He didn't think he'd have trouble sleeping tonight. Something about working as a detective again had helped him in so many ways, he could not begin to thank Meredyth enough. He made a mental note to do so as he drifted off to sleep.
Lucas had been hopeful that he and Meredyth might find a common sexual interest in one another, and to that end, he had changed his room at the front desk. His room had been opposite hers, across the hall, but now it was adjacent, a mere pair of doors between them, which he had toyed with on entering, trying to get up the nerve to knock, but hadn't. Now he heard a rattle, a snake rattle… no, the rattle of keys, perhaps, just outside in the hallway, and the second shook him from slumber. At first he thought it might be her, knocking at the adjoining door, but no, this was a set of keys and a turning lock. Other guests, he assumed.
Still, curious, Stonecoat slipped from bed to investigate the noise. He heard muted voices. . “No one there,” he heard.
Stonecoat grabbed his gun and the empty ice bucket, tore his door wide while concealing the gun behind the bucket, and saw that it was one of the young Indian sons of the proprietor, snooping in his old room. Their eyes met.
The jet-black eyes quivered, and the boy with the copper skin said, “I knocked, but no answer.”
“Were you looking for me?” asked Lucas.
“Yes. They told me to locate you.”
“They?”
He looked nervously past Lucas, his eyes darting. “FBI.”
“Oh, those clowns.” Stonecoat followed the boy's eyes, only to see shadowy figures and some sort of glinting metal in the dark vestibule. He suddenly recognized it as the business end of a crossbow pointed at him-he guessed- from the end of the hall. “Hit the floor!” he shouted and dove at once, springing the gun from the bucket and firing to his left twice, his right once. Two arrows whizzed by, their whirring noise ending with two jarring thuds and an outcry from the boy.
The shadowy assassins had dematerialized with the gunshots. “Meredyth!” he shouted, got to his feet and lunged through her door as she opened it, having been awakened by the noise.
He grabbed her, and using his gun as a ram, knocked over the single lamp she'd turned on, then cushioned her fall as he pushed her down, all in one fluid motion. At the same instant a window was shattered, and over Meredyth's ear, she heard the singing, snakelike hiss of another arrow whipping by.
“Are you all right?” Lucas asked as they lay together in the darkness, their hearts beating a dangerous anthem.
“Why are these guys such poor shots?” she asked.
“We had some warning. None of their other victims had the slightest idea they were targets.”
Stonecoat made his way to her window, cutting his feet on broken glass but not making a sound, his Browning automatic clutched in his massive hand. He stared out on a moonlit mesa filled with stunted trees, each one looking like an assassin. The South Dakota night did what it was meant to do. There were shadows and deep black holes everywhere he looked, any one of which could conceal assassins with crossbows. He searched for any sign of movement anywhere, but there was only a deafening silence and stillness mocking him. He wanted to climb out the window, go in search of the men who had done this, but he feared leaving Meredyth alone.
“No one out there. Fled like crows in the night,” he whispered.
“Bastards,” she growled. “Gutless cowards.”
They heard groaning and tearful crying from the hallway. The boy, remembered Lucas, rushing to the door, past the steel shaft in the wall. Meredyth quickly followed and lost her breath, seeing the young Indian boy impaled by the neck against the door.
“Damn! Don't move! Stay perfectly still,” Lucas was saying to the boy as his family came running out.
There was bedlam and panic from the boy's parents, but Lucas shouted everyone down. “You want the boy to live through this? Do as I say! You, Jake,” he said to the big brother, “get on the phone and call 911. Seth,” he shouted to the boy's stunned father, “get a pair of metal cutters, no, bolt cutters, you got that, Seth? You got that? Hurry!”
The father ran off after the cutters. Lucas shouted to the mother to be ready with a blanket to keep her son warm, and he told the sister to get a clean sheet to cut and clot the blood with. “And some plastic.”
“Plastic?” she asked.
“Like a bag, Baggies. Clean ones.”
The arrow had gone clear through, the arrowhead sticking out the other side of the door, the feathers tickling the boy's throat. “Don't struggle against the arrow, son,” he now told the boy, whose eyes beseeched him to do something.
“We'll get you to the hospital. You'll be all right. I can see from the amount of blood that no vital blood vessel was hit. You were, believe it or not, very lucky.”
He didn't look lucky, Meredyth thought. Rather, he looked as if he had been suddenly turned into one of those helpless butterflies pinned to a box.
The father returned with a pair of large bolt cutters to snip off the arrowhead so the shaft could be pulled through the boy's neck with one quick yank, but rather than turn the cutters over to Lucas, he said, “This is for me to do. Your enemies, whoever they are, are still lurking outside. I heard them. Go.”
Lucas nodded and started away. Meredyth shouted, “Wait a minute, Stonecoat. You're not going out there alone.”
“Stay with these people. They may need your protection. And wrap the wound in plastic and bandages. It'll stanch the blood flow.”
“And who's going to protect you from yourself?” she shouted as he disappeared out the back door.
Lucas had viciously attacked the back door, kicking at the bar lock running across it, throwing it open, and leaping like a pronghorn sheep out into the darkness, going into a tumble, ignoring his limitations, knowing he'd be sore in the morning. He now scrambled to a boulder jammed between two white pines. The darkness painted everything black now, the moon having found refuge behind scudding clouds. In the distance, the howl of a lone wolf tugged achingly at the heart, while a tickling breeze played its fingers over Lucas's perspiring brow.
His heart was beating like a running buffalo's, but he felt alive and strong and at ease with himself.
The door behind him jack-hammered open again, and he saw Meredyth racing toward him. “Get down!” he shouted, as a steel-shafted arrow suddenly twanged into the tree beside his head, inches from his temple.
Lucas had to fire blindly in the direction from which the arrow had come, spitting as it had like a coal from hell, but his true attention was drawn by Meredyth, whom he pulled down beside him. “Damn it, I told you to stay put.”
“I'm not leaving you alone to fight these madmen!”
'Then at least be quiet.”
“Do you hear something?” she asked.
“Over you, you mean?”
“Sounds like someone moaning.”
“A wolf,” he suggested.
“No, definitely human.
“Maybe I got dumb shit lucky.” He cocked an ear to his left, the direction from which the arrow had come whizzing at him. Someone was groaning. “Maybe I hit the bastard,” Lucas again suggested.
In the distance, they heard the approach of an ambulance siren, help coming for the kid. But it also appeared to send the rats scurrying. Shadows were suddenly moving everywhere, two, three, then four, as the moon slowly revealed itself and the purple landscape all around them.
“Fire at will!” shouted Lucas, who raised his weapon and began firing alongside Meredyth, who was also frantically firing, when suddenly Lucas went down with a thud, as if hit.
Meredyth grabbed him up in her arms, certain that he'd been hit, but there was no arrow and there was no blood from a gunshot wound. She called his name several times before he opened his eyes.