‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered. ‘I just want you to leave me be.’
He fired again, and the girl shook her head violently, but still she circled, drawing ever closer to him, before she retreated abruptly into the trees. He could still see her, though. She seemed to be tensing herself for a final attempt at him. He decided that his best chance lay in emptying the gun into her, in the hope that the ferocity of his response might finally send her back whence she came. He watched her buck as the first of the bullets hit her, and this time he felt only satisfaction.
A weight struck Ray in the chest, and he heard another shot, although it did not come from him. He fell back against the trunk of a tree and slowly slid down the bark, leaving a sticky trail of blood as he went. His rifle fell from his hands as he sank to a sitting position, his hands splayed by his sides. He looked down and saw the wound in his chest, the redness of it spreading like a new dawn. Ray’s hands hung over the wound, and he sighed like a man who has just spilled soup on himself. His mouth felt dry, and when he tried to swallow the muscles in his throat refused to respond properly. He began to choke.
Two men appeared before him, one tall and black, his face and head hairless but for a neatly-trimmed graying beard at his chin, the other shorter and scruffier. They seemed familiar. He tried to recall where he had seen them before, but he was too busy bleeding out to concentrate on faces. Behind them appeared three other people, one of them a young woman. The black man kicked away Ray’s rifle. Ray stretched out a hand to him. He did not know why, except that he was dying, and dying was like drowning, and a drowning man will always reach out in the hope of finding something to save him from sinking.
The black man took Ray’s hand and gripped it, as the seconds of Ray’s life melted away like snowflakes in the sun. It was the girl, Ray realized: she knew that she wouldn’t get him, so she let these others take him instead. By firing at her, he had fired on them, and now they had killed him for it.
‘Who is he?’ said one of the others, a big, bearded man who looked out of place among these others, yet more at home in the woods.
Ray tried to speak. He wanted to tell them:
My mother gave me my name. The kids used to laugh at me in school because of it. I never had any luck that wasn’t bad, and maybe my name was the start of it.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. I was looking for an airplane.
My name is—
51
We searched the dead man’s body. He had two thousand dollars in cash in his pockets, along with some candy bars and a suppressor for the 9 mm pistol he carried under his coat. He bore no identification. Louis had killed him after he fired two shots in our direction, one of which had missed Liat by inches, and seemed set to fire a third. If Louis hadn’t shot him then I would have, but I felt shame as I stared down at this unknown man, dead at our hands in the depths of the Maine wilderness, all to secure a list of names from a plane that might already have been consumed by the forest.
‘You recognize him?’ said Angel.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘There is something about him.’
‘He was in the ice-cream parlor back in Portland. Louis threatened to shoot him and his buddy.’
‘I guess it was meant to be,’ said Louis.
‘I guess so,’ said Angel.
‘I doubt that he came out here alone,’ said Jackie.
‘Could be he was the one we heard doing all that shooting earlier,’ said Angel.
‘Still doesn’t answer the question of who he was shooting at before he began taking potshots at us.’
The trail left by the gunman was clear to follow. He had broken branches and trampled shrubs as he made his way through the forest. It was not the careful progress of a hunter, whether of animals or men. This man had been running from something.
‘You reckon we’re still heading northwest?’ I said to Jackie.
‘Far as I can tell without a working compass, but I’d lay good money on it.’