Fargo, Burgade, and the sisters would be no trouble. A mass grave right here on the island would take care of them.
The other two, Liz and Tom—they would take some explaining. But that was where Fargo would be the proper villain. Tom found him raping Liz. Fargo killed both of them and then dumped their bodies out on the island where Noah’s dogs savaged them. Noah would be forced—for the first time—to admit that he had dogs like these. But that would help him look like the good citizen. He was so afraid of keeping the dogs anywhere near town that he put them on the island.
As for Fargo, Noah would insist that he’d escaped. And then offer a huge reward for his capture. He would claim that Aaron was missing, too, and that he believed Fargo had likewise killed him and buried the body somewhere.
His final act would be to burn down everything on the island and keep it off-limits to the town, posting a guard to make sure the ban was enforced.
“You even listening to me, Noah?” Burgade said.
“What?” He knew that he sounded old and a bit confused. He had rarely been forced to explain himself to anybody. This story he had to concoct needed to cover so many things, would it satisfy people? Or would all the people who envied and hated him see this as the first serious opportunity to bring him down?
All these deaths tonight, it was supposed to have been a night of hunting, of the singular pleasure of stalking and killing the most challenging prey of all, your own species. Now, all he could think about was going back to the estate and getting a good night’s sleep, safe and comfortable in the knowledge that he was Noah Tillman by God and nobody could touch him.
“I was saying that I think the dogs are hiding. They know we’ll kill them if they come out in the open. So they’re playing hide-and-seek with us. They won’t show themselves until we go back down.”
Noah snorted. “You give them a hell of a lot of credit. You sound like they can think the way humans do.”
Burgade defended his two remaining dogs. “We’ve trained them to hunt and kill, Noah, that’s all they know. They can use more of their senses, that’s what makes them so dangerous.”
“Right now, I’m more worried about what Fargo’s up to.”
“Maybe all those shots—maybe I killed him.”
Noah refrained from tearing into Burgade. Good as Burgade was in some ways, he always tried to convince himself that everything would be fine. Noah knew better. For things to be fine—for things to go your way—you had to manipulate everything from behind the curtain, like a puppeteer. You couldn’t count on killing a man by pounding fifteen shots into a leafy hiding place a good ways away.
“He’s alive,” Noah said.
“What makes you think so?”
“What makes you think he’s dead?”
“All those bullets—he must’ve—”
“Did you hear him fall out of the tree?”
“Well, no, I guess not.”
“Did you hear him scream?”
“No.”
“Then assume he’s alive. And that he’s coming for us.”
“I can handle him.”
“Oh, sure, Burgade. We’re sitting up in a tree with two insane animals waiting to rip us apart. And we’ve got the Trailsman trying to figure out how to kill us.” He spat. “Yes, it really sounds like you’ve got things under control.”
Burgade was a sulker and he started sulking now. He was sick of this rich old bastard always challenging him, questioning him. If Burgade was such a know-nothing then why had Noah hired him in the first place? And if Burgade was such a know-nothing, how was it that he’d run the island so efficiently and effectively all these years?
Nobody had ever snuck on for long. Burgade took care of them. Noah had said that he wanted the most vicious dogs a man could train. And Burgade had trained them just that way. So well, in fact, that they were now hiding from the animals.
And Noah was trying to make himself feel better at Burgade’s expense. But Burgade was sick of being berated, scorned, made fun of by this old bastard.
Burgade leaned out over the sturdy branch they sat on, stared down at the ground.
The thought came out of nowhere. If the dogs were hiding, waiting for them to leave the tree, what if he pushed Noah off the branch. What if Noah became his decoy?
While the dogs were feasting on the old man’s body, Burgade would have enough time to sneak away to the boat—and escape from the island.
He looked at the old man in a whole new way, smiling at Noah as he did so.
Noah wasn’t a human being—he was a big, juicy side of beef.
Just the kind those dogs had dreams about.
Fargo made his descent into a darkness as complete as the inside of a coffin. This side of the tree was angled in such a way that moonlight did not reach it. The interwoven branches from other trees also hampered his climb down. He had to forage through leafage as thick as bushes in some places. He also had to find branches that worked as handholds and ladder rungs for his feet. They weren’t always readily available.
The work was slow. During the descent, he had to worry about falling from the tree and breaking his bones. While crashing probably wouldn’t be all that bad, that wouldn’t help him with the dogs. The dogs would likely be on him in seconds.
He slipped twice and damned near slid down several feet of rough-barked tree. Another time a branch his hands clung to snapped. Luckily, his feet found a solid, if slender, branch a few feet below. The tree was far too wide to wrap his hands around but while he slipped down those few feet, he hugged the tree the way he would hug a grizzly he was wrestling—he never let go of the damned thing.
Darkness. Sweat. Barked knuckles, scraped palms. Awareness of the waiting beasts. Awareness that Burgade and Noah could start firing again at any time.
Then there was the snake. Someday this would make a great story to be told over whiskey in a saloon. But at the moment it happened, nothing at all was funny about it.
As his feet touched a sturdy branch below, he automatically reached up to reposition his hands on the branch he presently held. But in repositioning them, he accidentally moved them over about a foot, taking a moment to flex them. They were badly cramped from the descent.
If there had been any light, he would have known better because he would have seen the snake. At least an outline of it. And so he would have put his hands back where they’d been and quickly dropped down to the next branch, keeping an eye on the creature so that it didn’t, in its spitting anger, dive down for it.
The furious rattling noise it made, just as it was about to strike, startled Fargo so much, he jerked his hands from the branch and crouched down instinctively. This, in turn, caused him to fall backward and crash down through heavy leafage. He might have gone all the way to the ground if he hadn’t reached out blindly and grabbed a handful of leaves and fragile tiny branches that stopped his fall. He swung like an ape from this spot, better than forty feet from the ground, until his feet, desperately searching for a perch, found a gnarled knot of stunted branch that allowed him to hug the tree and stand erect.
He once again pressed himself to the tree. Closed his eyes. Let his hot, ragged breathing find its natural rhythm and pace.
He gave himself a few minutes to put his mind and body back together and then began his descent into utter darkness again. This time, he moved more cautiously.
The closer he got to the ground, the more keenly he listened for the dogs. He began to peer around the tree, holding on with one hand, using the other to part leaves for a look at the shore. Burgade’s boat, traced by moonlight, looked like a means of holy deliverance straight out of the holy book itself. If he could only get to that, find a weapon aboard. . . .
When he was ten feet from the ground, he stopped and listened as intently as he could. He could hear, faintly, the voices of Noah and Burgade—not the exact words—but he certainly heard the urgency of what they were saying. They had to know that if Fargo got a weapon, the first thing he would do once he got past the dogs—if he got past the dogs, of course—was to come after them.