Decker said, “I’m sure glad you’re wearing that orange raincoat, captain. Bet they can only see us a mile or two away.”
“Semiautomatic?” Skink asked through clenched teeth.
Decker nodded. “Sounds like a Ruger Mini-14.” Very popular with the Porsche-and-powder set in Miami, but not the sort of bang-bang you expected upstate.
The rifle went off again, so rapidly that it was impossible to tell the fresh rounds from the echoes. The slugs slapped at the leaves in a lethal hailstorm. From where they huddled Decker and Skink couldn’t see the truck on the highway, but they could hear men’s voices between the volleys.
“Will they come for us?” Decker whispered.
“I expect.” Skink’s cheek was pressed against a carpet of pine needles. A fire ant struggled in the tangle of his mustache; Skink made no move to brush it away. He was listening to the ground.
“There’s only two of them,” he announced.
“Only?” One with a Ruger was plenty.
Skink’s right hand fished under his rainsuit and came out with the pistol.
Decker heard twigs crackle at the edge of the pine.
“Let’s run for it,” he said. They wouldn’t have a prayer in a shoot-out.
“You run,” Skink said.
And draw fire, Decker thought. What a grand idea. At least in Beirut you had a chance because of the doorways; doorways made excellent cover. You simply ran a zigzag from one to another. Right now there wasn’t a doorway in sight. Even the trees were too skinny to offer protection.
Decker heard footsteps breaking the scrub a few yards behind him. Skink motioned for him to go.
He bunched up on his knees, dug his toes into the moist dirt, and pushed off like a sprinter. He ran erratically, weaving through the pine trunks and hurdling small palmetto bushes. A man shouted and then the gunfire started again. Decker flinched as bullets whined off the tree trunks—low, high, always a few feet behind him. Whoever was shooting was running too, and his aim was lousy.
Decker didn’t know the terrain so he picked his openings as they appeared. He spotted promising cover across a bald clearing and he pumped for it, holding his head low. He almost made it, too, when something struck him in the eyes and he crumpled in pain.
A rifle slug had caught a pine branch and whipped it flush across Decker’s face. He lay panting on the ground, his fists pressed to his eyes. Maybe they would think he’d been hit. Maybe they would go looking for Skink.
Abruptly the shooting was over.
Decker heard honking. Somebody was leaning on the horn of the truck; long urgent blasts. From the highway a man shouted somebody’s name. Decker couldn’t make out the words. He took his hands from his face and was relieved to discover that he wasn’t blind. His cheeks were wet from his eyes, and his eyes certainly stung, but they seemed to be working.
It was not until he heard the pickup roar away that Decker dared to move, and then he wasn’t sure which way to go. The direction that made the most sense was away from the road, but he didn’t want to abandon Skink, if Skink were still alive.
Decker crawled to a tree and stood up, cautiously aligning his profile with the trunk. Nothing moved in the clearing; the morning lay dead silent, the songbirds still mute with fear.
What the hell, Decker thought. At the top of his lungs he shouted, “Skink!”
Something big and pale moved at the edge of the woods across the clearing. It made a tremendous noise. “I told you to call me captain!” it bellowed.
Skink was fine. He stood stark naked except for his military boots. “Look what that asshole did to my suit!” He held up the plastic rain jacket. There were three small holes between the shoulder blades. “I got out of it just in time,” Skink said. “Hung it on a limb. When I rustled the branch the guy squared around perfectly and cut loose. He was looking the wrong place, slightly.”
Hairy and bare-assed, Skink led Decker to the body. The dead man had a black crusty circle between his sandy eyebrows. His mouth was set in an O.