DR. Pigeon is in session… ah… Just a moment. Hold please."
Anna sat in the semi-darkness of the Cholla Chateau's laundry room listening to Cheryl's laundry squeak around and around in the dryer.
The voice returned. "May I say who's calling?" Molly had had the same receptionist for eleven years, an efficient woman who steadfastly refused to recognize Anna's voice.
"Her sister," Anna said. The Open Sesame.
"One moment please." There was a click, then strains of Handel's Water Music filled the earpiece. Molly soothing the savage beasts.
"Hallelujah!" Molly came on the line.
Anna glanced at her watch: five-thirty in Texas, seven-thirty in New York. "You ran late with your last client."
"Silly bugger wouldn't stop crying. I couldn't get a profound sentence in edgewise. And I was feeling particularly insightful today. What's up? You don't usually call this early in the week."
The sucking sound: toxic, killing smoke going deep into her sister's lungs. Anna repressed a comment. It crossed her mind that, were she gone, there would be no one left to nag Molly, get her to quit before it was too late. "Not much. Another 'accident.' A herpetologist bit the dust. Death by snakebite this time."
"Jesus!" Molly laughed with the career New Yorker's reliance on black humor. "Lions and tigers and snakes, oh my! You're on hold… can I pour you a drink?"
"Got one," Anna replied and clinked her wine glass against the plastic mouthpiece.
"It figures," Molly said. Handel flooded in. Anna was sorry she'd refrained from comment on the cigarette.
"Cheers." A glass containing one careful shot of scotch clinked down the two thousand miles of wire from Manhattan.
"To old friends and better days," Anna said and they drank in silence. "I'm coming to New York," she announced, deciding it in that instant. "I'm going to camp on you and make end runs up to Westchester County to see Edith."
"When? When are you coming?" Molly didn't sound as pleased as Anna had anticipated.
"I don't know…" Anna faltered. The plan was too new for dates. "I've got a ton of annual leave coming to me. I thought I'd come in September if-"
"Ha!" Molly exploded. "IF. What in the hell are you up to, Anna? What's going on? You're doing some silly damn thing with that snake and lion business."
"What makes-"
"Hmph!" Molly cut her off. As children they'd both practiced doing hmph like it was spelled in books. Molly had become very good at it. "Psychiatrists aren't omniscient for nothing," she said. "The snake and lion business, Anna. Out with it. I hate suspense. Always read the last page first. Adjust expectations."
Anna sighed. "I've done 'How,'" she admitted.
"And?" Molly demanded.
There were times Anna wished her sister had gone into interior decorating, labor relations, anything but what she had. But the obvious had never held any interest for Molly. EFFECT left her cold. It was CAUSE she was fascinated with.
"And I've got some final checking to do," Anna equivocated. "Then I'll know everything."
"Everything? Like who is going to win the World Series? Whether God can make a stone so big He cannot lift it? What Scotsmen wear under their kilts? Or just enough to get shoved under whatever passes for a trolley there in Timbuktu?"
"Do you know what Scotsmen wear under their kilts?" Anna countered.
"I'm a psychiatrist," Molly returned. "Not a sociologist. I know what they want to wear under their kilts."
Anna laughed despite the acid drippings from the New York exchange into her West Texas ear. "I'll know everything," Anna said. "Then I'll come hang my shingle out next to yours: 'Psychiatry: 5 cents.'"
"It'll never sell on Park Avenue," Molly told her. "We're like physicians of old but instead of bleeding the patient, we bleed the bank account. Take the Root of Evil onto our own broad shoulders."
"A modern-day sin-eater," Anna said.
"You got it. Now what the bloody hell are you up to? Back to the snakes and lions, Anna."
Anna did not intend to tell Molly anything, not until she had a story with a beginning and a middle and an end. She'd called because she needed to hear her sister's voice once more. "Some checking. I'll call you Saturday and tell you what I found."
"It's Tuesday. Four days of checking?"
"No. Thursday and maybe Friday of checking."
"You're going to creep about like the Lone Ranger stalking the forces of evil clad in Virtue and Right, is that the deal? A miniature, middle-aged John Wayne."
"They're dead," Anna snapped. "Pathetic as it is, I'm it. Nobody else gives a damn. Bureaucrats-monkeys who hear no evil and see no evil-are first in line for promotion."
A long silence paralyzed the phone lines. Not even the sighing of cigarette smoke broke the darkness.
"You there?" Anna asked hesitantly.
"I'm here," Molly said. Then, very deliberately: "If you get yourself killed, I will kill you. Is that clear? I will donate all of your things to the Pentecostal Church. I will have you embalmed and put on display in the Smithsonian as the World's Biggest Horse's Ass. Call me Saturday."
"I will," Anna promised.
"Before noon. At noon, Eastern time, I call out the National Guard."
"Molly, I-"
"Gotta go. I'm reviewing Suicide as a Solution for the Washington Post."
The click. The dead line.
What the hell, Anna thought. She knows I love her.
Thursday night the moon rose full and round at 9:12 p.m. Anna was waiting for it. The light came first, a faint silvery glow on the bottom of the few ragged clouds left from the afternoon's fruitless thunderheads. Then a dome, slightly flattened, pushing up into the saddle between El Capitan and Guadalupe Peak. Fainthearted stars faded from sight. Cool, colorless light poured down the park's western escarpment, rolled out like liquid silver across the ravine-torn desert to pool black under the spreading brambles of the mesquite and shine in the cholla needles.
Sand sparkled as if lit from beneath, the white salt flats glowed with reflected glory. Shadows became fathomless. The moon, as if held to a regal creep by a suddenly broken string, popped clear of the Guadalupe Mountains. Its light bathed the Patterson Hills. Desert hills: rugged and stony and cut deep with washes. No roads, no trails intruded on this outlying stretch of land. No people hiked or camped there. Not in July when daytime temperatures rose above a hundred and ten degrees and there was no water for miles in any direction.
It was there Anna waited for the moon. The tent she would use for its meager shade if she had to sleep away the next day's heat was stuffed into its nylon sack. The gray ensolite sleeping pad she'd folded in half to use as a seat cushion. Cross-legged, hands loosely clasped in her lap, she sat in the pose of a classic desert pilgrim.
A boulder, flaked into miniscule staircases by heat and cold, threw its inky cloak of shadow over her. Sand was strewn over her tent and pack. To creatures dependent on sight and sound for their prey, she was invisible. She sipped at one of the jugs of water she had carried in. In the Pattersons, in July, she would sweat all night, losing water to the desert even in darkness. Since six p.m., when she'd begun the hike in, she had consumed almost a gallon. Two more gallons were cached close by.
Once above the escarpment the moon dwindled rapidly in size but its light flowed unabated through the dry clean air, caught the iridescent shells in the ancient reef-become-mountains and the salt crystals of the long dead sea. Anna could see each spine on the small barrel cactus growing at the edge of the shadow that hid her. Each petal of its glorious bloom was perfectly illuminated but robbed of all color. The papery flower showed blood-black.
Soon, night hunters would be coming out: the scorpion, the rattlesnake, the tarantula.
And me, Anna thought. Despite her feeling at one with the night, she was aware of a certain creepiness, a feeling of hairy-legged beasties tickling up her arms and legs.
The moon shrank to the size of a dime, passed overhead, slipped down after the stars. Shadows moved in their prescribed arcs. Anna's joints stiffened, her ears ached from listening for the alien footsteps that had heralded Craig's death the night of the last full moon. Sleep swirled around her, catching her head dropping, her dreams encroaching.
Anna rubbed her face hard, twisted her spine, hearing the settled bones cracking back into line. She took a sip of the lukewarm water. What she wanted was wine: a drink for her brain, not her body. It crossed her mind to take the pledge, go on the wagon, but she couldn't decide which was worse: pending alcoholism, or remorseless unrelenting sobriety of the rest of her days.
Taking another pull of the water, she let the sky draw her eyes into its perfect depths. No fear, nothing so petty as murder: it soothed her, overwhelmed her as it always did with a comforting sense of her own littleness; the reassuring knowledge that she was but a single note in the desert's song, a minute singing in the concert of the earth. She thought of Molly, of her office full of clients.
In the city the lights blinded the night sky, robbed it of stars. Only the moon could compete, a pale contender against the roving search lights of mall openings, the unwinking concern of security lights. No one was given an opportunity to feel deliciously small, magnificently unimportant. Everyone was forced, always, to take their dying littles as truth.
Slowly, Anna breathed in through her nostrils, inhaling the desert, knowing this wisdom would pass, knowing she would flounder in nets of her own devising a thousand times before her dust blew across the mountain ridges. But as long as the desert remained, as long as the night sky's darkness was preserved, she could read again her salvation there.
The jagged teeth of the Cornudas Mountains to the west devoured the moon just after four a.m.
Craig Eastern's Martians were not coming. The Smithsonian was not getting its exhibit of the World's Biggest Horse's Ass. Not tonight.
Anna brushed the sand from her pack and put up the one-man tent on the west side of her boulder where the morning sun wouldn't find her. She unfolded the pad and lay down, enjoying the freedom to stretch. Luxuriating in the knowledge that snakes and spiders and scorpions were zipped outside in their own world, Anna slept.
The sun turned her nylon home into a Dutch oven an hour before noon. Unable to sleep any longer, she read and ate and dreamed the afternoon away moving as little as possible. There was no sound but the audible sear of sun on stone. Creatures of the Patterson Hills were hidden away waiting, like Anna, for the night.
At sunset, she folded her tent and ate her supper. The second gallon of water and half the third were gone. In the cooler evening air, she began her inspection of the area. She'd arrived too near dark the night before to do any searching. Pulling out her binoculars, she examined the hills for three-hundred-and-sixty degrees around. Nothing moved but air shimmering with heat.
Anna's boulder was near the top of a rugged hill three-quarters of a mile south of where Craig Eastern had camped, across the narrow talus saddle from where they had found his corpse in a bed of rattlesnakes. Between her and Eastern's camp the saddle flattened out, made a table of broken slate.
Anna studied it through the glasses. It was the only possible place in a three-mile radius of the ridge where Craig had camped. In the shadowless light she could see a game trail along the spine of the ridge she camped on and down to the land bridge between the two hills.
Again she searched land and sky full circle. For the moment she was alone but for a jet in the northeast quadrant of the sky. Leaving the binoculars behind, she trotted down the ridge, following the faint animal track. Lechugilla spines curved like daggers shin-high. Low, rugged barrel cacti, aptly named "Horse Crippler" pushed up through the rocky soil. No trees, no shrubs more than twenty or thirty inches tall grew on the hills, and the cacti were a foot or more apart, rationing the meager rainfall.
On the land bridge connecting her hill with Eastern's at the head of a long L-shaped ravine, she stopped. Gridding the saddle in her mind, Anna began a foot-by-foot search. The hard ground held no prints, but near the center of the ridge she found what she was looking for: a broken piece of slate, a stone with a scratch on it, and a crushed cactus. Eight feet away, running parallel, was another short line of destruction. Satisfied, she trotted back to her comfortless bivouac.
As the first pinprick stars dared the blue above the mountains, she camouflaged her pack with sand and pebbles and took up her vigil on the dark side of the terraced stone.
Ten-fifteen brought the moon's silver bulge, pushing up the sky above El Capitan. The desert hills began to itch and skitter with small close life.
Anna began to wait.
Waiting changed from the passive to the active, became a burden to bear, a weight to lift with each breath. Time seemed to change direction, flow backward.
I don't do well at this, she thought. Good or bad, she ached to make something happen, take action. She pulled out her watch. 11:17. Fourteen minutes had elapsed since she had last checked the time. How many more to go? Thirty? An hour? Never? Irrationally she wondered if she could survive another vigil at the next full moon; if she could survive the next half hour of this one. Surely her nerves, taut an hour and two minutes after moonrise, would begin snapping soon. She'd hear tiny cracks, like rubber bands breaking under pressure, and bit by bit her body would begin to grow numb.
Another waiting, as intense, as desperate, flashed into her mind and she almost laughed aloud. She'd been fifteen, waiting for Dan Woolrick to call. Sylvia had said he'd told Donny he was going to ask her to the Tennis Court dance. All one Saturday she'd waited for the phone to ring, afraid even to go to the toilet lest she miss it.
A small comfort: waiting for death was easier than waiting for a boy to call.
Somewhere after midnight consciousness crept away, dreams took the place of thoughts. Into this unstable world came the sound of alien footsteps. Craig's aliens walked the desert with faint pounding footfalls and glowing halos of green. The air throbbed with their advance, the regular rhythm beating into Anna's lungs till she couldn't draw breath.
Nightmare jerked too hard and she woke, still sitting tailor fashion in her shadow. The Martians vanished.
The pulsing footsteps did not.
Anna cupped both hands behind her ears. "Make moose ears," she remembered absurdly from some naturalist's program. Swiveling her head like a radar dish, she picked up the sound more clearly. The pounding steps plodded methodically down from the northeast, marching up the long L-shaped wrinkle between her camp and Eastern's.
Pulling on her sneakers, Anna laced them tightly then belted her.357 to her waist and took a last, long drink of water. The thumping grew louder and she pulled herself carefully within the moonless shadow.
The helicopter, flying low, passed so close she had to close her eyes against the sand blasted from beneath the propeller blades. It swung up, cleared the ridge by what seemed only inches. For a second it hovered there, silhouetted against the distant pale cliffs of Guadalupe's high country, then settled onto the flat saddle.
Anna pressed her binoculars to her eyes, cupping her hands around the end lest some stray gleam of light catch the glass and give her away.
No lights were struck, no navigation lights marked the helicopter. The only illumination was the eerie glow of the pilot's instrument panel through the bubble of Plexiglas on the front of the fuselage.
Two men jumped from the helicopter. One's hair shone like a white flame in the cold light. The other was dark- another shadow in the night. Between them they dragged a crate six feet long and three feet square from the back of the helicopter. Moving quickly, with practiced motions, they lifted two more boxes, one from each of the wire-mesh baskets suspended above the runners to either side of the aircraft, and set them on the ground. If they spoke, the sound of the rotors drowned out their voices.
The white-haired man climbed back into the helicopter. Shadowman waved once and the aircraft lifted up, slipped over the ridge and dropped again from sight down the long ravine.
"Cheeky bastards," Anna whispered. Flashes sparked in the periphery of her vision. She was pressing the binoculars too hard into her eye sockets. Easing back, she forced herself to breathe slowly. Then she let herself look again. The shadow man had disappeared. Focusing her glasses on the largest of the three crates, Anna studied it. Through the slats she could just discern a faint green light, the color of a glowworm.
Anna had expected it, waited for it, considered it when she was planning this night venture. This time she was to watch and wait, make notes and remember. She'd promised herself and, in her mind if not via AT &T, promised Molly. There'd be no Lone Ranger, no John Wayne, no Rambolina, no misguided tragic heroines. Just the watching and the waiting and the gathering of evidence. Then channels: proper channels and legal gymnastics. And faith.
"One whole hell of a lot of faith," Anna muttered. Staring hard at the dying green light inside the crate, she wondered where she'd thought she would find that faith, the strength to sit and watch the slaughter, the belief that this one must die to get the system rolling. A system that didn't give a damn, a system that counted non-human lives as "resources."
"Fuck that," she said aloud, frightening herself with the noise. For a second she froze, a palm clamped across her mouth, in horror of her outburst. But Shadowman did not reappear.
Where was he?
Anna cursed silently.
Slipped off for a pee? Why hide? To his knowledge none but spiders and snakes looked on. Anna forced every spark of her concentration into her hearing until it felt as if her ears waved around her head on stalks.
Faint, scrabbling: a tiny avalanche scraped loose in the ravine between the hills, down from the saddle. Shadowman had made a misstep. Anna knew where he was and, from where he was, he couldn't see the crates. That decided her.
Rising in one fluid motion, she moved to the far edge of the ridge where she, too, would be out of sight from the inhabited darkness of the ravine, and ran lightly down the animal track she'd followed that afternoon. In the glareless light of the moon with its hard contrasts of shadow and light, Anna could see the faint trail clearly. Stones gouged her feet through the soft rubber of her running shoes. Cactus spines would easily penetrate the thin leather. But she moved with scarcely a sound.
Within minutes she reached the flattened saddle where the helicopter had landed. There she dropped to a crouch and, willing heart and lungs to be quiet, again pushed her ears out over the desert. From the ravine came the sound of feet crunching on gravel, rustling. A man unselfconsciously moving about, comfortable in the knowledge that he was alone. A metallic ringing: the top of a canister pried loose.
Shadowman had climbed down to a cache hidden somewhere in the rocks on the side of the ravine. This rendezvous point had all the amenities neatly arranged right on National Park lands. Bastards! Anna repeated, this time without sound.
Staying low, she trotted over to the large crate. A lechugilla spine, sharp as a dagger, cut across her shin above her sneaker top. Anna hardly felt it. She knelt by the box. Snoring, deep and labored, came from inside. Pale fur pressed through the flat metal slats that formed the sides of the cage. Stripes of moonlight painted the panther within. A ghostly midnight tiger with a glowing green necklace and a black radio collar.
Anna squeezed a hand between the slats, touched the fur. Gently, she worked her fingers under the collar, feeling for a pulse. The animal was still deeply under the effects of the ketimine.
The latch on the cage was simple, made to withstand paws, not fingers. Anna tripped it and eased the end of the cage open. The lion's head lolled out, the mouth open, tongue protruding black and deathlike in the colorless light.
Anna unsnapped the glow-ring and dragged it from the cat's neck. The radio collar would not be so easy. Radio collars were riveted on. It would take more time than she had to saw through the heavy leather with her pocketknife. Somewhere there would be a rivet punch.
Great White Hunters don't like their trophies cluttered up with proof of cowardice, Anna thought bitterly. One ear on the ravine, she crept to the crates that had been unloaded from the helicopter's side panniers. Dreading the squeak of metal hinges, she lifted the lid of the first. Noiseless. Oiled. Everything bespoke well-planned, often executed night operations. How often? Anna did the simple arithmetic in her head: twenty radio-collared lions; three left. One lay in the crate. Karl tended one in his animal Shangri-La. One still roamed free. This was the nineteenth time. Nineteen full moons had spotlighted this murder-that-was-not-murder.
"Goddamned sons-of-bitches," Anna whispered. In the crate she had opened rifle barrels gleamed. Cold polished metal catching the moon. The top rifle, resting on a cloth of felt, was ornately carved. Anna dragged it out where she could see the stock clearly: the Sako, Paulsen's baby. Beneath were four more rifles, a cleaning kit, four custom-made silencers and several hundred rounds of ammunition.
Anna moved to the second crate and opened it. A radio receiving device set, no doubt, to the stolen frequency; the frequency emitted by the collars on the lions. What better way to locate one's prey in this technological age? In a canvas pouch affixed to the crate's inside edge she found the rivet punch.
The panther's breathing seemed slightly less stenorous. Again Anna felt for a pulse. Slightly stronger, perhaps. "It's okay, sweetie," she whispered as she pushed her hands beneath the lion and dragged it partially out of the crate where she would have room to work. Near a hundred pounds: the lion was fully grown, probably male.
The rivet punch was less straightforward than Anna had hoped. Wrestling with the leather and the inert lion, trying to thread the jaws of the punch through the proper holes, the light of the moon was suddenly inadequate. A final wrench and the collar fell free.
Anna smoothed down the fur of the lion's neck where it had been worn ragged beneath the collar. Feeling blessed, she stroked the darker ears, the fine muscled shoulders. Wake up, Anna thought, run away. Then I can, too.
A scraping, stone on stone, jerked her attention from the panther. Shadowman. Just below the ridge. She had stayed way too long. He was so close she could hear his puffing breaths. She didn't bother to look around. There was no place to hide.
Unsnapping the keeper with her thumb, she drew the.357 from its holster and steadied her arms on the top of the lion's crate. Without moving, she waited until the man had climbed clear of the ravine, taken a few steps onto the flat. His arms were full of goods retrieved from the cache: a canvas tarp meant to shroud the lion's corpse, flares so the helicopter could find the hunters at the end of the hunt.
"Stop where you are, Harland," Anna ordered.
Harland Roberts stopped. If he was surprised, Anna couldn't see it. The moon was at his back.
"Anna!" he said in the tone of a man with his mistress on his arm, meeting his wife unexpectedly. "I'll be damned."
"That's the plan," she returned. "Drop what you are holding. Open your arms slowly and place them on top of your head. Do it now."
He did as he was told.
Anna stood, the.357 held shoulder-point. She began moving slowly around, sure of each step, getting the moon behind her. He echoed her movements and she let him. He was too far from the rifle crate to frighten her. When the moon was behind her left shoulder and Harland stood several feet from the unconscious panther, she said: "That's far enough."
"You liked me, Anna." Harland sounded genuinely hurt. The moon was shining in his face but all Anna could read there was disappointment.
"I liked you," she said. "But you keep killing my friends."
He smiled a boyish smile. "Anna, you wouldn't shoot me." Slowly he began to move his hands down from his head.
"Yes. I would," Anna said evenly. "It isn't a problem."
His hands stopped moving.
"I'm going to tell you what to do," she stated. "You won't move until I tell you. Is this clear?"
Harland nodded. For the first time Anna read something other than fine acting in his face. Not fear: an alertness, an aliveness, a moving of mental gears. It scared her. She wanted to shoot him and be done with cat and mouse, hunter and hunted. But training took over.
"Kneel down. Do it now."
Harland knelt.
"When I tell you, take your hands from your head, walk them out in front of you. Lay face down. Do it now."
Carefully, Harland moved his hands from the top of his head. "Anna, I don't want you to shoot me. I haven't got a gun or a weapon of any kind. Listen to me. This is important." The hands were moving slowly down, held well away from his body, every movement clear, innocent. He ducked his head, bending at the waist, arms out to the side as if he would let himself fall facedown onto stone and cactus rather than risk alarming her into pulling the trigger by moving too quickly.
One hand vanished behind the prone lion's head. "Listen, Anna. The lion is choking." The animal's breathing had changed, was more rasping than before. "The ketimine can cause them to swallow their tongues. When you moved it to cut the collar you didn't put its head back in a position where it could breathe."
Anna's eyes flicked to the lion. She knew there was nothing Harland could use as a weapon near or inside the crate. Not even the heavy radio collar. She'd thrown it a couple of yards off. "Move his head," she said.
Harland brought his other arm slowly around, careful to keep it always in her sight. Both hands buried in the thick fur around the lion's throat, he began lifting the big beast gently. With a liquid motion, so smooth as not to seem sudden or even startling, he yanked the lion onto his lap, held its torso against his chest, his face almost hidden behind the lolling head.
"You would shoot me, Anna. You might even enjoy it. Will you shoot your kitty cat? I'm betting not." Harland stood up, holding the hundred-pound lion down the length of his body. The cat's belly, white and fuzzy, covered him from shoulders to knees. Its legs and tail dangled in front of his.
Anna felt sick. She moved her sights to Harland's head but it was ducked peek-a-boo fashion behind the lion's. Shoot the damn cat, Anna said to herself. Maybe the hollow point shells she carried would penetrate the lion's body, kill Harland Roberts. The white tummy, looking so soft, so vulnerable stretched before her. A perfect target. Shoot the goddam cat, Anna's mind screamed to her soul. But her finger would not move on the trigger.
Harland began to sidle toward the boxes, toward the hunting rifles. Anna followed, the sight of her Smith & Wesson searching for a target, a three-by-three-inch square of Roberts left exposed.
The man was careful. Dancing his macabre dance, his partner a demon lover in lion form, Harland waltzed over the stony ground. He reached the crate. One hand slid out, ran along the carved stock of Paulsen's hunting rifle. Not once did a square big enough to fill with.357 cartridge show clear of the inert, living, lion-skin armor.
Anna squeezed off a shot. Not at Roberts, but at Paulsen's Sako. In the shadow of the crate lid, the rifle was little more than a narrow line a shade lighter than midnight. She missed.
Harland snatched up the Sako, held it shoulder high. Turning slightly, he pointed it at her. The shining barrel caught the night's silver sheen. Its tiny, deadly, black eye met Anna's.
"The cat is waking up, Harland," she tried and saw a spark of what might have been fear-or excitement-bloom and as quickly fade in his eyes. He didn't spare even a glance for the unconscious lion.
"Don't you fancy hand-to-hand combat anymore?" Anna asked. "Like the good old days 'wrasslin' gators' at the Deadly Poison Snakes show? Is that where you learned to milk snakes so you could pump Craig full of venom?"
He just smiled, slow and easy. Anna sensed more than saw it. His head was still shielded by the lion's. Harland was not going to be lulled or baited into exposing enough of himself to kill.
"You never know when a liberal education is going to come in handy," he said and: "Put down the gun, Anna."
"Fuck you," she replied, the.357 unwavering.
The glinting rifle barrel dropped, swung in an arc, ending beneath the lion's left ear. "Do it now," Harland mocked her.
Anna's brain screamed to her fingers: shoot the cat, please God damn it, shoot. But her hand opened and the revolver dropped to the ground.
Harland let go of the lion. Dead weight, the animal fell to the stones. The bones of its jaw or skull cracked audibly against the rock. Anna winced. "You son of a bitch," she whispered.
Harland laughed. "It's not nice to call an armed man a son of a bitch," he said.
"Fuck you."
"Anna, Anna, Anna, your vocabulary is disintegrating under pressure. Obscenity is the last resort of the ignorant. Didn't you learn that in Sunday school? I expected better from a woman willing to lay down her life that a lion might live a couple hours longer." Harland kicked the lion with an indifference more cruel than hatred. "That's what you've done, you know."
Anna had thought that one's mind would race at a time like this, that it would whirl and spin, dart at solutions probable and improbable. It didn't. It was as clear as the desert night, as still. "Well?" she said and smiled. She was not afraid. It wasn't that she was ready to die there among the Texas stars; she merely felt invulnerable, out of the normal realities of flesh that could rip, bones that could break.
Fleetingly, she wondered if she were going into shock. Or overdrive. How long would this detachment last before terrible fear, deep enough to be a bone sickness, would flood through her and she would understand that now, tonight, she was to die?
"Well? Are you going to shoot me or not?"
"Oh, I'm going to shoot you all right. Bury you here in the Pattersons under enough rock the coyotes won't drag you out at an embarrassing moment." Harland stepped over the lion and moved several steps closer. Not close enough she could grab the rifle; close enough he could see her face. "And damn you for making it necessary, Anna. You're more fun than I've had in years."
"More fun than big-game hunting?" Anna jerked her chin toward the crated rifles.
He didn't look away from her for an instant. "I told you, I don't hunt anymore. No challenge. I like my prey to have an IQ higher than your average two-year-old. Most of the elk these hotshots pay Paulsen to shoot I could club to death with a baseball bat."
"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.
"What're you doing, Anna?" Harland called up the hill.
"Leaving."
"I'll die of thirst," he cried.
Anna walked over to the ravine, looked into the depths. She couldn't see Roberts. "You never know," she said. "You might not live long enough. That lion could still be around. Here kitty, kitty, kitty," she called.
"Don't!" Harland screamed.
Anna walked across the flat toward the ridge where her camp was. The moon had moved partway down the sky. A silver trail led down the ridges: the path she would follow home. She began to run.
"Please!" she heard Harland yelling.
Maybe she'd saddle up Gideon, ride out tomorrow with water and bring Harland in. Then again, Gideon's hoof wasn't healing like she'd hoped.
Maybe she'd give him the day off.