But only for a few seconds. He had waited too long, been too conservative; he had escaped the effects of that grenade only through dumb luck. He got to his feet, a little unsteadily, not just because of the ankle but the brain-stirring effect of the blast, and stood with his back to the wall next to the window. Through the opening he could see a narrow swath of what was out there, but Jones wasn’t in that swath. Getting the revolver out in front of him, he pivoted around his good foot and presented himself in the window opening long enough to get a wide-open view outside the cabin.
Jones was at about ten o’clock, and lower down than Richard had been expecting, since he had apparently thrown himself down to await the results of the grenade. He was just clambering to his feet, and when Richard caught his eye, he made a sudden sideways dive toward the cabin. Richard swung the revolver laterally, trying to track the movement, but his elbow struck the frame of the window at the same moment as he was deciding to pull the trigger. The revolver made a sound that would have seemed loud, had a grenade not just gone off, and a bullet drew a trace through weedy foliage about a foot away from Jones’s head. Jones was bringing his rifle up to return fire, but Richard was already withdrawing from the window. He pulled back so quickly, in fact, that he lost his balance and tumbled onto his ass.
He and Jones were now no more than four feet apart, separated only by the log wall of the cabin.
Richard could squat there and wait and hope that Jones would move into just the right position so that Richard could fire through a gap between logs. Or he could go out the way he had come in, move around the side of the cabin, and try to shoot around the corner. Or he could present himself in the window again and just fire from point-blank range.
He was cocking the revolver again when Jones opened fire with his Kalashnikov. Richard’s whole body flinched, and he very nearly let the hammer slip. But no rounds seemed to be passing through the cabin. Nor could they, really, given Jones’s location. So what the hell was Jones shooting at?
It came to him then that he was overthinking this.
This was a shoot-out. Nothing could be simpler. But he was making it too complicated by trying to use his wits to work the angles, figure out some clever way to dodge around the essential nature of what was happening, to get through to the other side without getting hurt. His opponent, of course, simply didn’t give a shit what happened to him and was probably a dead man anyway—which gave Jones an advantage that Richard could match only by adopting the same attitude. It was an attitude that had come naturally to him as a young man, taking down the grizzly bear with the slug gun and doing any number of other things that later seemed ill-advised. Wealth and success had changed him; he now looked back on all such adventures with fastidious horror. But he had to revert to that mind-set now or else Jones would simply kill him.
All of this came simply and immediately into his head, as though the Furious Muses had chosen this moment to give up on being furious for once—perhaps forever—and were now singing in his ears like angels.
Richard stood up in the window, holding the revolver in one hand now, and swung it out and down.
Jones was right there, sitting on the ground, leaning back against the wall of the cabin, aiming his rifle, not up at Richard, but out into the open space beyond. He had been shooting in that direction for some reason.
He glanced up into Richard’s eyes.
“It’s nothing more than a great bloody cat!” Jones exclaimed.
Richard pulled the trigger and shot him in the head.
He cocked the revolver again and stood poised there for several seconds, looking at the aftermath to make sure he was not misinterpreting the evidence of his eyes, out of wishful thinking. But Jones was unquestionably dead.
Finally he raised his gaze from what remained of Jones and looked up and out over the field of weeds and overgrown scrub beyond. It was by no means clear what Jones had been marveling at in the last moment of his life. For fresh green leaves had not yet begun to bud out, and the hue of the place was the tawny umber of last year’s dead growth. Finally, though, Richard’s eyes locked on something out there that was unquestionably a face. Not a human face. Humans did not have golden eyes.
The eyes stared into Richard’s long enough for Richard to experience a warm rush of blood to his cheeks. He was blushing. Some kind of atavistic response, apparently, to being so watched. But then the eyes blinked, and the cougar’s tiny head turned to one side, ears twitching in reaction to something unseen. Then it spun around, and the last Richard saw of it was its furry tail snapping like a whip, and the white pads of its feet as it ran away.
THE FORTHRAST FARM
Northwest Iowa
Thanksgiving