Testament (30 page)

Where he lay was on high ground to the left of the front of the cabin. From his point of view he could see the shed, the side of the house, part of the front porch and the well. He had a good view of the open slope and of the road up through the trees. If they came that way as they had before, he certainly would spot them. The only problem was if they came from his direction through the woods, and he was counting on the dog sensing them before they did. He had taken trouble backtracking, circling far off into the woods, so that his footprints wouldn’t show them where he was. He had made tracks around the cabin as well, but these he didn’t worry about, wanting to advertise he’d returned. He built a fire in the cabin, smoke coming from the chimney, to make it seem that he was in there, and after the moon set each night he went back in, putting more wood on the flames to keep up the smoke.

He counted the days, the twenty-ninth now, going in through the back that night and hearing a sound, a scratch in one corner that made him think that they were there, tensing, lunging behind a chair, but no shots, and he never did know what made the scratch, a small animal perhaps. But his fright made him even more careful, staying near the cabin after dark from then on, wanting to be close enough to hear if they came close, knowing he never would be able to see them from his campsite if they came at night.

The thirtieth and then the first, and he was beginning to think that he’d misjudged. Maybe the real-estate guy had kept the secret after all. Maybe they weren’t going to come. Maybe he would need to wait a few weeks more, or even a month, when something bothered him. Just before sunset on the second. He heard a car far off on the road down there, and then it stopped. It could be nothing. It could be just some people visiting another cabin a mile across over there or visiting the old man with the horses, his place was in that direction too, but it could be them as well, and if they were coming up through the trees at night, he couldn’t go down near the house this time. They might be down there by then, waiting for him. He lay still, listening. No one and no warning from the dog. He remained motionless, even so. He listened for the sound of the car to start up, but it didn’t, although that didn’t mean much either. If the car really was people visiting the old man with the horses, they could have chosen to stay the night. Sometime around three, he guessed, he heard a snap down in the trees. A broken branch settling, an animal moving. It could be anything. Or it could be them, and so he waited.

There were three of them, one in the trees at the back, two others stretched out just below the top of the slope in front. He could see them clearly in the first light of day. They were wearing brown nylon padded jackets and warm-up pants, as near as he could tell not the same three he had seen the fall before in town. He wanted them together. He wanted to see what they were going to do. He waited. They kept checking their watches, and then as if they had all agreed on a time, they started firing shotguns, blowing out the windows, blasts echoing, recoils jerking, except for the guy in back who wasn’t shooting at all, just standing there among the trees, tensed and ready, as if the plan was to scare him from in front and drive him out the back where the guy would be waiting for him. And they kept shooting like that from in front until they needed to reload, and then again, and with still no sign of him in there, they stopped. Undecided, they poked their heads up, one and then the other, checking for any movement in there. And of course there wasn’t any, and the two guys in front had been some distance apart to begin with, but now they moved even farther apart, and as if on signal one jumped up, running toward the front door while the other covered him. When the first guy ducked out of sight against the door, the second guy jumped up then, running as if the other guy were covering him now. The guy in back never moved.

He imagined them bursting through the front door, one going in under cover of the other, then the second guy rushing in, them checking the place. They’d be going through the house upstairs and down and then out the back door to talk to the third guy, and that’s when they would be together, and he crawled back, running with the dog through the trees, slowing as he thought that they might hear him, working toward a spot where he could see down to the back door and the third man. Then he was in position. He was about sixty yards up, the guy’s back to him, the door in sight. He eased down and peered through his scope, the crosshairs focused between the third man’s shoulder blades. Then he shifted his aim toward the back door, and it opened, and the two of them were coming out, talking, shrugging. The third one lowered his shotgun, saying something indistinct, walking toward them on the stoop, and he fired, bringing down the third man easily, shifting quickly to the men on the stoop, firing, bringing down another, and the last of them was gone, ducking back into the house.

He couldn’t wait. He had to run around to the high ground on the side in case the one in there got out the front and down the slope. He slipped and fell, running, reached the side, mud soaking through his clothes, and had a good view of anyone who might come out the front or back. There was always the chance that the guy in there might already have gotten out, but he himself had moved fast, and in any case the guy down there would likely be cautious, hesitant to leave cover.

He didn’t want to prolong it, so he shot the lantern he had put on the sill of the bedroom window on this side in case he trapped them in the cabin. He blasted it apart, chipping the phosphorous strips he had covered with tape on the glass, the phosphorus open to the air now, burning, igniting the spilled-out kerosene. At least it was supposed to work that way. But he saw no sign of fire, and he was beginning to think that he’d been wrong when the flames surged up to fill the window. Now all he needed to do was wait. There were no windows on the other side, the stove and cupboards against that wall in the kitchen, the fireplace against it in the living room, so when the fire got too close the guy would be forced to come out either through the front or back. The flames were all through the bedroom now, smoke rising through the windows in the upper rooms. Smoke came from the front now too, and it wouldn’t be long before the guy would need to come out. Even so, he stayed in as long as he could, flames spreading through the upstairs and reaching the tower before the guy dove out the back.

He almost missed him, glancing once at the tower, then at the back, and the guy was running past the two men spread out on the ground, racing toward the cover of the trees when he fired, missed, fired again and the guy’s right leg whipped out from under him. The guy flew sideways, cracking against a tree, lying there, shaking his head, starting to crawl into cover when a bullet in that direction stopped him.

“Don’t move or you’re dead!”

Afraid, the guy was holding his leg now, craning his neck to look around. His face was pale. His blood soaked into the snow.

“Get rid of the shotgun!”

As if the thing were alive, the guy threw the shotgun away.

“Now stay where you are!”

He started down through the trees, looking around. The flames licked through the roof of the house and the tower, smoke rising thick and black, the sound of the flames like a furnace, crackling in there, whooshing. He saw where the snow was melting all around the house and where the moisture on the jacket of one guy close to the house had started steaming. He looked carefully at the other guy and then started for the man he’d wounded.

He searched him, taking away a knife and a .38 handgun, putting a tourniquet on his leg, then forcing him to stand. Looking around the trees, he saw a fallen branch with a crook where the guy could put it under his arm and a shaft that was stiff enough that it wouldn’t break if the guy put his weight on it. He forced him up into the trees toward where he had camped. He collected his gear, slipping it into his sack, shoving his rifle into the sleeping bag, rolling the bag up and hitching it over his shoulder, then pushing the guy up toward the hills.

The guy was in shock. It didn’t matter. He kept him on the move. He let him rest when it seemed he couldn’t go any farther, letting him drink water, then forcing him onward. He kept looking back toward the direction they’d just come from. No one was after him, although for a time he did hear the sound of a siren. He looked up toward the cliff wall they were approaching, and he knew he would never get the guy over to the wash that led up to the top of it, so he finally chose a flat circle of snow-free ground near the base, thick trees encircling, and pushed him down.

“Take your clothes off.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Take your clothes off.”

“Why?”

He kicked his wounded leg, and the guy took his clothes off.

“Lie down flat. Spread out your arms and legs.”

The guy didn’t move, and he kicked him again, and the guy spread out his arms and legs. His skin was white against the cold brown ground, his leg red-caked and swollen. The hole in his leg was just below the knee, the bone untouched, a black hole through the flesh. He had been loosening the tourniquet and tightening it as they came up through the trees. Now he loosened it and tightened it again.

“I don’t want you to lose too much strength.”

He made four stakes and shoved them into the ground, secure enough that they wouldn’t come free, tying the guy’s arms and legs to them so that he was spread out with his chest and privates exposed to the sky. Then drawing his knife, he sliced once thinly from the guy’s nipple to his navel. The guy started screaming even before he did it, flesh spreading, blood swelling, and he looked at him, grabbing his face so that he could look him directly in the eyes.

“Now I’m going to ask this only once. Were you with the others at the town they burned up there?”

The guy’s eyes were wide, darting to the right and left. “I don’t know what you mean.”

He made another cut.

“Yes. Yes, I was with them.”

“That’s very good. You don’t know how good. If you hadn’t been with them, you might have been useless to me, and then I would have needed to kill you. All right now, here’s another one. What did they do to the woman they shot?”

“They buried her.”

“That’s not what I mean. What did they do to her?”

“Took an ear.”

“And then what?”

“Nothing. They just buried her.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Two others did it.”

“But where did they say?”

“In a cabin across from the river.”

“Which cabin?”

“I don’t know.”

“All right, I believe you. Tell me who you report to.”

Little by little, it came out, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes in obvious lies, him cutting, probing, digging at the wound or at his chest or his arms or his other leg, sometimes staring at his privates and the guy talked faster after that, about who had told him what to do when and who that other guy might be responsible to and what might be the structure of command. They were an hour at it that way, the guy crisscrossed with gashes, him learning everything he could, the names of the other men that this one had worked with, forcing the guy to keep talking so that he could remain alive. And then he was finished. He couldn’t think of anything more he needed to learn, and he just sat back, looking at the guy, working through a litany of all that had been done to him, unable to stand it anymore, plunging his knife in and twisting.

EPILOGUE

1

It took him a year. He went back to the house in the town where everything had begun, standing in the dark between the two fir trees, looking toward the place. He went back to the cemetery where Ethan was buried, staring at the tombstone. Then he made his way back toward the hills, hiking carefully up into them, up through the break in the cliff, past the line shack and the sheep desert to the town again, and he found where Claire was, where the guy had said, in a shallow grave in one of the tumbled cabins on the tree side of the river, and she had one ear gone as the guy had said, and he quickly covered her again. Then he hiked up toward the corrugated metal shack and the mine, across the pass and down toward the country of the mound, and the mound was as he’d left it, green boughs turned to brown but otherwise the same, and he didn’t want to bother her, just sprinkled the dust he had gathered from the graves of Ethan and Claire over it, scooping up dirt from underneath one side of the mound, starting back toward Claire, sprinkling the dirt from the mound and some from Ethan’s grave upon the soil that covered her, and weeks later, standing again in the dark in the cemetery, staring down toward Ethan’s grave, he sprinkled the dirt together.

Then he started.

2

He lay on his chest among a line of trees that looked down on a fertile valley. It had taken him the summer, fall, and winter to get there. He had gone around to the people the guy had mentioned when he was torturing him, and he had made them talk before they died as well, getting other names, higher ones, and finally he had gotten a lead and then another, working back and forth across the country, using different names, shaving his beard, then growing it again, taking jobs on farms, mending fences, painting barns, anything for which he didn’t need a Social Security number, angling southwest as the weather changed from warm to cold but needing to go that way anyhow, the dog always with him, through Kansas, Colorado, Arizona, California, spring again, and he was lying among the line of trees, looking down toward the valley.

A farm was down there, a big wide house and a barn and sheds, and everything was white against the green of the growing crops, a family down there eating at a backyard table, Kess, his wife, two daughters, and a son, eating, talking, smiling as he peered through his scope.

They were far enough from the house that only a few of them would have a chance to make it to safety. Maybe he would get them all. Maybe they’d be so confused, looking around, trying to help each other, that none of them would make it to the house.

Now that he looked closer, he noticed the bodyguard by the corner of the garage and the other one just inside the screen door of the house, but they didn’t matter. By the time they figured where he was, he’d be gone, and if he got a chance, he would shoot them too and the cat that was playing in the flower bed, that would make a nice balance, and his only question now was how to go about it.