Rhodes bent painfully and separated the second and third strands of the fence wire, holding down the lower one with the cane. He got his body through the opening, but his pants leg hung on a barb. He pulled to free it, lost his balance, and fell. The pain that shot into his head almost shorted his circuits; he barely heard the ripping of his pants leg. He did hear his own involuntary yell.
With the aid of the cane he stood up, feeling like a very old man. Johnny had heard the yell and turned to face him. He was taking aim with the pistol, but not at Kathy. He was aiming at Rhodes. Kathy was on the ground beside him. Whether she’d slipped or been hit, Rhodes didn’t know.
Johnny didn’t fire the weapon, however. Kathy launched herself at his legs and knocked him off balance. He struck out with the pistol barrel and hit her in the head.
Rhodes tried to run, but he couldn’t move very fast.
Johnny looked back at him. “I’m sorry, Sheriff,” he called out. “I never meant to hurt anybody, least of all you or Kathy.” He turned and trotted toward the trees, which soon swallowed him up.
Rhodes traveled as fast as he could to where Kathy lay. Her face was smeared with mud, but there was little blood. She looked up at her father.
“Are you all right?” Rhodes asked.
“I think so,” Kathy said, putting a hand to a knot that was rising on her head. “I can’t believe this. I knew Johnny was acting funny, but he says you think he killed Jeanne Clinton. Then he dragged me out here, and he hit me. . What’s going on? I don’t understand.”
“I can’t explain it all now,” Rhodes said. “Can you stand up?”
Kathy didn’t answer. Instead, she got her feet under her and stood. “My head hurts,” she said.
Probably a slight concussion, Rhodes thought but didn’t say. “I want you to try to walk back to the road,” he told her. “You remember how to start a car without the keys?” He had showed her once, in case she ever lost her keys.
“I think so,” she said vaguely.
“Try to start the pickup,” he said. “Go back to town and see if you can find some help. Talk to Hack. He’ll know what to do.”
“I’ll try,” she said, and started unsteadily across the field.
Rhodes watched her go. He could wait for help, or he could go in after Johnny. Either way was a loser. If he waited for help from town, Johnny could hide himself so well that no searchers could ever hope to find him. If Rhodes went in, he might not only lose Johnny, but he might get so lost himself that it would take him days to get out. If he got out. In those woods, it would be hard to tell who was the hunter and who was the game.
“Damn ribs,” Rhodes said aloud to no one. He started for the trees.
Thirty yards into the woods might as well have been a hundred miles. There was nothing to see in any direction except trees, front, sides, and back. It was dim and still and hot; no breeze could penetrate in there. The light was filtered through hundreds of branches, and the trees closed around Rhodes like the waters of the sea.
Rhodes was not an experienced tracker, but Johnny Sherman was not an experienced fugitive, either. Rhodes could follow the crushed vines and the broken limbs fairly easily at first. But he couldn’t move very rapidly. His ribs hurt, and his leg was scratched from the barbed wire. His pants leg flapped where it had been ripped. The footing was soft and uncertain, the ground covering as likely to give way underfoot as not. Rhodes didn’t want to fall again.
A few hundred yards into the woods, Rhodes paused to listen. If Johnny was blundering along, Rhodes could hear nothing to indicate the fact. He heard a few birds twitter, and there was a woodpecker hammering somewhere not too far off, but that was all. He kept going, trying to keep in a straight line, laying about him with the cane to break more branches and limbs to mark the path clearly.
Another reason Rhodes went slowly was the possibility of a trap. If Johnny were to jump him, Rhodes knew he was a goner. He hoped it wouldn’t happen, and he put the thought out of his mind. His shirt was sticking to his back, and sweat was running into his eyes.
Then Rhodes came to a deadfall. What had once been one of the larger elm trees in the woods had long ago fallen prey to blight, or lightning, or insects. In falling, it had brought down a few smaller trees. Now, brush and vines grew around the decaying trunks and almost obscured the rot beneath. Dead limbs stuck out of the greenness here and there.
Somewhere a squirrel chattered. There was no other sound. The area around the deadfall seemed unnaturally quiet. If Johnny were going to make a try for him, Rhodes thought, this would be a perfect spot.
“You in there, Johnny?” Rhodes said. His voice came out in a hoarse whisper. He cleared his throat as he waited for the answer, but there was none. Not that one had really been expected.
Rhodes looked the setup over carefully and then took a few steps forward. Johnny could be at either end, or he could be half a mile away. There were no signs to read. Johnny had become much more careful about things, which meant either that he was trying to throw Rhodes off, or that he was trying to trap him. Or that Rhodes had lost him entirely.
Rhodes took a firm grip on the cane and started around the end of the deadfall to his right, at the point where the huge elm had split and fallen. The cover there seemed to Rhodes a little less dense.
Just as he rounded the deadfall, he heard a noise. It was in front of him, not to the side, and he looked up. Thirty feet away, walking between two pecan trees, were several Poland China hogs. Or what had been Poland China hogs at one time. They were still black, and they still had the characteristic drooping ears of the tame breed, but they were clearly no longer the hefty meat hogs once bred on nearby farms.
These were feral pigs, the generations of breeding fallen away. They were thin and mean. Their backbones stuck up sharply. Razorbacks. Rhodes could see the tusks growing high on each side of their snouts. The largest of the animals had one tusk that was broken in two.
Rhodes heard them snuffle and grunt. They had not seen him yet, and he hoped that they never would. It was one thing to face another man with a gun. It was something else entirely to face feral pigs. He was about to turn and make a quiet retreat behind the deadfall when something struck him hard in the back. He suddenly found himself sliding forward on the ground, his mind wrapped in a red haze of pain.
He heard Johnny Sherman’s voice. “You shouldn’t have come, Sheriff.”
“H-had to,” Rhodes managed to get out. His hand felt for the cane. He heard Johnny walk toward him, and he wondered if he had just one more fast move left in him. Probably not.
Then Johnny noticed the hogs. Rhodes didn’t want to lift his head, but he could hear them pawing the earth and rooting in the soil and grunting. It wasn’t a pleasant sound.
“Godamighty,” Johnny said.
While Johnny was momentarily distracted, Rhodes swung the cane at the deputy’s shins, connecting solidly.
There was a sharp crack of cane against bone, and Johnny Sherman yelled out in pain. At the same time, he accidentally fired a round from the pistol he had been holding in his right hand. He stumbled toward the razorbacks, yelling and hopping from one foot to another.
The hogs were puzzled by his behavior and frightened by all the noise and confusion. A few of the more timid ones fled back into the trees, but two of the old boars looked up with a savage light in their tiny eyes. Their sharp hooves pawed at the soft ground.
Rhodes was trying to stand and having no luck at all. He got to his knees, however, in time to see Johnny turn toward him. Rhodes made a turning, clumsy twist toward his deputy, sticking out the cane’s hooked end and managing to grab an ankle. He pulled, and Johnny tumbled down. He dropped the pistol, and both men reached for it.
Rhodes tasted dirt as his face was mashed into the forest floor. Sherman was on top of him, one hand on his head, the other reaching for the pistol.