A Purple Place for Dying Read Free Page A

full second? Less. Five hundred yards? I pulled myself forward and peered around the trunk of the tree. An empty jumble of hills over there, a thousand crouching-places.
    I had to settle myself down to a rational appraisal of his luck. He had the whole torso to go for. Provided it wasn't some halfwit potting at a twig. That much slug, in shoulder or hip, would do the job. Even if he'd gotten the thigh or the upper arm, my chance of getting help to her in time would have been slim. He had exploded that big pipe that held all the circuits. Massive hydrostatic pressure on the spinal fluid, blowing the brain dark in a microsecond.
    She had died without knowing she was dead.
    I looked at her, my eyes at ground level. The top of her head was toward me. Once I had seen a fence-jumping mare killed by a pickup truck. The corner post of the windshield had hit her behind the ear and snapped her neck, and she had gone down in the same utterly final and boneless way.
    I watched the crumpled country of that neighbor mountain, saw nothing, heard nothing. In the silence I thought I heard a car start, a long long way off.
    The princess wouldn't be making it back to the castle tonight.
    When I got tired of waiting, I scrambled up and ran for the cabin in the way Uncle had taught me once upon a time. I dived into the cool interior, and let my precious treasured flesh unpucker. Her empty glass was on the hearth, pink lipstick on the rim. The leather cushion still bore the imprint of that round behind. I saw battered binoculars hanging on a nail. Eight power. Navy issue. The left lens was knocked out of true. The right was good enough. It showed me the flies with the bright green back-ends scurrying around on her silk shirt.
    Her leather purse was on the chair with the jacket and cowgirl hat. I found eighty-nine dollars in it. I took the eighty. I put my bottle back in the suitcase, went to the doorway, took three deep breaths, then went running for the road.
    I ran until I was down around the first curve. I watched my fingers shake as I lit a cigarette. And then I went swinging down the road.

Two
    WHEN I clambered over the rock slide, I had the insane feeling I should start turning the rocks over, looking for the little white car. I squatted. The gravel was too loose to take a print, and where there wasn't gravel, the earth was baked too hard. But I could see where the little car had been backed around and driven away. I had remembered her leaving the keys in it. There had been no reason not to. Two or three miles down the hill was the weathered gate I had opened and then closed again after she had driven the car through.
    I wondered if it had been her car I had heard starting up. I had another idea. I left my suitcase on the road and climbed to the top of the slide. It took me about five minutes to find the place-scorched blackened rock and a faint stink of explosive. All somebody had to do was pick a likely crack, wedge a couple of sticks in there, and, tumble a few tons of rock onto the road. Why? To make her leave the car there and walk in? Why? So somebody could take the car? Why?
    I ran out of answers, and picked up my suitcase and continued on down the mountain. I thought how curiously merciless it is to kill a provocative woman. They aren't supposed to be killed. No one is supposed to render useless all that sweet flesh and heat and honeyed membrane.
    But dead she was, and dead she would forever be. So I occupied myself with devising and double-checking a reasonable story. After I had let myself out the weathered gate, I was on narrow, pitted concrete, a small road which went nowhere very important, and was in no hurry to get there. I headed back the way we had come. I estimated it another two miles, but it could be further. I had hopes of being picked up. But the four cars that passed me, going my way, went by so quickly I couldn't even get a decent glance at the people in them.
    At last I came to the vaguely-remembered crossroads, to