Eyes of the Predator (43 page)

“Whoa! Hold on, don’t shoot, son.
I’m one of the good guys.”

“Stop right there!” Clay gripped
the shotgun tightly. “Who are you? Where’s Deputy Parsons?”

“I’m Tommy Sims,” Lylee said, the
lie tripping off his tongue as if it were a truth he had learned from his mama.
“Maintenance man here. I was down by the creek, and I heard the commotion so I
came to check it out. Found the deputy and some other fella inside on the floor
and saw the girl running out the back door.” He smiled and put his hands out,
showing the young man that they were empty. “Just trying to help. Please take
it easy with that shotgun, buddy.”

The young man was still wary and
cautious, but Lylee saw the small signs as the boy relaxed, just slightly. A
small change in his posture. A slight variation in his breathing.

Lying in the cool, damp grass
between the two men, Lyn became aware of talking above her. Why were they
talking? She recognized one of the voices. It was the boy, Clay. He had given
her a ride. She closed her eyes and smelled the fragrant grass.

The other voice spoke again and
she recognized it too. It was…the man. Her throat struggled to form words. Her
breath came in pants, and she tried to push herself up to flee once more, but
could barely come to her knees.

“No,” the sound came from her in
a whisper. “No, no.” She struggled to form other words, to warn the young man.
None came.

Hearing the whispers, Clay looked
down at the girl. That brief second was all that the predator required.

Reaching in his rear pocket, he
pulled the small .38 Smith and Wesson taken from old Harold Sims in his moment
of death two nights earlier. An instant later, as the young man with the
shotgun just barely became aware of his movement, he pulled the trigger of the
small revolver, and then pulled it two more times.

Thunder cracked over her head,
and Lyn tried to claw her way into the ground. And then after the last
thunderous crack, a deeper louder roar that seemed to shake the ground and
grass around her, pounded down on her, taking her breath away.

The three bullets slammed Clay in
the chest and abdomen plunging him into stunned and breathless shock. He fell
with the realization that he had failed. He had found Lyn only to know that she
would be murdered.

The ground came up and slammed
him in the back. The shotgun rose slightly from the impact. He became aware
that he still held the gun and that his finger was still locked on the trigger
as he fell. With one last conscious thought, Clay put the slight amount of
pressure required on the trigger, and the shotgun roared as it bucked from his
hand. It was the last thing he knew.

Leyland, “Lylee”, Torkman,
predator, howled and snarled his curse in pain. The shotgun blast had not been
a direct hit, but three .00 buck pellets had struck him in the left leg, one
piercing his kneecap.

The voice of caution screeched in
his ear, End it! I told you! END IT!

The agonizing throbbing in his
leg and the screech inside his head forced him up to stand on his remaining
good leg. The girl lay trembling in the grass before him, face buried in the
dirt. He would have preferred the knife. Even in the disappointment of not
having all that he wanted from the girl, the knife would have made the end
better, sweeter.

But the knife was lodged in the
side of the deputy lying on the cabin floor. He had left it there in his
pursuit of the girl. The small revolver would have to do. There were three
rounds left. It would only take one. He raised his arm and pointed the pistol
at the back of the girl’s head. The muzzle of the pistol was barely two feet
from its target. He smiled at the thought that the medical examiner would find
powder residue in the wound.

The Pickham County pickup had
come fishtailing off the highway and down the drive of the Creek Side Cabins.
Roaring past the office, George and Sharon ignored the couple still standing
there arm-in-arm and pointing down the drive. They knew from the alert given by
the Rye County deputy where they were going.

At the turn along the creek, they
saw no one by the Rye County car. The deputy had advised dispatch that he was
going to check the situation and had explained tersely to his sheriff over the
open radio waves that if the girl was there, she was in danger, imminent or
not, and that every minute of delay constituted an increase in the threat to
the girl. He was going to check it out, despite the sheriff’s objections.

After that, no one had come on
the radio to argue with him. Any one of the units responding might have made
the same decision, probably would have, George Mackey knew. Correct procedure
in law enforcement was often a very subjective thing. This was not accounting
or engineering. Answers were not defined by mathematics and science. The right
or wrong thing to do usually depended largely on an officer’s interpretation of
the facts, the perceived threat, and a million other subjective bits of
information. Often, there was no absolute ‘right’ answer, and the right or
wrong of it was determined by the outcome, or the press, or the courts years
later.

Gunning the engine as they made
the turn along the creek, George brought the pickup to a sliding halt just
short of the last cabin. From the angle, he could see that the front door was
open, but there was no movement.

The crack and roar of Sharon
Price’s pistol reverberated through the cab of the truck as George started to
open the door and scared the shit out of him in the process. Price stood just
outside the truck with the door open, surrounded by the dust of the pickup’s
braking. Her pistol was pointed towards the backyard, visible from their angle
on the road.

The pop of a small caliber weapon
and the whiz of a round overhead caused George to crouch by the car as Sharon’s
weapon discharged again. Peering over the hood of the pickup, George saw a man
limp into the woods carrying something that looked like a rifle or shotgun.
Clearly, it was not the weapon he had fired at George and Sharon.

 Two bodies were visible on
the ground where the man had stood a moment before.

“Did you hit him…or anything at
that range?” George asked, judging the distance to the backyard at about
seventy-five yards, a long distance for an accurate shot from Price’s
nine-millimeter pistol.

“No, pretty sure I didn’t, but he
was about to put a round into one of those bodies. Had to get his attention.”
Still holding the pistol, Sharon Price had jogged half way up the side yard
towards the back before George made it around the pickup and started after her.
“Come on,” she called over her shoulder.

Approaching the bodies on the ground,
they slowed. George could barely bring himself to examine them. They were
bloody. The girl was nude. The young man was… “Shit,” he said. “That’s the kid
from last night, isn’t it?” George stood with his Glock at the ready in a
two-handed stance, watching the woods into which the man who had fired at them
had disappeared.

Price knelt to check the bodies
as George stood watch. “Yeah. It’s him, Clay was his name.” Three spreading red
spots covered his work shirt, the same shirt he had been wearing the night
before as they sat talking in the state patrol office.

She turned towards the nude girl.
“This would be the girl they left at the truck stop, the one on the voice
mail.” She knelt beside the girl and placed her hand on her head as if trying
to take away the terror and fear she had felt in the last day, in her last
moments.

The tear that ran down George’s
face dropped silently into the grass beside the girl. Late. Again. He felt the
frustration and desperate anger rise in him, and something else. George Mackey
was the hunter now. He knew how to hunt, and he would hunt down this animal.

The blood trail on the ground
showed the way. Young Clay must have given a good account of himself before he
went down. George moved towards the woods but stopped at Price’s next words.

“She’s alive.”

“What?” George spoke the word
softly as a prayer and looked at Sharon who was now kneeling beside the girl.

Sharon placed her hand on the
girl’s bare, bloody back. There was an unmistakable shudder, followed by a low,
soft sob and then a whispered question, too low to be understood.

“What’s that, baby? What did you
say?” Sharon Price knelt with her mouth near the girl’s ear, hand still softly
resting on her back.

“Is – he – gone?” The words were
spoken so softly and with evident terror of the possible response that they
were barely audible, even with Sharon so close.

“He’s gone baby. He’s gone. He
won’t hurt you now. We won’t let him.” Price whispered the words into the
girl’s ear, putting an arm around her on the ground and stroking her hair as if
she were a child having a bad dream.

“He came for me.”

“Who baby. Who came for you?”

“The boy. His name is Clay. I
left him a message, and he came for me.”

“I know. I know.” Sharon’s words
were whispered softly as she looked at the young man in the bloody shirt and
brushed away her own tears.

“He came for me. He saved me.
Where is he?”

Sharon had already shifted on her
knees to the young man’s body. Gently, she felt for the carotid artery, and
then more firmly pressed into his neck with two fingers, a look of surprise and
urgency on her face. Pulling the portable radio from her belt, Price looked up
at George Mackey and nodded. Her eyes burned into his taking only a second to
say, “Go! Do what you have to do. Find him. End this.” And then she raised the
radio and spoke.

As he disappeared into the tree
line, George heard Price’s call for EMT’s… ‘person shot…vital signs weak…’

The blood trail was clear at
first. In the low foliage and brush at the edge of the woods, it was easily
visible. It did not appear to be arterial bleeding. Not enough blood and not
spread far enough to be from a spurting artery. It was likely that he would not
bleed out before George found him. That was good, George thought. Very good.

As he moved deeper into the woods,
the trail became harder to follow. The blood blended in with the leaves and
pine straw on the ground and was not as visible as when spattered across the
green foliage in the daylight. George lifted his head from his inspection of
the ground to peer into the dim woods around him. He was keenly aware that the
danger here was watching the blood trail on the ground too closely and not his
surroundings, becoming an easy, unaware target.

There was a loud popping bang not
fifty yards away, followed by the sounds of rustling leaves and snapping twigs,
and ending with an almost simultaneous dull thunk as the bullet plowed into a
tree to his right. Okay, he thought, I’m in the general vicinity at least.

George moved around a tree to his
front, advanced a few yards, staying low, and then found cover behind a large
hickory. His efforts drew a quick bang followed by the buzz of the round flying
by into the ground. Closer, but still no immediate threat. The shooter was not
much of a shot, he thought. Still he had a gun, and it only took one round to
make him a great shot, and George a very dead deputy.

George took stock and thought.
Looked like three rounds into the boy, Clay. One fired at them as they pulled
up in the pickup. Two here in the woods. That made six. Unless he had reloads,
he was out of ammo, for the revolver at least. And George doubted that he had
any reloads. He knew that the pistol must be the one he took from Harold Sims,
and it was not likely that Sims was carrying any extra rounds.

That left the long weapon, rifle
or shotgun. George suspected it was the deputy’s shotgun loaned to the boy to
watch the back door while he checked things out. It was just a guess, but it
made sense. He had no idea how young Clay had found them and showed up at the
Creek Side Cabins, but having done so, he was clearly not the kind to let the
deputy go to the door of the cabin without some backup. As George pondered it,
he was sure the weapon must be the deputy’s shotgun.

His thoughts were confirmed a
second later when a loud roar slammed through the woods sending numerous
pellets ricocheting through the trees. Shotgun it was.

So, the shooter had taken one
round from Clay and was bleeding. He had fired one wild round into the trees,
either to draw George out or to see what he might hit. That left three to five
rounds or so, depending on the shotgun’s magazine, the make of the shotgun,
whether there was a round in the chamber with a full magazine or whether Clay
had had to pump a round in before firing. In short, George had no way of
knowing exactly how many rounds the shooter had left.

He took a breath and decided he
wasn’t going to wait to find out. Slowly, he moved his head to the side of the
hickory and studied the woods ahead, showing just enough of his face to allow
his right eye to see forward.

The light in the woods was dim
and dusky in the waning autumn afternoon. The sun set early in the mountain
valleys where the horizon was a thousand feet above your head. It occurred to
George that he did not want to be out here in the dark, looking for a wounded
man with a shotgun. He studied the woods ahead, hunting and searching one small
area at a time, eliminating an area with his eyes and then moving to the next,
looking for any movement. There was none, except for the rustling of squirrels
in the trees overhead.

George wanted very much to pull
his head back behind the safety of the large tree trunk, but he knew that he
couldn’t. He had to spot the shooter before he was spotted. So far, the
shooting had been erratic and not aimed. It was suppression fire, hoping to
discourage the pursuer. At other times, it might have suppressed the hell out
of George. But not this time. George Mackey would see this through. He may have
been too late to prevent much of anything, but he would not be late for the
ending.