Hunter and the Trap Read Online Free PDF Page A

never wanted to, Andy.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œI don’t want to kill.”
    â€œOn a moral basis, Monte?”
    â€œI don’t know. I never thought about it very much.”
    â€œEverything lives and dies, Monte. That’s the definition of life. You’re the hunter or the hunted. But in the hunt and in the kill, there is a kind of exultation. It’s a moment of passion. How many moments of passion does life give you?”
    â€œI’m just the guy to ask, Andy.”
    â€œI’m sorry. Think about it?”
    â€œI’ll think about it.”
    â€œGet some sleep. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

9
    I walked home through a city of beginning dawn. The night workers were coming home, but the day workers had not yet appeared. Like myself, the night people were drawn and tired. I tried to remember what kind of deer one would find in Scotland. Would they be fallow deer? I seemed to recollect out of my boyhood reading that Robin Hood killed the fallow deer. Or was it the red deer? Was fallow a name of a species or simply a color? Would they be white deer or yellow deer? I made a note of that in the woolly drift of my thoughts and promised myself that I would ask Andy about it the following day.
    Fortunately, we had no doorman. I let myself in with the common key, used the self-service elevator, and entered the four-room apartment that I called home. She wasn’t there. I got out of my clothes, crawled under the covers and slept. It was a rotten sleep, filled with bad dreams, but I slept.
    And then the phone rang. I heard Liz’s voice. “Monte—for Christ’s sake, will you get that phone!”
    I looked at my watch: it said four o’clock, and since the room was filled with daylight, it was obviously four o’clock in the afternoon. I tried to fix the day, while the phone rang a third and a fourth time.
    â€œWill you get that son-of-a-bitch phone!”
    Andy had come in on Friday—two o’clock in the afternoon on Friday—so this was Saturday.
    â€œGod damn you!”
    Usually a phone will stop after three or four rings. I picked this up on the seventh ring. I was still half asleep, but when I heard Andy’s voice, I became alert. His voice was tense and hard, and he apologized for waking me, but only to get that aside.
    â€œWhat is it, Andy?”
    â€œI’m in trouble,” he said. “I am in damn big trouble, Monte.”
    â€œWhere are you?”
    â€œIn the phone booth at the St. Regis. In the King Cole room. You know the booth at the far end of the room?”
    I couldn’t see how it mattered where the phone booth was, but I told him I knew.
    â€œThat’s where I am. In the phone booth.”
    â€œAll right. Just take it easy.” I could not have seen myself telling Andy Bell to take it easy, but neither could I have anticipated that a time would come when I would hear this kind of tension and anxiety in Andy Bell’s voice.
    â€œMonte, I’m being hunted.”
    â€œWhat?”
    Suddenly, his voice became quiet and controlled. “You heard me, Monte. I am being hunted.”
    â€œHow do you know?”
    â€œMonte, goddam it, I am a hunter. I know.”
    â€œWhen did it start?”
    â€œTwo hours ago—when I left the Carlyle.”
    â€œAre you all right where you are?”
    â€œI think so. I think I broke clear. But I have to talk to you about this. I have to talk to someone I can trust. I can trust you.”
    â€œAnyone recognize you there—at the bar, I mean?”
    â€œNo. I suppose that’s a blow. Funny, I sit here, and under everything else I am scared shitless the way I was never scared before, and still I can feel the bruises on my ego because no one recognized me.”
    â€œYou’ve been away a long time.”
    â€œYeah. The bartender looked at me twice. I didn’t want anybody to spot me—not now. Then he apologized. He thought I was Burt