Duggai was naked in the pool, floating, paddling.
The truck was in the shade under the cliff, its tailgate overhanging the tanque: out of habit Duggai had backed it in.
Mackenzie hadn’t realized Duggai would be able to get the truck that close to the pool.
Bleak realization desolated him. The truck was in Duggai’s sightline. There was no way to get to it without being seen.
He looked at the pool again.
Duggai was looking right at him.
Mackenzie let his breath trickle out slowly through his mouth. It occurred to him after a moment that with the bright sky in his eyes Duggai couldn’t see him. Duggai floated around, splashing lazily, benign. By the bank of the pool his clothing was heaped and the Magnum’s blue gleam came from the top of the pile of clothes. Duggai was within arm’s reach of it.
Duggai stiffened and listened to something and then relaxed, having identified and dismissed it.
The rifle wasn’t there.
So the rifle was in the truck. But the truck was visible to Duggai and probably the door was locked.
When Duggai rolled over in the water and began to wash his face Mackenzie backed away from the rim, moving by inches. He had to fight a cough down. He slithered back along the slope until he was concealed from below. The sun blasted him into the ground but he found his feet and got upright and swayed when the last strength tried to run out of him as if a drainplug had been pulled.
He tightened everything. Massive effort. Down to raw quivering nerve ends he walked the tangential incline to the point where he’d ambushed the javelina. The cliff ended here. He stumbled out onto the game trail. The splintered ground punished his feet into an agony that was almost blinding.
Rich light streamed across the desert, its color too bright: it made his head swim. Hot wind soughed through the brush. Mackenzie feebly went up along the game trail in a silent crippled crouch.
He went past a dispirited mesquite and around the jutting rock. The truck came in sight, its snout facing him. Beyond it he heard splashing in the pool.
He put his shoulders against the cliff and inched toward the truck until he could see the far rim of the tanque beyond the narrow passage between truck and cliff. Past the rim he could see the desert and pale blue mountains far away. Forward another few feet and he could see halfway down into the tanque. If he were to step forward as far as the truck’s door he’d be in plain sight of Duggai.
Duggai, he thought, all this time through all this anguish we have dueled with each other at long range until now and I’ve longed to get within reach of you, you God damned cocksucking motherfucking miserable pissing son of a bitch, and now we stand within thirty feet of each other and I can’t get at you.
He sagged back against the wall of the cliff and brooded at the dusty drab hood of the truck. Through the windshield he could see a pillow scrunched up in the slot behind the driver’s seat. Duggai probably used it for dozing through the heat of the day, sitting in the cab with the air conditioner running.
Mackenzie worked forward another foot, stepped out in front of the truck, put his palms lightly on the hood and stretched forward on tiptoe trying to see if the rifle was in the cab. The bulk of the truck blocked him from Duggai’s view but if he stepped on either side he’d be seen.
He saw the front sight and the muzzle, tipped up against the inside of the passenger door. So Duggai hadn’t slung it in its rack under the camper roof. He’d kept it in the cab. It stood, no doubt, with its buttplate on the floor, the stock wedged firmly between seat and door so that it wouldn’t carom around inside the cab. If Mackenzie could only get that passenger door open the rifle would fall right out into his hands.
It was that easy. And that impossible. The rifle might as well have been in Texas. The lock buttons on the sills of both doors were punched down in the locked positions; and the windows were shut.
He backed silently away from the truck and leaned against the cliff and tried to think.
Beyond the rock lip he heard Duggai grunt with pleasure and splash gleefully, slapping the surface of the water like a child learning to swim. Mackenzie scowled at the distraction and tried to focus his thinking on the truck, the problem of the truck, the Chinese box puzzle dilemma of the truck. Then something tickled his foot and when he looked down he saw the scorpion.
It was a small one not more than half an inch high with the whiptail stinger curled up over its golden back. It’s the little ones that kill, he thought dispassionately. The little ones had the most virulent poison. He watched it move alongside his foot, coming out away from the base of the cliff where it must have been holed up in a crack between the rocks. He stood absolutely still in his terror and watched it. The scorpion stopped, one tiny leg pressed against the knuckle of his little toe, and he thought perhaps it was licking up the blood by his foot. The curled stinger twitched back and forth.
His mouth twisted with the irony of it. Stretch the scorpion out straight and it might not measure three inches from antennae to stinger but it was deadlier than Duggai’s two hundred-odd pounds or Duggai’s engine-block-busting Magnum.
It was one of Duggai’s demons. Mackenzie knew that without thinking anything through. Nothing mystical about it. Sheer logic. Duggai had posted the scorpion here as a sentry.
He wanted to laugh.
The scorpion leaned momentarily away from his foot, following the trace of the blood Mackenzie had left. Mackenzie whipped his foot away, hopped mightily away along the face of the cliff-more than a yard in the single jump and then he kept retreating until he saw that the scorpion had scuttled back into its hole, startled by his sudden movement. When Mackenzie stopped he felt the pain flood up through his feet but it wasn’t the pain of a poison sting, it was only the same pain as before; anyhow he’d been watching the scorpion when he fled and he was sure it hadn’t had time to whip him.
Frozen against the cliff he waited: had he made noise?
The water rippled once or twice. Then he heard nuzzling snorts: Duggai playing in the water. So he hadn’t heard anything.
Mackenzie watched the scorpion’s hole with abiding suspicion but the creature didn’t reappear for a while and finally he switched his attention to the truck again, the truck and the rifle locked inaccessibly within it.
He stood there for a very long time filled with nagging frustration because his mind had gone blank.
Duggai’s voice startled him: his heart seemed to stop. Then he realized Duggai was only singing. Chanting a Navajo song softly to himself. The voice was too soft for the words to reach Mackenzie but he knew the song. It was a young boys’ campfire song of no particular consequence. White Painted Woman and Coyote and legends from faraway times-a sort of nursery-rhyme song.
Perhaps it was the song that drew the scorpion out of its hole. Mackenzie saw it venture into sight and stand just outside its rock crack, tail up over its back, little claws opening and closing like lobster appendages. When it moved it moved quickly but not very far-across the game trail in front of the truck, claws rattling audibly like a crab’s. After some insect, probably, but Mackenzie couldn’t see the prey. The scorpion disappeared into leaf shadows under a ball of scrub.
Sluggishly Mackenzie’s brain began to work. He had one advantage although it wasn’t much: Duggai wouldn’t be expecting him here. Duggai wouldn’t credit Mackenzie with the strength to get this far and probably he wouldn’t believe Mackenzie still had the presence of mind to think ahead of him. Duggai had it all mapped out and knew his victim’s limitations and knew he was safe here: this was R amp;R, not a combat zone. Therefore Duggai would be just a shade slower to react than he’d have been if Mackenzie had come at him last night in his hilltop lair where Duggai had been expecting it.