He rolled onto his back and sat up. He saw the rifleman at once: down on one knee in a sportsman’s pose, thirty feet away at the edge of the woods. On the drive from town, Paul had reloaded the Combat Magnum; now he held it with both hands and squeezed off five quick shots.
All of them missed the mark.
However, the sharp barking of the revolver and the deadly whine of all those bullets skipping across the pavement apparently unnerved the man with the rifle. Instead of trying to finish what he had begun, he stood and ran.
Paul scrambled to his feet, took a few steps after him and fired once more.
Untouched, the rifleman headed away in a big loop that would take him back to the mill complex.
“Sam?”
“Here.”
He could barely see Sam-dark clothes against the macadam and was thankful for the older man’s telltale white hair and beard. “You were hit.”
“In the leg.”
Paul started toward him. “How bad?”
“Flesh wound,” Sam said. “That was Dawson. Get after him, for God’s sake.”
“But if you’re hurt-”
“I’ll be fine. Malcolm can make a tourniquet. Now get after him, dammit!”
Paul ran. At the end of the parking area he passed the rifle: it was on the ground; Dawson had either dropped it by accident and had been too frightened to stop and retrieve it-or he bad discarded it in panic. Still running, Paul fished in his pocket with one hand for the extra bullets he was carrying.
12:15 A.M.
The wooden tower stairs creaked under Klinger’s weight. He paused and counted slowly to thirty before going up three more steps and pausing again. If he climbed too fast, the woman and the girl would know that he was coming. And if they were ready and waiting for him-well, he would be committing suicide when he walked onto the belfry platform. He hoped that, by waiting for thirty seconds or as much as a minute between brief advances, he could make them think that the creaking stairs were only settling noises or a product of the wind.
He went up three more steps.
12:16 A.M.
Ahead, Dawson disappeared around a corner of the mill.
When he reached the same corner a moment later, Paul stopped and studied the north work yard: huge stacks of logs that had been piled up to feed the mill during the long winter; several pieces of heavy equipment; a couple of lumber trucks: a conveyor belt running on an inclined ramp from the mill to the maw of a big furnace where sawdust and scrap wood were incinerated . . . There were simply too many places out there in which Dawson could hide and wait for him.
He turned away from the north yard and went to the door in the west wall of the building, back the way he had come, thirty feet from the corner. It wasn’t locked.
He stepped into a short, well-lighted corridor. The enormous processing room lay at the end of it: the bull chain leading from the mill pond, up feeding shoots, into the building; then a crosscut saw, a log deck, the carriage that moved logs into the waiting blades that would make lumber of them, the giant band saw, edging machine, trimmer saws, dip tank, grading ramp, the green chain, and then the storage racks . . . He remembered all of those terms from a tour that the manager had given Rya and Mark two summers ago. In the processing room the fluorescent strip lights were burning, but none of the machines was working; there were no men tending them. To his right was a washroom, to his left a set of stairs.
Taking the steps two at a time for four flights-the first level was two floors high in order to accommodate the machines in it-he came out in the second-floor hallway. He stopped to think, then went to the fifth office on the left.
The door was locked.
He kicked it twice.
The lock held.
There was a glass case bolted to the corridor wall. It contained a fire extinguisher and an ax.
He jammed the revolver in his belt, opened the front of the case, and took out the ax. He used the flat head of it to batter the knob from the office door. When the knob fell off, the cheap latch snapped. He dropped the ax, pushed open the ruined door, and went inside.