Shadowfires

Remington and the.357,
but he could not handle both efficiently, and he preferred the
shotgun.
    They moved off into the brush just far enough to slip around the
padlocked gate, returning to the dirt track on the other side.
    Ahead, the road rose under a canopy of pine limbs, flanked by rock-
lined drainage ditches bristling with dead dry weeds that had sprung
up during the rainy season and withered during the arid spring and
summer. About two hundred yards above them, the lane took a sharp
turn to the right and disappeared. According to Sarah Kiel, the lane
ran straight and true beyond the bend, directly to the cabin, which
was approximately another two hundred yards from that point.
    “Do you think it's safe to approach right out on the road like this?” Rachael whispered, even though they were still so far from the cabin that their normal speaking voices could not possibly have carried to Eric.
    Ben found himself whispering, too.
“It'll be okay at least until we reach the bend. As long as we can't
see him, he can't see us.”
    She still looked worried.
    He said, “ If he's even up there.”
    “He's up there,” she said.
    “Maybe.”
    “He's up there,” she insisted, pointing to vague tire tracks in the thin layer of dust that covered the hard-packed dirt road.
    Ben nodded. He had seen the same thing.
    “Waiting,” Rachael said.
    “Not necessarily.”
    “Waiting.”
    “He could be recuperating.”
    “No.”
    “Incapacitated.”
    “No. He's ready for us.”
    She was probably right about that as well. He sensed the same
thing she did: oncoming trouble.
    Curiously, though they stood in the shadows of the trees, the
nearly invisible scar along her jawline, where Eric had once cut her
with a broken glass, was visible, more visible than it usually was in
ordinary light. In fact, to Ben, it seemed to glow softly, as if the
scar responded to the nearness of the one who had inflicted it, much
the way that a man's arthritic joints might alert him to an oncoming storm. Imagination, of course. The scar was no more prominent now than it had been an hour ago. The illusion of prominence was just an indication of how much he feared losing her.
    In the car, on the drive up from the lake, he had tried his best
to persuade her to remain behind and let him handle Eric alone. She
was opposed to that idea-possibly because she feared losing Ben as
much as he feared losing her.
    They started up the lane.
    Ben looked nervously left and right as they went, uncomfortably
aware that the heavily forested mountainside, gloomy even at midday,
provided countless hiding places-ambush points-very close to them on
both sides.
    The air was heavily laced with the odor of evergreen sap, the
crisp and appealing fragrance of dry pine needles, and the musty
scent of some rotting deadwood.
    Reeeeee, reeeeee, reeeeee…
He had returned to the armchair with a pair
of binoculars that he had remembered were in the bedroom closet. Only
minutes after settling down at the window, before his dysfunctioning
thought processes could take off on yet another tangent, he saw
movement two hundred yards below, at the sharp bend in the road. He
played with the focus knob, pulling the scene in clearer, and in
spite of the depth of the shadows at that point along the lane, he
saw the two people in perfect detail: Rachael and the bastard she had
been sleeping with, Shadway.
    He had not known whom he expected-other than Seitz, Knowls, and
the men of Geneplan-but he had certainly not expected Rachael and
Shadway. He was stunned and could not imagine how she had learned of
this place, though he knew that the answer would be obvious to him if
his mind had been functioning normally.
    They were crouched along the bank that flanked the road down
there, fairly well concealed. But they had to reveal a little of
themselves in order to get a good look at the cabin, and what little
they revealed was enough for Eric to identify them in the magnified
field of the binoculars.
    The sight of Rachael enraged him, for she had rejected him, the
only woman in his adult life to reject him-the bitch, the ungrateful
stinking bitch! -and she turned her back on his money, too.
Even worse: in the miasmal swamp of his deranged mind, she was
responsible for his death, had virtually killed him by angering him
to distraction and then letting him rush out onto Main Street, into
the path of the truck. He could believe she had actually planned his
death in order to inherit