I didn’t give him a chance to finish. I scissored my legs hard against his ankle, and it took most of the rest of my strength just to do that. It caught him off guard though, and he fell backward off of me. I heard two splashes, and hoped one was his gun.

Half in, half out of the water, leaning hard on my good left hand, I raised myself up enough to launch at him. I managed a ground tackle, and then a left hook before he could respond.

He reached up and laid a heavy grip on my face, digging in with his fingers. Michael Bell was about my height, but a super heavyweight; despite his weight loss in the past few weeks, he had at least thirty pounds on me.

I got a hand on his throat, dug in, and pushed as hard as I could. He gagged some, but didn’t let go.

Leverage was the only thing I might be able to increase, but when I moved my foot, it hit a slick of algae.

The sudden shift of weight sent me lurching with an agonizing twist of my body, and I landed back in the freezing cold water.

God, it was cold—but I almost didn’t care.

Michael Bell stood up faster than I did this time. Not a good sign. He had a second wind. The dead weight of my aching right arm slowed me down.

I saw him in vague silhouette, picking up what looked like a flat rock about the size of an encyclopedia. He raised the rock high in both hands as he came toward me again.

“You stupid fuck!” he yelled. “I’ll kill you! That’s my plan, all right. That’s how the story ends. This is how it ends!”

I scrabbled back and away from Bell as best I could, but I knew it wasn’t enough. My hand landed on something hard in the shallow water. Not rock, at least I didn’t think so. Metal?

“You die!” Bell yelled at me. “How’s that for a plan? How’s that for an ending?”

The metal object. I knew what it had to be. I yanked Bell’s gun out of the water and fumbled with the trigger. “Bell, no!” I screamed.

He kept on coming with the enormous rock held over his head. “Die!”

So I fired.

I couldn’t tell exactly what happened in the moonlit woods. I had no idea where he was hit, but he grunted noisily and stopped for a second.

Then he charged forward again. I fired a second time. And a third. Both upper-chest shots, at least I thought so.

The heavy rock he was holding fell back into the water. Suspended for a moment by some invisible force, Bell staggered away two or three drunken steps. Then he fell over face first into the water, making a loud splash.

Then nothing. Silence in the woods.