She shook her head. “No,” she whispered hoarsely.
“Not a lot of women do. It’s more of a man thing. But we’re fixin’ to go hunting, you and me.” He sighted along a long, slender shaft, pointing its triangular tip at her, and at the far end, she saw three slender vanes. Feathers. “Actually,” he said, smiling, reaching down with one hand, “I’m fixin’ to go hunting.” He lifted something from the floor of the van, a shape that reminded her of a half moon: curved on one edge, straight on the other, but empty in between. She began to whimper and shudder, her trembling as rapid and desperate as the luna moth’s, its powdery wings flailing and beginning to smoke as they beat against the pitiless glass of a searing searchlight.
The man with the moon was the devil himself, and the moon in his hands was a hunting bow.
CHAPTER 20
Roy Lee
“WHAT THE FUCK?!” PERCHED fifteen feet up the trunk of a pine tree, on the narrow platform of a tree stand, Roy Lee Cheatham blinked and peered again through the scope of his deer rifle, then released his trigger finger, flipped on the safety, and laid the .30-06 across his knees so he could look through his binoculars instead. The binoculars were more powerful than the rifle scope, and they had a wider field of view, too, which made it easier to keep them trained on moving animals.
“Come on, come on, where you at?” he whispered, then, “God a-mighty.” Two hundred yards away, moving from tree to tree, was a woman. A buck-naked woman. He stared through the glasses, his vision—frequently blocked by tree trunks—shifting from her face to her bare breasts and flanks and back up to her face. Again and again she looked over her shoulder, as if she were being pursued, and her face looked wild and desperate. She was limping—staggering, almost—and Roy Lee understood suddenly that she was hurt. He got another brief glimpse, and this time he thought he saw blood streaming down her leg. “Holy shit.” Laying the rifle flat on the platform of the tree stand, he scrambled down the ladder and ran toward her, calling, “Hey, lady! Lady! Hang on—I’m coming to help you.” He ran on a diagonal track that he thought would intercept hers, but it was hard to be sure, as his line of sight was often obscured and his crashing run drowned out whatever sounds she was making. After he’d sprinted a hundred yards, he stopped to look and listen.
The woods were silent. She had stopped, too, he realized. He scanned slowly, his eyes and ears on full alert. Slightly to his left, perhaps thirty yards away, he heard a faint, ragged wheeze, and then he caught a flash of pale skin. “Hey,” he called again, and started in that direction. She burst into view, like a quail flushed from dry grass, and began to run—away from him, not toward. “Wait,” he called. “You look hurt. I’m trying to help.”
She continued to flee, but she was moving far slower than Roy Lee was, so he gained ground on her swiftly. Blood was streaming down her leg, and as he got closer, he was stunned to see the shaft of an arrow protruding from the back of her thigh. He drew even with her within a minute. “Hey,” he panted. “Hey. What happened?” She stared at him, wild-eyed, and continued to stumble forward. He took hold of her wrist. “I’m trying to help, can you understand that? We need to get you to a doctor. I’m not gonna hurt you.” She stopped, her chest heaving, her breathing somewhere between gasping and sobbing. “Easy, now. Easy, now.” He spoke as if he were soothing a spooked horse. “That’s a girl. That’s a girl. Don’t be afraid. You’re okay. Everything is gonna be okay.”
“Is it?” Roy Lee’s head snapped up at the words, spoken in a male voice somewhere ahead and off to his right. He scanned the trees but saw nothing. “Never make promises you can’t keep, Goober,” the unseen speaker continued. “Didn’t your mama teach you that?”
“Git your ass outta your damn hidey-hole and we’ll have us a little talk about what my mama did or didn’t teach me,” said Roy Lee. He caught a slight movement in his peripheral vision, and he turned just in time to see a camouflaged figure rise from a crouch and pull a compound bow to a full draw.
“I’ve got no interest in talking to you about your hillbilly mama,” said the man with the bow. As he said the word mama, he relaxed the first two fingers of his right hand. Roy Lee heard a dull twang and a brief seething sound—the snap of a bowstring, followed by the whisper of feathers as the arrow flew toward him at 300 feet per second. Then he felt himself shoved against the naked woman as the razor-tipped arrow penetrated his chest, and his heart opened in a bloom of crimson to receive its thrust.
CHAPTER 21
Brockton
“DIS-PATCH. CAN I HEP you?” From the woman’s voice—flat but twangy, like an out-of-tune banjo—I guessed that she’d lived in Wartburg, or at least somewhere in the hills of East Tennessee, all her life.