David Morrell: The naked edge

At distant houses, dogs howled in response. Gradually, the night returned to the quiet of moisture dripping off leaves, the wind scraping branches, and water trickling along the creek. Cavanaugh eased toward the dog-a Labrador retriever, he estimated-and found the stake that had catapulted into its chest when paws tripped a wire.

A booby trap, Carl? After dark, you crawled from your hiding place and arranged a surprise for me? I'm disappointed. Since when are traps in the game?

Rage heating him, Cavanaugh yanked the stake from the dog. He felt along the wire. It was the sort of item routinely discarded on a construction site. He coiled it, put it in a pocket, and inched forward, holding the stake.

At the open door to his room, wearing hastily put-on clothes, Rutherford squinted at his watch, his eyes puffy from having been wakened. "Maybe he just went for a walk."

"At one in the morning?" Jamie asked skeptically.

"It was a tough night and day. He must have a lot on his mind, a lot to rethink."

"He's gone to the park."

"You don't know that for a fact."

"I know him. There isn't anywhere else he'd go."

"What do you expect me to do, tell those thousand men to go back to the park? Even if I wanted to, I couldn't get them organized before dawn. Did you watch the evening news? Did you see how foolish we looked? For sure, Mosely would demand my resignation if I repeated today's farce."

"No," Jamie said, "I don't expect you to tell those thousand men to go back to the park."

"Thank heaven."

"I expect that you and I will go to the park."

"Shit," the Southern Baptist said.

Sweat blended with moisture from the fog and trickled down Cavanaugh's face. He lay on his chest on wet grass, assessing the gloom of the next stand of trees. He was sure that a booby trap waited for him in there, also. He tried to imagine Carl's reaction to hearing the dog's agonized howl.

Carl needs to assume I realize what killed the animal. He also needs to assume that I'll now avoid the trees and any other areas where traps can be easily set. He'll decide that I'll shift to the open spaces. He'll focus his hunt in those areas.

That meant Cavanaugh needed to do the opposite of what Carl expected and go farther into the trees. But first he rolled toward a nearby picnic bench. He crawled under. It was a space that would appeal to someone who wanted to hide his silhouette while looking for his prey. Cavanaugh used the wire to bind the stake to a metal leg, the point projecting outward at head level.

Then, ready with his knife, he squirmed from beneath the table and studied the closer gloom of the trees. Probing with the knife, moving it up and down, then right and left, he crawled past a bush. He waited. He listened. With his peripheral vision, he stared at the fog and the shadows. In the distance, the muffled drone of a car proceeded along West Benton Street. His nerves tightened until the sound was gone and he could again concentrate on the faint noises around him.

He shifted deeper into the trees. Immediately, he froze when his knife met resistance. Something thin and taut. A wire. Moving to the side, he discovered a low branch bent sideways and down. Feeling in the darkness, he found that the wire was attached to a rock that weighed down the branch. A stake was tied to the branch. If Cavanaugh had disturbed the wire, the rock would have shifted, the branch would have sprung, and…

He held his breath-one, two, three. Silently exhaled through his lips-one, two, three. Quietly inhaled through his nose-one, two, three. The technique calmed his heartbeat and steadied his lungs. Then he pushed the rock off the branch. With a whoosh, the branch vaulted noisily past him. Simultaneously, he grunted as if he'd been hit, then crashed against a bush. His groan became faint as he remembered the groans of wounded comrades becoming faint when death claimed them.

Holding his breath again (one-two-three), exhaling (one-two-three), he crawled silently to the edge of the trees, doing his best to make his crouched silhouette indistinguishable from a stump.

One minute.

Two minutes.

Three minutes.

Ten minutes.

A whisper on his right made his heart lurch. "Getting tired of waiting, Aaron?"

The words came from a cautious distance, perhaps as much as thirty feet away, muffled by the fog.

"I'd have joined you sooner," Carl's voice continued, "but I had to check the rest of the park and make sure you didn't bring company like you did this morning."

Cavanaugh's pulse was so rapid that his veins felt swollen.

Something crashed among the trees. Instantly, Cavanaugh squirmed in that direction. He knew that was the one place Carl wouldn't be. The noise was intended as a distraction. Right now, Carl would be hurrying around the stand of trees, intending to enter them from behind while Cavanaugh theoretically remained in place, his attention directed toward the noise.

All the while Cavanaugh squirmed forward, he used his knife to probe the air. Abruptly, he felt the resistance of another wire. At the same time, he thought he heard a slight noise behind him, Carl entering the trees.

He rolled to the side, threw a branch on the wire, heard a whoosh, and relied on that to distract Carl while he snaked to the side of the grove, emerging onto the grass. He sprinted soundlessly onto a soccer field and spun with his knife, waiting for Carl to charge through the fog.

"How do you like the traps?" Carl asked from the murk of the trees. "Makes the game more interesting, don't you think?"

Cavanaugh didn't answer, refusing to be baited into revealing his location.

"I figured, if you can break the rules, so can I. Honestly, don't you feel embarrassed that you brought all those guys to look for me? Can't you fight your own battles?"

Cavanaugh remained silent.

"All that manpower, and they couldn't find me. Aren't you dying to know where I hid?"

A crash among the trees. Cavanaugh flinched. Instantly, he recovered and tightened his grip on his knife, knowing that Carl had used the noise to hide the lesser sounds he made as he hurried from the grove.

Now they were both in the open. In the fog.

"The truth is, I counted on you to betray me again." Carl's voice came from straight ahead. "After all, betrayal's in your nature."

Cavanaugh crouched, making himself a small target while priming his arm muscles to strike with his knife.

"I wanted you to bring help, lots and lots of help." This time, Carl's voice came from the darkness on the right.

Cavanaugh moved in the opposite direction.

"So much help that, when they didn't find me, they'd figure this was the last place in the world to look for me." The voice was farther to the right.

He's tempting me to charge, Cavanaugh thought.

"The only flaw in the plan was the chance you'd feel so ashamed that you wouldn't show up tonight." Now Carl's voice came from the left.

Cavanaugh reversed direction and headed to the right.

"Even though they'll never find your body, they'll be forced to assume I was here." The voice was closer, to the right now.

Cavanaugh stopped moving.

"After you disappear, they'll focus on this area."

Cavanaugh glimpsed a shadow in the fog.

"But of course, that'll be too late. I'll be far away by then."

Taking advantage of Carl's distraction, Cavanaugh charged.

From experience, he knew that the surprising rush would provoke Carl's startle reflex, gaining the second he needed to strike a lethal blow, but as he raced toward the shadow, plunging his knife into flesh, feeling blood on his hand, he realized with sickening dismay that what he stabbed was the dog.

Carl held the corpse in front of him. Before Cavanaugh could pull the blade free, Carl twisted the carcass sideways, wrenching the knife from Cavanaugh's hand. Carl shoved the dead animal at him, knocking him backward, the dog's weight thrusting him to the ground.