“That sounds like a happy ending.”
Coburn shrugged. “Maybe for a guy who wants to settle down. Maybe for a guy like you. A guy who knows who Elmo is.”
He chuckled. “A little girl, huh? So you’re awash in estrogen.”
“You could say that.”
“Sometimes I think of my place as the ‘House of Feelings,’?” he said. “It can be quite a shocker to spend the day alone out in the field and return home to that.”
“Four of ’em,” Coburn said, shaking his head. “I have trouble handling two. I’ve spent my whole life on my own. Keeping my own company. Not sharing anything with anybody, especially space. Now I’m having discussions about things like curtains. I don’t care what color they are. I just want to know if they shut.”
He nodded. “I hear you. And what’s the thing with throw pillows?”
“Hell if I know.”
They pondered the imponderable for a few seconds.
“Can Honor cook?” he asked.
Coburn smiled. “Oh, yeah. And don’t get me wrong. She’s wonderful. I can’t keep my hands off her. It’s the other stuff I gotta work through. I keep asking myself, Can I do this?”
“That’s not the question you should be asking.”
“Enlighten me.”
“Do you want to do it?”
He gave him time to answer, but nothing came, so he said, “You can do it, Coburn. If I can put up with a mother-in-law who never fails to remind me that her daughter married down, you can put up with curtains and throw pillows. Builds character. Maybe Honor will take the edge off you.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“With all due respect, you could be less of a hard-ass. And one other thing. When we get out of this thing, go have Emily’s name added to your arm. Don’t chicken out this time.”
Coburn glanced at his still seeping wound. “If we get out of this thing.”
“We’ll find out soon enough, I think.”
By eight thirty a sliver of moon had wedged between the spindled tops of two pine trees, the sky overhead almost cloudy from the countless stars. A sight Pickett never tired of seeing.
Two men stepped out of the trees on the south side of the clearing. One was stocky and short with a barrel chest. The other cadaverous, and he pulled his left leg behind him as he walked. Silver light reflected off the barrels of their rifles.
The stocky man whispered, “You gonna make it?”
“I better,” the skinny man said in a southern twang. “Ain’t never tried to walk on a shot-up leg before.”
The stocky man chuckled.
They moved deliberately across the clearing toward the walls of the lodge. Condensation puffed from their mouths with every breath. They kept low as they neared the log walls.
When they were leaning against it, the stocky one whispered, “One, two, three.”
And they both sprang up and looked over the wall, their rifles sweeping the dirt floor.
After a beat, the stocky man said, “Where the hell did they go?”
“Right behind you,” Coburn said, raising the .45 with his left hand.
Joe didn’t even have the stock of the shotgun up to his cheek before there were two loud booms and orange fireballs erupted from the muzzle of Coburn’s weapon. Both the rednecks were thrown into the wall by the bullets’ impact. The skinny man fell like a puppet with his strings clipped. The stocky one regained his balance, turned, and raised his rifle. Coburn shot him again and the man dropped to the ground.
Pickett’s ears rang.
He barely heard Coburn say, “I think I forgot to say freeze.”
COBURN EYED PICKETT IN THE amber light from the campfire. The game warden had finally stopped talking and had settled in to shoveling spoonful after spoonful of canned stew into his mouth.
“I can’t believe I’m so hungry,” Pickett said. “Usually when I see a dead person, I get sick.”
“Then drink,” Coburn said, extending a bottle of bourbon they’d found in the One Nation cache.
Pickett grabbed the bottle, sucked a long swig, then grimaced.
“Good, huh?” Coburn said, taking it back.
The liquor dulled the pain from his shoulder but not as much as he would like.
“How did you know they wouldn’t see us leave that shelter to hide in the trees?”
“The darkest time of the night is that ten-minute window after the sun goes down, and just before the moon comes out. It takes a few minutes for your eyes to adjust. You learn that by chasing poachers around. That’s why we left when we did.”
He nodded.
Smart thinking.
Something emerged from the trees.
Like a ghost, twenty feet from the fire, startling them both.
“My steed,” Pickett said, definitely pleased. “Rojo.”
The horse snorted.
Pickett stood with a grunt and led the animal closer to the fire, tying him to a tree trunk and fishing a radio out of the saddlebag.
“I’m going to contact the Teton County Sheriff’s Department. When the good guys get here, do you want to go straight to the hospital?”
“Where else?”
“Thought maybe you’d want to roust your tattoo guy first.”
Coburn savored another deep drink of the bourbon.
And grinned.
VAL MCDERMID AND PETER JAMES
VAL MCDERMID TELLS ME THAT the idea for this story came while she was having her feet worked on by a brisk German reflexologist. While lying there she kept thinking about how most people consider feet unattractive, and yet for some they’re a powerful sexual fetish.
A thought occurred.
What would happen if a foot-fetishist reflexologist confronted a pair of feet so perfect he wanted to keep them forever.
And the story was born.
Both Peter and Val are British crime (thriller) writers. But their novels are set at opposite ends of the country. Val’s principal characters are a detective and a psychological profiler. Peter’s is a pure detective. For them both, the whole world of foot fetishists was a relatively unexplored subject. Learning about the weird and wonderful world of feet, as objects of eroticism, seemed a bit mind-boggling for them.
But there was an element of fun to it too.
Peter wrote the skeleton of an outline. Val then fleshed it out and drafted the opening, setting the scene and the tone. Together, they then worked back and forth, each writing segments of about a thousand words. Val counted on Peter for all the police procedural elements, which gave her free rein to have some fun with the characters. And they both had “a bit of a giggle” at each other’s terrible puns about feet.
The result is something quite unique.
Footloose.
FOOTLOOSE