Those Who Wish Me Dead by Michael Koryta Page A

done, how he had given them what they wanted. He could feel his own blood warm and wet on his back, pooling beneath his arm and then running down the slope, and he hoped that it would pump faster, empty his body swifter.
    Bring it to an end.
    Their voices came and went in the blackness.
    “I’m in favor of it. Would take a fine crime-scene team to determine he died anything but a fool’s death, and I suspect they do not have such a team in this area.”
    “Does it matter how he died?”
    “Time might matter. What this man Serbin hears and when he hears it might matter.”
    “True enough. Of course, if you do that, the whole hillside goes up. Awfully dry. Good breeze blowing and taking it up the mountain, into all that timber.”
    “Might provide quite a distraction, then.”
    “Another fine point. You’ve won me over, brother. But you’re assuming we’ll have no need for him again.”
    “I’ve seen lying men and I’ve seen honest men. In that last moment, when he said the wife was the only one who knew? He had the characteristics of an honest man. In my assessment.”
    “I concluded similarly.”
    What they were discussing, Claude had no idea. He was distracted by wondering what had happened to his arm. The pain suggested it was still part of him, but he had trouble believing that it was. If he was strong enough, he could move it, and that might tell him whether the arm remained, but moving seemed a terrible idea; he wanted to hold on to the blackness longer, where the pain was less. He tried to find it again and could not, because the sun was too hot. The sun was keeping him conscious, and he hated it, oh, how he hated it. What he’d give for a single cloud, something to block out that heat.
    But the sun came on stronger, relentless, and with it came the smell of smoke, and he realized then that the sun had somehow set the mountain on fire, and he thought that was one hell of a thing, because in all of his years in this country, he’d never encountered a day so hot as to set the earth to smoking. Someone should do something about that. Someone should make a cloud.
    The mountain crackled around him as the sun strengthened, and Claude Kitna squeezed his eyes shut tight and moaned low and long and prayed for a cloud as the world turned to fire.

11
    H annah didn’t trust her eyes. She’d sighted the smoke late in the afternoon and promptly went to the binoculars, certain it was a trick of the light or maybe some backpacker’s campfire, nothing more. She’d already sighted one campfire and found the same boys who had been in various spots around the mountains for nearly a week. Scouts or something. When she saw the second fire, all she was expecting to find with the binoculars was the same group, but when she glassed the hillside above the tree line, she saw a steady column of smoke, growing and thickening, too much for a campfire.
    Still, she didn’t call it in immediately. She lowered the binoculars and blinked and shook her head. For days she had watched the empty mountains for fresh smoke and had seen none, and there had been no storms and no lightning, nothing to give her cause for suspicion.
    But there it was.
    She lifted the glasses again as if the second viewing might prove her wrong; she felt like someone on a ship in ancient times who, sighting land after many months at sea, was afraid that it was an illusion.
    It was not. The smoke was there, and it was spreading, and Hannah Faber had her first chance to help.
    She was nervous going to the radio; the simple protocol suddenly felt infinitely complex.
    Get it together, Hannah. Get it together. This is your damn job, they’ll do the rest, all you have to do is tell them where the hell it is.
    That was when she realized she didn’t know where it was, that she was rushing to the radio without first identifying the location. She went to the Osborne, rotated the bezel, put her eye to the gun sight, and centered it up with the smoke. Looked at the map