55 IN THE COMPANY OF MONSTERS

55

IN THE COMPANY OF MONSTERS

The dogs are on the scent, respectful of the restraining leash, although Sam can barely keep up with them. Sherlock, Whimsey, and Marple keen and pant and growl, but don't bark. Their excitement is transmitted to Sam as he hitches and staggers up the deer path with a desperate hold on his team. He is as much a member of the pack as he is the master of it, propelled by the thrill of the hunt. Vector and Trott labor after him; accustomed to hiking at a more leisurely pace, both are wheezing, especially Trott with his backpack, and one or the other mutters curses when he has breath to spare. They erupt from the lower forest onto a broad sloping meadow, where the woman is nearing the top of the incline and making for the higher woods.

For a few hundred yards, the underbrush has been so sparse that Monger and Rackman have been charging through it, parallel to the beaten path that Sam follows. Effortlessly, they bear backpacks that contain bottled water and PowerBars but also enough ammunition to win a firefight against a battalion of enemies. Implacable, like robotic terminators in a movie, they have about them the aura of men who will do anything, who allow no restraints to be imposed on them. Sam doesn't entertain illusions about Monger and Rackman, and yet when they come out of the forest to his right and see their quarry and open fire, he's shocked. The AR-15s can be accurate at a significant range, but the woman, Vida, is at the limit of a sure hit, maybe beyond it. They fire bursts, depleting their extended magazines, hoping that volume will bring luck that distance might deny them. From the last of the overhead branches, great flocks that have been perched in silence erupt into flight, dead brown needles spiraling down on the men and dogs.

As Monger and Rackman insert fresh magazines into their rifles and hook the empties to their utility belts to be reloaded later, Galen Vector, closely followed by Frank Trott, rushes into the open meadow. Vector is apoplectic. "Hold your fire, dammit! We want her alive. You know we want her alive ."

Monger and Rackman regard him with expressions as enigmatic as those of the carved-stone heads on Easter Island, as if to say they don't share his agenda and in fact find it incomprehensible.

Their silence and hard stares seem to surprise Vector, though in a moment his eyes narrow and his face becomes as pale as that of a cadaver on which a mortician hasn't yet applied the subtle color of a sleeper sleeping. "You work for me. When have you ever worked for anyone but me? You take orders from me ."

As Vida slips away among the trees, the brothers hulk up the meadow, ignoring Vector's question and his demand.

"I have issues to discuss with her," Vector calls after them. "For Belden, the Bead family."

The confidence with which Monger and Rackman disobey him suggests that whoever now employs them is so much higher up the ladder from Vector that they are guaranteed a rich future and immunity from the vengeance of the Bead crime family.

"Boschvark," says Vector. "He just wants her dead and buried deep. The pig-shit bastard doesn't care about family honor."

Sam has suspected they've been deceiving him, that they aren't interested in interrogating the woman to learn what she might know. Now their actions belie everything they said and implied. They have no intention of buying her off with Boschvark's money. This isn't a search. This is a hunt to the death. He doesn't know who she is, what she's done, what she knows. But his ignorance is an inadequate defense against the charge of being an accessory in a murder case.

Besides, there are the dogs to consider. What happens to them if he's arrested? Will they be impounded by authorities? Put down?

Vector and Trott are watching him like players at a high-stakes poker table, looking for a telltale that might reveal whether he's confident about his position or calculating a new strategy. Because he doesn't know the woman, these men will doubt that his sympathies could be with her; his survival depends on encouraging them in that doubt.

"Sam," Vector says, "Monger and Rackman think they've slipped their leash. Don't worry. They're mine. I've got them."

"You sure?"

"Nothing will happen to her. Except she's going to talk to me."

"They shot at her."

"They won't get another chance. She's safe. Those shithead brothers, those traitors, are dead. They just don't know it."

Sam doesn't believe him. If his disbelief is evident, he will be killed sooner than later.

"You've always been good to me," Sam says.

"Don't forget it."

"It's just my dogs."

"I love dogs," Vector says. "Your pack has done a lot of good work for me. Find the woman. I'll deal with Monger and Rackman."

"Find," Sam tells the dogs, and they are in the hunt again.

Vector stays close beside Sam as they ascend the meadow. "Don't hold the dogs back."

"I'm not holding them back."

"It'll be quicker to turn them loose and let them tree her."

"This isn't a raccoon hunt," Sam says. "They're not trained to tree anyone."

"She doesn't know that. They come at her fast, she'll panic, climb to keep from being bitten."

"Maybe she won't. Anyway, that's not how they're trained. They need the leash and commands to follow. Unleash them, they'll think the hunt is off. They won't go at her fast or at all," Sam insists, though his purpose now is to fail at this task without his dogs coming to harm and without taking a bullet in the head.

"All right, but don't hold them back."

To Vector and Boschvark and all the others, the woman matters because of something she knows, a secret that could bring them to ruin if exposed, whatever that might be. However, considering that she has remained free and alive with such powerful and unscrupulous people aligned against her suggests to Sam Crockett that the secret she's discovered is not the most important thing about her. There is something bigger at work here. Some quality or power she possesses that these men resent but also fear.

As they ascend toward the trees among which Vida disappeared, Sam is unaccountably reminded of an event from eighteen years in the past—the fortuneteller whom he paid with photographs of his father, photos that he no longer valued.

The table of many colors, the candle flames, the three figures of light pulsing on the wall, the woman's piercing stare ...

"Will I be like him?"

"Your father?"

"Yeah."

"Like him in what way?"

"Will I betray people?"

"No. Not you. Never."

Although the meadow rises toward higher phalanxes of trees, somewhere ahead the land descends into the valley that is always just one hill away, the valley of the shadow of death.