“Mr. Plumber. He’s staring at us.”
Mr. Plumber is the principal. He’s an annoying man, a stuffy man, very uptight and rigid, but harmless to the point it’s hard to take him seriously. I don’t understand why the sight of him would make Caleb anxious.
“Where is he?” I ask.
“He disappeared behind those people over there.” Caleb tilts his head toward a crowd.
Now I feel it too. Tension. Danger. Looking around, I find Mr. Plumber emerging from the crowd. On his face is an expression of malevolence I’ve never seen before.
“He’s circling us,” I say.
“I think he wants to kill us.”
“Why does he want to kill us? We haven’t done anything.”
And now, despite the music and the crowd and the dancing, I can hear Mr. Plumber’s footsteps. They sound like the crunching of dead leaves. The crunch of dead leaves is louder than any of it. Then that’s the only thing I can hear, and the ballroom and Caleb and everything else disappears into blackness.
Blackness. Footsteps. That’s all I know. Except I also know to be afraid.
Opening my eyes, I see leaves. Dried, dead, brown leaves. I feel bark under my fingers. I smell a forest in autumn, the smell of decay, of leaves turning to soil.
Then, in the distance, movement.
Reality is back now. It’s fully with me. The sun has crossed the apex of the sky and has turned the morning into afternoon. My tongue is dry with thirst, my body is statue stiff, and my little bit of the woods is no longer mine alone—it also belongs to the Wolfman.
His head is down. He’s searching for footprints, moving in a sweeping motion across the forest floor. There’s no rifle, only a handgun in a holster. He must have gone back to the truck, and maybe even the cabin, because not only does he have the gun, he’s now wearing a fancy hunting vest with a ton of pockets. Those pockets look full. More zip ties, more elements of torture.
He also has something in his left hand, something like a stick, but from this distance I’m not sure what it is.
The sight of him makes me want to cry. He is like the tide. Always returning, relentless, unbeatable. He’s getting closer to my slanted tree. How does he do it? How can he track so well? The leaves beneath his feet look like every bit of ground I’ve seen. How can he look at those leaves and see a story I’ve told with my stocking feet? I don’t know how he does it, but I know that he does, and that he’ll keep doing it until I stop him.
Despite everything, despite my own survival on the line, despite the terrible things this man has done, it is with sick dread I pull the Colt Python from my pocket. Shooting at him while he raced for a weapon, while on the run, that was one thing. This is another. This is fueled by a different sort of adrenaline, an adrenaline mixed with a cold intellectual knowledge that I am about to try to take another human being’s life. I don’t want to do it. I don’t have the energy for it. But it’s something that has to be done.
He’s right under my tree now.
Although the process of silently withdrawing the pistol and lining up my sights takes only a couple of seconds, an entire memory runs through my mind. I remember when we had to put Tucker’s mother down. She had foundered and was in a slow decline. It was hard to find the right time. She was such a good horse, the first world champion my mother trained as a professional out on her own. She was family. We called her Lucy, and she was the horse I learned to ride on. It was the right thing to do, but that didn’t stop it from being impossibly hard.
I look at Wolfman and I think of Lucy. Lucy lived a good life, was loved and loving, but there was a moment, a moment I was there for, when one second Lucy was alive and the next second Lucy was dead. That’s what’s about to happen to Wolfman, and as far as I know he has never loved or been loved. He’s going to die without the benefit of having lived.
All of this takes less than a second to run through me. As I’m thinking these things, he turns away to examine the base of my tree, and God help me, it feels easier to shoot him in the back than in the front. I line up my sight to a spot between his shoulder blades, and I pull the trigger.
As I squeeze, he turns his head, and there is the tiniest, slimmest of moments when he sees me. I look into those wolf eyes, and even though they are empty, they’re still alive. In that split second he is alive and looking at me. I am alive and looking at him. Then the moment is over, the trigger is pulled back, and the gun is empty.