getting tired, the pauses longer, the scurrying less frenzied. The chase would not go on much longer; at some point the man would disappear.

The forest seemed sparser. Looking up at an angle through the trees, Kenji saw stars. It signaled a large opening. Maybe a clear-cut, maybe a power line, or perhaps a log haul road. A place this fellow might run. Without waiting for more brushy footfalls, Kenji estimated the direction and crashed wildly, not caring if he punished his body. Head down, arms out in front of him, he managed to miss the tree trunks.

There were no more sounds of the man running, but he guessed the reason. He burst out of the brush into the clearing. Stars were bright in the watching sky, the moon a fountain of light silhouetting a figure sprinting in its glow. A power line and a maintenance road stretched to the crest of a small hill where the man’s feet flew over the smooth surface of the dirt road. It took only a few strides before Kenji knew he couldn’t keep up. This man was a lithe, long-muscled runner.

Fear swept through him. He saw his wife’s disgusted, hurt face. He raised the gun. You couldn’t shoot a man for taking a picture. But your whole life, everything you value—your honor, your vanishing fortune… The finger squeezed in the middle of the debate. Eight times it squeezed. It was an unlucky shot, almost an accident, he would later conclude. Hitting a running man with a pistol at 50 yards is really not possible with precision. He knew the instant he pulled the trigger that he had a hit. His knowledge of the hit, he decided, came from a spiritual union with the hunted, rather than the sickening thud that was the bullet hitting flesh. Startling to think that you would actually hear the strike, hear the thump of expanding lead boring through bone and meat.

For a moment Kenji considered the odds that the body could be hidden, the evidence destroyed. He and his security man Hans Groiter would be back first thing in the morning to dispose of the body. For money Hans could do something like this. Already he and Hans were so deep into the dirty deeds of life that he didn’t fear Hans or his reaction, although this accidental shooting was rather more dramatic than anything they had done previously.

Next Page