Work Done for Hire (23 page)

I recognized her voice from the phone. The man had been the driver of the car in the cowfield, I thought.

They walked me up a gravel path to the back door, and then through a rustic kitchen. “Company coming,” she called out.

It was the living room in the photograph. Kit was bound in the same chair, but was wearing different clothes, jeans and a man's work shirt. She didn't seem harmed, but had a bandana tight over her mouth. I tried to smile and she tried to smile back.

Seated next to her on a couch, similarly bound, was Ron Duquest, wearing a white silk suit, all California. It had probably looked pretty sharp a couple of days ago. He was pale and shaken.

Standing by the fireplace, the man who'd had the camera in the car. Whom I had last seen over the sights of the snub-nosed revolver. He had a broad grin and a Glock in an army-issue shoulder holster. He looked drunk.

“The writer,” he said. “Marksman.” I couldn't think of anything to say that might improve the situation, so just nodded.

I catalogued the weapons. Shotgun and pistol, mine, behind me, and who knew what else. Another handgun in front of me and, leaning up against the fireplace, a pump shotgun. On the coffee table, the sniper rifle with the fancy grain, with the futuristic Leupold flip-out scope.

Perhaps with a bullet still jamming the barrel.

They had more weapons than people. Pretty grim. The woman nudged me in the small of the back with my own snub-nose.

“There are too many variables in this equation,” she said. “You know what I say.”

“Kill 'em and dump the bodies,” said the man next to her, and looked at his shotgun. “That may be good for you, but I personally have never killed anybody. I don't want to hang for your scheme.”

“There's no death penalty in Maine, chickenshit,” said the man by the fireplace. “Remember?” He picked up the sniper rifle.

“Careful,” the woman said.

“You be careful,” he said. “This asshole never shot at you.” He cocked the bolt up and down and took aim. “Just nick the ear.”

My only chance. “Big man,” I said. “You don't have the balls to pull the trigger.”

“No!” she said, and then a wave of concussion smacked me.

The man's face became a splash of crimson as the jammed receiver exploded just below his eye.

I half turned and kicked out at the woman. If the snub-nose went off, I didn't hear it. My kick caught her between the legs and she folded—and then
my
bad leg gave out and dropped me on top of her. The pistol skittered away and I snatched it up. The double-barreled shotgun went off like a sledgehammer, searing the side of my face, as I fired the snub-nose into its owner over and over.

I levered myself up, pulling on the arm of the couch, and aimed wildly left and right, not sure whether the revolver had any shots left. The air was grey with gun smoke and there was a lot of blood.

Some of it was mine. It dripped off my chin when I looked down.

The woman was very dead. The double blast that had singed me had excavated her chest.

The man who'd done it was bent double on the floor, twitching, clutching his abdomen, the emptied shotgun under him. I put the muzzle of the revolver behind his ear and happened to look up.

Kit was shaking her head frantically, weeping, no.

A strange calmness came over me.

She would never understand.

The dead people, this dying one, and me. All of us were Hunter. And all of us were prey.

I set the pistol down and watched him die.

I
had gone into the kitchen to find a knife to cut Kit's ropes when I heard a helicopter laboring through the storm outside. I had her hands free and was working on the tight-knotted bandana gag when someone kicked open the front door and four men charged in, wearing black body armor with “FBI” in white letters, front and back.

I put my hands up. “What took you?” I think I said.

In fact, it was amazing that they had gotten there so fast, or at all. Reconstructing, I found out it started with fast action on the part of that annoying operator in New Delhi. He was on the line long enough to hear me say I was in Maine and “It's a murder. James Blackstone was killed.” That operator queried a stateside operator, playing back the recording, and within a minute or two an FBI analyst was listening to it. Agent Blackstone's name was still hot enough to trigger a response.

A helicopter with a SWAT squad took off from Boston while FBI computers chased my credit card trail down to the Swan's Island ferry. The black helicopter was already over Cape May, speeding north by northeast, when the FBI verified the location of the cabin and sent them a satellite photo and a map.

I have to wonder, as fast as they responded, what might have happened if they'd showed up a few minutes earlier. What would the bad guys have done if they'd heard a helicopter coming? It might have prevented a bloodbath. Or precipitated a different one.

The whole bizarre story came out in Ron Duquest's trial. I had just missed my big chance at fame and fortune.

Duquest had concocted a scheme for a kind of cross between an action feature and reality TV. He hired a couple of lowlifes in Los Angeles and had them drive out to the Midwest, then Louisiana, then Mississippi, to put Kit and me through what he conceived as a fantastic paranoiac chase scene: Who is after us? Why does the sniper weapon from my past keep cropping up? Who's on first? It would be a post-postmodern version of classic old television serials like
The Fugitive
and
Lost
, with the delicious variation that the star didn't know he was on camera.

He testified that he knew me well enough to trust that I wouldn't commit any serious crime, and the men he hired were under orders to just harass us; not break any laws themselves. But that all went out the window when I actually shot at them.

They had guns, too, it turned out, and an attitude problem that escalated into a runaway kidnapping scheme. Duquest lost control of them and was afraid to call in the police.

I've told the rest of the story here. Except for the happy ending.

The slight scar on my cheek from the shotgun just makes me look “interesting,” Kit says, and together with the missing finger they mark the beginning and end of my decade of violence.

This decade will be parenting, we just found out last week. Starting lives rather than ending them.

We're even getting married, continuing a family tradition that started with old Grand-dude, back in the sixties: pregnancy, then marriage.

When the other hippies asked why they bothered, he said that one thing the world didn't need was yet another bastard.

Oh, and the cube in my finger? Nothing to do with anything. The army won't even tell me what it was. That probably means it never worked. Typical. All that aluminum foil wasted—and I'd been so proud of myself. Our tax dollars at work.