Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

He could think of nothing to say.

“Please don’t do this to me.”

“We should be apart.”

“Please. I can’t lose you. I can’t lose my daughter. I’ll do what you want. I’ll go with you to the mountains. I can change. I can become the man you want. You watch me! I can do it. Please.”

“Bob, I’ve made up my mind. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. You need space, I need space. The shooting business just makes it more important. I have to get away from you and get my own life, and get away from the war.”

“It’s not the war.”

“It is the war. It cost me the boy I loved and now it’s cost me the man I loved. It cannot take my daughter. I’ve thought all this through. I’m filing for separation. After I recover, I’m returning to Pima County and my family. We can work out financial details. It doesn’t have to be bad or ugly. You can always see Nikki, any time, unless you’re off at war or in the middle of a gunfight. But I just can’t have this. I’m sorry it didn’t work out any better, but there you have it.”

“I’ll go. Just promise me you’ll think it over. Don’t do anything stupid or sudden. I’ll take care of this business—”

“Don’t you see? I can’t have you taking care of this business and getting yourself killed. I can’t lose someone else. It almost killed me the first time. You think you had it hard in your traction and your VA hospital? Well, I never came back. There isn’t a day I don’t wake up and not remember what it felt like when the doorbell rang and it was Donny’s brother, and he looked like hell and I knew what was happening. It took me ten, maybe twenty years to get over that and I only just barely did.”

He felt utterly defeated. He could think of nothing to say.

“I’ll go now,” he said. “You need to rest. I’ll say good-bye to Nikki. I’ll check on you, stay in contact. That’s okay, isn’t it?”

“Yes, of course.”

“You be careful.”

“We’ll be all right.”

“When this is all over, you’ll see. I’ll fix it. I can do that. I can fix myself, change myself. I know it.”

“Bob—”

“I know I can.”

He bent and kissed her.

“Bob—”

“What?”

“You wanted to ask me what was wrong with you. Why you couldn’t figure something out?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll tell you why. It’s because of the great male failing of your age. Vanity. You’re publicly modest but privately insanely proud. You think everything is about you, and that blinds you to what is going on in the world. That’s your weakness. You have to attack your problem without ego and vanity. Approach it objectively. Put yourself out of it.”

“I—”

“It’s the truth. I’ve never told you that, but it’s the truth. Your anger, your violence, your bravery; it’s all part of the same thing. Your pride. Pride goeth before the fall. You cannot survive unless you see through your pride. All right?”

“All right,” he said, and turned to leave.

Here I am, right back where I started from, he thought.

The room was shabby, a motel on the outskirts of Boise, not a chain but one of those older, forties places on a road that had long since been surpassed by other, brighter highways.

I am slipping, he thought. I am losing everything.

The room smelled of dust and mildew. Every surface was slightly warped wood, the bathroom was only nominally clean, the lightbulbs were low-wattage and pale.

I drank a lot of bourbon in rooms like this, he thought.

He was here on more or less sound principles. The first was that by this time, whoever had been trying to kill him surely realized he had missed and was back on the hunt again. Therefore the ranch house, with its clothes, its life, was out. He knew that place and to go there was to get yourself killed, this time for real, with no poor old Dade Fellows to stop the bullet.

So, after doubling back and crossing his own tracks a dozen times, and setting up look-sees for followers and finally satisfying himself nobody was onto him yet, he was here. Paid cash, too. No more credit cards, because whoever this bird was working for, he might have a way of tracking credit cards. No more phone calls except from public phones.

What he needed now was a gun and cash, like any man on the run. The cash he knew he could get. He had $16,000 left from a libel case the late Sam Vincent had won for him years ago, and he’d moved it from a cache in Arkansas to a cache here in Idaho. If he was clear again tomorrow, he would get it.

A gun was another problem. He felt naked without one, and the gun laws here in Idaho weren’t troubling yet, but there was still that goddamn seven-day wait by national law. He could head back to his property, where his .45 Commander was stored away, but did he really want to carry it on a daily basis? Suppose he had to take an airline or wandered into a bank with a metal detector? Sometimes it was more trouble than it was worth. Besides, how could he shoot it out against a sniper with a 7mm Remington Magnum with a .45? If the white sniper found him, it was over, that was all.

Bob sat back, turning the TV on by remote, discovering to his surprise that it worked. The news came on.

Bob paid no attention. It was just white noise.

His head ached. He held a bottle in his hands, between his legs as he lay on the bed, on a thin chintz bedspread. Jim Beam, $9.95 at the Boise Lik-r-mart, recently purchased. There were water spots on the ceiling; the room stank of ancient woe, of raped girlfriends and beaten wives and hustled salesmen. Cobwebs fogged the corners; the toilet had a slightly unwholesome odor to it, like heads he’d pissed in the world over.

I am losing it, he thought.

He tried to press his brain against the riddle again.

He felt if he could get that, he would have something.

Why, all those years ago, did Soloratov use an Ml rifle, a much less accurate semiauto? It appeared to be one of those mysteries that had no solution. Or, even worse, the answer was mundane, stupid, boring: he couldn’t get a bolt gun, so he settled for the most accurate American rifle available, an M1D Sniper. Yes, that made perfect sense but…

…but if he could get an M1D, he could get a Model 70T or a Remington 700!

It don’t make no goddamn sense!

It doesn’t have to make sense, he told himself. Not everything does. Some things just can’t be explained; they happen in a certain way because that’s the way of the world.

Bob looked at the bottle again, his fingers stole to the cap and the plastic seal that kept the amber fluid and its multiple mercies from his lips, and yearned to crack it and drink. But he didn’t.

Won’t never touch my lips again, he remembered telling someone.

Liar. Lying bastard. Talking big, not living up to it .

He tried to lose himself in what was on the tube. The news, some talking head from Russia. Oh, yeah, it sounded familiar. Big elections coming up, everybody all scared because some joker who represented the old ways was in the lead and would carry the day, and the Cold War would start up all over again. The guy was this Evgeny Pashin, handsome big guy, powerful presence. Bob looked at him.

Thought we won that war, he said to himself.

Thought that was one we did okay in, and now here’s this guy and he’s going to take over and restore Russia and all the missiles go back into the silos and it’s the same old crock of shit.

Man, there was no good news anywhere, was there?

He was feeling powerfully maudlin. He yearned for his old life: his wife, his lay-up barn, the sick animals he was so good at caring for, his perfect baby daughter, enough money. Man, had it knocked.