How wonderful and fulfilling daubing pigment on canvas must be. Particularly, in view of your former occupation.
Jason wasn’t sure how a person could be sarcastic with himself, but the damn voice was a master at it.
You’re telling me that the life of a painter on a remote island is as exciting as what you used to do, that you enjoy it as much? C’mon! Kidding yourself isn’t good mental hygiene.
“So, OK, the old life had its moments, but all good things…”
Come to an end? Like you and Maria?
“Make your point.”
Simple enough: You’re bored out of your gourd when a trip to Liechtenstein to see your bankers is the highlight of your winter. Maria is doing what she loves. And whoever she loves, for all you know. The two of you never discuss what happens when you’re apart. She does what she wants; you paint.
“What if painting is what I want to do?”
If it were, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we?
Jason disentangled himself from the comforter. He was staring at the book on the table as though it might exhibit some paranormal qualities, levitate, disappear, spontaneously erupt in flames, something like that. His feet appeared from under the covers like early spring flowers through the snow. Groping blindly with his toes, he located first one then the other fur-lined moccasins that served as bedroom slippers. His breath emitted a cloud of steam despite the efforts of the heater. Jason took the two or three steps required to cross the room.
Pangloss raised his head, an inquiry as to what was going on. He started to lower it again and stopped halfway. From somewhere deep in his throat came a low growl, a most un-Pangloss noise. Whether it was the unusual sound or long-ago Delta Force training-become-instinct, Jason hit the light switch, flattening himself against the wall next to a window. Slowly, he extended his neck to see through the pane. He used a circular motion of a hand to make a peep hole through the glass slick with translucent frost.
The wet glass gave him back only his reflection. Beyond, the night was as dark as the stomach of any Jonah-swallowing whale. Other than the absence of sound, Jason couldn’t even tell if the snow/sleet had stopped. He sat, his eyes just above the sill. Unless someone out there had night-vision equipment, he doubted he could be seen from the yard. The cold of the glass would defeat infrared, and he guessed light enhancement would have little to work with, with the darkened room as backdrop.
He waited a full five minutes by the luminescent dial of his Rolex, the watch he removed only in the shower. Pangloss was growling, whining and, from the sound of nails clicking on the wooden floor, pacing. Dark nothingness on the other side of the glass was the only reward for Jason’s patient vigil.
He stood, snorting at the dog, “Alarmist! There’s nothing out there but…”
Before the sentence was complete, a red dot of light, perhaps the size of a dime, danced across the window’s glass.
Jason threw himself aside, away from the window, just as the glass shattered inward.
On his belly, Jason crawled quickly back toward the bed. Small shards of the window glass pricked at his bare hands like insect stings. Beside the bed was another hooked rug similar to the one on which Pangloss slept. With one hand, Jason lifted the near edge, using the other to grope underneath. His fingers closed around a metal ring sunk into the floorboards, and he heaved upward. Blindly in the dark, his hands explored the hidden compartment until they touched what he was searching for: The American version of the South African Armsel Striker, a twelve-gauge shotgun mounted over a twelve-round revolving magazine.
Grabbing the rear pistol grip, Jason dragged the eighteen-inch barrel free of its hiding place at the same time pulling into place the top-mounted folding stock. Again, commando fashion, he crawled across the floor, this time to the open well of stairs leading below. His progress was heralded by the crackling of glass particles under his weight.
His back pressed against the wall, he put an exploratory foot on the top stair. He was well aware of which steps tended to creak or groan underfoot and where, but weather and age moved these locations with exasperating unpredictability. He reluctantly trusted to luck the ancient wood would bear his weight silently.
He was fairly certain whoever had taken the shot had not entered the house. Redundant indoor alarm systems out of reach of local cattle would have alerted him to an entry. Unless the shooter had found a way to disarm them. Although that was unlikely, Jason had more than one former comrade who had suffered the consequences of ignoring all possibilities.
In the seventh of well-memorized fourteen steps, he stopped, listening. Other than Pangloss somewhere behind him, the night gave him only an ear-ringing silence in which he imagined he could hear his own breathing. There were the phantom footsteps of old wooden beams expanding or contracting, the low moan of the endless breeze caressing the shingle roof.
By that intuition common to nature’s predators and learned by their human counterparts, Jason sensed emptiness. Nonetheless, he waited another full five minutes before completing his descent. Aware as any blind person of the exact location of furniture in his home, he crossed the small room to a chest, opened a drawer, and produced Night Optics night-vision goggles, a bulky apparatus that resembled something NASA might have invented more than something worn by a pilot.
The room came to visual life, furniture black shapes in a green murk. Cradling the shotgun, Jason stepped to the window that framed the orchard, the place from which the shot had come. The familiar trees in their shrouds of snow were huge, green vegetables, the snow, greener than fresh grass, shifted in the wind like a restless tide.
There was no sign of human life. Jason might as well have been viewing some long-dead planet on which restless emerald sands blurred objects as through a photographer’s Vaseline lens. Edges of trees and rocks were particularly hard to distinguish, but close scrutiny revealed two sets of dark marks in the snow.
Tracks?
Human tracks?
Hard to tell from the indistinct images of the NVGs. Possible tracks left by wandering cows, although the thrifty farmers of Sark would probably house their livestock in this weather rather than risk loss by freezing. For sure, Jason had no intent of going outside for a closer inspection. It took little imagination to visualize a rifleman, his night scope zeroed in on the door, as he waited for such a move.
13
Jason made a circuit of the cottage’s great room and bath before entering the kitchen and testing the lock on the back door. Not substantial enough to resist a determined assault but sturdy enough to cause a racket before yielding. Satisfied he had done everything he could, he was returning to the stairs when he stepped on something soft, something that emitted a hair-raising yowl loud enough to send Jason staggering backward in astonishment.
“Goddammit, Robespierre!” he muttered, “Why can’t you stay put at night like the rest of us? I could have shot you by mistake.”
From wherever he had taken refuge in the dark, Robespierre maintained an unrepentant silence.
Still grumbling about the perverse nature of cats in general, and this one in particular, Jason sat, shivering in the cold invading the space that had been heated by the stone fireplace. Relighting the fire was a temptation, but one easily dismissed by the necessity of a visit to the woodpile behind the house. Instead, he moved quickly upstairs, snatched the eiderdown comforter from the bed, and wrapped himself in it so that only his eyes and the hand holding the Striker were uncovered. He returned to his vigil, this time the same bent wood chair Momma had occupied. Its hard back and seat would diminish the chances of falling asleep.