Dead Watch Read Free

had no idea where she lived, had no thought that she might be in his future. As she spoke to a half million people on Randall James’s show, he knelt on a rubber tarp, not forty miles from her farm, waiting. Above him, the sun was a dull nickel hidden in the clouds.
    The rain had come every night for the past three, courtesy of a low-pressure system stalled over the Appalachians. The night before, the rain began just after 3 A . M . He’d woken in his guest room, upstairs in the cabin, snug under the slanting tin roof. He’d listened for a few moments, the water whispering down a drainpipe, the cotton smell of the quilt around him, and then he’d rolled over and slept soundly until four-thirty.
    He woke at four-thirty every morning. When he opened his eyes, he lay quietly for a moment, surfacing, then looked at the bedside clock, stretched, and got out of bed. He did fifty push-ups and fifty sit-ups on the colonial-style hooked rug from China, then a series of stretches, working hard on his bad leg. As he was finishing his routine, he heard an alarm go off down the hall.
    He grabbed his jeans and a pair of fresh underpants from his bag, and padded barefoot down the hall to the bathroom. Better first than at the end of the line . . .
    He brushed his teeth, skipped shaving, showered quickly. Out of the shower, he dried himself with his designated towel, pulled on the shorts and jeans, and opened the door. Peyson Carter was leaning against the opposite wall, green eyes, sleepy, wrapped in a bathrobe, holding a hair dryer.
    “Morning, Jake,” she said, not looking at his bare chest. His name was Jake Winter. “Billy’s just getting up.”
    “Yeah, let me get out of your way.”
    He slid past her in the hallway, careful not to brush against her. Peyson was his best friend’s wife. Since Billy Carter first brought her around, fifteen years ago in college, he’d been a little in love with her. Some of the feeling, he suspected, was returned. They were always careful not to touch, because there might be a question of exactly when the touching would stop. And she loved Billy . . .
    The guys downstairs were slower getting up, but by the time he’d gotten dressed and into his boots, and gathered his coveralls and gear, they were moving around. He could hear the downstairs shower going, and the plop-gurgle of the coffeemaker, the smell of hot coffee on a cool, rainy morning.
    As he left the room, Peyson came out of the bathroom, steamy and pink, wrapped in the robe, and he said, “Scrambled?” and she said, “Yes,” and shouted, “Billy, get up,” and he followed her down the hall, watching her ass, and God help him, if Billy his best friend ever died in a car wreck, he would be knocking on this woman’s door the next week.
    Peyson went on to the other bedroom and he turned down the stairs.

    In the kitchen, he started breaking eggs into a bowl, got some muffin-premix poured into pan-molds, fired up the oven, took a package of bacon out of the refrigerator. Bob Wilson came out of the downstairs bathroom, hair wet from the shower, and said, “Rain.”
    “Mist.”
    “Gonna make the woods quiet, anyway. Hope the birds don’t hunker down.”
    Sam Barger walked sleepy-eyed from the bedroom and asked Wilson, “You all done in the shower?”
    “Yeah, go ahead.”
    “Rainin’,” Barger said. “TV says it should be outa here by noon.”
    They took a little time over breakfast: the smell of muffins rising in the oven, bacon and eggs, coffee, the pine-wood walls of the cabin. Peyson Carter across from him, curly blond hair, catching his eyes. Did all attractive women keep a spare tire?

    They hunted together every spring and fall, looking for Virginia wild turkeys, four men, one man’s wife. They had the routine down. Everybody knew what to bring—bows, boots, camo, pasta, booze, garbage bags, toilet paper, target faces—and everybody knew about where he or she would set up. They were all bow hunters. Between