Praying for Sleep

Hrubek other than a smell of animallike musk and sweat and fragments of shattered animal skulls—like the one Hrubek had left on the woman’s lap in the house in Cloverton. The keys were in the ignition.
    Owen stood and looked around him. The spongy leaves had left no footprints and there was no sign of blood or other trail. Owen stepped behind the Cadillac and turned his back to it as he scanned the vast forest, damp and gray and dark. His heart fell. He knew how hard it was to track on wet leaves and through dark woods. And after an accident this bad Hrubek might be disoriented or stunned and could wander pointlessly in any direction. He might—
    The trunk!
    Owen cocked the gun and spun on his heels, aiming at the broad dented plain of metal—a perfect hiding place. The trunk was secured by a keyhole button but—since the Caddie was an older car—it did not automatically lock. Owen approached. He touched the cold chrome latch, pushed it in. The mechanism snapped open. He pulled the lid up and leapt back.
    The spacious trunk had ample room for someone as large as Michael Hrubek. But it did not in fact contain him.
    Owen turned toward the forest and in a crouch ran to the closest opening in the tall fence of brush and trees. In an instant he was swallowed up by the cold darkness around him. He shone his shielded flashlight on the ground in a slow U pattern. After ten minutes he found two of Hrubek’s boot prints. They led deeper into the forest. He smelled pine in the damp air. The psycho might have headed out of the deciduous trees and Owen would find a clear trail in pine needles. He had proceeded only thirty feet when he heard a thud and a snap nearby—a careless footstep, it seemed.
    He aimed his pistol toward the sound.
    Owen gauged his footsteps perfectly and placed them on foliage-free ground, making no noise as he moved. He crouched, pistol in front of him, and stepped onto the bed of fragrant needles.
    The man was sitting on a fallen tree trunk and massaging his outstretched leg, as if taking a break on a Sunday-afternoon hike.
    “Looks like we just missed him,” the lanky man in a New York Mets cap said to Owen, looking up without a trace of surprise in his face. “So you’re the other bounty hunter. Guess we got a few things to talk about.”
     
    The woman was thirty-six years old and had lived in this prim little bungalow all her life, the past six of those years, after her mother’s death, alone. She hadn’t seen her father since the day the old man got his other daughter pregnant, was arrested for it and taken away. One week after the trial the sister too moved away.
    The woman’s life consisted of filling cartons with electronic circuit boards that did something she had no desire to understand, of lunch with one or two fellow workers, sewing, and—for entertainment—church and the newspaper on the day of rest, and television on the other six.
    The house was an island of caution and simplicity in a grassy clearing carved out of what had been one of the oldest forests in the Northeast. The half acre of grass was almost a perfect circle and was marred only by a rusted hull of a pickup that would never go anywhere under its own power and a doorless refrigerator her father had been meaning to cart to the dump one Saturday morning ten years ago when he chose instead to pay a visit to his daughter’s bedroom.
    Blonde, thin and fragile, the woman had a plain face and a good figure though on the rare occasions when she and a few girlfriends went to the rocky beach at Indian Leap or the riverside at Klamath Falls, she would wear a high-necked swimsuit that she’d bought mail-order so she wouldn’t have to try it on in a store. She dated some—mostly men she met at church—though she rarely enjoyed the outings and had recently started to think of herself, with some comfort, as a spinster.
    Tonight she’d just finished preparing a bedtime snack of Jell-O with mandarin oranges and a cup of hot milk, when she heard the noise in the yard. She walked to the window and saw nothing other than blowing leaves and rain then returned to the maple dining table.
    She sat down, said grace and put her napkin in her lap then lifted a spoonful of Jell-O as she opened TV Guide.
    The knocking on the front door seemed to shake the whole house. The spoon fell to the table and the gelatin-cube wobbled off her lap then escaped onto the floor. She stood abruptly and shouted, “Yes, who is it?”
    “I’m hurt.