Dead Men's Harvest

Chapter 47

Using a friend in that way seems callous, but I believed that given the choice, Hartlaub would have said to go ahead. He’d given me his life, and now the means to draw Cain into a trap. The idea had come to me when I’d shouted my challenge at Cain. He was the type who couldn’t refuse an easy kill when my back was turned. I’d seen the winch and the hook and had fed it under Hartlaub’s armpits and hauled him off the deck. I’d positioned him so that he looked like a man stooped in grief, and it seemed to have done the trick.

It was difficult lying there among the dead, waiting as Cain crept forward, and more than once I’d wanted to leap up and shoot the bastard before he could reach Hartlaub. The ruse would only last so long, and I hadn’t honestly thought he’d spring on to my dead friend’s back like that. I’d waited, held myself lax, ready for my moment.

And then it had come.

‘I told you to drop the fucking knife,’ I said.

Cain shook his head sadly as I came to my feet.

I stood with my feet planted, one slightly in front of the other, toes turned inward to grip the deck, the butt of my SIG supported in my opposite cupped palm. Only ten feet away, I could shoot Cain in either eye without stirring his lashes.

‘That wasn’t very sporting,’ Cain said. ‘Tricking me like that.’

‘It isn’t a game.’

‘Oh, but it is. Don’t say you don’t agree. I know what you’re like.’

‘No, Cain. You don’t. You can’t begin to imagine what it’s like to be me. You aren’t human.’

‘I’m not?’

‘No. A human has a soul. Your soul died the day you picked up a blade and became Tubal Cain.’

‘Maybe. But we’re alike in so many other ways.’

‘I’m nothing like you are, you murderous bastard.’

‘Sigmund Petoskey. Kurt Hendrickson. Need I continue the list?’

‘They deserved everything they got.’

‘Where’s the difference? You enjoy killing, I enjoy killing. There’s this Hemingway quote I’m fond of. It goes something like, “Those who’ve hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else.” That’s us, Hunter. We’re both hunters of armed men. We are alike.’

‘No, Cain.’ I shook my head. ‘You don’t care if they’re armed. You hunt anyone… including defenceless women.’

Cain’s gaze slipped to the rail. ‘Aah, I see now why you’re pissed with me. But I had nothing to do with that. Jennifer chose her fate. She jumped overboard, I didn’t push her. You can’t blame me for that.’

‘I can,’ I said. ‘And I will. Now drop the knife.’

He dropped the Tanto.

‘And any others you’re carrying.’ I wiggled the gun barrel to show him I wasn’t taking no for an answer. ‘Take it real easy, Cain. The rain’s making my finger a little slippery on this trigger.’

He sighed, then dug in his pocket and pulled out what looked like a Stanley knife. He tossed it away from him.

‘Anything else?’

He shook his head. ‘You can search me if you want.’

‘Isn’t going to happen, Cain.’

‘So you’re just going to execute me? Just like that?’

‘Yes.’

I held the gun steady, aiming for the point directly between his eyes. Give him his due, he wasn’t a coward like many notorious killers turn out. He didn’t flinch, just stood there. Maybe I’d been correct: what did a man whose spirit had already been slain have to fear? I drew the moment out, and finally I noted his gaze slip slightly.

‘So what are you waiting for?’

‘Before I kill you I want to tell you something you might not want to hear.’

‘Oh, God! Save me the sermon, will ya!’

‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to play psychiatrist. You’re a sick-headed bastard, we know that already.’

Cain snorted, but the derision was tinged with humour.

‘John’s dead,’ I stated.

The words sounded wrong even to my own ears. But it explained Walter’s reticence every time my brother’s name was mentioned, and why John hadn’t come to bait a trap as I’d requested. I’d denied what common sense had been telling me all along, but to voice those thoughts was still an alien sensation.

‘Liar. I’ve been speaking with your old pal, Walter Conrad. He told me that John was on his way.’

‘He was lying to you, Cain. The way he’s lied to me since Jubal’s Hollow. You remember what you did to my brother there? How could he survive that?’

‘The medics saved him, the way they saved me.’

‘So why isn’t he here?’

‘Because Conrad sent you instead.’

‘We’ve both been played along. John’s dead.’

‘You’re only saying that so that I stop chasing him.’

‘No, Cain,’ I corrected him. ‘That isn’t necessary. Not when I’m going to kill you. I’m telling you so that you realise what a total fuck-up all of this has been. You’ve been chasing a trophy that you’ll never get your hands on. All the pain, all the suffering that everyone has gone through, it’s been for nothing.’

‘Lies.’

‘Truth,’ I countered. ‘You’re going to Hell with the knowledge that you’ll never get to John. You already missed your opportunity.’

‘Nooooo…’

Everything about him changed in that instant. His shoulders rounded, his head dipped, and he flicked out with his right arm. From his sleeve projected the item I was certain he’d disclose at this last moment. The fiendish bastard had been busy during his downtime aboard the ship, whittling and paring the rib bone taken from the ship’s captain. Cain had planned to spear me with it, the way I’d rammed a rib bone through his trachea back at Jubal’s Hollow. Well, I’d also something to pay him back for: my brother.

I allowed him a moment, and he took it. He launched himself at me.

Calmly, I shot him.

His forearm was shattered, and the horrifying weapon went spinning across the deck alongside chunks of his arm.

Cain kept on coming, teeth bared like a wild beast’s.

I shot him again, this time through his left thigh.

He staggered against the rail. Clawed hands held him upright. He twisted to look at me, his eyes squinting as I shoved the gun away, replacing it with the Bowie knife I’d jammed down my belt. I thought it only just that I use his own weapon to punish him. He watched me load up like a javelin thrower, and barely reacted as I swiped the blade across his face with all the power I could muster. His jaw shattered under the force, and he stood there with a glazed expression, blood spewing from the open wound. He tried to say something, but it was difficult speaking with a mouthful of broken teeth and blood frothing between his lips.

‘Save the sermon,’ I taunted, and backhanded the knife across his chest.

His jaw was opened up, his chest gushing, but still he was alive. Good, because I’d intended that the slashes of the knife were debilitating without taking his life. The knife was his weapon, mine was the SIG. I lifted it. ‘This is for John, you piece of shit.’

I aimed directly between his eyes.

I fired and his skull snapped backwards, and his body went with it. He collapsed over the rail, then very, very slowly his weight eased forward and he slipped over the side and into the night. Over the roaring wind, I heard the slap of his body as he smacked the waves.

Normally I feel no satisfaction in killing.

But Cain had been right about one thing. There was nothing in the world like the hunting of armed men like him. I cared for nothing else than to see them dead. A long time ago Tubal Cain had been slain in the spirit; now he’d been slain in the flesh and I couldn’t have been happier.

I stood alongside the railing where he’d gone over, watching the pale blur of his corpse as it rode the pitch-black tide. Within seconds, a wave rolled him over on to his back, and he sunk beneath the surface, his wide open eyes staring accusingly at me. They were like they’d always been: dead and soulless.