Peter Heller - The Painter

The gun jumped. Concussions wiped the night clean of sound. Flame shot from the barrel.

It felt good. To blast away.

At two hundred yards I knew I’d be lucky to even hit the truck. Fuck it. I shifted over to my right and muttered Fuck off and aimed about where my windshield would be, where he would be, then raised it higher so the bullet could drop, somewhere over the back of the hood, just to let him know I was serious. Should scare the shit out of him. I thumbed back the hammer and pulled the trigger.

The thudding and breaking ceased. Silence. I waited.

He’d be crouched. I couldn’t make out the shadow of any figure in the dark. This could take a while. He would be patient this time. Grant. Brother, barn burner, anonymous threatener and killer.

I didn’t wonder what the fuck he was doing here, it seemed like a natural conclusion. Not conclusion, better hope not—development. If I’d thought the shots at the house might be a warning, a scare tactic, now I knew they weren’t. He had missed, period. Jason had called him of course. Or he’d followed me from the house. They’d been keeping track. I’d been so lost in my musing while driving I’d never noticed the now and then glimpse of Grant’s pickup a few curves back. And there, with a couple of hundred yards of cool country night between us, I could feel he had the meanness of a true coward.

He would be crouched now, behind one of the trucks, and I also knew without considering that he would be armed perfectly for the job. He would have a handgun as I had, and he would also have a rifle, or several, and I had an idea what they would be: an AR-15 .223 for the middle distance flat shot, one of the best setups for killing a man, and a .30-06 or a .308, bolt action, his elk gun, and if I knew the man and I didn’t but could feel his malevolence like a smell even at this distance, if I knew him he had night vision scopes on one or both rifles. Because that’s where he and his brother really made their money: poaching, and there was no better time to do that than at night.

I went to visit my uncle and aunt in southern Vermont, I was maybe twenty-six, and one night I got drunk and walked up the road, just maple and birch woods on either side, fields, and came to Sam Frazer’s, a guy my age I’d known since I used to visit when I was a kid. An old farm house, the light in the front parlor was on and I knocked. He was a town selectman now, and his wife had just left him and he was glad to see me. He’d been drinking, too, and we got more drunk together, then drove into the field west of his house and I tried to shoot a buck in his headlights. I was so drunk that I’d duct taped a flashlight to the receiver of the little .30-30, and taped right around the lever so I couldn’t work the action. Well. I’m glad now that the whole herd ran off before I could get my act together.

I imagined that Grant was much better at shooting things at night.

There was no sound coming from the trucks and no shadowed figure moving between them or moving at all. He was waiting. He had broken the glass to draw me out of wherever I might be sleeping nearby and it had worked. Now he was crouched with some flat shooting rifle and a night scope and he was cursing himself for not getting a bead on the short stab of flame from the barrel of my handgun. He would wait. He would maybe expect me to work my way down, to get closer, and that would be fine because he would be scanning the hillside which was all open meadow between us.

My heart was thumping against my ribs. Fuck. I knew, I knew there was a man down there waiting to kill me. I think I knew from the moment his truck stopped that certain distance back and froze my own pickup in his headlights. Something about the jerky rhythm of the spotlight, something about all of it that was malevolent and evil, and worse because it was practiced, because it was clear this sonofabitch had done this before and who knew how many animals he had killed this way, who knew even how many men. Because a man who burns down another man’s barn, a barn full of horses, seemed capable of most things.

But this way, the coward’s way, in the dark from cover. Fuck. Which made us two killers. That occurred to me with a shock: we were two practiced killers squaring off in the thick of night, and it also occurred to me that I wasn’t certain he was a murderer but I knew that I was. How much less cowardly to jump out of a bush and surprise a drunk man with his dick in his hands and crush his skull?

So it seemed to me that this was a fitting showdown. Two cowards in the cloaking dark, cloaking their shame which I was sure neither of us felt.

I was pressed against the fragrant bark of the old ponderosa. My heart no longer hammered. Good. If I ever got close enough and had to actually shoot the bastard, being a little calmer would be helpful.

I wouldn’t shoot him. One Siminoe was enough. Wasn’t it? What was I supposed to do now? He was trying to kill me. I was sure, I could feel it like the heat of an engine.

I breathed. The crickets chirped. His idling truck down in the road was a low murmur, a faint ticking. Probably needed a valve job. Something rustled in the duff under the trees, a quick scratching that froze me. It peeped, sounded surprised, jumped, gone. Drama everywhere. Let out my breath, lay still, listened. Felt my phone bulging in my pocket, pressing my thigh, shifted it to the side. What if it rang? And gave me away like a beacon. It wouldn’t. Before I turned up the rancher’s road I had thought of Sofia, wondered where she was, and pressed on the phone to call and of course there was no reception. Not here.

Okay, relax. He is a hunter as you used to be, he is accustomed to the Long Wait, probably enjoys it in some primal way.

All he needed was one cough to hone in. Honed in he could probably keep the scope on the spot and wait for me to shift which I would eventually do, and bang. Not a good situation.

I began to taste bourbon on my tongue. Jim Beam to be precise. I am not a hunter by nature, not this kind of hunter. I always moved. I liked to move through trees, to the edge of a meadow or rockfall, crouch, listen, wait a little while, get stiff while ungloved hands got cold, move on. Never had this kind of patience. Why I loved to fish creeks, it was a rhythmic enterprise, wading and casting, never still.

After some time, maybe minutes, maybe an hour, it occurred to me that something needed to happen. If I waited long enough he would kill me. He had the rifle, I had a handgun. It was like a mismatched fight where one boxer’s reach is twice as long as the other’s.

Fuck it. My worst bar fights came with this impulse to get it over with. Fuck it anyway. I had three shots left in the pistol, I’d have to get very close.

I grasped the rucksack in one hand, backed on hands and knees further into the shelter of the trees and stood up. Go. I moved fast. As fast as I could. Came out of the grove at an angle to my right, out into the open meadow at a crouch, and ran. The pack was in my left hand. Zagged left, legs in freefall, stepped into a hole, prairie dog, stumbled almost fell, sear from the left knee, braced for the hot rip exploding my chest. Cut right again, almost falling down the hillside, a shadow a large shape in the dark fuck! humped—a humped giant, a rock, a boulder beside the road, I collapsed behind it. Thank you God for dropping a boulder in the middle of this valley. Breathed.

Breathed. What must be the crack and echo of his shot reverberating down the valley, right over my head. But it wasn’t. Nothing. Quiet again, I made myself listen for more than the drum of my heart. There was no echo. Had been no crack of a shot. What the fuck? I peeped around the side. Two trucks, their shadows. Pulled back, lay on my side, breathed. The moon like an orange lightship was clearing a high wooded ridge back toward the highway. First time I’d noticed. Fuck. I scanned the slope I had just come down and realized that in the ruddy light he could have seen me easily without a night scope. Was he being perverse? Waiting for me to walk right into him?