Earl walked along the path after T-Bone and Rusty for a few hundred yards to let his pupils open to the dark and his muscles get warm. Then he stopped and did a few stretching exercises against a tall cedar. When he was ready, he began to run.
As he ran, Earl considered his circumstances, and he found them to his liking. Jane Whitefield and Pete Hatcher had graciously gone to a great deal of exertion and inconvenience to put themselves into a place where he was strong and they were weak. Hatcher had been saved twice by the simple fact that it was hard to kill a man in a public place without committing suicide. Now it was only one day before the whole national park closed, and there would be no more tourists setting out into the high country to get in the way.
Earl moved through the woods with a hunter’s practiced lope. He had always been a sportsman who loved to take the long, difficult shot, so he had spent many cold mornings running patiently through rough country, trailing wounded deer until they began to choke and cough too much blood to go on. Tonight he used his dogs to find his way and keep him on the path. He could hear the difference when their panting came from higher or lower, left or right, and the thuds of their big paws told him the nature of the surface they were running on. Turning on a flashlight in these woods would have given his presence away to anyone looking back from the ridges above, and the glare would have made his pupils contract, leaving him half-blind for several minutes.
Earl habitually held his head a little to the side as he ran, because the best night vision was at the edges of the eyes, and none of the wind from his running distorted the sounds. He knew his long legs carried him farther at each stride than his prey could step, and his stamina would keep him going longer than any man who had spent his days lounging around in Las Vegas.
He knew that the two of them must have started hiking at least four or five hours ago, but that did not bother him. They would walk for a few hours, until the moon was high and the wind up here started to howl, and then they would take their own exhaustion as an assurance that Earl would be too tired to follow. They would camp, make a shelter and a fire, and curl up. Maybe they would be cautious enough to tramp a distance off the main trail first, but they wouldn’t risk going too far.
They didn’t know what was after them. Earl could just discern the black barrel torsos of Rusty and T-Bone ahead of him in the dark—beasts with as much mass and muscle as small men, that could hear a twig the size of a toothpick snap under a boot, smell a fire in the woods for miles, and see with a predator’s vision that didn’t bother much with subtle gradations of tone and color but had evolved to pick out unerringly whatever was alive so they could sink their teeth into it.
As Earl ran, he could feel the strange, triangular field between him and Rusty and T-Bone, the dogs’ attentiveness to his sound and scent holding them in position. They were as alert to any change in his will as to the sights and sounds ahead of them. The dogs were part of him now. He was a creature with three heads and sharp teeth and a rifle and a man’s brain, galloping through the forest sniffing the wind for the smell of live meat.
Carey had finished his hospital rounds at seven, but he had found over the past ten days that each night he went home a little later. The old, comfortable house where he had grown up now seemed cavernous and empty because Jane wasn’t there waiting for him. Tonight he had gone back to his office and spent two hours making notations in the files of his patients, signing forms and letters that Joy had typed and left on his desk, then looking over the latest pile of medical journals for articles that he needed to study. At nine he walked back to the hospital lot, climbed into the BMW, and remembered that he still had not stopped to fill up the tank. In the midst of that Susan Haynes business last night, he had forgotten, and then in the morning she had managed to delay him long enough so that he had not had time.
He turned the key carefully with dread in his heart and listened intently. The engine turned over, and the car violated Carey’s sense of the laws of physics by starting, then taking him to the gas station without running dry.
As Carey drove up to the big old house in Amherst he was thinking about food. It was nearly ten o’clock, and he had not had dinner yet. Maybe he would just make himself a sandwich and go to bed. He saw that there were lights on in a couple of the downstairs windows. Susan Haynes had obviously forgotten to turn off any switches before she had locked the door this morning … if she had remembered to do that much. He pulled into the long driveway toward the garage. As he reached the place where the drive turned the corner of the house, his headlights lit up the bright-red tail reflectors of the car parked by the back door. It was the big black Mercedes that Susan Haynes had leased.
Carey stopped his car, pulled it forward around the big Mercedes to keep from blocking it in, and killed the engine. He glanced at his watch again. It was nine fifty-six. This woman was in his house at nine fifty-six waiting for him to come home. He closed his eyes and felt a constriction in the muscles of his throat.
His mind surveyed his mistakes leading backward in time like stepping stones. He should never have given her his key. He should never have invited an unattached woman to stay the night, never have given her a ride, never even have let on that her car had been towed to clear his parking space. He batted away the excuses that his mind automatically fabricated and spit out for him, like a machine that had short-circuited: no, he had not done it because she had really needed his help. He had done it because she was beautiful and he had not wanted to stop looking at her; because she was smart and distracting and he was tired of being alone. He had liked her. The nervously clinical words of an old study of physiological responses came back to him. Affection—even the most innocent kind—was found to prompt a “slight tumescence of the genitals.” And that, in turn, would probably prompt a rationalization.
He knew that he could not start his engine again, back out of the driveway, and abandon his house until this woman got tired of waiting and went away. The only other option he had was to go inside and find out what she thought she was doing. It took him a moment to identify the source of his reluctance to face her. It was the instinctive alarm that made animals shy away from one of their kind that was behaving strangely. It had probably kept a lot of epidemics from spreading to healthy animals and wiping out entire species. This time the instinct was serving no purpose. Neuroses weren’t contagious.
He walked around to the front door, found it unlocked, and stepped inside. The smell of food cooking overwhelmed him and reminded him how hungry he was. Susan had sneaked into his house and cooked something for him. He was relieved. It was unwelcome, but at least it was comprehensible, possibly even within the boundaries of normal behavior. He tried to analyze his lingering irritation at her. What had she actually done? He supposed that what had annoyed him most was that she had playfully set off a sexual longing that he was not entitled to feel. As soon as he had admitted it, he felt ridiculous for resenting her for it: blaming women for stimulating impure thoughts had gone out with witch trials. Or it should have.
He detected that he was also straining against some primitive territorial reaction she had triggered by coming into his lair without permission. The hostility was misplaced—just another legacy from earlier primates that had begun to get in the way. She wasn’t trying to harm him. She was trying to be kind, after all. A lot of people believed that the rules should be abrogated for surprises. Carey was not one of those people, but he had to live in the world. “Hello?” he called. “Anybody here?”
When he heard no answer, he ventured into the living room. He moved into the dining room, and saw her. She was facing away from him, wearing a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt that he recognized as Jane’s. If it had not been for the long, golden hair he might almost have convinced himself that she was Jane. She was pouring champagne into two glasses. The table was elaborately set with the best silver, and the candles were lit. She turned and held out a glass. “Hi,” she said. The reserved, distant smile was on her lips. “Have you eaten dinner?”