Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

Earl steadied the rifle and held the running animal’s head in the scope. He placed the crosshairs between the two rust-brown spots above the eyes and fired.

Rusty’s forelegs crumpled and he collapsed, dead before his muzzle hit the ground. The bear stopped, gave a quick swat with his claws, and made sure the dog was dead.

Earl quickly switched off the flashlight and crouched, holding the scope on the big black shape. The wind was blowing from the bear’s direction. Earl made no noise. As he watched the shape of the bear he tried to remember. He had fired once at Pete Hatcher, then once more. He had fired at the bushes twice: four. Then one for Rusty: five. But was he really sure he had started with ten rounds? Old hunting stories came back to him. People had shot grizzly bears ten or twelve times in places that were supposed to be fatal and they had not even slowed down. Earl kept his eye in the scope, slowly and quietly released the box magazine from the rifle, found the full magazine in his pocket, and clicked it in place.

He knew that if the bear charged, there was no way he could outrun it. He had to kill it before it reached him. He went to a prone position with his flashlight against the foregrip again, and waited.

As he waited, the third possibility, the one he had almost forgotten, occurred. The enormous dark shadow seemed to rise and grow as it lifted its snout from Rusty’s carcass and turned its head toward Earl. It had finished feeding on the dog. It sniffed the air, turned, and slowly walked away.

31

Earl lay curled up on the top of the ridge, sheltered from the wind by a rock outcropping. It was cold enough to snow now, and he was almost sure the flakes would begin to fall before sunrise. A man could easily freeze to death up here with no sleeping bag, no tent, no tarp, no … He decided not to make a list. All of the gear was on Lenny’s back right now, somewhere behind him on the other trail. If the dogs had been alive, he could have lain between them and used their body heat.

The slaughter of his dogs was the very last offense that Earl was going to suffer. He knew who had done that. Jane had fed the bear something to keep it in Earl’s path. She had known that the bear would kill the dogs and probably Earl too. Great upwellings of rage came out of his chest with each breath like convulsions, making his head pound with anger.

About now she would be certain Earl was either being eaten or clinging to a tree limb someplace down in that valley waiting for the bear to go away. A woman like her would be too smart to try to make her way north down there in the dark, through a forest that had never been cut. She would have to travel up here where the vegetation was almost nonexistent and she could take a step with some confidence about what was going to be under her foot when she put her weight on it. She would have felt the change in the wind and the drop in the temperature too, and she would want to be out of the mountains before the snow hit.

Earl lay still and kept his eyes focused on the long expanse of bare ridge ahead. When he heard the first sounds below the heights, he held his head up a few inches and listened, trying hard to pick out the noises he had sensed were different. Their footsteps were slow coming up, as though they were picking their way with difficulty. No, it was caution. Jane was that smart. She knew that if Earl was alive it was because he had backed away from the bear, staying downwind and heading for the heights, where there was nothing for bears to eat, so he wouldn’t repeat the encounter.

She seemed to satisfy herself after a minute. He heard her footsteps begin to quicken, and then the bigger, heavier steps came faster too.

Earl took his hands out of his pockets, where he had been warming them, then slowly rolled onto his belly and pushed the A.W. against his shoulder. This was the sort of shot he had waited for. They would be moving away from him with their backs fully exposed.

He listened and strained his eyes to see, but he could not quite tell where they were. He picked up the flashlight and clamped it against the foregrip with his left hand, then turned it on.

For an instant he saw them: the man on the left, the woman on the right. But the flashlight had an unforeseen effect. The woman seemed to pitch forward onto her face, and the man crouched beside her and fired. Earl saw the first bright flashes as the man fired the pistol at his flashlight.

Earl ducked low and switched off his flashlight. He heard the ricochets as the next two bullets pounded off the rocks behind him. Then, after one more shot, there was silence.

Earl thought hard. Hatcher had fired. Jane had not. It had been a reasonable shot—certainly the best they could hope to get. Why had she held her fire? Earl crawled a few feet away to a new hiding place and peered over the rocks. He could see nothing.

He steadied himself, aimed the rifle, and switched on the light. Hatcher leapt up from his crouch and ran, but Jane stayed on the ground. Hatcher dashed to the left, back toward the woods. Earl followed him in the scope, but suddenly sensed something was wrong: Jane could have sent Hatcher off to draw Earl’s attention while she rushed him in the dark. Earl held his fire and quickly swept the light toward the woman. She wasn’t dashing toward Earl. She was still lying there. When the light hit her, she rolled to her side and screamed. “Pete! Don’t leave me here!” There was no answer, and her voice came again, lower and with less hope. “Please!”

Earl swept the light along the slope of the mountain, but Pete Hatcher was gone. Then he turned the light back on the woman. She still didn’t fire, and she still didn’t get up. She began to drag her body along on the rocks, using her left leg and her hands to try to slither out of the beam that pinned her there. She couldn’t be faking it. She knew as well as he did that if the bright white beam could reach her, the bullet could too.

Earl’s heart beat faster. He knew exactly what had happened, because for two days he had been afraid it would happen to him. She had been startled when the light went on, turned her head to look at it, taken a blind step, and twisted her ankle in the rocks.

Hatcher had certainly emptied his pistol firing at the light. That could not be faked. When he had no bullets left and Jane was not about to do any running, there wasn’t much he could do but take off and hope Earl took his time killing her. No, Hatcher probably didn’t even have that much calculation in him. He had panicked, as they always did at the end. Now he would run until he was exhausted and lost before he remembered there was such a person as Jane.

Earl began to walk toward her. He could probably have bagged her from this distance, even in the dim light of the flashlight and with her lying down, but doing it that way made no sense. He had only ten rounds left, and after that the beautiful precision rifle would be seventeen pounds of useless metal. He began to relish the chance to look into her eyes before he killed her. He could afford to do that. Pete Hatcher was going nowhere. He would never have gotten this far without professional help, and now he was alone with an empty pistol in mountain wilderness with a snowstorm coming. There was a good chance he didn’t even have the map and compass. Jane never would have let an amateur do the navigating. Earl would search her body and find out.

When Earl was fifty feet away from her, he turned on his flashlight again. Her eyes squinted against the glare and she struggled to rise to her knees, but she didn’t seem to be eager to put weight on the ankle. Earl moved closer.

“Don’t bother to get up on my account, Jane,” he said.

“How do you know my name?” She could not keep the fear and shock out of her voice. How could he possibly know her real name?