Standing beside the rental car, keeping a wary eye on the woods around
them, Ben distributed four extra shotgun shells and eight extra rounds
for the Combat Magnum in the pockets of his jeans.
Rachael emptied out her purse and filled it with three boxes of
ammunition, one for each of their guns. That was surely an excessive
supply-but Ben did not suggest that she take any less.
He carried the shotgun under one arm. Given the slightest provocation,
he could swing it up and fire in a fraction of a second.
Rachael carried the thirty-two pistol and the Combat Magnum, one in each
hand. She wanted Ben to carry both the Remington and the .357, but he
could not handle both efficiently, and he preferred the shotgun.
They moved off into the brush just far enough to slip around the
padlocked gate, returning to the dirt track on the other side.
Ahead, the road rose under a canopy of pine limbs, flanked by rock-lined
drainage ditches bristling with dead dry weeds that had sprung up during
the rainy season and withered during the arid spring and summer. About
two hundred yards above them, the lane took a sharp turn to the right
and disappeared. According to Sarah Kiel, the lane ran straight and
true beyond the bend, directly to the cabin, which was approximately
another two hundred yards from that point.
“Do you think it’s safe to approach right out on the road like this?”
Rachael whispered, even though they were still so far from the cabin
that their normal speaking voices could not possibly have carried to
Eric.
Ben found himself whispering, too. “It’ll be okay at least until we
reach the bend. As long as we can’t see him, he can’t see us.”
She still looked worried.
He said, “If he’s even up there.”
“He’s up there,” she said.
“Maybe.”
“He’s up there,” she insisted, pointing to vague tire tracks in the thin
layer of dust that covered the hardpacked dirt road.
Ben nodded. He had seen the same thing.
“Waiting,” Rachael said.
“Not necessarily.”
“Waiting.”
“He could be recuperating.”
“No.”
“Incapacitated.”
“No. He’s ready for us.”
She was probably right about that as well. He sensed the same thing she
did, oncoming trouble.
Curiously, though they stood in the shadows of the trees, the nearly
invisible scar along her jawline, where Eric had once cut her with a
broken glass, was visible, more visible than it usually was in ordinary
light. In fact, to Ben, it seemed to glow softly, as if the scar
responded to the nearness of the one who had inflicted it, much the way
that a man’s arthritic joints might alert him to an oncoming storm.
Imagination, of course. The scar was no more prominent now than it had
been an hour ago.
The illusion of prominence was just an indication of how much he feared
losing her.
In the car, on the drive up from the lake, he had tried his best to
persuade her to remain behind and let him handle Eric alone. She was
opposed to that ideapossibly because she feared losing Ben as much as he
feared losing her.
They started up the lane.
Ben looked nervously left and right as they went, uncomfortably aware
that the heavily forested mountainside, gloomy even at midday, provided
countless hiding placesambush points-very close to them on both sides.
The air was heavily laced with the odor of evergreen sap, the crisp and
appealing fragrance of dry pine needles, and the musty scent of some
rotting deadwood.
Reeeeee, reeeeee, reeeeee He had returned to the armchair with a pair of
binoculars that he had remembered were in the bedroom closet. Only
minutes after settling down at the window, before his dysfunctioning
thought processes could take off on yet another tangent, he saw movement
two hundred yards below, at the sharp bend in the road.
He played with the focus knob, pulling the scene in clearer, and in
spite of the depth of the shadows at that point along the lane, he saw
the two people in perfect detail, Rachael and the bastard she had been
sleeping with, Shadway.
He had not known whom he expectedother than Seitz, Knowls, and the men