"Who?"
"Old Jack! Is he hurt?"
"Not that I can see," King said, sweeping the dappled brute's bulk with his flashlight.
Nancy took it away from him. "Give me that!" She climbed onto the cab, using the light to illuminate every square inch of wrinkled hide. There were no visible cuts or wounds.
"A miracle," she breathed, coming down off the cab.
"You could throw a little gratitude around," King said sourly.
"I could. But I won't."
"That's cold."
Nancy speared the light in his eyes. "Yes, cold. Exactly how you'd feel if you woke up and found your top blouse buttons unbuttoned. And don't try to deny it, either!"
King's lean lips grew pouty. "I was checking for wounds. In case you needed a medic."
"How many dead?" Nancy demanded.
"None."
Nancy blinked. "None! After all that shooting?"
"You sound disappointed."
"Confused is more like it. What happened to the one I nailed?"
"You mean the one who conked you over the head?"
"Whatever. Answer the question, please."
"He got away. I would have nailed him myself, but I was too busy-"
"Sexually assaulting me."
Skip King lifted placating hands. "Don't say that. Please don't say that. The board is very down on sexual harassment this quarter. I don't know what got into them. But please don't call it that."
Colonel Mustard came up at that point. "Mr. King, we've finished our sweep. It's all clear. We can move out now."
A serpentlike head lifted in the darkness and from it came a low harrooo of a sound. Nancy held her breath. The head settled back into place and the eyes fell closed.
"We'd better get a move on, or baby is going to make our other troubles seem tame," King said uneasily.
"We'll settle this later," Nancy spat. "This time I'm riding on the carrier."
"Suit yourself," said King, stomping away.
As the Berets got into the cars and the transport team clambered into the cab, Nancy gave the hauler a quick once-over.
The tires were whole, she found. The body hadn't a single bullet pock. Nor the ground.
"Strange," she muttered.
Then she noticed a long black streak on the fender above the tire she had shot. She ran her hand along it. The fingertip came away black. Smudged.
"Gunpowder burn," she said. "But where are the bullet holes?"
Her flash picked out a sprinkling of spent cartridges. She picked up one. It was still warm.
Then the hauler's diesel engine was rumbling and she doused the light and climbed aboard, a worried notch appearing between her eyes that stayed there the rest of the trip.
She was looking at the ragged, powder-burned tip of the cartridge.
Chapter 18
Doyce Deck liked nothing more than to kill.
The kick of a Marlin .444 lever-action rifle against his shoulder was sweet music to his ears. The eruption of blood from a fresh wound was a too-brief painting, the smell of gore wafting on the breeze, metallic and tangy, were more pleasing than the scent of flowers after a spring rain.
Right now, in the sagebrush hills north of Gillette, Wyoming, with the Devil's Tower national monument thrusting up against the endless sky, Doyce Deek laid the crosshairs of his Tasco scope on the bronze flank of a pronghorned antelope.
The antelope was poised on a rise. It look around, white tail switching, as if scenting danger. Deek took his time. He ran the crosshairs down from the flank to the big tawny hindquarters. He could shatter that hip and still split the narrow skull before the animal could hit the dust.
Then again, head shots were pretty spectacular. He shifted his sight to the head. He got the left eye, big and black as the heart of a bull's eye, centered in the crosshairs. There was a lot to say for a clean head shot. The crack of the skull, the splash of hot brains. True, you didn't get as much of a pump of gore from the head as from the flank. But the satisfaction of looking into the kill's eyes in the instant before death all but gave him hard-on.
So, with the morning sun climbing the brass bowl of the clear Wyoming sky, Doyce Deck lingered over his kill.
The trouble was, Doyce Deck really, really preferred other game. Human game. Antelope were fine. Their eyes had that hunted look that people got when they found themselves staring into the end of a hunting rifle. But antelope never understood what hit them. The crack of the bullet might stir their eardrums in the final moments of life, but they wouldn't hear it. The brain was usually dead by the time the sound got to the target.
It was different with human prey. But Doyce Deck couldn't afford to hunt human prey anymore. Not after that time in Utah when he stalked two men through the desert for two days. He killed one. The other had gotten away. Deck might have hunted him down, but since everyone at work knew that the three of them had gone camping together, it would look suspicious if only Doyce Deck came out of the desert alive.
Deck had started back to civilization after planting his rifle where the third man, Roy Shortsleeve, had left his abandoned belongings. Then he fingered Shortsleeve for the murder. It had been that simple.
The Utah State Police never did a background check, never learned that in other states where he had lived Doyce Deck had a habit of inviting friends and coworkers on camping trips and coming back alone. And never figured out that Roy Shortsleeve had been condemned to die for something he didn't do.
Doyce had testified against Roy those many years ago. He had kept in touch with the prison, as each postponement came. And when the time came, he planned to be a witness when they injected Roy Shortsleeve with liquid death.
He was looking forward to it, in fact. In a way, Deck liked to think, it was going to be his thumb on the plunger. He only wished it could be. Doyce really, really liked to kill people. No special reason. He just liked it.
In the meantime, he had to settle for antelope.
But this specimen in particular seemed skittish. Its head swept away and back. It had a scent. Not Deek's. He was upwind. Cayote, maybe.
Doyce Deck had decided to go for the head shot when, abruptly, the antelope bolted.