Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

Yet he chose this rifle.

What the hell was going on?

Bob mulled, trying to make sense of it all.

He had the feeling of missing something. There was a thing he could not see. He could not even conceive of it.

What am I missing?

What in me prevents me from seeing it?

I can’t even conceive it .

“Sir?”

“Oh, yes?” he said, looking up at the flight attendant.

“You’ll have to put up your lap tray and straighten your seat back. We’re about to land at Boise.”

“Oh, yeah, sorry, wasn’t paying any attention.”

She smiled professionally, and he glimpsed out the windows to see the Sawtooths, the down-homey little Boise skyline, and the airfield, named after a famous ace who’d died young in war.

Bob drove to the hospital straight from the airport. During a brief gap in the power of the ibuprofen, his incision began to knit in truly exquisite pain. He knew bruising would start by tomorrow and the thing would be agonizing for weeks — but he didn’t want to stop.

He drove through the quiet, bright streets of Boise, as unpretentious a town as existed anywhere, and finally reached the hospital where the crutches got him in, the ibuprofen got him beyond the agony again and an elevator got him to his wife’s room, outside of which his daughter and Sally Memphis waited.

“Oh, hi!”

“Daddy!”

“Sweetie, how are you?” he said, gathering up his daughter and giving her a big hug. “Oh, it’s great to see my gal! Are you okay? You doin’ what Sally says?”

“I’m fine, Dad. What’s wrong with you?”

“Sweetie, nothing. Just a little cut on my leg, that’s all,” he said, as Sally shot him a disbelieving look.

He chatted with his daughter for a bit and with Sally, whose response to him was cool. It seemed that Julie was sleeping now, but there hadn’t been any real complications from the surgery. They thought she’d get out sometime soon and Sally had made arrangements to go to the small ranch in Custer County as Bob had planned. She agreed with him that it was a safe security arrangement, at least until the situation clarified.

Finally, Julie awakened and Bob went in to his wife.

Her torso was in a full-body cast that supported the arm on the side where the collarbone had been shattered. His poor girl! She looked so wan and colorless and somehow shrunken in the cast.

“Oh, sweetie,” he said, rushing to her.

She smiled but not with a lot of force or enthusiasm and asked how he was and he didn’t bother to answer her, but instead went on about her, caught up on her medical situation, checked on the security arrangements, finally told her he thought he was on to something.

“I could tell; you’re all lit up.”

“It’s a long story. There’s something I can’t figure out, and I need help.”

“Bob, how can I help you? I don’t know anything. I’ve told you everything I know.”

“No, no, I don’t mean about it. I mean about me.”

“Now you’ve lost me.”

“Honey, I got this thing I have to figure out. It doesn’t make no sense to me. So either it’s wrong, or I am wrong. If it’s wrong, there’s nothing I can do about it. If it’s me that’s wrong, then I can figure it out.”

“Oh, Lord. I get shot and it’s all about you.”

He let the cut simmer, not responding.

Finally he said, “I’m very sorry you got hit. I’m very happy you survived. You should concentrate on how lucky you were to make it through, not how unlucky you were. You handled yourself well, you took control, you were a hero. You got your life, you got your daughter, you got your husband. It ain’t no time to be angry.”

She said nothing.

“It ain’t about me. It’s about us. I have to figure this thing out.”

“Can’t you let the police, the FBI do it? They’re all over the place. That’s their job. Your job is to be here with your family.”

“I have a man hunting me. The more around you I am, the more danger you’re in. Don’t you see that?”

“So you’ll be off again. I knew it. You weren’t there when I got shot, you weren’t there when I lay in that gulch for three hours, you weren’t there when I was operated on, you weren’t there when I came out of the operation, you haven’t been taking care of your daughter, you’re evidently not going with us to the mountains, I hear you’ve been drinking, you’ve obviously been in some kind of fight or something, because of the terrible way you’re limping and the way your face is completely sheet-white, and all you want to do is go off again. And … somehow, you’re happy.”

“I wasn’t in a fight. I had a bullet cut out of my leg, that’s all. It’s nothing. I’m sorry,” he said. “This is the best way, I think.”

“I don’t know how much of this I can take.”

“I just want this to be over.”

“Then stay here. Stay here, with us.”

“I can’t. That puts you in danger. He’ll know soon enough, if not yet, that I wasn’t the man he hit. So he’ll come back. I have to be able to move, to operate, to think, to defend myself. Not only that, if he comes after me again, and you’re there again, do you think I can defend you? Nobody can defend you. Let him come after me. That’s what he was trained to do. Maybe I can get him, maybe not, but I sure as shit ain’t going to let him go after you.”

“Bob,” she said. “Bob, I called a lawyer.”

“What?”

“I said, I called a lawyer.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means I think we ought to separate.”

Certain moments, you just feel your chest turning to ice. It just freezes solid on you. You have trouble breathing. You swallow, there’s no air, then there’s no saliva in your mouth. Your ears hammer, your head aches, blood rushes through your veins, pumping crazily. You’re that close to losing it. It had never happened to him when the shit was flying in the air and people were dying all around him, but it happened now.

“Why?” he finally said.

“Bob, we can’t live like this. It’s one thing to say we love each other, we have a family, we take care of each other. It’s another when you go off every so often and I hear rumors that people are dead and you won’t talk about it. It’s another when you’re so angry all the time you won’t talk or touch me or support me and you snap at me all the time. I can just make so many excuses to our daughter. But then the next thing, the worst thing, the war comes into our house and I’m shot with a bullet and my daughter sees a man die before her very eyes. And then you go off again. I love you, Lord, I love you, but I cannot have my daughter going through that again.”

“I’m— I’m very sorry, Julie. I didn’t see how hard this was on you.”

“It’s not just the violence. It’s that you somehow love it so. It’s that it’s always in you. I can see it in your eyes, the way you’re always searching the terrain, the way you’re never quite relaxed, the way there’s always a loaded gun close at hand, the way you drive me out. You’re not a sniper anymore; that was years ago. But you’re still over there. I can’t compete with the war in Vietnam; you love her more than us.”

Bob breathed heavily.

“Please, don’t do this to me. I can’t lose you and Nikki. I don’t have anything else. You’re all I value in this world.”

“Not true. You value yourself and what you became. Secretly, you’re so happy to be Bob the Nailer, different from all men, better than all men, loved and respected or at least feared by all men. It’s like a drug addiction. I feel that in you, and the angrier you get and the older you get, the worse it becomes.”