Relentless

6

The target had disappeared and Eddie Burt turned his head to scan the shadows, suddenly afraid.

A rifle started talking in hard echoes down toward the creek, inside the pines somewhere, and the Major was up on one knee, rifle lifted, answering that fire. Burt could hear Baraclough’s rifle above him and he swung his own weapon toward the gun by the creek but then he caught a tail-of-the-eye movement imperfectly and wheeled.

It was a horse. Riderless, whipping erratically through the pines.

A decoy, Burt decided instantly. The stupid cops had driven the horse toward them to draw their fire. He wasn’t going to fall for that one.

He held his fire and switched his attention back to the bottom of the hill. The rifle had moved down there; it spoke again, three times quickly-or was that another rifle? Probably; it was too far to the right, the first man couldn’t have moved that far in these few seconds. All right, two of them down there. Where was the third one? Burt waited for one of the rifles to speak again, to give him a target. He kept the running horse in the edge of his vision. It was beginning to lose momentum, starting to drift; it wandered forward on a tangent that would take it past him, behind him.

In the pines below him a rifle barked and Burt put the horse out of his mind, steadied his aim and squeezed a shot. The buttplate jarred his shoulder and he had the satisfaction of hearing a man’s brief cry: he had scored a hit.

The riderless horse had turned and was bearing down on him. Burt chambered a shell and threw an irritated glance at the horse. If the damned animal got in his way he’d have to shoot it. Then the rifle by the creek opened up again: either there were two of them down there or he hadn’t hit the guy very badly. He shouldered his weapon again and fired another one.

Then the horse was wheeling right past him and he looked up in time to see a shadow drop free of the stirrup-right on top of him.