Do Unto Others

I’ll move first, okay? I’m going to step to your right, then I want you to follow me exactly. Exactly, Candace. Do you understand?” I sensed her nod in the darkness. “You don’t step where I haven’t already stepped. You hit a wire and those boxes blow buckshot in your face. They blow off your head. You understand me?” “Yes.” Her voice was frightened but steady. “Okay. I’m moving now.” I pressed the light down on the ground, shuffling my feet slowly to her right. I put my back to her and she looped fingers in my belt again. Keeping the light tightly focused on the dark earth, I moved forward, away from the wire. Candace stuck to me like ugly on an ape. God only knew how many other wires we might have passed by. I didn’t think we could have made it unawares passing many; no one’s luck was that strong. If they’d strung wires higher than our feet we would have hit them, but from what I’d heard about such traps I didn’t think it likely they were strung that way. We shuffled along for several minutes at an agonizingly slow pace. Every movement made me wonder if hot lead would pepper our bodies. The clouds parted and the moon glanced through, casting a little more light through the arching pines. We’d gotten a fair distance away and I felt Candace sag against me. “Are we clear of them?” she breathed. “I’m not sure. We’ll take it slow for a while longer.” We scraped our shoes along. We hadn’t gone too much farther when Candace gave a gasp and, reaching around me, snapped off the flashlight. I didn’t make a noise and I whirled. Two other lights fanned through the trees, searching, less than thirty feet away. My heart, exercised enough over the course of this unforgettable evening, jumped back into my mouth, where it felt right at home. “Here’s their track!” a course male voice hissed in darkness. His light played along where we’d been dragging our feet, trenching out a nice little path in the forest for homicidal drug dealers to follow. I seized Candace’s arm and ran, tearing through the brush. If we didn’t move, they’d track us easy. I’d rather risk hitting a wire than begging for my life from a pot harvester. Bullets whined above our heads and Candace yelped. I didn’t think she was hit ’cause she started running harder than me. You just don’t know the adrenal surge you get when someone’s shooting at you. I couldn’t imagine the high was any less than what you got from the plants these folks guarded. Another bullet thundered and bark exploded from a trunk a few feet left of my head. I yanked Candace to the right and barreled into the bushes. We ran for several more feet, and then hunkered down. She pressed her face against my back, not wanting to look up. I heard footsteps running along past us, and I kept as still as stone. The moon flirted again, hiding behind one of the long, thready clouds that streaked the night sky. I cursed myself for my stupidity. I should have brought a gun, I shouldn’t have brought Candace, I shouldn’t have come up here myself. My own stubbornness might get us killed. Candace’s fingers twined with mine in the silence and the darkness. We crouched there in the bushes, letting minutes pass. I heard footsteps coming back along the forest floor, and I risked a peek through the foliage. I saw a dark form striding along, a shotgun nestled under one arm. Faint moonlight gave a profile I knew. Hair pulled back, high cheekbones, confident body.

The eyes I couldn’t see, but I had looked into them enough to know they were intelligent and catlike. Ruth Wills. I held my breath as she passed within ten feet of us. Candace kept her eyes buried in the side of her arm. Ruth went by and I heard a man’s voice, unfamiliar and tinged with a Spanish accent, call to her in the distance. I didn’t hear her answer. I hunkered back down and counted to two hundred. I wasn’t sure it was enough, but I wanted the hell out of there. Slowly, Candace and I crept along the forest floor, not using the flashlight, stopping in the pitch blackness and waiting for the moon to be kind and dimly light our way. Eventually the forest spat us out on a stretch of the farm-to-market road. I got my bearings and figured we were about a mile from the car. We hiked back, keeping a ways off the road, without flash-light. One pickup passed and we hid in a ditch, waiting for the truck to disgorge Jamaicans with Uzis. The truck whizzed past, only tossing out a Clint Black tune from a cranked radio. We made it back to the Blazer. The tires weren’t slashed and no one lay in wait for us. We got in the car, I started the engine with a minimum of noise and, keeping the lights out, shot down the road. “God in Heaven!” Candace yelled at the top of her lungs. Apparently I hadn’t heard her entire decibel range. “We could have gotten killed!