Testament by David Morrell Page B

hardware store, shouldering his knapsack. He’d been in there buying a gun belt for his revolver, a three-inch-wide strap of smooth flat-brown leather with loops for ammunition and a small buckled strap around the middle of the holster and a leather thong for tying the holster to his leg. He bought an extra box of ammunition, tucking the gun and the belt and the box into his knapsack just before he opened the door and went outside, and he was never sure what made him look across the street just then.
    They were walking along the sidewalk directly opposite him, two of them, wearing jeans the same as everybody else, but their shirts were different, red-checked wool hunting shirts with khaki army field jackets unbuttoned over them, and one nudged the other, looking over at him. He didn’t let on, just stood there long enough to hitch the straps of his knapsack up over one shoulder, and then letting his eyes slip past them toward the post-office truck going by, he started walking slowly down the sidewalk.
    It was a warm bright Friday. The big clock hanging up over the corner a half block away indicated a little after three. There were cars and trucks parked all along the street, people come to town to cash their paychecks and buy supplies and have some fun to start the weekend. A woman was walking toward him, pushing a little boy in a stroller as a man carrying two sacks from a feed and grain store nearly bumped into her.
    Take it easy, he told himself.
    But he started speeding anyhow and had to force himself to slow.
    Just take it easy. This might be nothing. Maybe it’s just some girl over here that caught their eye. Maybe they think you’re somebody they used to know.
    Maybe nothing.
    He wanted to turn around and see if they were still watching him, but he couldn’t let himself, and he finally stopped in front of a drugstore, pretending to look at the razors and shaving soaps displayed in the window, glancing at the reflection in the window of them farther along the street, directly opposite him now, standing, staring at him.
    He was going into the drugstore before he knew it.
    How had they found him this soon?
    Never mind this soon. How had they found him at all?
    “I need the largest first aid kit you’ve got,” he told the girl in white behind the counter. “And some heavy-grain aspirin and some multiple vitamin tablets.” And what else? he thought. What else were they going to need that he had not thought of? And the strain must have showed in his voice because the girl behind the counter looked strangely at him a moment before she went and got what she was told.
    The place smelled of disinfectant.
    A knife, he thought. When I was in the hardware store I should have bought a knife.
    He stood half-hidden behind a counter of hair sprays and bath salts, looking out the window, and they were coming across the street now, waiting for a motorcycle to pass before they kept coming and stopped between two cars parked at the curb.
    “Here you are, sir,” the girl said behind him. He turned, and she was standing there at the counter, putting everything in a large brown paper bag. “That’ll be eight dollars and seventy-six cents.”
    He gave her a ten and took the bag.
    “Your change, sir,” she said.
    But he was already going out the front door.
    They were standing between the two cars, watching him. Twins, he saw, as he turned to the left toward the hardware store. Tall, thin-faced, thin-lipped. Short blond hair, sideburns trimmed to the middle of their ears. As soon as his back was to them, he looked at the reflection in a window that was angled their way, and they were following him.
    “Hello again,” the guy in the hardware store said as he came in.
    “I need a skinning knife.”
    “What kind?”
    “I don’t care.”
    The door opened, bell tinkling. One of the men came in, pausing to look at him, then walking over to a rack of fishing poles, touching them.
    “I don’t mean what brand,” the guy from the