Free Vineyard Prey by Philip R. Craig Page B

interested in Kate MacLeod?
    Was he, after all, just a guy anxious to jump her lovely bones? If so, why follow me?
    I was long on questions and short on answers. One thing I was pretty sure of was that if Joe Begay did terminate the Bunny, I’d never learn where or how and nobody outside of his professional circle would even know it had happened. The Bunny would simply be gone.
    On the other hand, if the Bunny killed Joe and Kate, there was a good chance that he’d make a spectacle of his work, to show people who cared about such things that he was more than capable of tough jobs that others in his field might shun and that he was not a man to mess with. It would be good publicity and could lead to a fee hike for his services.
    I wondered why no one had a good photo of him. He must have passport pictures, at least. Why didn’t Joe’s agency have a copy? Some agency must haveone; why didn’t the members of the fatal trade mission have copies?
    I was glad to be out of the Bunny business, but I wasn’t sure that was actually the case. I might think I was, and Joe and Kate might think I was, but the Bunny might not think so and Green Coat might not think so and maybe there were other people I didn’t even know about who didn’t think so. And if any of them didn’t think so, I might be a target.
    Good grief! I was getting paranoid! Pretty soon I’d be hearing voices and thinking that everybody in the whole world was a Bunny!
    Maybe I was paranoid and being followed at the same time.
    Maybe this, maybe that. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
    Maybe nothing at all.
    As I passed a parked pickup, two hunters in orange camouflage coats and caps came out of the woods. One carried two shotguns and the other had a deer slung over his shoulder. They looked tired but happy. I’d once been a hunter so I knew how they felt. There’d be venison for their supper tonight. My mouth grew moist at the thought.
    For them, life was good and the Easter Bunny didn’t exist.
    I thought of the torturer’s horse and of the boy falling from the sky while the ship sailed calmly by. The world didn’t stop turning for love or for loss. It had turned as Abelard and Héloïse lay abed, it had turned as Rome fell, and it would turn the day they buried me.
    In my mind an image appeared of the wheels ofmy truck turning on the turning earth. It was a hint that I was wasting time thinking shallow thoughts. Enough of that! I had most of the day left, so I’d do something useful for a change. I decided to go home, get keys for the houses I looked after during the winter, and put in a few hours of caretaking.
    But, just in case, I was careful when I drove down our long, sandy driveway. I checked the woods on both sides, drove slowly, and eased into the yard. Nothing seemed unusual. Oliver Underfoot and Velcro ran to meet me, giving me their usual lectures. I studied the house, then got out and petted the cats.
    The tape was still at the bases of the front and back doors, so I went inside and checked the rooms. Everything looked the same as when I’d left it earlier that morning.
    I got the keys and was walking toward the front door when I heard a car coming down the driveway. I looked out a window. It was a black sedan.
    I tossed the keys onto a table and trotted to the gun cabinet. I hurriedly opened it and loaded my old .38 revolver while listening for the silence that would follow the sedan’s engine stopping and the sound of the driver’s door shutting behind him.
    But the engine didn’t stop and the car door didn’t close. I went back to the window. The car had stopped beside my truck. The man in the green coat was only partially out of the car and was sagging against the door as if he was too tired to go farther.
    As I looked, he lurched to his feet and staggered toward the house, and I saw blood on the front of his coat and the hand that he held against his chest.
    I shoved the pistol in