Free Fire - C. J. Box [56]
“That’s right,” the man said to Demming, “pull that gun out slow and toss it over to the side.”
She did as told.
Because his back was to the lake, Joe figured the man with the rifle hadn’t seen the Glock in his belt. Not that it would help them right now, since in order to use it he’d need to pull it, rack the slide, and hit what he was aiming at. In the time that would take, the rifleman could empty his weapon into the both of them.
“I seen you coming half a mile away,” the man said, stepping out from behind the tree but keeping the rifle leveled. “I was in the trees taking a shit when you showed up.”
He was short, stout, mid-thirties, with a blocky head, wide nose flattened to his face, dirt on his hands. His eyes sparkled with menace. Behind him, in the shadows of the timber, Joe now saw a crude lean-to shelter, a skinned and half-dismembereddeer hanging from a cross-pole lashed to tree trunks. A survivalist, living off the land in a place with no law.
“You need to lower the weapon,” Demming said, her voice calmer than Joe thought his would be at that moment. “Let’s talk this over before you get yourself into any more trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?” he said. “There ain’t nothing you can do to me here.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Demming said.
“Sure it does,” he said, and showed a tight smile. He was missing teeth on both top and bottom. “It worked for Clay McCann.”
Joe and Demming exchanged a quick glance.
“I wrote him a letter but he never answered,” the man said. Joe tried to determine the man’s accent. His words were flat and hard. Midwestern, Joe guessed.
“Where you from?” Joe asked. “Nebraska?”
“Iowa.”
“You’re a long way from home.”
The Iowan looked hard at Joe for the first time and narrowed his eyes. “This is my home. And you two are trespassing. And the way I got it figured, I could shoot you both right now and walk ’cause no court can try me.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Demming said. “How long have you been here?”
“Month.”
“Then you don’t know that Congress passed a law,” Demmingsaid. “You’re now in the Idaho district. This is no longer off the map.”
Joe admired Demming’s quick thinking. The lie sounded credible. It produced a flicker of doubt in the Iowan’s eyes and the muzzle of his rifle dropped a few inches.
“Let us leave,” Demming said, “and no harm will come to you. There was no way you could have known.”
“They really passed a law?” he asked.
Demming nodded. Joe nodded.
“And the president signed it?”
“Yes.”
The Iowan looked from Demming to Joe and back, digging for a clue either way. Joe hoped his face wouldn’t reveal anything.Seconds ticked by. A bald eagle skimmed the surface of the lake and just missed plucking a fish out.
“Naw,” the Iowan said, raising the rifle butt back to his shoulder,“I don’t believe you. If that was the case there would have been some rangers patrolling out here, and I ain’t seen nobody.”
The heavy boom, an explosion of blood and fingers on the forestock, and the rifle kicking out of the Iowan’s hands happenedsimultaneously and left the wounded man standing there empty-handed and wide-eyed.
Demming screamed, Joe froze.
Another shot took the Iowan’s nose and part of his cheek-boneoff his face. When he instinctively reached up with his now-shattered left hand, a bullet ripped through the back of his camo trousers at knee level, no doubt slicing through tendons, collapsing him backward into the grass like a puppet with strings clipped.
Joe saw movement on his left in his peripheral vision, a flash of clothing darting from the reeds along the shoreline into the cover of the trees. He fumbled for his weapon, racked the slide, trained it on the writhing, moaning Iowan as Demming retrievedher pistol.
He approached the Iowan and squatted, patting down the man and finding a .44 revolver, bear spray, and the half-gnawed leg bone of the deer. He tossed them aside, adrenaline and