No Man's Dog by Jon A. Jackson Page A

at you in the hot springs. But I’m not worried about him. It’s you. You might get lonely.”
    They sparred over that for a while, but as always it ended in wrestling and then making love. An hour later, having packed up the Durango, Joe was driving out, already engaged in road thoughts. He had taken everything he needed to take. He was glad that he and Helen had parted as they had. If he never came back, well, at least they’d had that.
    He believed that he was making a clean break. He had regrets, but basically he felt all right. He’d gotten too into this straight life, he knew. The visit from Caspar had been the jolt he’d needed. He’d gotten so complacent with domestic concerns that he’d forgotten who he was. He was crazy about Helen, but he’d have had to leave her eventually anyway, he supposed. Even if they’d grown old together, he thought, one of them would die. And there had been the nagging feeling about the Colonel and the Lucani. That relationship wouldn’t have gone on much longer, he was sure. Well, now he’d take of that, too, after he dealt with this problem with Echeverria’s men. And Fedima.
    It was the irritation with Fedima that had precipitated all this, he saw. Those damned cows. What to do about Fedima? This woman had a different agenda. This kind of thing would only go on, build to greater and greater issues. Next, she’d feel lonely. She would start thinking about the value of this hidden paradise, the money it would bring if they sold some river frontage for vacation homes. The lovely neighbors they would have.
    It was inevitable: paradise was threatened. Joe had no long-range plans. He hadn’t considered this, but if asked he would have supposed that very likely he would eventually live somewhere else. But that was some purely putative future. For now, he could be satisfied that he’d left a safe, beautiful place, a hole-in-the-wall, for Helen.
    It was odd, he thought, but he had never considered the consequences of Frank marrying Fedima, having a family. A family! He was sure, now that he thought of it, that Fedima was bound to have many more kids, dozens. Good god! She had to be stopped.
    He drove slowly over the ridge and saw Fedima outside the house. She was hanging clothes on the line. She wore a housedress with a floral print and a babushka. When she saw the Durango, she waved to him. Joe pulled into the drive and sat in the car, waiting. He reached down between the front seats to make sure his automatic was handy. He swiftly racked a shell into the chamber as she walked down the drive, barefoot. He settled the .38 into the crevice between the seat and the center console.
    Joe looked around. Was this the last time he’d see this country? It was very beautiful, the long, sweeping meadows rising to the ridge, and far beyond them the dark crags of the continental divide.
    Fedima looked rather fetching, a slim, dark beauty in her early twenties, with large dark eyes. The light was behind her as she approached and Joe realized that she was clearly wearing nothing more than the housedress. She smiled as she came up to the Durango. Joe did not get out. He liked her, almost against his will. A pretty girl can do that to a man.
    She leaned with both hands on the door, her fingers curled over the window opening, peering in. She saw his bags. “Joe, where you going?”
    “Ah, business,” Joe said. “Where’s the baby?”
    “He is taking a nap,” she said, glancing back at the house. “Frank is fishing, again.”
    “Where?” Joe said. It occurred to him that he would have to kill Frank, too. Frank would never harm a soul, intentionally, but he could tell investigators far too much about Joe. He felt a bitter regret—it was Fedima’s fault. But what about the baby? Joe hadn’t considered that. He dismissed the thought; it wouldn’t be necessary to kill the baby. Perhaps Helen would take the baby. But he realized, almost in the act of thinking it, that Helen would never get