Page 35 of Hunter

After carefully putting the bottle away, he reminded her that he wasn’t simply on a sightseeing trip when he pulled the gun from the waistband of his jeans. Removing the silencer from the barrel, he tucked the weaponry into an upper cabinet, behind a bag of flour.

She wanted to ask why he didn’t turn it in. She supposed he thought it might come in handy. And who was going to say it was missing, she asked herself. Not the intruder, unless he’d been acting on official orders.

Careful to hide her state of mind in case somebody was listening, she cleared her throat. “What do you want to eat?”

He turned to look at her, pulled at his earlobe the way he did when he was at a loss for words. “Nobody ever asked that before. They just brought food.”

She gave him a quick little smile that was meant to mask the sudden tightness in her chest. “What do you like?”

He thought for a moment, his lower lip caught between his teeth. Then he answered in a flow of words. “Steak. Baked potato with sour cream. Peanut butter and grape jelly. Once Beckton let me have some potato chips. They were good. We have creamed chipped beef for breakfast sometimes. I like that better than eggs.” His eyes took on a dreamy look, the hard planes of his face softened. “Once I had vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup. Another time I had cherry pie.” He stopped abruptly, then added wistfully, “You probably do not have any of those.”

The way he said the last part made her eyes sting. “Well, as a matter of fact, I do have some. Most men like steak. So I bought it.”

“Steak,” he repeated with enthusiasm.

Quickly she turned toward the refrigerator, “I have apple pie and vanilla ice cream. And popcorn. I should have gotten potato chips.”

“You tried to think of things I would like?” he asked, his voice full of awe.

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

“Friends try to please each other,” she told him.

“Friends,” he echoed.

“Yes. And I brought some music,” she added brightly, crossing to the machine and putting in a disk. There hadn’t been much of a selection, but she’d foundThe 1812 Overture.With its stirring themes and pounding rhythms, it should get some kind of response—particularly the cannons firing at the end.

He stood and listened intently for a minute.

“Do you recognize that?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No one here plays that kind of music.”

“Do you like it?”

“Yes,” he answered, his voice thick and deep.

“I’m glad.”

He continued to listen, his face blissful. She might have stood there watching him for a long time. Instead, she busied herself with the food preparations, working quickly to keep from weeping. He mustn’t see her weep. Mustn’t know that she was on the edge of breaking down as she discovered how deeply he responded to a little kindness, a little color in his bleak life.

After putting the pie in the oven to warm, she cooked a package of frozen mashed potatoes and stirred in extra butter and some grated cheddar cheese. Then she began to melt more butter in a pan and added the steak, along with some seasoning salt.

“How do you like it?” she asked.

He looked like a man roused from a dream as his attention snapped back to her. “How do you?”

“Medium.”

“I will try that, too.” Abruptly he turned and began to move around the house again, poking into the backs of shelves, looking at each object critically. On silent feet, he moved toward the other end of the room, switching lights on and off, opening drawers, examining the edge of the baseboard.

She lost track of him when he wandered into the hall. Several minutes later he came back to the living room and switched off the music with an expression on his face that conveyed a kind of grim triumph.

“Don’t you like it?”

“I will listen later,” he said as he motioned her to follow him. After moving the pan off the burner, she came into the hall where he had opened an access door that she had assumed held the circuit breakers. It did, but below the electrical panel was a niche hidden by a piece of plywood. Hunter removed the wood and gestured toward the interior. “I found another toy,” he said.

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