Liars & Thieves Read Online Free PDF

chimney.
    I had been in the main room of the house on several occasions and remembered the huge, cut-stone fireplace.
    The smoke became a column.
    Maybe the bastards were setting the place on fire.
    At twenty-nine past the hour a man wearing a camo outfit came out onto the porch. He had a submachine gun cradled in his arms. He walked to the end of the porch and, facing in my direction, made a come-here motion with his arm.
    I froze, holding my breath. Certainly he couldn’t be motioning to me!
    That was when I had a bad shock. A bush near a solitary tree twenty yards in front of me suddenly stood up and began walking toward the porch! It was a man in a ghillie suit, a web of cord and leaves and strips of rag that covered him completely and allowed him to sink to the ground and mold himself into the landscape. I could see the round sausage-shaped silencer on his weapon protruding from the suit.
    If I had moved in any direction from this tree, he would have spotted me and killed me.
    Every Tom, Dick, and Harry wore camouflage clothes these days, but silenced submachine guns and a ghillie suit? These men had the look of professionals. Military snipers, perhaps. Uh-oh! Right then I thanked my stars that I was wearing a dark green
    jacket, not my yellow one. The air went out of me, and I seemed to sink into the earth in my attempt to disappear from view.
    I was also doing some hard thinking. When I saw the man in the camo clothes glance at his watch and take a two-way radio from a holster on his belt, I knew I was in deep and serious shit. They might have hiked across the hills through the national forest to get here, but I was willing to bet my pension these dudes were now waiting for a ride. Someone was going to drive a vehicle up the only road, and that someone was going to see my car—and call these guys on their handheld radios, which would cause them to come looking hard for little old me.
    Even as that thought shot across my synapses, I heard the radio in his hand come to life. In that still air the sound carried, although I could not distinguish the words. Yep, both of them took a quick glance around.
    Uh-oh!
    That was when I realized I should have taken the car to the village to telephone the cavalry.
    The inadequacy of my hiding place also hit me hard. Stretched out behind a tree, I was invisible to these two as they stood in the yard, but if they began circling the perimeter of the clearing, they would see me easily.
    I backed straight up, keeping the tree between them and me. When the ground permitted, I rose to a crouch and began waddling back the way I had come as fast as I could. They would see my tracks, of course, but I had a few minutes before they found them. I intended to see if I could get back to my car before they did.
    Fifty yards into the woods I began jogging toward the guard cabin. I didn’t jog far—the tree trunks, dead limbs, fallen trees, rocks, and uneven ground made it impossible. The best I could manage was a fast walk, going over, under, and around obstacles, just as I had coming from the cabin. The heel marks and boot prints in the sodden forest carpet were nearly a path by now, plainly visible. And here I was trucking along this little highway, begging for someone to shoot me.
    After about four minutes of this, I stopped and shucked my hiking boots, tied them together with the strings, and put them around my neck. The wetness went through my socks instantly, nearly freezing my feet.
    Trying to disturb the leaves and dirt as little as possible, I climbed up the hill away from the path at right angles. When I had gone forty feet or so, I sat down to put my boots back on. My feet were already cold—there was no way I could walk very far without the boots.
    I was tying the lace on the second one when I caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of my eye. A rotten log partially concealed me on that side—the side toward the guard cabin. I ducked down, huddled against it, and