The Purification Ceremony (21 page)

    “That’s not fair.”

    “Nothing is,” I said. “We’ve got something hard to do now. I don’t want it to be made foggy by some romantic notion you might be carrying around.”

    He looked at me as if I were a stranger he’d met on a plane. Which I was. “Okay, then. Good luck.”

    “You, too.”

    The walkie-talkie on my belt squawked. Griff came toward us slowly. Heavy bags hung under his eyes. I was about to say something when the radio squawked again.

    “Everybody ready and in position?” Nelson asked.

    One by one, the voices came over the radio: Earl, Phil, Cantrell, me.

    “Okay, then,” Nelson went on. “Take your compass readings. Keep each other in sight. Move slowly. Stay in contact.”

    We skulked parallel to the river for about twenty minutes. We were three abreast, about fifty yards apart. I was in the middle. Kurant walked on my left, Griff on my right. Overhead there were breaks in the clouds and an eerie blue sky shone through. Replaced by a squall and then more blue.

    The gusting breeze dislodged snow from the thick brush. Clumps of it fell at our slightest touch. The movement and the soft thumps as it struck the drifts kept me alert. Kurant quaked at each snowfall. He held the shotgun before him as if it were alive and feral. Until now, he’d been an observer. Now he was a participant.

    The radio buzzed. “This is Cantrell. Nothing so far.”

    “Hard to see in here,” Earl came back. “Everything’s weighed down by the snow. Jumping a lot of deer, though.”

    “Phil?” Nelson asked.

    The radio went to static for a moment, then he came back. “Not yet.”

    I took the radio from the holster. “We’re almost as far south along the Dream as we want to be. No tracks. We’re going to turn east in about five minutes.”

    I whistled to Kurant and Griff. I pulled out the topographical map. “We’re about two miles from that beaver pond. We’ll get on either side of this feeder stream and work our way along it.”

    “It’s going to be tight in there. A lot of red willow and rushes,” Griff said.

    “I can’t see a better way to do it, though,” I responded.

    He took the map and pored over it, finally nodding. “Okay, but let’s close ranks to stay in sight.”

    Kurant motioned to a thin slide behind the tang on the shotgun. “I push this to shoot, right?”

    “The safety,” I said. “Then just point and pull the trigger. It’s a semiautomatic. Five shots.”

    We moved on then, down the slope toward the feeder stream. As Griff feared, the tangle of alder and red willow in the drainage slowed our progress to a crawl. To keep in visual contact, we were forced to walk no more than fifteen yards apart. The deer had come into this slough heavy during the storm: shoots and buds of the past summer’s growth had been gently nipped off; and the deer tracks and poop were everywhere. Several times we pushed them from their beds and the brush in front of us erupted with snortwheezes and grunts and the rifle-shot cracking of branches.

    An hour went by in that manner. The muscles in my forearms and upper back ached from gripping the gun stock at each invisible pop and crunch. Sweat pooled around the backstrap of my bra and at the waistband of my long underwear. A headache took shape between my eyes from trying to peer ahead through the frozen jungle.

    I glanced at my companions as we passed through an opening. Kurant’s face had gone ashen. Griff’s cheeks sagged like those of a man in his seventies. I was worried about them.

    We had just come out of that opening, and I was working right along the stream bank, when I saw them, deeply cut into the snow, emerging half frozen at the water’s edge. Ahead of me, the accumulation on the puckerberry had been brushed off. I whistled softly. Griff and Kurant stopped. I pointed downward. I took the radio and hit the transmitter button twice to alert the others.

    “I’ve got his tracks,” I whispered into the radio, fighting against the pressure forming like deep water around me.

    Nelson came back immediately. “Where?”

    I could see them all staring at their radios, waiting for my response. The killer was ahead of us somewhere in the broad loop of the lasso Nelson had laid out. They were waiting to hear how close he was, how close confrontation might be.

    “We’re less than a mile from the pond,” I said. “He came in by this feeder stream. It’s the one wearing the wave-sole boots. He’s heading almost due east.”

    Get in behind him, Diana,” Nelson said. “Keep Kurant and Griff close. And I want to hear what he’s doing every two minutes.”

    “Okay.”

    Cantrell came on. “First chance is our best chance. After this, he’ll know we’re hunting him.”

    I got on the track, paralleling it so as not to disturb his sign. I noted with grudging admiration the way he threaded himself, calculated and soft, between the tendril trunks of the streamside growth. I found where his wolf-skin hat had brushed through snow clinging to limbs and left hairs when he’d looked left and right. I found where he’d knelt to scout the terrain ahead. I found three holes where his fingers had probed the snow. He was examining everything, even the consistency of the surface below him. He was a good hunter, no doubt about it. The next thought turned me jittery, bloated and cramped inside; he was stalking us. even as we stalked him. Any mistake meant…

    I shook it off. I could not think of him as a hunter. That could dull resolve. I thought of him as game. Game to be respected. Even feared. But game nonetheless.

    The trick to writing a good piece of computer software is to anticipate the pitfalls and snafus that might thwart a user, leaving her frozen at the keyboard, wondering where she went wrong in the electronic wilderness. The same is true of executing a hunt.

    I thought ahead as I moved on the track, allowing my memory of the topographical map and my general knowledge of how the killers had moved in the past to draft scenarios as to how this one might act as he approached the beaver pond. The watercourse was his ally as well as his path. But soon he’d have to abandon it. Maybe he’d circle the pond to the north and run into Nelson or Cantrell. Or maybe he’d leave the stream bottom to cut crosswind toward the lake and those who pressed at us from the south.

    We were now no more than four hundred yards from the beaver pond. The wind died. The forest took on a deep and abiding stillness that closed in around me.

    The radio crackled with voices. Where was he? they were asking, Our noose was tightening. He had to be right up ahead. But there’d been no sightings. Against the back wall of all of this played the image of a nocked arrow.

    I was racking my brain to devise new scenarios, when he did something I didn’t expect. The track in front of me stopped. Completely. Just as it had the night I found Patterson.

    I stared at the last footprint, unbelieving. It came in around me then, the same sort of electric pressure I’d felt anticipating the appearance of the bear so many years ago. I snapped my head and my gun skyward, looking into the gaps between the tree limbs around us. I felt exposed, vulnerable, trapped. “He’s here!” I hissed to Kurant and Griff.

    “Get down!”

    They threw themselves in the snow. They backed up against the trunks of larch trees, searching the forest canopy. No movement. No sound. Just our throttled breath struggling through clenched teeth. And the flicker of snowflakes. And the call of scrub jays and magpies.

    The radio buzzed. I reached to turn down the squelch.

    My hand was halfway to my hip when a branch high in a towering jack pine to Kurant’s left wavered. Fourteen inches of snow poured off. The reporter swung his shotgun and fired at the white cascade. Three times the roar plugged off all other sound. More snow fell. A severed branch plunged to earth. I swung my rifle to the spot where Kurant had shot, safety off, fighting to see the man shape.

    But there was no man. There was only the collapsing comprehension that our emotions and our will were being sucked off into the black hole created by the shotgun blast, by the loss of the track and by the knowledge that the killer had heard the shot and now had our position plotted.

    The radio chattered. Earl. Then Phil and Cantrell, followed by Nelson ordering everyone to be silent.

    “Diana?” he demanded. “Diana Jackman, please call in. Diana?”

    I could not reach for the radio. I had become a squirrel in the shadow of a hawk, turned to stone in the conviction that wings had been trimmed to dive. A minute passed. And then another.

    “Diana?” Nelson called.

    “C’mon, woman,” Phil said. “Just hit the transmit button if you’re okay.”

    Finally my fingers moved. I struck the button.

    “How about that!” Cantrell said. “Tell us where you are. Tell us if you need help.”

    Kurant’s head turned. Blood trickled down his chin. His lip was split. And glowing across his cheek was a great red welt from where the butt of the ill-shouldered gun had smacked him.

    “He’s not here,” Kurant said dully.

    “Don’t be so sure,” Griff called back. “He could be playing with us.”

    “Oh, he’s toying with us,” I said.

    I got the radio finally and managed to give Nelson our position and tell him we were all right. He barked orders to the rest of them to move in our direction.

    I slipped the radio back into the holster, then whispered to Kurant and Griff to cover me. I wanted another look at that last track before the others arrived and obliterated the sign.

    I crawled to the footprint and studied it from six inches away. He had remarkable skills. Ordinarily when an animal sets its feet back in its own track, there is a stark indication of a rolling weight in the imprint and a brushing at the edges that enlarges the volume of the sign. Here, there was the barest reflection of his rearward movement. He’d gone backward in his tracks in this nearly perfect manner for fourteen paces. It dawned on me that he was acting just like a mature white-tailed buck would when it figures out it’s being pursued. My stomach went to cramps again.

    I circled toward the stream and found crust from splashed water forming on the powder snow; he must have jumped sideways a good eight feet and landed in the shallows. I leaned out into the stream to study the overhanging branches. About fifteen feet ahead was a limb devoid of snow where he’d passed and bumped his shoulder.

    I frowned.

    “What’s going on?” Griff asked behind me.

    “He knows we’re after him,” I said, more to myself than to Griff. “Yet he’s going forward in a situation where a deer would probably have circled to the rear. It doesn’t make sense.”

    And then it hit me. He wasn’t acting like a deer. He was acting like a big cat or a wolf, like a predator. He’d wanted us to freeze like squirrels when the track suddenly ended. He was hoping for a panicked response like Kurant’s shot to give away our position and perhaps the positions of the others.

    I yanked at the radio in the holster. The antenna caught in my belt. I tore at it, jerking it free finally. I fumbled with the squelch and brought it to my mouth.

    “Nelson. Nelson, this is Diana. Tell everyone to — ”

    I jumped nearly a foot at the deafening explosion of the large-bore rifle somewhere ahead of me in the forest. Another shot, followed immediately by the unmistakable flat punch of metal striking flesh.

    I was running forward now. Earl’s high-toned voice came over the radio. “I got him! Hound dogs! I finally got him!”

    Nelson came on. “Where? Earl, where are you?”

    “I’m down below the…”

    The transmission stopped. There was a split second of silence. I waited for him to finish.

    Instead, I heard a sound burst from deep inside a man accustomed to being in control, to having things go his way. It came from three hundred yards off to my left. But the way the forest carried the sound, it changed its shape and appeared before me like a cornered animal. It pulsated, baritone and guttural at first, then broke over into a savage falsetto wail that could have shattered crystal… only to be cut off by a third rifle shot.

    Another long silence. And then Lenore’s trembling voice crackled. “Please… oh, please, help us… don’t let it be like this… please don’t let it be like this…”

    Lenore Addison sat in the snow in a weed patch in an old burn of perhaps half an acre. The browned seed crowns of the buck brush wafted in the bitter wind and brushed her face. She had her husband’s head in her lap. Her expression had never seemed so loving. Earl gazed in the direction of the crumpled form of the biggest white-tailed buck I’ve ever seen in any magazine or book.

    Earl was moaning: “It burns. It burns, Lenore. But look at him, sweet thing. Just look at my Booner.”

    Lenore stroked his face and cooed to him: “He’s the prince of the forest, my little man. You did real good.”

    “But my legs won’t move. How can I drag him to camp if my legs won’t move?”

    She looked up at us, tears streaming down her face. Her tough, manicured facade was gone. She was that dusty unsure girl from some backwater in Texas brush country now.

    “He’s all I’ve got. What am I gonna do?”

    Arnie and Phil emerged through thick spruces that rimmed the south side of the burn. Arnie took one look and rushed to Earl. “Hold him still,” he told Lenore. “We don’t want more damage than has already been done.”

    Phil took off his orange knit cap. His skull glistened with sweat. “What the fuck? I thought he shot the dude.”

    “That’s not important right now, man,” Arnie snapped.

    Phil kicked at a stump. “We had him!”

    “My father was a doctor,” I said, kneeling next to Arnie. “I’ve helped in emergencies before.”