The woman nodded again and smiled. Ryan walked onto the porch and turned left, heading westward, in the general direction of the township of Twin Forks.
RYAN STEPPED OUT along the rutted trail, keeping to his path by the stars that were already glittering coldly from the dark velvet sky. All his senses were alert for some indication that the bodies had been found, and he was ready to slip into the brush if he heard any sign of pursuit.
But time passed, and he had put four or five miles between himself and the small ville. Far enough to be reasonably safe that they weren’t going to come after him.
HE HAD JUST DECIDED that it was probably safe to look for an abandoned building to sleep the night, when he caught the sound of dogs, echoing from some distance behind him.
“Fireblast!”
Nobody would be just exercising tracking hounds in the middle of the evening. The corpses had been found, and someone had decided that the murderer should be hunted down. Maybe they figured that a man responsible for a pile of bloody dead might well be carrying some kind of a price on his head.
The river glinted to his right through a thin screen of willows.
Above him the moon was glittering like a new-minted coin, giving plenty of light to pursuers.
At his best, given such a good start, Ryan would have backed himself to simply run away from whoever was trailing him. But he was still far from peak fitness, plagued by the repeated injuries to his wounded thigh.
He was already limping, ready to rest.
The ground was low and the track was winding between swampy meadows, with pools of brackish water seeping between the tussocks of coarse grass. It looked like the only thing to do was keep going on the country road and hope to find some way of cutting off it and throwing the dogs off his scent. Right now Ryan wasn’t keen on blundering into the muddy waste that stretched both sides, to the river on his right, or toward the indistinct shape of a lake on the left.
Trees closed in on him on both flanks, and the trail snaked sharply left and right, making it impossible to see far ahead. Behind him the baying of the dogs was closer. Ryan knew how difficult it was to judge sound at night, but his best guess had to put the pursuit around two miles back. Call if fifteen minutes if they were moving fast.
He moved on at a sort of shambling, limping jog, wincing at the strain on his injured leg.
The bends opened out, and he was finally able to see for a good mile ahead of him, the road now running arrow straight. It was built up higher on a levee, with the swamp pressing on both sides, the river bending away a quarter mile or more to the north. There was absolutely no sign of any cover.
Ryan stopped, biting his lip, considering the possibility of plowing through the bayous to his right and then risking swimming the river. But it was the best part of a half-mile wide, and there was a fair risk that the swamps would be home to all manner of murderous creatures.
He ran on.
Ryan was within a hundred yards of the far end of the straight section of the trail when he heard a gleeful yell from behind him and the crack of a rifle. There was no sign of where the bullet went, but he was confident he was safely out of range of anything except a fluke shot with a spent round.
Feeling the sharpness of a stitch biting under his ribs, Ryan turned, doubled over, fighting for breath. He made out the dark smudge of his pursuers, the noise of the dogs flatter now, out in the open.
At best they were less than twelve hundred yards behind and closing fast. He wasn’t sure, but it looked as if there were horsemen among them. Now that they had him made, there was no need to wait for the hounds. They would simply spur on and hope to ride him down within minutes.