Hunting Season Read online

  Before Anna recovered from the shock of having two rounds fired from a .357 less than a foot from her face, she felt herself lifted by the scruff of the neck like a half-drowned kitten. Randy had the hood and collar of her coat clamped in one huge hand and was yanking her to her feet. He was talking; Anna could hear the sound distortion past the ringing in her ears, but couldn’t make out the words. Sparks of white and red light blurred her vision; retinal ghosts from the muzzle flash.

  Noise separated, began to resolve into sense.

  “Stand up,” Randy was urging, yelling without volume.

  As her mind blew clear of the stench and clamor of cordite, Anna toyed with the idea of playing possum, making Randy carry her to whatever dense thicket he had in mind for dumping purposes. There’d be no hole, he was too lazy to dig and damned if she’d dig her own for the meager privilege of a few more minutes topside.

  “Stand up.” He shook her with the violence of a terrier onto a rat. She decided to comply. Perhaps it would be tactically wise to tire him with her dead weight, but she didn’t like the idea of being manhandled any more than she already had been. And, too, he might decide it was too much work and dispatch her prematurely.

  It took a couple tries but Anna got her feet under her. Her legs felt rubbery at the knees and for a second she didn’t know if they would support her weight.

  The flares dazzling her eyes were fading but nothing took their place. At first Anna thought powder burn had blinded her or a freak of the explosion so close had caused the same effect. The pale cruiser swam into vision, and she knew her eyes were all right. It was the night that was blind. Seldom were nights truly dark. Starlight, light pollution from distant cities, the moon, brought shape and form out of the black.

  At the pullout for Emerald Mound there were none of these.

  “Stand up,” he hissed. “I’m not screwing around with you much longer.” He shook her again.

  Pain rattled from ear to ear and her flimsy purchase on the vertical was compromised. “Enough already,” she snapped. “I’m standing. What now?”

  Anger had brought back Anna’s butch side. Hearing it she backed off, slumped her shoulders forward and dropped her chin. Snuffling through mud, snot or whatever else had worked its way into her nose while she sprawled on the ground, she repeated. “What’re you going to do? Look Randy, I’ll never tell anybody. Swear to God. Just let me go.”

  “What we’re going to do is get rid of your gun.” Randy had hold of her coat with one hand, a six-shooter in the other. She could feel him hesitate, not wanting to let go of her, not willing to holster his own weapon to reach for hers. Schooling her body not to signal readiness, she waited.

  “You get it,” he said at last, and her hope of striking out at him died. “You do it slow. You even wiggle or twitch wrong and I kill you.”

  Anna believed him. Hands chained together, she awkwardly fumbled under the thigh-long tail of her Gore-Tex jacket. “I’m not going to try anything. Real slow. Here goes,” she said pitifully. Reaching under the coat she unsnapped the leather keeper on the pouch where she kept her extra magazines. One snap sounds like another and she was satisfied. “Lifting it out,” she said. His grip tightened on her coat, choking her with her own collar. The barrel of the revolver pressed hard into the bone of her skull.

  “Dropping it,” she said and let the magazine fall to the ground augmenting the sound it made when it hit by a surreptitious stomp. “Don’t shoot,” she whispered. “Please don’t shoot.”

  Because of the jacket and the handcuffs, there was no way to retrieve her gun quickly. Anna had it in her mind to ease it out under cover of darkness while they walked, their joint movements she hoped would cover the groping for the Sig-Sauer.

  “Show me your hands,” Randy said and gave her a shake. The barrel of the pistol pressed so hard against the base of her skull that she could barely keep her head up.

  She raised her hands.

  “To your shoulder.”

  She did as she was told. In a movement as quick as it was brutal, he adjusted his grip till he held not only the back of her coat but the chain between her hands in one great beefy paw. Anna’s shoulders ached, her wrists chafed. The inside of her left elbow, wrapped in a wet bulky Gore-Tex sleeve, was pulled hard across her face making it difficult to breathe. Claustrophobia reasserted itself despite the fact she was out of the car and under the sky. Darkness and constriction choked her mind with a cavelike sense of the walls closing in. Enough air could be drawn around the fabric to keep her alive, but still a sense of suffocation took hold of her mind. Her vision was probably impaired as well. As it was too dark to see, she set that aside and concentrated on not succumbing to panic.

  “Now we walk. I’m going to handcuff you out in the woods. I got a plane to catch. Then I’ll call and tell them where you are. You do what I say and I’m not going to hurt you. Just buying time is all.”

  The old joviality that had always set Anna’s teeth on edge was creeping back. A round of crying, a couple of pistol shots, a chaser of physical abuse had restored his confidence. Anna was relieved. In the car he’d been on the brink of panic. Should he fall over that edge, shooting her would be the obvious panacea. He shoved and she staggered over to the rickety wooden gate that let the public through the fence to the mound site.

  Emerald Mound, though little visited, was one of the true wonders of the Trace. It’s magnificence put the modern structures—buildings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that were so meticulously restored and lovingly toured—to shame. For reasons of their own, and eons before white settlers had come straggling up the Mississippi River, the Natchez Indians had created it out of swampy forest lands. Dirt, the rock-hard clay and powdery loess of the land, had been carried in, heaped up until a mound over fifty feet high, longer than a football field and at least half that wide, had been created. The top was flat and level. On either end of this great elevated field more dirt was piled, sculpted into two squared-off hillocks, the westemmost higher than the eastern.

  In summer this immense monument was green, emerald green, covered completely in a thick carpet of grass and tiny wild flowers. This night the mound was cloaked in such darkness that Anna felt rather than saw it, a looming presence in the night. As ever with ancient structures imperfectly understood, modem imagination had speculated that the highest point was reserved for human sacrifice. Stumbling toward the first steep incline, the winter grass slippery underfoot, Anna wondered if she was destined to reenact the role of the hapless virgin.

  The path grew suddenly steep, the dirt trail augmented by sections of four-by-four timbers set flush to provide steps. Anna’s booted foot hit the first of these. Sleet had turned to ice on the wood. Slipping, she fell to one knee. Arms and jacket were jerked hard, and she was on her feet again.

  Snippets from years of inadequate training and no practice flipped through Anna’s brain, cue cards to be read and discarded. If she tried to kick back, hit a knee—the best way to cripple a big man—she would die. If she tried to jerk an elbow free to strike she would die. Reasoning with him would heighten his hatred of women in charge and she would die. Many stories, and Anna did not like the end of any of them.

  Grunting, his breath coming hard from exertion and tension, Randy pushed her uphill. Several times he slipped, and Anna was jerked roughly one way or another as he used her as ballast to regain his balance.

  A vision of herself laughing, excited, safe with Zach’s arms around her, whipping through Space Mountain in Disneyland, a roller coaster in darkness, each turn a spine-snapping surprise, surfaced from nowhere. Seeing Zach in her mind’s eye made Anna suddenly sad. Self-pity washed up and threatened to unman her. Maybe the meek inherited the earth but the pitiful inherited only a six-by-three-foot plot.

  Anna pushed the vision and the weakness aside. The effort of doing so caused her to cry out, a muffed squeak very like a whimper. The grip on her chain and coat seemed to loosen a little. Maybe.

  A
bruptly they reached the level tabletop of the man-made mesa. Black plain, black rain, yet Anna could see after a fashion, enough to put one foot in front of the other, enough to discern the earth from the sky. Even on such a night as this, ambient light leaked through and the miracle of the human eye gathered and used it.

  Anna realized how acutely aware she was of life, past, present and bleak future: how clean and cold the sleet burning her face, the air sliding into her lungs, the faint singing of the rain on her jacket, the pull of water-soaked trousers over her thighs. She couldn’t but wonder if this overwhelming sensitivity and appreciation heralded coming death. She did not welcome it. Neither did she fear it sufficiently. Perhaps the poet was wrong and one should go gently into that good night.

  Not by this bozo’s hand, an outraged voice reverberated through her brain.

  Randy had set a course straight ahead to the foot of the wooden stairs set into the hillock that rose above the rest of the mound. The back of this rise was steep, falling seventy feet or more into the dense tangle of woods below. He would shoot her there and let her body tumble into the massed shrubs. By the time she was found, if she was found, the woodland critters, four-, six- and eight-legged, would have done their best to destroy any evidence of who had pulled the trigger. Not that there was any. Anna would die without defensive wounds, no DNA of the perpetrator beneath her fingernails.

  Killed by Randy fucking Thigpen.

  Anna whimpered again experimentally and said, “Please, please,” in a broken voice. Thigpen’s hold did loosen, if only a fraction. It hadn’t been an isolated phenomenon. Female helplessness, degradation, soothed and comforted her erstwhile field ranger. Able by alchemy of familiarity and truncated eyesight, Anna saw the wooden steps a dozen yards ahead forming out of the sleet-driven darkness. For all the progress she’d made on any half-formed plan to better her situation, they might as well have been the steps to a scaffold.

  Bidding final farewell to John Wayne, Anna burst into tears, pleas for her life riding brokenly on sobs. Thigpen talked over her snivelings. As she wept and begged, he shoved her forward, letting the invective of what he viewed as his months of servitude under her reign flow and voicing the bigotry he’d held in imperfect abeyance during that time.

  Over the slosh of their boots through the wet grass, the hard rain on her jacket and the wet sounds of her own weeping, Anna heard him listing the rights women had robbed him—all men—of: promotions, training, dignity, pride, decency. Through it he used her as living proof of his theories, vilifying her for her tears, her begging, her cowardice, her small frame and inferior strength.

  The more he talked the braver he became, brave and relaxed, full of his superiority and confident in his control over the sniveling hank of hair and bag of bones that Anna had become.

  With a curse and a jerk, he started her up the steep wooden stairs leading to the highest point on the mound. Ice was forming on the wood. Anna shuffled in her abjection, guaranteeing she wouldn’t lose her balance.

  A little over halfway up she reached the step she’d been hoping for. Ice covered the surface. Anna shuffled carefully over it and stepped to the next. When she felt Randy put his full weight on its slippery surface, she cried out loud and wild and hurled herself backward with all her might and jammed the fists he held clamped at her shoulder with chain and collar back into his face.

  Thigpen gave way in an avalanche of noise and flesh. Instinctively flinging his arms out to recover his balance, Randy moved the pistol from the back of Anna’s head. The barrel, pressed so long and so hard into her skull, left a hot place behind when it was moved. As she fell with him she heard the shot as his trigger finger convulsed and he fired a round into the storm.

  Falling seemed to take a long time. Anna felt her feet push off as she kicked away from the hillside, driving back into Randy’s gut. She was aware of the small bones in her neck crackling when she slammed her head back, smashing the hard part of her cranium into his face. Then they seemed to float downward. Icy rain on her face, universal nothingness filling her eyes and mind.

  Randy struck the ground. She smashed down, un-bruised, onto his great soft belly. Time abandoned its petty pace. Anna had succeeded in knocking him down, but she wasn’t free. He was still armed, still outweighed her by two hundred pounds.

  Instinct took over and a sudden bone-deep desire not only to survive but to win or, failing that, wreak as much havoc as possible took over. Screaming, spitting, hissing, Anna wrenched her chained wrists free and rolled off, kicking back to inflict what damage she could on shins and knees. Randy had lost control of her hands but still held on to the hood of the jacket. Cloth caught her around the throat. Instead of fighting against it, Anna rolled back toward Thigpen scratching, biting, butting, knees and elbows punching.

  He let loose with a startled cry. She straightened her limbs and began rolling like a log, as she and Molly had done down summer-warm grassy hills. Shots rang out but darkness and speed were on Anna’s side. Dizzy, but unhurt, she came to a stop several yards from the foot of the hill.

  On elbows and knees, she crawled another ten or fifteen yards, then stopped and listened.

  At first she heard only the pounding of her heart and the rush of the blood past her eardrums. Willing herself to breathe deeply, regularly, she listened past the raucous celebration of life in her veins. Rain. A huff. A splash. A booted foot on wood. Randy was up.

  Mathematics was the first skill to vanish when guns were fired but Anna tried: two shots to cut her free of the shoulder strap in the Crown Vie, two—or maybe it was only one—when he’d fallen. Make it one. Safer. If he’d not lost the revolver in the fall, he had three shots left before he’d reload. Ideally a law-enforcement officer would take this down time to replace the spent shells with live ones. Gun battles were seldom ideal. Randy wouldn’t risk reloading till he had to. Moving with care, she levered herself to her feet. Her keys were in her trouser pocket. The handcuff key was the smallest, the most difficult to maneuver with cold numb fingers and a mind shot full of adrenaline. Anna chose not to try it. Thigpen believed her to be unarmed. She had nine shots to his three and a second magazine. The first lay in the mud down by the car.

  Anna unsnapped the keeper on her holster and, two-handed, lifted the semi-auto from the leather. It probably wasn’t personal, merely leftover body heat trapped between her hip and the raincoat, but the butt of the weapon was warm, welcoming, more comforting than a father’s hand.

  Anna stood still a moment, letting dizziness pass, enjoying being free and alive. Clatter. Huffing. Randy running down steps. Wild-eyed Anna stared into the rain and darkness till she made out a piece of it that moved differently from the rest.

  “Drop it, Randy. Give it up. The game’s over,” she yelled. The report of his pistol and a flash of muzzle fire were her answer. Anna threw herself to the ground and rolled, this time on level ground. Two more shots. Both wild. Randy was running, he’d fired at the sound of her voice.

  Six shots, if she’d counted right. His gun was empty. Anna was on her feet running toward him yelling.

  “Down. Down. Down. Get down, you son of a bitch.”

  Randy remained standing, a black hole in the night. Ten feet from him she stopped. “Give it up, Randy. I’m armed. Give it up.”

  “Bullshit.” A glint gathered from the wan light of the house below the mound and across the road shone dully as he raised the pistol.

  Firing wide to make her point, Anna squeezed off a shot.

  “You lying bitch,” Randy screamed.

  Such was the shock in his voice that while being kidnapped prior to murder she would have the unmitigated gall to lie to him, Anna laughed.

  “There’s something wrong with you,” Randy said again.

  “Drop the gun, Randy. There’s no bullets in it anyway. No sense getting yourself killed. Drop it now.”

  “Fucking lying bitch,” he said, unable to get past her deceit. He dropped the gun.

  Rangers weren’
t in the habit of carrying backup guns. It wasn’t authorized, necessary, or more to the point, it wasn’t the vogue. Still Anna was taking no chances. “Put your hands on your head. Interlace the fingers. You know the drill.”

  Randy didn’t move. “Yeah,” he said. “I know the drill. I’m unarmed. No threat to myself or anybody else. I’m not attacking you.

  “Like you said, I’ve never killed anybody. Ol’ Doyce fell by himself, Badger said. He and Martin left him hanging while they cleaned that doe. Thought it was funny. When they came back and found him dead they called me. I never killed anybody. I’m no danger. You can’t use deadly force.” With that he began backing away, his outline beginning to blur into the night.

  Technically he was right. Probably he wouldn’t get far. The highway patrol or the local police department would pick him up in a few days. Until then Anna could sleep with the doors locked and her gun on the nightstand.

  He turned, began lumbering toward the trail that would take him down off Emerald Mound. Anna took her radio from her belt and called dispatch. “This is five-eight-zero,” she said evenly. “I need backup and an ambulance at Emerald Mound.” She dropped the radio into her pocket. Took careful aim and pulled the trigger.

  For predators, compassion has never been an evolutionary advantage.

  21

  Randy was down, screaming. Anna felt no remorse. Chances were good he’d live. She’d aimed for a leg. Unless she’d gotten luckier than she’d intended and the bullet had severed the artery in the thigh, he’d survive. Given the breadth of the man’s thighs, Anna thought a direct hit was unlikely.

  Staying where she was, thirty feet from the shrieking lump of ranger meat and cloaked by the night, Anna put her gun in the pocket of her raincoat and, taking her time, retrieved her keys from her trousers and unlocked the cuffs with which Randy had fettered her.