Dead Watch Read Free Page A

the five of them, they averaged two turkeys per season. Turkeys were tough.
    All that brought him to the rubber tarp, where he knelt in the gloom, waiting for his bird to move. A little hungry now, trying to ignore it. The four-foot-square mat made it possible to shift his weight silently; he had to shift frequently because of his lame leg. The tangle of brush around him made it possible to draw the bow without the motion being seen.
    He had a Semiweiss Lighting compound bow, the draw weight adjusted down to provide for a very long hold. He was shooting carbon-fiber arrows, one-inch broadheads with stoppers. A good-sized tom hung out in the oaks behind him. And the tom would be coming out to this cornfield, and with luck, following a track along a shallow ravine below him. He knew the bird sometimes did that, because he’d seen the scat and the tracks on scouting trips.
    Whether the tom would do it this day, he didn’t know.
    He waited, listening, straining to see in through the brush, the problems of the bureaucracy falling away from him. He’d hunted most of his life, since his grandfather had first taken him out when he was six years old. He hunted deer and turkeys in Virginia, elk and antelope out west. When he was hunting, he stepped into a Zen-space and became part of the landscape. Time didn’t pass, nor did it stop; it simply wasn’t. He faded away from himself and his day-to-day problems.
    He’d been in place since dawn. The sun came up, rose higher, broke briefly out of the clouds, disappeared again. A breeze sprang up, played with the oak leaves, died again; squirrels ran across the ground, noisy beasts; a chickadee stopped on a branch a foot from his nose.
    He saw it all, but didn’t look at it. He was waiting . . . When the cell phone went off.

    “Ahhhh . . . Jesus!”
    The sound was stunning, like being hit in the face by a snowball. He rushed back to the present, out of the Zen-space to the here-and-now. He unzipped a panel on his camo, pushed his hand through to a shirt pocket underneath, and took the phone out.
    “Yes.” The only people who had the number for that phone were people he needed to talk with.
    A woman’s voice, quiet, cultivated: “Jake, this is Gina Press. I’m sorry to bother you, I understand you’re on vacation. The guy needs to see you.”
    “When?”
    “Today. Where are you?”
    “Down in the valley. It’ll be a while.”
    “It’s pretty urgent. Can I put you on the log for four forty-five?”
    He looked at his watch: One o’clock. “Okay—but give me a hint.”
    “Madison Bowe.”
    “I’ll be there.”

    The killer could feel the pull of the .45 in his pocket, pulling down on his shoulders, and maybe his soul.
    He was moving Lincoln Bowe. Bowe was pale, naked, unconscious, a sack of meat, for all practical purposes. The killer had him slung in a blue plastic tarp, purchased at a Wal-Mart, and wrestled him down the narrow stairs, under the single bare basement bulb.
    He was a big man, straining with the load, trying for a kind of tenderness while moving two hundred pounds of inert human being. He wore blue coveralls from Wal-Mart, purchased for the murder, and a hooded sweatshirt, with the hood pulled over his head, and plastic gloves. He knew all about DNA, and it worried him. A hair, a little spit, and he could wind up strapped to the death gurney, a needle in the arm . . .
    He got the load down, puffing and heaving all the way, then looked back up the stairs: two minutes and he’d have to take the body back up. But he couldn’t do the killing upstairs, the neighborhood was too tight, somebody might hear the shot.
    He moved Bowe under the light, spread the tarp, exposed him. He was lying on his back, soft and helpless. His body was dead white, touched here and there with blemishes, pimples, the rashes and scrapes of an out-of-shape man in his fifth decade. He looked at Bowe for a few seconds, then said aloud, “Here we are. Christ Almighty.”
    No