the Labrador retriever, was tethered to a dog run parallel to the lake side of the house. The second dog, a golden retriever, was on its dog run, which ran from the lake, across the front of the house, out toward the woods where the dirt road came into the clearing. The third dog, a German shepherd, was out toward the rear of the house. The shepherd wasn't on a wire run, but was on a fifty-yard-long leash, attached to a pole, that allowed it to roam at will as far as the woods and as close as the house. He was satisfied that the placement of these dogs covered the perimeter of the clearing around his house.

They were good dogs, Baxter thought, but they barked at nearly everything. Still, when they barked, he checked it out. He went back to the front deck and, again in a kneeling stance, he raised the rifle and pointed it toward the dirt road. It sounded like the golden retriever who'd barked, and in fact the retriever was at the end of its run near the wood line. But Baxter noticed that the wind was coming off the lake now, so the dog probably couldn't smell anything upwind. But it must have heard or seen something. Baxter adjusted the focus knob again and concentrated on the infrared images as he slowly scanned from left to right.

He focused on the golden retriever again and saw that the dog was facing toward the woods about thirty yards left of where the dirt road began. Baxter dropped into a prone firing position, rested the rifle on the deck below the bottom slat, and sighted to where the retriever was pointing. He aimed low at the base of the pine trees and squeezed off a single round.

The shot echoed through the trees and over the lake behind him, breaking into the silence of the night. All three dogs began barking. Baxter sighted again and fired another round, then another.

The echo died away, and the dogs quieted down. Baxter lay motionless, peering through the scope, waiting for a sound or movement in the pine, and waiting, too, for return fire. After two full minutes, he decided there was nothing out there, or if there was, it was gone or dead. "Maybe a deer." They liked to feed after dark during the hunting season, but as soon as the dogs barked, they ran. So why was the dog still looking into the woods? "Maybe a rabbit or squirrel. Yeah..."

"Okay..."He didn't want to attract attention and didn't want to kill a hunter, but he didn't think there was anyone in the few cabins around this side of the lake, and even if there were, they didn't belong out at night in the woods during the deer season; at least not this close to his house.

He waited a few more minutes, then rolled along the deck, stood quickly, and went back into the living room through the sliding door.

Baxter put the rifle back in the gun rack and locked it, pocketing the key chain. He had four other semiautomatic rifles on the rack, one with a twilight scope for dawn and dusk shooting, one with a standard four-power scope for daylight, one with a long-range twelve-power scope for distance shots of up to a mile across the lake, and an AK-47 assault rifle with open sights for close-in shooting.

Aside from the armaments and the dogs, he also had six old-fashioned bear traps set around the property, out of reach of the dogs. One of them was near the staircase that led up to the deck. He also had a few other tricks up his sleeve, in case any uninvited and unannounced visitors showed up. He wasn't expecting anyone, but somewhere in the back of his mind was the image of Keith Landry.

Keith lay flat on the ground among the pine boughs, with Billy beside him. When the firing stopped, Keith whispered, "Just probing fire."

Billy nodded. "Yeah... but damn close."

"I think the dog was pointing."

Billy whispered, "You had a clear shot at him when he was kneelin'."

"I did, but I think he was wearing a vest. I'd have to go for a head shot, and that's tough at this distance."

"Hey, did you see that red-eye lookin' at us?"

"I did." The infrared scope's major drawback was that you could see the red glow when it was pointing directly at you. He wasn't surprised that Baxter had a night-vision scope, but it made things a little more difficult.

The dog, which was about twenty yards from them, made a low, rumbling sound.

They lay quiet and motionless for another few minutes, then the dog, responding to some other sound or impulse, turned and ran off down the length of its wire run toward the lake.

Keith waited another minute, then slowly rose up into a kneeling position. He raised the binoculars and trained them on the house.

Baxter slipped out of his bulletproof vest but kept his pistol strapped to his side. He turned on a floor lamp that cast a soft light across the big, cathedral-ceilinged living room.

Along the slanted walls of the A-frame room were trophy heads: elk, deer, bobcat, wild boar, two black bears facing each other on opposite walls, and above the mantel of the fireplace, a rare gray timber wolf surveyed the length of the room.

Sitting in a rocking chair beside the fireplace was Annie, staring into the flames. She glanced at him as he came toward her.

Baxter said, "You expectin' company, darlin?"

She shook her head.

"I think you are." He sat in an easy chair opposite her.

She was naked but had a blanket wrapped around her to keep away the cold. Still, her feet were cold despite the fire. On her ankles were leg manacles from the jail, connected by a twenty-four-inch chain long enough for her to walk normally but too short for her to run. The chain was padlocked to a large eyebolt screwed deep into the oak floor.

The only telephone in the house was the wall phone in the kitchen, but Cliff had locked the handset in the kitchen closet, along with all the sharp knives. When he sent her to bed at night, he handcuffed her wrists to the iron headboard and released the leg manacles, "So you can spread your legs for me, darlin'."

Cliff looked at her awhile, then said, "You think he's comin' for you, but that phone call I got before was from Blake, and he tells me that your lover boy went and kidnapped Ward and tortured the guy. But Ward told him that we went off to Florida. So that's where the stupid bastard is goin', if he gets that far." He added, "If he even gives a shit about you."

Annie didn't reply.

Baxter added, "I don't think he cares, and even if he does, he don't have the balls." He laughed. "I mean, he really don't have the balls. But, in a way, I hope he does show up here. You ever seen a man caught in a bear trap? It ain't pretty, I'll tell you. Most of the time they can't get it open and they die of starvation and thirst. Sometimes they cut off their foot to get out. Now, if your lover boy gets himself caught in a trap around the house, we can both watch him dyin' for a week or so. They usually yell themselves hoarse, cryin' and beggin', then at the end, they want you to shoot 'em."