Coburn sighed.
“Honor and why don’t you shut the hell up.”
NOTHING HAPPENED FOR THREE HOURS.
Coburn was getting antsy, and becoming more annoyed with Joe Pickett by the minute. The evening sun was dropping below the tops of the trees, casting deep shadows through the golden light. The smell of the cool pines seemed to intensify. The temperature had dropped ten degrees. It would be dark in two hours.
His shoulder had gone from screaming pain to what was now a low throbbing. If he sat still, he could stand it. But when he moved, even when he took a deep breath, he had to clench his teeth to keep from moaning, groaning, or cussing a blue streak. Despite the chilly air, he was sweating. Only an act of will, and his training for covert missions, prevented him from shivering. He had no doubt he could do what he needed to do with the .45 in his left hand. Especially at close range.
But he wasn’t sure he’d even get the chance.
The game warden sat still.
He worried that Pickett had fallen asleep. He stared across at the man who seemed to be looking at nothing. Face stoic. Or was it empty? He wasn’t sure which, but either way it was getting on his nerves.
“Blink if you can hear me, Pickett.”
“I hear you.”
“What are you doing?”
“Thinking.”
“Please don’t strain yourself, but could you speed it along so I don’t bleed out?”
“I’ve been waiting for Rojo to come back.”
“Rojo?”
“My steed,” Pickett said, with an embarrassed smile. “It doesn’t look like he’s coming.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
Pickett was quiet for a long time. Then said, “Do you hear anything?”
He perked up, but when he tried to straighten his shoulders, pain pulsed through them.
“No,” he said. “It’s perfectly quiet, except for a little bit of wind.”
“Right,” Joe said. “We’ve been waiting three hours and the natural sounds haven’t come back. No birds, squirrels, anything. Meaning, those guys are still up there.”
He was more than a little impressed that the game warden had determined that. Coburn had engaged in guerrilla warfare in Central America. When the birds quit calling and the monkeys stopped chattering, you unsheathed your machete because somebody was close.
“It also probably means they aren’t exactly sure what they’re going to do,” Pickett said. “Otherwise we would have heard something. Low talking. A branch snapping underfoot. Something. I think they’re still up there, but confused.”
“By what?”
“Think about it,” Pickett said. “It was around noon when they were peppering us with gunfire and watched us take cover here. But because they’ve only seen you, they might assume I was hit and died in here. They haven’t even caught a glimpse of me. They’re pretty sure you’re hit. And since that happened we haven’t shown ourselves. For all they know there are two dead men down here.”
He gave a curt nod of agreement.
Pickett asked, “Have you ever hunted?”
“You mean game?”
“What else?”
He turned his head aside, looked into the darkness, and said quietly, “Men.”
“Only bad men, though.”
“Sort of depends on who you ask, doesn’t it?”
Pickett said nothing for a moment, then cleared his throat. “I was thinking elk or deer.”
“Long ago in Idaho, with my dad,” he said.
He’d been twelve years old. His father shot a mule deer from the window of their truck before the sun came up, which was illegal. In the headlights, his dad had put the wounded animal out of its misery by hitting it on the head with a shovel.
“Didn’t like it much,” he said.
“Maybe you can still relate to my point.”
“Which is?”
“You can spend weeks in a wilderness like this, going after elk or moose. Stalking. Camping. Moving on foot. The first few years you hunt you’re filled with bloodlust. It’s how men are wired. We want to blast away and kill something and get our hands bloody. But it gets frustrating after a while because these animals we hunt are prey. That’s how they’re wired. They aren’t particularly smart, but they know not to charge into a confrontation. Instead, they avoid ’em.”
“What does that have to do with us?”
“Maybe nothing. But from what you tell me, these One Nation guys are just dumb rednecks. If they were smart, they’d hightail it out of these mountains while they’ve had the chance. Either that, or they’d wait until morning and sneak down here to make sure we’re dead. But these guys are dumb. And violent. They have bloodlust. So they’re itching to confirm their kills, bury our bodies, and get to working on this building again so they can go back to inciting a race war. In other words, they don’t have much patience and they’re probably hungry, like I am.” Pickett chinned toward the coolers and canned goods in the shadow of the trees. “They want their Dinty Moore stew.”
Coburn saw the logic in what Pickett said. Besides, in the shape he was in, he couldn’t launch an attack on a butterfly, much less two idiots with firepower and a cause.
“So we wait them out?”
“Till they make a move,” Pickett said.
“Or I drain dry of blood.”
“Whichever comes first.”
“EMILY.”
Pickett opened his eyes.
It had been an hour and a half since either of them had spoken. They had thirty minutes of light left, although it had been a while since they’d seen the sun. The dark walls of trees seemed to be closing in, and because the breeze had stopped it seemed incredibly still and totally silent except for Coburn’s whisper of a name.
“What?” he whispered back.
“Honor and Emily.”
He was puzzled. “That’s a new one.”
Coburn shook his head. “Honor is the name of my . . . woman. Emily’s her daughter. Five years old.”
He tried to keep his surprise from showing. “So you have a family?”
“Barely.”
Joe waited for more that didn’t come. Finally, he said, “I’ve got a great wife and three daughters. I don’t mind admitting that, if it weren’t for them, I don’t know what good I’d be.”
Coburn looked over hard at him. “You mean like me.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You wouldn’t be far off the mark. She and I have only been together three months.”
“Marybeth and I met in college.”
Coburn shifted uncomfortably. “Honor and I met under more unusual circumstances.”
He waited for more.
“I crawled out of a swamp into her yard, held her at gunpoint, threatened her life, and tied her up.”
“Never would’ve taken you for such a romantic.”
Coburn puffed a laugh. “She was involved in this case I was working.”
He motioned toward Coburn’s belly. “Is that when that happened?”
“Yep. Didn’t know if I’d ever see her again. I started going out to the airport every day.” Coburn paused. “Anyhow, that asshole I told you about? My boss. Hamilton? Honor threatened him with bodily harm if he didn’t tell her where I was. She would’ve been better off staying in Louisiana. But one day there she was. With Emily and Elmo.”