Free Cold Heart by Chandler McGrew Page A

through the branches to her right, and once again she considered making a break for it.
    He had missed with his first two shots when she ran from the cabin. But she didn't see how he could miss at this range if he spotted her. And the brush would slow her flight so much that he could unload the pistol at her before she even reached the creek. He'd probably reload before she made it to the safety of the far shore.
    If he didn't just chase her down and stab her to death.
    The handkerchief was still stuck to his right boot, glued on with blood and mud. She lowered her head and tried to make herself as tiny as possible. El flailed at the brush, peering this way and that.
    “Come on out, now,” he said, the calm in his voice even more terrifying than before.
    How could anyone do what he had done, be doing what he was doing, and act so calm?
    Suddenly she knew what it was about El that had always set her teeth on edge.
    There was never any emotion in his voice. As though there were no life going on inside him, just the automatic actions of a machine, just chemicals boiling inside his body and his brain.
    “Come on, Dawn. If you're hit, you're going to bleed to death in there and the little animals will pick your bones. You don't want to die like that. Come on out and you can be with your mother. I'll close up the cabin after you. That will be better. You'll be with your mom.”
    The mention of her mother made the tears sting again. Snot ran down her face, dripping like tears onto the ground, and it grossed her out but she was scared to wipe it away. She wanted desperately to blow her nose. She was afraid some weird instinct of El's would point her out to him and he would spin and fire a shot in her direction. She tried even harder to press herself into the ground.
    It seemed only an instant before that she had witnessed the horrible scene in the cabin. But it also seemed as though she had been crouching in the alders for hours, for days. She felt certain the horror would continue forever. That she would be hiding here for eternity, holding her breath, stifling the shivers, terror paralyzing her, waiting for the death blow to fall.
    El spun again and she stiffened, bracing for the killing shot. Her eyes were focused—her entire body was focused— on the scrap of bloody white cloth twisting beneath his boot.
    Why doesn't it come off?
    Is blood that sticky?
    She felt the mirror glasses searching the welter of brush. Felt them on her. Her breath came in involuntary gasps,none large enough to fill her burning lungs. She couldn't quell the shaking of her hands in the dirt.
    The boots finally turned away, upslope, and a tentacle of hope attached itself to her heart.
    But the damned handkerchief chose that instant to dislodge, just as El was taking his first step away, back toward the cabin.
    She saw him bend. His fingers plucked the bloodied square of cotton from the gravel. He lifted the handkerchief, inspecting it closely. Then he sniffed it, like a bloodhound might.
    “Got you,” he said in that same flat voice. “I knew I hit you. If you aren't dead, you need to come out, Dawn. You can't go up the trail without passing me. You're either going to bleed to death here or I can make it fast for you. Come on up to the cabin. I don't have all day.”
    He thinks the blood on the handkerchief is mine.
    If he thinks I'm dead, will he just go away?
    El tossed the handkerchief aside and vanished over the bank.

12:45
    H OWARD MACARTHUR KEPT HIS ears open for another shot. He rubbed sweat off his brow with the sleeve of his blue-denim shirt. Blue-denim shirts were all Howard owned. He wore them summer and winter along with bluedenim pants.
    Not blue jeans.
    Trousers.
    At eighty-five his hearing was amazingly acute, although his vision required the aid of bottle-thick glasses and he didn't get around near as well as he let on. Rheumatism stiffened nearly every joint in his tall body but only Clive Cabel knew how much aspirin and Advil he