Track of the Cat (28 page)

"Park elk," Anna said flatly.

"Some of them. I'm an equal-opportunity employer."

"You stole the radio frequency from the Resource Management office, used it to pinpoint the location of the lions we collared, didn't you? Big game to order."

"You're playing for time, Anna," Harland said, clearly amused. "Okay.

Play. But the game will have to be short. You can live just until I hear Jerimiah D.'s helicopter coming back with the hunters. Can't have the clients upset either by your presence or your corpse. The silly SOBs get dressed up in camo and carry big guns but the poor bastards just can't get it up if the quarry can fight back."

Till the helicopter returned with its second load. Ten minutes-maybe fifteen-for something to happen, to even the odds. "What do they pay you for a kill?" Anna asked. Harland didn't reply. He seemed to be thinking better of letting the game go on. "If I've got to die," she said, "don't make me die curious."

He laughed then. She could feel him relax. "Seventy-five hundred dollars.

For that they get dinner at Paulsen's, the hunt, a guaranteed kill, the lion's head, and-the best part- they get the story. The 'battle of wills,' the 'ultimate challenge,' 'man against the elements.' Trophies.

Cheap at twice the price."

"Trophies. You used them to make Drury's death look like a lion kill, didn't you? Severed her spinal cord with an icepick or something, then bit her with dead jaws, raked her with severed claws."

"Ah, Anna," Harland sighed. "We could've been beautiful lovers, you know that? Our minds work alike. Our bodies would be a concert. If we must spend your last minutes on this earth playing 'you show me yours and I'll show you mine,' you must take your turn. How did you guess?"

"I didn't guess," Anna retorted. "You fucked up. One of the neck punctures, the fatal one, was too deep; deeper than any living lion's tooth." Anna hoped he would become annoyed. Maybe, if she was lucky, tempted to close the distance between them to strike her.

Harland laughed, seemingly delighted with her cleverness. "And what made you think of me? Or do you often think of me?"

She ignored the second question. If his face was the last sight she was to see on earth, she didn't want to read satisfaction there. "Everything.

You had access to the radio frequency, you use ketimine in your work, you'd worked with reptiles, led hunts, had too much money for a government employee, and you called Paulsen 'Jerimiah D.' Only his old friends call him that.

"You made a lot of mistakes, Harland. You lowered the body into the canyon from the helicopter. Right into a saw grass swamp. But you forgot to scratch the body up, forgot to put any water in the pack. Not very clever."

"Clever enough to stay alive, my dear. Clever enough to stay alive." He smiled, the rifle he held never wavering so much as a fraction of an inch from her heart. He was, she realized, truly enjoying himself. A hunter who'd lost his taste for the easy kill, finding in murder, in the covert and illegal taking of game, in the fleecing of fools, a spark of the old feeling.

"Why the ketimine?" she asked.

"Didn't want to kill her till the last minute. Time of death and all.

Didn't want marks of a struggle on the body. There's not a problem with needle marks using ketimine: the stuff is so strong you can administer it in eyedrops."

"Eyedrops. Fitting. She had seen something. What?"

"Just what you're seeing tonight, but on the other end. Our brave hunters dividing up the spoils," Harland said. "And with the same unfortunate-and rather fatal-results."

Behind Harland, Anna saw a faint flicker of movement pale against the stones. The lion had flicked its tail.

"Kitty is waking up," she said.

Harland looked merely annoyed. "That didn't work the first time, Anna."

"The first time it wasn't true."

As if responding to a stage cue, the lion growled, a low threatening cascade of gravelly notes.

Harland turned-not far, maybe half a turn-toward the cat. The barrel of the rifle moved eight inches to the left of Anna's heart and she sprang.

It was utterly without thought. Mind at one with muscle, as countless animals had sprung at their prey since there had been a difference between the quick and the dead.

Her hands hit the rifle; both hands, hard, like a gymnast on the uneven parallel bars. Harland's considerable strength went into holding onto the gun and it stayed rigid in his grasp. Rigid enough Anna used it for leverage. Pulling against Roberts, she let her center of gravity sink to her butt and with all of the muscles of thigh and fanny, she drove her knee into Harland's groin.

Harland, protective instincts born of years of painstaking care of "the family jewels," pivoted and her knee struck the inside of his thigh. Pain forced a grunt from him but he did not collapse and Anna knew, with her first rational thought since the lion's tail had moved, that the fight was not over.

Banking on the surprise of sudden reversal, she let all pressure off the rifle, turned her energy with his, and he helped her to shove the gun hard against his chest.

A round fired into the air. The powerful recoil jerked them both off-balance. Stumbling back, Harland tripped over the goods he'd dropped at her first command. Anna felt herself falling with him. Neither dared relinquish their hold on the weapon to break the fall. The rifle butt struck first and another round ripped down the barrel just as Anna's shoulder pounded into the hard earth.

The report was muffled. Flesh and bone had silenced the bullet. Anna didn't know whether it was she or Harland who had been hit.

"Oh no..." she heard him whisper.

There is a God, she thought. And She is on my side. With renewed energy, she pulled herself to her knees, her fingers still locked tight around the weapon.

"Give it up! You're dying!" she screamed, willing him to believe, to die.

"You've been hit. You're bleeding to death. Give it up. You'll die."

With a suddenness that caught her off-guard, Harland wrenched the rifle from her grasp. Anna lunged across him, slamming her weight into the arm that held the Sako and heard the rifle skitter downslope into the black ravine.

Harland closed her in a deadly embrace. "I'm not dead yet." The words were harsh and hot in her ear, more air than sound. "But I'm the last lover you'll ever know." His arms began to clamp down, crushing her.

Anna's legs were tangled in his, held tight, but her arms were free. She dragged at his hair, pounded his skull, but the grip never loosened. He'd tucked his face tight into her neck, his throat, his eyes were protected by her flesh. She sank her teeth into his shoulder and felt an answering bite on her neck, an animal bite tearing down through skin toward tendon and vein.

Like a jackal, he was ripping her throat out with his teeth. Terror gripped her, paralyzed her. Unrelentingly he was bending her spine. Soon it must snap. She could not breathe. The soft flesh of her throat was being eaten away.

Like the blind things they were, Anna's hands scrabbled over the stony ground above Harland's head. A long smooth stick came under her fingers.

A flare. Hope sparked thought; hope made life possible. Hope blanked the fear and the pain that froze her mind. With every ounce of concentration she had, Anna forced her hands to uncap the flare, strike its tip against the safety cap.

Searing pain in her right wrist and hard pink light burning beyond her closed eyelids let her know she had been successful. Yelling, Anna drove the flare down inside Harland's shirt, pushed the spurting, chemical-driven torch into the back of his neck.

A scream pulled his teeth from her throat. Convulsively, his arms released her and he began clawing at the dragon consuming him from behind.

Crawling free, Anna struggled to her feet. The .357 was lost in the shadows. Snatching up a second flare, she struck it to life. In its hot light, she watched Roberts, mad with pain, ripping at his shirt. The flare fell free, tumbled down-slope.

Crying, Harland sat up. Blood seeped from a hole in his left shoulder.

His back, Anna knew, would have a gaping wound where the bullet had exploded from his body. The smell of burnt flesh polluted the night.

The lion was gone.

Silently, her breath coming in gasps, Anna was crying, too. Ready to push it into his eyes, she held the gout of flame from the flare toward Harland. Roberts's face was ragged, wild with more than pain: with unacceptable defeat. Drawing on reserves Anna would marvel at later, he pushed himself upright, stood swaying in the wavering light. Like an angry bull, his head dropped and he glared at her from beneath straight dark brows.

Rage had taken the place of cunning. With a roar, he charged. Anna stepped aside and he stumbled over the lip of the ravine, crashing down the talus slope into the darkness. One final cry broke up through the shadows. Then silence.

Anna hung back. Harland's fall had taken the same path as Paulsen's hunting rifle. Using her flare, she found the .357. The moon had moved scarcely at all since she'd cut the lion free of its lighted collar.

Minutes only had passed. Soon Paulsen would be returning with the

"client."

Shoving the burning end into the earth, she stubbed out the flare like a gigantic cigarette. Cool white light returned and she saw the trails of black on her hands: blood. It seeped down from her throat, dripped to the ground. Anna chose not to worry about it. Had an artery been severed, she'd be dead by now. Next time she was in town she could get her rabies booster.

Free of the chemical glare of the fire, her eyes began to adjust again to the semi-darkness. The garish ghosts receded from her peripheral vision.

Making her breathing as even and soundless as she could, Anna watched and listened. From beyond the lip of the ravine came a pink glow and the insistent hissing of the first flare. Other than that, no sound. Even the skritching and slithering natural to the desert night was hushed.

She ran quickly twenty yards to her right, approached the edge of the ravine from an unexpected-she hoped-direction. Leading with the revolver, she looked down. The inky shadows were given unholy life by the guttering flare. First Anna sought the dark and bright wood and metal of Paulsen's hunting rifle. It had lodged fifteen or twenty feet down, butt wedged between a small rainbow cactus and a rock. Below, perhaps twenty yards, crumpled at the edge of the uncertain light, was Harland Roberts. He did not move.

Crab-like, Anna scuttled down the loose stone of the ravine's side.

Partway down she stopped and picked up the hunting rifle. For a moment she watched Roberts. He seemed not even to breathe and it crossed her mind that he'd broken his neck in the fall. Or he was playing possum.

She slung Paulsen's Sako across her back on its strap. Her shoulder was aching. The collarbone, incompletely knit, had cracked again. Once more she started her slow descent. A dozen feet from Harland she stopped. The moonlight didn't penetrate this far and the flare, burning its way out in the arid soil, made little of Harland but a shadow darker than the rest.

"I'm not coming any closer, Harland," Anna said. "Maybe you're dead and maybe you're not. Either way, I win."

The lump never moved. Anna turned and started up the slope. She was past the raided cache when his voice brought her to a halt.

"You can't win, Anna." Though he tried to keep it out of his voice, she could hear the pain. He was shot. He was burned. Maybe he'd broken something in the fall. Still Anna didn't trust his helplessness.

She turned back but went no lower.

"You can't ever win, Anna. Your system is against you. Maybe I'll get fired. Maybe not. They won't put me out of business, though. One good hunt will pay off any fines for poaching. Nobody cares, Anna. They're just animals. In Texas they may even give me a medal."

"Craig, Sheila-even in Texas that will be considered murder," Anna said.

"No murders. Just the ravings of a crazy lady ranger. Your word against mine."

The dull chopping of a helicopter engine sounded as it marched down the northern sky, toward the ravine.

"Jerimiah and I and every scrap of evidence will be gone in thirty minutes. Your word against mine. And you may not live long enough to talk too much. You don't win."

The helicopter was in the ravine, flying up from where the hills opened onto the salt flats to the west.

"He's coming, Anna, Jerimiah D. and three men. Maybe if you run we won't find you. We won't find you tonight," he amended and laughed. The laughter was cut short. Anna hoped it was from pain.

She unslung the hunting rifle, put it to her shoulder, and braced for the recoil. As the helicopter flew over, she fired four rounds. One sang off metal. There was a light tinkling sound as fragments of Plexiglas rained down onto the rocks.

The helicopter climbed abruptly, was silhouetted against the moon. A spotlight beneath the fuselage switched on and a white finger of light began probing back down the narrow canyon. Anna fired again. The light shattered.

The helicopter spun on its axis and flew north, straight over the hills, not even attempting to seek cover from prying eyes. The pounding noise of the blades receded.

"You can bring the law down on me, Anna. But you won't win," Harland said. He was only a voice from the shadows. The flare had died, and the helicopter's light had robbed Anna of her night vision.

"You can beat the law," Anna said. "But you can't beat the desert." She started up the slope.

"You can't leave me here," he called after her and there was fear in his voice for the first time.

"Fence crew will find you in a couple of months," she returned without stopping. "What's left of you."

"I'll die of thirst. Anna, I broke my ankle. Swear to Christ."

Anna said nothing. She didn't much care.

"Paulsen'll be back in the morning. He'll get me," Roberts cried.

Anna doubted that. For all Paulsen knew this was a trap and the place was crawling with Feds. He'd steer clear of the West Side for a long time to come.

Reaching the flat of the saddle, she unslung Paulsen's fancy rifle. Using the tail of her shirt, she smudged her prints from the stock and barrel but didn't wipe the stock clean. Half New Mexico knew Paulsen's gun, knew he never let anyone touch it. And it was the gun that shot Harland Roberts. Anna set it on the ground.