The Last Family

19

The cougar stood contemplating Paul, her big brown eyes locked on his. Then she sprang, leaping easily over his head and hitting the steep trail ten feet behind him. Paul turned and watched her lope off, disappearing into a wall of thick mist. He didn’t feel fear; he was instead filled with an overwhelming sense of sadness and loss.

Paul awoke disoriented and encased in that sadness. He lay frozen in the hotel room’s bed until reality set in. It was after four A.M. according to his Rolex, and even though he had been asleep for only three hours he knew he wouldn’t be going back to sleep. He climbed out of bed and sat naked in the chair nearby while he thought. The weight of the past few days and the days ahead were overwhelming him.

Paul stood up and looked at his body, which was lit by the small amount of light that found its way in from the street through the sheers.

What if I fail? The answer was easy. If I fail, they will die. If I am wrong on any assumption, misjudge one piece of evidence, or misinterpret any action by this lunatic, they will die as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow. Martin doesn’t care about anything except punishing me. I can’t ever lose track of that. This is only about Martin and me. The rest, including Thorne’s, Joe’s, and Rainey’s dead families, is all window dressing.

Paul was plagued by doubt. He knew he was too far from the action, but he was afraid to move closer for now. He wished he knew if it was fear of his family’s rejection, of their judgment, or fear that he would fail because he wasn’t up to the task. He hadn’t had one night’s uninterrupted sleep since he had left the mountain.

He even worried that he was not as worried as he should be, or not about the right things. For instance, he didn’t want to face a decision on Rainey’s mental state, in particular his ability to make judgments-his grasp on reality. It was entirely possible that Rainey’s mind was a deep and dark place filled with twisting serpents. Sometimes Paul saw things reflected in Rainey’s eyes that alarmed him. A shallowness to them, a lack of emotion that didn’t make sense; he had to be boiling inside. And he was turning into something of a religious fanatic, reading the Bible constantly. On the other hand, he rarely mentioned what he was reading. What was the man thinking?

Problems demanded decisions, and he hoped he was making them as fast as he needed to. He didn’t feel the conviction that he had found so natural before the Miami incident. Oddly, no one seemed to notice what a mess he was inside. Maybe the mask was holding up, or maybe that just spoke volumes about other people’s needs.

The man in the mirror held his attention as the light and shadow acted in concert to take his body back six years. The diffused light softened and hid the scars; the light defined the bulk, outlined the body. His face, the right side deep in shadow, appeared normal. But he knew that if he turned on the lamp, he would see the mutilated stranger he had faced every day for six years. Martin did this to me. He knew that he should blame Martin for what he had lost, but he didn’t. He had thought he hated the man. He had spent a lot of the past six years brooding over Martin. But no matter how he tried, he did not hate Martin. Despite everything the man had done, what he felt was more pity than hatred.

Paul remembered dreaming of the cougar. He had been climbing up the side of a mountain and had come face-to-face with her. He should have been afraid but wasn’t. Awake, he knew where the dream had come from. As a boy of eight or ten, Paul had accompanied Aaron and a hunting party of some neighbors who had set out to kill a marauding lion who threatened their livestock. The female cougar, though fatally wounded by a rifle bullet, had gotten away but then had turned and moved slowly back down a rock face to meet the pack of baying dogs that had been trailing her. She had managed to seriously maul two of the fierce dogs, but the relentlessly circling pack had proved too much for the weakened lioness. The dogs had had her down before the hunters had arrived and fired a bullet into her head, stilling her. Later the men, who were trying to understand her return down the rock face, had discovered that she had made her stand between the hunters’ dogs and her den. The dogs had found the den, and the men would have let the animals kill her twin cubs except that Paul had raised such a fuss, the lion hunters had spared them. Aaron and Paul had turned them over to the game warden a few days later. Paul had never discovered their fate.

Paul’s subconscious had conjured up the big cat. An Indian, having the same dream, might have thought the cat was a spirit guide appearing to give him warning or to show him the way to a victory over an adversary. Paul supposed that, figuratively speaking, he was the cat standing between his own den and the dogs-Martin Fletcher.

He moved to the window, parted the curtains, and looked out at the traffic on the street. He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and stood there in the dark waiting for the first inkling of daylight that would put him one sunrise closer to Martin Fletcher.