John Lutz - Urge to Kill

Jerry smiled. “We both know that.”

“Do we have an agreement?”

Jerry nodded.

“This hunt will be slightly different,” said the man from Quest and Quarry.

When he was finished explaining that difference, he said, “Your quarry will be a man named Thomas Rhodes.”

After leaving Gillman’s Bar, Martin Hawk took a cab to the block of Thomas Rhodes’s West Side brownstone and got out at the corner. He put on the plain blue baseball cap he’d had in his suit coat pocket and adjusted the bill at a slight angle. Everyone in a baseball cap looked like everyone else in a baseball cap. He walked down the street and, without being noticed left a small, tightly wrapped package in the brownstone’s mailbox.

He was smiling as he strode casually away. The package contained a small. 25-caliber revolver. He knew that Rhodes would understand what it was for, and he knew how he’d react. Rhodes should never have discharged his weapon inside his opponent’s hotel. It had been carefully explained to him that both hunters’ hotels were safety zones. He’d broken the rules and the code of honor, and that was unforgivable, as well as dangerous.

Rhodes wouldn’t contact the police, but he might try to leave town with his life preserved, made silent by fear. Or he might feel that he had no choice but to take up the challenge.

Either way, Hawk had faith in Jerry Dunn. Also either way, Quest and Quarry would neutralize a former client who was a potential problem. This kind of pairing was Martin Hawk’s way of sweeping up after himself.

He glanced at his watch. It was still early enough to see a woman who very much interested him. A special woman.

The special ones were getting closer together, he knew, and it was beginning to worry him. But there was no way to deny the need or the urgency. He really had no choice. And this woman…she was unique, like all of them, and the same, like all of them.

In the end, alike.

Simple puzzles. All of them.

He’d know how to deal with her, how to figure her out. He’d observe her and learn her thought processes and habits, and then take advantage of them. It was all in knowing when to move in. It was much like hunting.

It was hunting.

He stepped off the curb into the oil-stained street and hailed another cab.

Black Lake, Missouri, 1986

The old Chevy pickup was dented and rusty, but it was all determination as it snarled and rattled over the rough and uneven dirt drive leading to the dilapidated farmhouse and outbuildings.

During the year since his initiation rite at the lake, Marty had become the hunter his father had anticipated, keen of eye and eager. He was twelve now, taller, still skinny but filling out.

The truck needed exhaust work. Anybody within a quarter of a mile might have heard it. But there was a brisk wind to go with the subzero temperature, so there was nobody to hear and notice the pickup with the illegal deer in the bed. Most folks knew Carl Hawk and his son Marty hunted out of season anyway, and chose not to do anything about it. They were more than a little scared of Carl, and besides, the family needed the meat.

Carl was driving. Marty sat next to him with one hand on the door handle to brace himself, his teeth clenched, as the truck bucked and swayed. Their rifles were unloaded and fitted into brackets so they were stacked horizontally across the back window. The deer in the truck’s bed was a dead six-point buck that Marty had shot three hours ago. Its throat was slashed and the animal had bled out where it hung in the woods while Carl and Marty had hunted some more, so it wasn’t making much of a mess in the truck.

“We’ll drive on into the barn,” Carl said, “so’s you can get right to it.”

“Yes, sir.” Marty’s breath fogged like his father’s in the cold truck, as the heater hadn’t worked since he could remember. He’d thought some days that they might as well be driving with the windows down.

When they reached the barn, Marty climbed down out of the truck and used the cold, rusty hasp for a handle as he swung one of the big wooden doors open. The hinges squealed, and the wind tried to take control of the door, so he had to hold tight to keep it from blowing shut.

The old truck growled and spat as if clearing its throat as Marty’s father bounced it over frozen ruts and inside the straw-littered building. Curtains briefly parted in one of the house’s front windows, but neither Carl nor Marty noticed, being too cold and bent on their task.

As soon as the truck was clear, Marty leaned into the barn door and walked backward, letting it close of its own accord as a concession to the wind.

There was no electricity in the barn, but it was easy enough to see by the light slanting in through spaces between the boards. There wasn’t much warmth, either, and eddies of winter wind found their way inside. There wasn’t any livestock. The family was down to half a dozen chickens, huddled in their coop, and four hogs crowded together for warmth in the walled plywood lean-to attached to their pen.

There was more growling and grinding of gears as Carl maneuvered the truck so its bed was directly below the block and tackle attached to one of the barn’s rafters.

Marty scampered up into the bed and got hold of the thick rope dangling from the pulley. He looped the rope around and between the deer’s stiffened rear legs and fastened it with a solid bowline knot.

When he was finished, he hopped down off the truck and went over to where the rope was angled away from the overhead pulley and was wound about the spool of a steel winch. Marty clung to the winch handle and gave it several turns while his father edged the truck forward until the deer was hanging free of the opened tailgate.

The truck’s engine gave a few mighty roars and died, and Carl got out and helped Marty work the winch another turn until the deer was hanging upside down with its antlers a few inches off the plank floor.

Carl brushed his gloved hands together, then stood off to the side and lit a cigar. He was watching Marty squinty-eyed through the smoke, a slight smile on his seamed face.

Marty knew what to do. He removed his jacket and draped it over the side of the truck bed, then rolled his shirtsleeves up above his elbows. The gutting knife was hanging by its buckskin cord on one of the wood supporting beams. Marty took it down and ran a finger over its cutting edge to make sure it was sharp. Then he approached the deer, struck with the knife hard and straight between the deer’s rear legs, and used his own body weight to make a ripping incision down the deer’s swollen belly all the way to the base of its throat. He had to move back fast then, as undrained blood and the animal’s intestines spilled out onto the floor.

Marty worked quickly and skillfully with the gutting knife, his arms inside the still-warm animal up to their elbows. Cold as the barn was, the deer’s dwindling body warmth felt good. He tied off the anus, then sliced away the internal organs, making sure all the intestines were detached, letting the visceral matter drop to the floor where the initial mass of bloody innards lay. Marty and his father would later feed it to the hogs. Most of the rest of the deer they would store in the keep box outside the house, where it would remain frozen for weeks while the family gradually consumed it. Sometimes Carl would want the antlers saved, so he could mount them on one of the barn walls with dozens of other impressive racks of antlers. But this deer was merely a six point, so the antlers could also go to the hogs.

“You make sure you hose all that blood off you ’fore you come in the house,” said a woman’s voice.

Marty turned from his task and saw his mother, Alma.