Man on a leash - By Charles Williams Page 0,42

it, and then the sickness was gone, and he was conscious only of a cold, consuming rage. He clawed his way up the wall, grasped a protruding root to hold himself there behind the body while he groped in the right-hand pocket of the jacket. He had the automatic then, but it was slick with blood from one of the other wounds, and as he slid back to the bottom of the ravine and started to pull back the slide to arm it, it slipped from his hands. He scooped it up, now pasty with dust, operated the slide, numbly watched the cartridge fly out of the already-loaded chamber, and pounded back up the ravine.

Twenty yards away he threw himself against the sloping wall and inched upward until he could see past a clump of sage at the top. The crest of the ridge ahead of him was at least two hundred and fifty yards away. The handgun, of course, was as useless at that distance as a slingshot, but if the son of a bitch came down to appraise his work and finish off the hiding and unarmed witness, he was going to get the greatest, and last, surprise of his life.

He waited. Minutes crept by. There was no movement anywhere along the ridge. He wiped sweat from his face and left it smeared with blood and dust from his hand. Raising the binoculars, he carefully swept the full crest of the ridge for several hundred yards in both directions and saw nothing but sage and sun-blasted rock. Then he heard a car start up, or a truck, somewhere beyond it. It began to draw away and faded into silence. He turned so he could look out over the flat beyond the ranch house, and in a few minutes he saw the lengthening plume of dust rising from the road as the unseen vehicle sped along it, headed south.

It might be a decoy, he knew; there could have been two of them, one remaining to cut him down when he ventured out into the open, but he didn’t think so. A feeling was growing in him now, a totally inexplicable conviction that the rifleman had been up there the whole time he was walking around this hillside and that the man could have killed him fifty times over. Then why Bonner?

In a few minutes he eased back down the ravine to where it shallowed and finally debouched upon the flat. On shaky knees and with his back muscles. drawn up into knots, he stepped out into the open and started toward the house. After a hundred yards he began to breathe easily again.

When he got out to the gate, the fence was gone on one side of it. Bonner had apparently just chopped his way through the wire without even looking at the chain. The dust of the other vehicle’s passage had long since settled, and there were no others in sight. The wheels spun as he straightened out and gunned it, headed for town.

8

“If you two goddamned bullheaded—” Brubaker searched for a word, gave up in bitter futility, and took a cigar from his desk. He began to strip off the cellophane. “He’d be alive now, but no, he had to go charging out there like a gut-shot rhinoceros instead of telling us about it, whatever it was. And if you can give me one single damned reason on God’s green earth why you shouldn’t be dead too, I’ll kiss your ass at half time in the Rose Bowl. Any one of those four slugs he put in Bonner would have killed him, and he could just as easily put the second one in you instead of wasting it on a man who was already as good as dead while he was still falling. Or maybe you’re so small he wasn’t sure he could hit you at two hundred and fifty yards with probably a twelve power scope, a bench rest, and hand-loaded ammunition that would put all five shots in your eye at that range—”

“I don’t know what he was shooting,” Romstead said wearily. “All I know is it was plenty hot, and he was an artist with it. And I’ve already told you, anyway, he could have shot me any time in that half hour I was wandering around there. He must have been up there all the time, and he knew I’d found their garbage dump and those cigar tubes—” He gestured toward the confused