wrapped thick chains around the trunk and dragged the tree away.
Through all of this, Becca read outside on the wraparound
porch, sitting in an old glider, rocking back and forth until he was
nearly nauseated watching that slow back and forth, that never-ending
back and forth, and hearing the small creaking sounds that
went with every movement in between the loud grating bursts
from the chain saws.
She went to bed early.
Around noon the next day, Becca was thanking the windowpane
guy for replacing the glass in her bedroom window. Not half
an hour later,Tyler and Sam were there, eating tuna fish sandwiches
at her kitchen table. She said, “We should be hearing from Sheriff
Gaffney soon,Tyler. It should be today, that’s what he said when he
came yesterday. They’re sure taking their time. Then all this nonsense
will be over.”
He was silent for the longest time, chewing his sandwich, helping
Sam eat his, then said finally, some anger in his voice, which
surprised her, “You’re quite the optimist, Becca.”
But she wasn’t thinking about the skeleton at that moment. She
was wondering why that man–Adam Carruthers–was watching
her house. He was standing motionless just to the right, in amongst
the spruce trees, not twenty feet away. He wasn’t the stalker. It
wasn’t his voice, she was sure of that. The stalker’s voice was not
old, not young, but unnervingly smooth. She knew she would recognize
that voice from hell anywhere. Carruthers’s voice was different.
But who was he? And why was he so interested in her?
Adam stretched. He went through a few relaxing taste kwon do
moves to ease his muscles. He was just in the process of slowly raising
his left leg, his left arm extended fully, when she said from behind
him, “Your arm is a bit too high. Lower your elbow at least an
inch and extend your wrist, yeah, and pull your fingers back a bit
more. That’s better. Now, don’t even twitch or I’ll shoot your head
off.”
He was faster than she could have imagined. She was a good six
feet behind him. She had her Coonan .357 Magnum automatic,
chambered with seven bullets, aimed right at him, and in the very
next instant, his whole body was in motion, moving so fast it was
a blur, at least until his right foot lightly and gracefully clipped
the gun from her hand, and his left hand smacked her hard enough
in the shoulder to send her flying backward. She landed on her back.
Becca grabbed the gun, which lay on the ground two feet to her
left, and brought it up only to have him kick it out of her hand
again. Her wrist stung for a moment, then went numb.
“Sorry,” he said, standing over her now. “I don’t react well to
folks holding guns on me. I hope I didn’t hurt you.” He actually
had the gall to reach out his hand to help her up. She was breathing
hard, her shoulder was aching and her wrist was useless. She
scooted backward, turned, and tried to run. She wasn’t fast enough.
He grabbed her and hauled her back against him. “No, just hold it
a minute. I’m not going to hurt you.”
She stopped cold and became very, very still. Her head fell forward
and he knew in that moment that she had simply given up.
He knew her shoulder had to hurt, that her wrist was now probably
hanging numb. “It’ll be all right. You’ll get feeling back in
your wrist soon. It’ll burn a bit but then it’ll be okay again.”
Still drawn in on herself, she said, “I didn’t think he could be
you–your voice is all wrong, I would have sworn to that–but I
obviously was wrong.”
She thought he was the stalker, the man who had murdered that
poor old woman in front of the museum, and then shot Governor
Bledsoe. Automatically, he let her go. “Look, I’m sorry–” He was
speaking to the back of her head. She’d taken off the second he’d
let her go. She was off at a dead run, through the spruce trees, back
toward her house.
He caught her within ten yards, grabbed her left arm, and jerked