choice of either cooperating with the deputy director or pulling a gun
on him, and neither course would leave him with both his career and his
self-respect intact.
Sharp plunged deeper into the woods, started down a slope into the gloom
beneath interlacing boughs of pine and spruce. He looked back, shouted
at Peake to join in the chase, took several more steps into the brush,
glanced back again and called out more insistently when he saw that
Peake had not moved.
Reluctantly Peake followed. Some of the tall grass was so dry and
brittle that it prickled through his socks.
Burrs and bits of milkweed fluff adhered to his trousers.
When he leaned against the trunk of a tree, his hand came away sticky
with resin. Vines tried to trip him up. Brambles snagged his suit.
His leather-soled shoes slipped treacherously on the stones, on patches
of dry pine needles, on moss, on everything. Climbing over a fallen
tree, he put his foot down in a teeming nest of ants, although he
hurriedly moved out of their way and wiped them off his shoe, a few
scaled his leg, and finally he had to pause, roll up his trousers, and
brush the damn things off his badly bitten calf.
“We’re not dressed for this,” he told Sharp when he caught up with him.
“Quiet,” Sharp said, easing under a low-hanging pine branch heavy with
thorn-tipped cones.
Peake’s feet almost skidded out from under him, and he grabbed
desperately at a branch. Barely managing to stay on his feet, he said,
“We’re going to break our necks.”
“Quiet!” Sharp whispered furiously. Over his shoulder, he looked back
angrily at Peake. His face was unnerving, eyes wide and wild, skin
flushed, nostrils flared, teeth bared, jaw muscles taut, the arteries
throbbing in his temples. That savage expression confirmed Peake’ s
suspicion that since spotting Shadway the deputy director had been out
of control, driven by an almost maniacal hatred and by sheer blood lust.
They pushed through a narrow gap in a wall of dense and bristly brush
decorated with poisonous-looking orange berries. They stumbled into a
shallow dry washand saw Shadway. The fugitive was fifteen yards farther
along the channel, following it down through the forest.
He was moving low and fast, carrying a shotgun.
Peake crouched and sidled against the wall of the channel to make as
difficult a target of himself as possible.
But Sharp stood in full view, as if he thought he was Superman, bellowed
Shadway’s name, pulled off several shots with the silencer-equipped
pistol. With a silencer, you traded range and accuracy for the quiet
you gained, so considering the distance between Sharp and Shadway,
virtually every shot was wasted. Either Sharp did not know the
effective range of his weapon-which seemed unlikelyor he was so
completely a captive of his hatred that he was no longer capable of
rational action.
The first shot tore bark off a tree at the edge of the dry wash, two
yards to Shadway’s left, and with a high thin whine, the second slug
ricocheted off a boulder. Then Shadway disappeared where the runoff
channel curved to the right, but Sharp fired three more shots, in spite
of being unable to see his target.
Even the finest silencer quickly deteriorates with use, and the soft
whump of Sharp’s pistol grew noticeably louder with each round he
expended. The fifth and final shot sounded like a wooden mallet
striking a hard but rubbery surface, not thunderous by any means but
loud enough to echo for a moment through the woods.
When the echo faded, Sharp listened intently for a few seconds, then
bounded back across the dry wash toward the same gap in the brush
through which they had entered the channel. “Come on, Peake. We’ll get
the basard now.”
Following, Peake said, “But we can’t chase him down in these woods.
He’s better dressed for it than we are.”
“We’re getting out of the woods, damn it,” Sharp said, and indeed they
were headed back the way they had come, up toward the yard behind the
cabin. “All I wanted to do was make sure we got him moving, so he