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  DYING BREATH

  Copyright © 2020 by Blake Banner

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  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

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  Chapter One

  I hadn’t eaten for thirty-six hours. It’s one of the conditions I impose on myself if I go hunting. I eat what I kill, and if I don’t kill I don’t eat. Some people might think that’s a hollow gesture, or a pretentious one. I can’t say I care much, but I get mad at hunters who talk about being in nature, a predator pitched against his prey in a primal wilderness, when they’re carrying a camouflage tent, thermal sleeping bags, propane camping stoves and sniper’s rifles with telescopic sights.

  I sleep in the open with a couple of woolen blankets, I cook—if I cook—over an open fire, and I hunt with a sixty-five-pound Osage orange bow from James Easter up in Iowa. I also hunt with my six senses, and I listen: I listen to the hundreds of sounds that are woven into the breeze.

  If you use a telescopic sight, you stop listening. The mountains and the forests are full of sounds that talk to you about the constant cycle of life and death in the woodlands: the animals that come and go on silent feet, that hunt in the shadows, that drink and fish in the creeks, streams and rivers which wind through the land. They tell you everything, from the twig that snaps under a deer’s hoof, to the murderous flapping of the falcon’s wing.

  I listen and I look, not through a telescope, but with my eyes; and I look not for prey, but for movement. A bull elk at fifty yards, standing among trees, five feet inside the shade of a woodland, might be all but invisible to a man with a sniper’s rifle and a telescopic sight. Because that man will be looking for a bull elk, and at that distance, among tree trunks, a bull elk looks like part of the forest. So if you want to see it, you don’t look for it; you relax your gaze and you wait for movement.

  You use all your senses. You listen, you smell the air, you taste the air, and you sense how the forest feels. You can’t do that if you insulate yourself in a tent, with your TV and your propane cooker. You can only do it if you’re in the forest, part of the forest. If you hide from the cold, moist night air, cushion yourself from the hard ground and the stones when you sleep, shut out the snuffling, howling and crying of the night, and rise only after the sun has burned away the chill dew of dawn, then you will be deaf to the whispering of the forest. Better stay at home and get your meat from the butcher.

  So, I hadn’t eaten for thirty-six hours, and that kind of hunger sharpens your senses. I was lying beside a spruce at the edge of the sparse woodlands to the south of Big Red Hill and to the west of Greenhorn Mountain, in Eagle County, Colorado. I was watching the large clearing spread out before me. It was about half a mile to the nearest trees, over on my right. But a hundred yards away a bull elk stood alone, smelling the morning air.

  I’m a good archer, but a hundred yards was a hell of a shot, and would depend as much on luck as on any skill I had. That’s OK in target practice, but when you are hunting a living, breathing animal, a bad shot can cause a lot of pain and unnecessary suffering. The animal can get away and it can take days to die. That is something you don’t want to happen.

  So I waited, chose my moment, and moved forward on my belly, a yard at a time.

  After ten minutes he had turned his back on me, grazing at the late summer grass and shrubs, and was moving a step at a time, toward the sparse woods that covered the foothills of the Greenhorn. I was downwind, and though I could hear and smell him, he could not hear or smell me. So I closed the gap with a couple of short, silent runs.

  I had closed the distance to fifty yards and dropped to my belly beside a young cypress. He still had his rump to me, but I had moved slightly to my left, hoping to get an angle on his heart. Luck, as luck so often does, played into my hand, and then robbed me.

  The bull grazed slowly toward his left, one slow step at a time while his mouth worked, gradually turning his left flank to me. With a sixty-five-pound bow I could make a fifty-yard shot with a fair degree of accuracy, but an arrow travels much slower than a bullet, and there is no guarantee your target will still be there by the time your arrow arrives where it’s going. If your target moves, instead of piercing its heart, your razor-sharp broadhead might slice clean through its belly, causing a slow, painful death. I needed to get at least twenty paces closer to take the shot.

  I had a tall spruce maybe twenty yards to my left and, keeping flat on the ground, I crawled yard by yard, over the shrubs and stones, toward the cover of that tree. It took a long minute, but the burning hollow in my gut made it seem like an agonizing half hour.

  The great beast had started moving slowly to its right now. I still had a shot, but if I was going to take it, it had to be now, because within seconds he would have turned his left side away from me.

  I nocked the heavy, wooden broadhead, stepped out from behind the tree, leaned into the bow and drew till my thumb touched the angle of my jaw. I sensed, rather than saw, the trajectory of the arrow, and in that moment a rifle exploded into the still morning and the roar of the shot echoed across the valley, bouncing off the sides of the hills.

  The elk looked up, its body tense as a spring. Next thing it had bounded and was racing across the plateau toward the cover of the trees, north and east. I didn’t hesitate. I sprinted after it, covered twenty paces until I could see where it was headed, and settled into a steady run.

  A scared deer, gazelle or elk is fast, but they will rarely run for long periods of time. Instinctively they know that predators operate with explosive bursts of speed, which burn themselves out pretty fast. So when the elk’s run started to slow, after thirty seconds or a little more, he had covered over three hundred yards, but I was catching on him, staying downwind and out of sight. Man is one of the very few predators who will stay on a single prey relentlessly, sometimes for days on end, until he takes him down.

  The bull elk had reached a gentle, wooded slope that rose to higher ground above. In the trees there was an opening that led to a kind of passage that wound up to the higher ground. There he stopped and sniffed the air, then started to graze again. I didn’t stop. I kept going at a gentle jog. At forty paces I slowed to a walk, but, as he was looking away from me, I didn’t seek cover. I kept walking. I still had the arrow nocked and drew it nine inches. After twelve paces I stopped, drew to my ear, sensed the trajectory and loosed the arrow.

  A second shot rang out across the valley. I swore violently under my breath and broke into a sprint as the arrow struck home inches behind the heart. The bull sprang and kicked and bounded up the passage through the trees, with the barb buried deep in its side.

  It took me fifteen or twenty seconds to cover the distance. A third shot rang out and I scrambled up the passage through the woodland.

  When I got to the top, there was another plateau, smaller than the one below, and there, three paces from where I stood panting, was the bull, lying on its side, dead. Approaching down the slight hill at a slow, heavy run were two men dressed in camouflage. They carried high-powered rifles with telescopic sights. When they saw me, the only change to their demeanor was a complacent smile.

  The one in the lead was in his fifties, well groomed, with permed gray hair and a slight paunch. He had a ranger’s camouflage hat and a sleeveless camouflage jacket that had probably cost him three hundred bucks. He was wearing jeans and cowboy boots, and touched the brim of his hat with two fingers as he approached.

  “Howdy? Good morning to you!”

  His pal, lagging slightly behind, was darker, more muscular. His haircut had cost him about five bucks, maybe less, about the same as his peaked camouflage cap. He was smiling, but the smile was for himself, and his eyes watched me with care. The guy with the perm came right up with his hand extended.

  “Rex Trent, Trent Enterprises. That was a bold shot, shame it just missed the mark.” I shook the proffered hand with little enthusiasm.

  “It was on target,” I said. “Your shot scared him and he bolted.”

  His mouth smiled but his eyes leered. “Shoulda used a rifle. That’s the problem with a bow. Slow delivery. With this bad boy,” he held up his Seekins Pro Hunter, “I never miss a shot.” He pointed at my elk. “Got this baby clean between the eyes.”
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  I let my eyes travel over him and his pal, then looked past them at where they had come from. I let my eyebrows shrug.

  “By my reckoning you should have two more elk lying somewhere.” He frowned at me, not catching my meaning. “I heard three shots,” I explained. “One of them hit my elk. Where did the other two go?”

  He didn’t think that was funny and his face told me so. After a second he gave a laugh that was on the dry side of humorless.

  “You call it your elk, but I’m afraid I’m gonna have to disabuse you, son. See, it was my shot that killed the animal, therefore my claim is good.”

  I didn’t bother pretending to smile. I gave him the deadeye instead. “You said it was a bold shot, Mr. Trent, which means you were watching. And that means you fired deliberately to scare my prey. In spite of that,” I pointed at the feathers protruding from the animal’s chest, “the wound was fatal and the animal would have died within seconds. Your shot may even have been postmortem. The bull is mine.”

  “You’re new to Sulfur Springs, ain’t ya, son?”

  “I’m not your son, Mr. Trent. I’ve been here a few times, but I stay away from people.”

  “Well folks round here know me, see? They know me because, well…” He turned to his pal and they both laughed. “Because I own the town, huh, Jacob?” He turned back to me. “Just about everything you see in and around Sulfur Springs is either mine or it’s a national park. So I guess you could say I’m like some kind of old-fashioned feudal lord. In the sense, like, that whatever I say goes.”

  I gave a single nod and gazed around, wondering if I was going to have to hit them.

  “So,” he smiled amiably, “I don’t want to get into a disagreement with you. We’ll just say that the damned elk is mine and leave it at that.” He cocked his rifle and turned to his pal. “Earl, go get the truck so we can load this bull in the back.”

  I let my eyes rest on his and held them a moment. I spoke quietly. “The bull is mine.”

  The smile faded and he jerked his chin at me. “You look like a city boy to me. Things ain’t changed around here for two hundred years. Still cowboy territory, and we don’t worry so much about the law as we do about what we say… And what I say, is the law.”

  I went very still and held his eye for a long moment. “That bullshit might have worked back when Clint Eastwood still had hair. But things have changed since then. Different rules apply. So let me get something clear in my mind. Are you threatening to kill me?”

  Jacob pulled back the bolt on his rifle with a loud clunk, put it to his shoulder and trained it on my gut. Trent laughed out loud.

  “Hell, no!” he said. “Why, that would be illegal, right, Jacob? And what the hell would we do with the body in this wilderness?” All the laughter drained out of his face, like it had suddenly been punctured. “Walk away, boy, before this gets ugly.”

  I nodded. “Sure.” I pointed at the bull. “But the bull is mine. That arrow is mine.” I pointed at him. “And you owe me for that bull.”

  He laughed, low and soft. “Yeah, city boy? Well you have your lawyer call my lawyer and we’ll see what we can work out.”

  They both laughed loud at that, like he’d said something original and funny. But by that time I was already walking back the way I’d come. I thought about turning and skewering them both, but you can’t just kill people because they annoy you. You can’t even kill them because they threaten to kill you. Because if we all did that, society would fall apart, and it would be a world of anarchy ruled over by people like Rex Trent. Sometimes you just had to walk away and either forget, or choose your own time and place to visit them again on your own terms.

  I got back to my camp a couple of hours later, and as I scrambled up the hill to where I had left my blanket and my rucksack, my cell buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out and knew it was the brigadier, Alex “Buddy” Byrd, head of operations at Cobra.

  “Yeah.”

  “Good morning. We need you back in New York. How soon can you be there?”

  “Couple of days.”

  “Good. Don’t dillydally. We’re in a hurry.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  I hoisted my rucksack on my shoulder and started down the far side of the hill. It was a half mile as the crow flies to where I’d left my truck, but over that terrain, along the weaving path, it took me over an hour to get there. I slung my stuff in the back of the truck and after that it was a four mile drive down a dirt track, following the course of the canyon, to the intersection with the I-70, and then another half mile along Route 6 to Sulfur Springs.

  One there I paid up at the motel, loaded my stuff in my truck and drove back toward the intersection. As I passed the Roast Buck Eatery, at the exit to the town, I saw a white Ford pickup in the parking lot. It had a bull elk in the back with a feathered barb sticking out of its ribcage. I glanced at it and slowed, wondering about going in to settle matters, but dismissed the thought and accelerated away from the town.

  At the intersection I turned right and east and hit the gas. I had two thousand miles to cover, and twenty-nine hours of driving to get through. With four hours’ sleep, make that thirty-three. And I still hadn’t eaten.

  Chapter Two

  I got to New York the following evening and went straight to my small, blue, clapboard cottage on Shore Drive, on the Eastchester Bay in the Bronx. I parked my truck down the side of the house and lugged my bags inside. With the door open, I paused a few seconds in the small entrance porch, to smell the air and listen. It was a habit. But the house felt and smelt as it had when I’d left it a couple of weeks earlier. I hung up my jacket, kicked the door closed, carried my bags into my living room and dumped them on the floor.

  In the open plan kitchen, separated from the living room by a breakfast bar, I leaned on the sink and spent a moment gazing across my neglected lawn at the dark bay. In the distance, a couple of ghostly, narrow sails bobbed and leaned, white on the black water.

  I opened the freezer, pulled out a couple of burgers and threw them in a hot pan. While they fried I cracked a cold beer and thought about nothing in particular, except for wondering what was wrong with me, that even in my spare time I needed to kill. I had come from hunting animals to relax, to hunting people for work.

  I dropped my burgers into a couple of buns with some tomato sauce and carried them upstairs with my beer and my bags. I opened the window onto the dusk and set about eating the burgers while I unpacked my bags.

  By the time I’d finished, dusk had turned to evening, and small lights were glimmering over the dark water. I went to drain my bottle but it was empty.

  Then the doorbell rang.

  I took the plate and the bottle and descended the stairs. As I came down into the living room I could see the silhouette of a man against the glass in the door, backlit by the orange streetlights outside. I pulled my P226 from the drawer in the dresser and slipped it into my waistband behind my back. Before letting go of it I called out.

  “Who is it?”

  “Special delivery from Brigadier Byrd.”

  I pulled the Sig from my belt again, held it behind my back and opened the door with my left hand. He was standing sideways on, wearing a trench coat and a fedora, like a character from a Bogart movie. He had a cigarette in his mouth and he was leaning into the flame from a match. He turned and raised an eyebrow at me, and spoke as he shook the match and released smoke from his mouth.

  “Harry Bauer?”

  “Yeah. Who are you?”

  “Captain Russ White, US Air Force. May I come in?”

  “You got some ID?”

  He reached in his coat and pulled out a brown leather wallet. In the transparent flap was his Common Access Card. I took it, pulled it out and had a look. As far as I could see he was who he said he was. I handed it back and stood aside.

  “Come on in, Captain.”

  He stepped through the door, took off his hat and smiled. “Any objection to first names, Harry? I’m not big on formalities.”

  “None. You want a beer?”

  “Sure.” He grinned. “But I’d prefer a Scotch if you have one.”

  I took his coat and gestured at a chair. “I have one. Ice?”