Eyes of Prey

down to forty miles an hour, the last car in an informal convoy.
    “What a fuckin’ night,” Druze said. Lightning answered.
    “I couldn’t make it another twenty-four hours,” Bekker answered. “Is he deep?”
    Deep? Ah, he meant George. “More than two feet, anyway,” Druze said. “Probably closer to three.”
    “Should be quick . . . Won’t take long,” Bekker said.
    “You weren’t here last night,” Druze said sourly. “We’re talking about a peat bog. This is gonna take a while.”
    They missed the turnoff to the cabin. Druze had slowed further on the blacktopped county road, driving thirty, then twenty-five, watching for the reflectors that marked the turn . . . but they missed them, went a mile too far, had to come back. They saw only one other vehicle, a pickup, passing in the opposite direction, a man with a hat and a face that was a blurred oval hunched over the steering wheel.
    They found the track coming back, turned and picked their way between the high bushes. The rain was tapering off; the thunderhead, still spitting out long chains of lightning, had moved to the north. The cabin popped up in the headlights like a mirage, congealing out of darkness, suddenly, and close. Druze parked in front of it, killed the headlights and said, “Let’s do it.”
    He took a gray plastic raincoat from the backseat and pulled it on. Bekker wore sophisticated foul-weather gear, with a hood like a monk’s cowl.
    “Take my hat,” he said to Druze, snagging it out of the backseat and passing it to the other man.
    They got out, the ground firm underfoot, sandy rather than muddy. As the rain slowed, a wind seemed to increase and moaned through the bare birch trees overhead. Past the cabin, perhaps two or three hundred yards across the lake, Bekkercould see a blue yard light and, lower, the yellow rectangle of a lighted window.
    “This way,” Druze grunted. His pantlegs below the rain suit were already wet, and he felt the first tongue of water inside his athletic shoes. He put the spade over his shoulder and, with the flashlight playing on the ground, led the way through the brambles, back to the edge of the tamarack swamp. The ground changed from high and sandy to soft, and finally to muck.
    “How much . . .” Bekker started.
    “We’re here.” Druze shined the light on the ground, and Bekker could just pick out an oval pattern of raw earth.
    “I kicked some shit over it before I left,” Druze said. “In two weeks, you wouldn’t be able to find it if you tried.”
    “We’ll do that again before we leave. Maybe get some leaves on it,” Bekker said vaguely. Rain ran down his face and collected in his eyebrows, and he sputtered through it. He was disintegrating in the water, falling apart like the wicked witch, Druze thought.
    “Sure,” Druze grunted. He jammed the flashlight into the branches of a bare bush and scooped up a shovelful of muck. “Dig.”
    Bekker worked frantically, shoveling, talking to himself, spitting in the rain, digging like a badger. Druze tried to be more methodical but after a few minutes simply tried to stay out of the way. To the north, the thunderhead was still rumbling, and another burst of rain put a half-inch of water in the hole.
    “I can’t tell . . .” Bekker said, gasping between words, “I can’t tell . . . if the water’s from the rain . . . or if it’s coming up . . . from below.”
    “Some of both,” Druze said. The flashlight caught a lump that looked different, and Druze prodded it with the tip of his shovel. The blade hit something resilient. “I think I got him.”
    “Got him? Here, let me . . .”
    Bekker motioned Druze aside and knelt in the hole, holding the blade of his shovel like a scoop, working like a man in a frenzy, throwing the muck out in all directions. “We got him,” he said, breathing hard. A hip, a leg, a shoulder, the sport coat. “Got him got him got him . . .”
    Druze stood back, holding the light, while Bekker cleared the mud away from the top of the body. “Shit,” he said, looking up at Druze, his pale face the color and consistency of candle wax, “He’s facedown.”
    “I just kind of dumped him . . .” Druze said, half apologetically.
    “That’s okay, I just have to . . .”
    Bekker tried to free the body by pulling on the sport coat, but there was still too much dirt around it and it held George as firmly as if he were frozen in concrete.
    “Suction or something,”