Robert B. Parker

by Wilderness

  It was an hour before dawn. He heard a branch snap. Half hypnotized by the hours of dead-quiet concentration, he jerked as if waking up, though he had not slept. He put his hand on her arm. She patted it. She’d heard. Some twigs snapped and there was a rustling of brush. In the thick blackness it was hard to find direction. Across the trail, he thought. To our right. Maybe ten, twenty yards. He turned his body so he could point the carbine that way. There was silence. Then the sound of someone’s breath, short and wheezing. A rustling movement. The wheezing breath remained constant, rasping air in and out. It was a sound of exhaustion. The twigs cracked again.

  Then someone spoke, the sound shocking in the silent wilderness they’d gotten used to.

  “I can’t make it, Dolph,” the voice said, the breath short and gasping. “I can’t make it no farther.”

  “Shut up.” It was Karl’s voice. They were closer than Newman had thought. Ten yards. Maybe less.

  “I gotta stop,” the voice said. It was the one on the telephone. The huge man.

  “For crissake keep your voice down,” Karl said. “They might be around. They might be anywhere.” Karl sounded frightened.

  There was sound of movement in the brush. “Fuck’em,” the huge man said. His voice shook with exhaustion. “I ain’t moving.”

  Newman very carefully got to his feet. He stood behind the trunk of a thick oak and held the carbine chest-high, aimed at the sound of voices. He heard a scratch, smelled sulfur, and saw the flare of a match.

  Karl’s voice said, “Richie, are you fucking crazy …”

  The match went out and Newman fired at the spot where it had been, the flare still an impression on his retina. He fired again, moving the barrel of the carbine an inch left. Then again, moving it two inches right. And again, two inches left. Methodically he fired in an oscillating arc centered on the place where the match had flared. He fired at waist-level. Janet crouched behind him, shielded by the tree, one hand on the inside of his right knee, the other holding her small silver revolver. He heard someone grunt. He heard Karl’s voice say, “Richie?” and then, higher, “Richie?” and then gunfire returned. They were firing at the muzzle-flash of the carbine. Two slugs thumped into the tree trunk. Another splattered through the foliage to their right. He could hear Karl’s voice. Cursing.

  “Son of a bitch,” Karl said, “son of a fucking bitch.” Another bullet hit a tree somewhere behind Newman. The fifteenth shell-casing ejected from the carbine. The trigger clicked and the firing pin snapped emptily. Newman crouched behind the tree, shrugged out of the knapsack, and dug into it frantically. He found the box of shells and, fumbling in the dark, feeling the pressure of Karl’s presence, he began to feed fresh ammunition into the clip. He counted, unable to see in the dark. Janet knelt with the .32 ready, looking into the dark. They were facing east and a faint tinge of gray was beginning to lessen the blackness in that direction. Fifteen, he said to himself, and feeling the bullets with his thumb to make sure they were in the right direction he slid the clip back up into the carbine. He tapped it home with the palm of his right hand and heard it click into place. Relief moved up along his buttocks and across his lower back. Safety is relative, he thought. Now I feel safe because the gun’s loaded.

  In front of them there was no noise. The absence of gunfire made the woods seem to echo with silence. The gunfire had quieted the normal forest sounds. As he got used to the silence Newman could hear two things, the sound of labored breathing and, faintly, the sound of someone running. The sky lightened a little more. Newman crouched beside Janet and put his mouth to her ear.

  “We have to move,” he whispered. “One of them got away and is ahead of us.”

  She nodded. He could now barely see her in the very early morning, but he felt her head bob, his face was so close. He started to stand. She took his arm, put her hand against his cheek, and pulled his ear to her lips.

  “It’s almost light,” she said. “Why not wait until we can see?”

  “The one that’s away will get farther away,” he whispered.

  “You can catch him,” she said. They had developed a little pattern of head-turns, so that each whispered into the other’s ear.

  “You think so?”

  “How far can you run?” she said.

  “Ten, fifteen miles.”

  “Can he?”

  “Probably not,” he said.

  “Let’s wait, at least until we can see.”

  “Okay,” he said, and remained crouched beside her with the oak tree trunk shielding them. There was no more sound of feet, but they could still hear the labored breathing. It was more labored. There was a rattle to it. The sky in the east was white now. Newman could see Janet clearly beside him. There was birdsong.

  “You go around that way,” he whispered, and gestured to his right. “I’ll come from the other side. Creep in. Be careful.” He touched her hand. She smiled at him. He moved in a crouch to his left, leaving the protection of the tree, swinging around the place where the breathing came from. He held the carbine ready, his finger on the trigger, a round in the chamber. He saw the huge man first. It was he of the labored breathing. He sat with his back to a tree, a short-barreled revolver in his hand, his hands in his lap. There was blood on his throat and on the front of his shirt. His mouth was open and he seemed to be struggling to breathe. His eyes were slitted and his head would drop forward then snap back erect, like a man falling asleep at the wheel. A stubble of beard showed through the blood that had smeared up onto his chin.

  Near his outstretched legs was Richie Karl. Facedown, dead. Bullet went in the front, came out the back, Newman thought. Don’t seem to mind, he thought. Doesn’t seem to bother me. Get used to anything. Beyond Richie Karl he saw Janet moving behind some sapling birch, then she stepped out from behind the saplings and stood next to the huge man.

  He raised his head, jerking it up again in that peculiar motion. He squinted at her. He moved his right hand. The gun fell from it. He didn’t seem to notice.

  “Remember me?” she said.

  He made a croaking noise.

  “Remember tying me up and gagging me?” she said.

  He moved his right hand again. She aimed the nickel-plated .32 revolver at his temple and pulled the trigger. A small black hole appeared in his temple and he slumped against the tree. The labored breathing stopped.

  “I hope you went to hell,” she said. She still held the revolver straight out ahead of her, pointed as it had been.

  “Jesus,” Newman said. He walked to her and pushed her arm down to her side. She didn’t resist but neither was her arm limp. With one hand on each shoulder he turned her away, and then, with his arm around her waist, he moved her to the trail. Behind them the woods closed. The dead men were no more. Ahead of them the trail led gently downward. Toward the water. Out of the woods.

  “One more,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  The sun appeared above the edge of the trees in the eastern sky, the top rim of it. And the woods, while shadowy, seemed pleasant and warm after the storm. They walked in silence along the trail for a quarter of a mile.

  “You are going to have to run him down,” she said.

  “Without you?”

  “You know I can’t run like you can.”

  “You can go several miles.”

  “I’ll have to carry your pack, unless you want to run with it on.”

  He shook his head. They stopped.

  “If he gets away it means our death,” she said. “It means our daughters’ death, probably, it means the destruction of everything you’ve ever cherished. We’ve come this far. We’ve almost won. You’ll have to do it.”

  His arm hurt. It had hurt all along, but in the fire fight in the darkness he’d forgotten. It throbbed and the pain ran into his shoulder and neck.

  Janet said, “I can’t chase him. I’m exhausted. I probably couldn’t, even if I weren’t.” She spoke very quietly, standing right in front of him, her face close
to his.

  “Yes,” he said. He felt heavy and slow. His legs felt weak and stiff. He was in pain. He edged the knapsack down over the wound in his arm and dropped it on the ground. He slipped off the nylon pullover and rolled it tightly and, squatting, put it into the pack. He slipped out of the down vest, rolled it tightly, and put it into the pack. Then he stripped off his shirt and stowed it.

  “You’ve lost weight,” she said.

  He handed her the hatchet and she slipped it into her belt.

  “You take the carbine,” he said. She took it. He took from her the .32 gun and holster and strapped it to his belt, in back, near the small of his back. He was naked to the waist, shivering in the early sunlight. He had on near-white corduroy pants, and boots that laced up over the ankle. They were expensive and weighed very little. He put two granola bars in his pants pocket.

  “What if he’s waiting ahead, like we did?” she said.

  He shrugged. “If he is, he is. You’re right. I got no choice.”

  “Maybe he won’t be.”

  “Maybe. He doesn’t know how many of us there are. His whole party’s been shot. He’s alone in the woods. He must be scared. I hope he’ll just run.”

  “I’m glad we destroyed the boats,” she said.

  “I wish we’d destroyed the canoe. If he finds it we’ve lost.”

  “He won’t,” she said.

  He looked again at her. She still had the green nylon pullover on, the hood over her head, the drawstring tight. It framed her face like a nun’s habit. There was no makeup left, and her face was gray with fatigue. But there was no uncertainty in the face. He’d looked at the same face with the strong planes and the wide mouth for almost as long as he could remember. Without makeup a few freckles showed against her pale skin. There were deep parenthetical lines around her mouth. Deeper than he remembered. He was enough taller than she was so that she tilted her head slightly to look at him.

  “You can do this,” she said. “He won’t find the canoe. You will catch him.”

  There were tiny lines at the corners of her eyes, a tiny red mark under her right eye. He could see the pores in her skin.

  “You can,” she said.

  He nodded. “Here I go,” he said. And turned and began to jog down the trail away from her, toward the lake.

  30

  He jogged slowly. He wasn’t used to running in boots and they felt heavy on his feet. But he remembered running in boots in the Army. I’ll get used to it. He watched the trail ahead of him: it was narrow and it turned frequently. There were fallen branches occasionally, and tree roots that reared here and there above ground, and rocks, some as big as softballs. What seemed easy to walk on became dangerous to run on. He knew that. The years of jogging had left him so sensitive to footing that he could feel the difference between running on sidewalk and running in the street. Street’s better. More give. Smooth. Shows what we care about in our culture. He took short steps. Running, even running slowly, increased his sense of the trail’s downward pitch. He felt clumsy and stiff, the joints awkward-feeling, and slow. His breathing was ragged. I’ll never make a mile, he thought, and thought how often he’d said that. He always felt this way when he started. As if today he couldn’t do it. But he pressed on and always he loosened up and the breath came easy and he found he could make it. It’ll happen this time too, he thought. The sun rose higher. In places among the trees a thin fog steamed up from the wet leaves. The pitch of the trail flattened slightly. As he ran, his eyes moved steadily back and forth across the trail into the woods on either side. He could almost feel the threat of gunfire, the bullet hitting him in the chest, a massive thump. A green garter snake with black stripes glided across the path in front of him, moving as if without volition. He began to feel warmer. He stayed on the pace, slow, easy, his arms held slightly above his waist moving in rhythm with his steps. When he’d first begun to run regularly, he remembered, he’d worked on the rhythm, getting the feet to move steadily, and the arms. When he’d been teaching his daughters he used to emphasize it: “Get the rhythm down,” he’d told them. “Later it will be much easier to run if you run in an organized way. If you look good or at least better.” They hadn’t stuck with the running, though, and had never got beyond the stage where their arms and legs moved in ragged asymmetry. Above him two sparrows chased a crow, darting about it in flight, looking ludicrously small next to the great black scavenger. But the crow fled, and the sparrows pursued. Watch the path he said to himself. Twist your ankle and you might as well be dead. Never mind the fucking birds. He was conscious as he jogged of the weight of the revolver banging against his coccyx. It was the best place for it. It would be more bothersome anywhere else. He began to loosen. His legs felt freer, stretched out more. His arms moved easier, he felt sweat begin to form on his bare back. He felt lighter. I probably have lost weight. I ought to. Haven’t eaten anything to speak of in … He couldn’t remember how long they’d been in the woods. A ground squirrel crossed his path, its tail out straight behind it, its feet moving very rapidly. He remembered how he used to try to keep his cat from killing chipmunks as a boy and how determined the cat was, dodging his broom, circling back to torment and toy with the half-crippled chipmunk, too quick for him to grab, until his father had told him not to interfere, that even if he saved the chipmunk its spine was probably broken and it would die a lingering death anyway. At night the cat slept on his bed. The fall of his feet sounded in his listening mind like the beat behind music. It always did, and songs moved aimlessly through his head, do wah, let’s take the A-train, the fastest the quickest way to get to Harlem. Windshield wipers did that too, always sounded like the Garryowen, he thought. He was now sweating evenly, his face and chest wet, a trickle collecting in the gully between his pectoral muscles. The sound of the air moving past his ears was pleasant. The sun was bright now, and warm. His breathing was steady, his heart pumped easily. His arms swung free, like some of those ads in Runner’s World, he thought, seeing himself from a remote vantage, small, shirtless, running through the enormous forest toward a distant lake. Could do an article on the training effect of homicidal necessity. “How my Nikes helped me run a man down and kill him,” by Aaron Newman. “We think you’ll find it a fascinating new look at cross-country running.” A branch leaned across the trail and he ducked under it, pushing it aside with his forearm. Through the trees ahead he caught a sudden shine. The lake. It was almost as if he’d come upon a scene from his childhood. He felt a little hollow seeing the gleam of the lake through the fringe of coloring leaves. Then the trail turned and he didn’t see it, and the trail turned again and he did, the sun dancing off it in odd and random splatters of light as the water moved. Then he was at the lake, his breath coming in large, clear drafts, still breathing through his nose. He stopped.

  Along the lake the snowmelt rise in spring and the summer parch of August had left a belt of rough and sandless beach ten feet wide where there were no trees and no topsoil. The belt circled the lake. A mile away from Newman, Adolph Karl walked and occasionally ran along this belt, looking back regularly over his shoulder. He couldn’t see Newman yet, standing in the shadow of the trees. Newman took one of the granola bars from his pocket and unwrapped it and threw the wrapper on the ground. In an emergency, he thought, litter. The granola bar seemed to absorb into his body tissue. Still chewing on the bar, he began to run after Karl.

  It was harder running here. No longer downhill, and very uneven underfoot. There were fallen trees to get over or around, rocks, brush, areas of soft mud. Don’t have to move fast, just faster than him. Karl looked back and saw Newman. Karl reached into the pocket of his red plaid coat and brought out a .45 automatic. Newman saw him stop, turn, raise the gun, and fire. The bullet whanged off a rock far in front of Newman. Newman kept running, varying his gait and direction, running in a weaving path to make him a harder target. He tried to crouch, but it was hard to keep pace crouching. He took out his own small revolver. But didn’t shoot. Karl af
ter one shot turned and began to run. He ran badly. No rhythm, Newman thought. Too fast. He can’t keep it up. Karl’s arms moved awkwardly and without synchronization. He slipped and fell once. He got up looking back over his shoulder and ran again. His feet pointed out to the side. He seemed to Newman to limp on his right foot. Newman kept his pace. Ahead of him, now slightly more than half a mile, Karl pushed harder, running full tilt across the cluttered and difficult rim of the lake. He fell, sprawling full-length. The .45 sprawled ahead of him. He scrambled after it on hands and knees, retrieved the gun and, still on his knees, turned, aimed the .45 with both hands, and squeezed off a shot. It was still too far. Newman didn’t hear the bullet. He kept his pace. Free of the trees the early fall sun beat down strong and solid against his chest and face. He squinted. The smell of the lake mixed with the smell of its margin. Karl was on his feet, limping more clearly, hobbling as he ran, looking back more often, and still Newman came, the footfalls steady, rhythmical, “… the A-train, do wah, you’ll get where you’re going in a hurry,” his eyes on the ground and then on Karl, alternating the ground and Karl as he watched where he ran and watched what he ran for. It was almost hypnotic, in the sun and the quiet, by the edge of the lake in the early autumn. A man alone running after quarry, he thought. Opus one, it’s not for Sammy Kaye, hey, hey, hey. A new rhythm fitted into the steady thump of his feet. As he ran, each foot hit the ground just before the arch, on the back of the ball, and almost at once thereafter the heel touched. He had closed the gap. He was a quarter of a mile from Karl now. Karl ran in spurts, hard briefly and then slower and then, looking back and seeing Newman closing, he’d run hard and the distance between them would increase, but he couldn’t sustain and then he’d falter and the gap closed more than before. Newman felt stronger, as if he could run on at this pace until he grew old and died. Even with the bad footing he felt irresistible, “with the ruthless and irresistible deliberation of a locomotive,” he thought. He smiled. Always the literati, he thought, “not even a mortal beast but an anachronism indomitable and invincible out of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life.“ He laughed, a short “Hah!” and began to jog faster, like a train, its momentum picking up. Karl scrambled across the broken trunk of a dead tree whose upper branches trailed in the lake. I’m coming, Karl, he said silently. I’m coming, you son of a bitch. Karl fell again as he climbed down on the other side of the fallen tree, and stayed down for a moment this time. Newman was two hundred yards away. Karl staggered as he got to his feet, nearly fell, and turned to look back at Newman. He started; Newman was much closer. Karl steadied himself and aimed the .45 with both hands, his elbows resting on the trunk of the fallen tree. Newman ran a sinuous course as he came. Karl aimed. Newman saw the gun, saw Karl steady it on the log. “Fuck you,” he said aloud, though Karl couldn’t hear him. He straightened as he ran, and stopped swerving. He ran straight at Karl, moving faster, arms pumping, the big quadriceps muscles in his thighs tightening and softening under the tight stretch of the corduroy, the sweat glistening on his upper body making the muscle definition more apparent as he ran. “Shoot me if you can, you son of a bitch,” he said. Again Karl didn’t hear. He sighted over the short front sight of the .45 at Newman’s bounding glistening chest. Karl’s hands shook. Newman was coming on, coming on, too close, he kept going off and on the sight, the gun wavered, centered, Karl pulled the trigger, and the shot went five feet to the right of Newman and two feet above his head. Newman came on now, pounding, arms pistoning, legs driving, the muscles in his neck definite and taut, the small nickel-plated five-shot Smith & Wesson revolver in his right hand glinting occasionally in the sun. He jumped over a low rock and landed without breaking stride. Karl aimed, panic flooded through him as he squeezed the trigger again, the sight square on Newman’s looming chest. The hammer clicked on empty. The clip was spent. He’d never reloaded. After the fire fight in the woods, he’d simply run. Newman heard the click as he pounded on, less than a hundred yards now. He heard another click as Karl squeezed the trigger again in a kind of blind panic, and Newman laughed, loudly, and Karl heard him; it was an explosion of mirthless and savage sound. One laugh. “It’s empty, you son of a bitch,” Newman said, and Karl could hear him. “It’s empty, you motherfucker, and I’m coming.”