Dead Man Running

by Steve Hamilton

  “We’re going to make it,” I told him. “The road’s not far.”

  We both knew that was a lie. But we kept going.

  “Just had a grandson,” he said to me. His breathing was ragged and shallow.

  “Don’t talk. Tell me later.”

  “No.” He leaned against me, so hard he almost pushed us both over. “You have to tell him . . . And my daughter . . . Tell them I’m sorry. Tell them I love them.”

  We made it another twenty yards. Then he slid to the ground. I tried to pull him up again. He shook his head.

  “You tell them,” he said. He coughed up blood, and it fell from his chin, onto his neck. “Promise me.”

  “I will,” I said to him. “I promise.”

  I moved over so that my body was sheltering his face from the sun. I held his wounded hand tight, trying to stop the bleeding. But his shirt was soaked with more fresh blood now. Every movement he made, it made his heart pump more blood from his body. He was struggling to breathe.

  I sat with him like that for another minute. Maybe two. He looked up at me one more time and gave me something almost like a smile.

  Then he died.

  I laid him back on the ground and closed his eyes. I stayed there with him for a few more minutes. Then I finally got to my feet.

  I made it about five steps before I had to stop and throw up in the dirt. I emptied myself until there was nothing more than a dry convulsion coiling through my body. I stood up, wiped off my mouth, and kept walking.

  My head was pounding, making me dizzy enough to wonder if I was even going in the right direction. It was all rocks and dirt and scrubby little cactuses and nothing else.

  I could get lost here. Make it out of that canyon alive, but then die trying to get back out to the road.

  I found what I thought was the trail, but now my left knee was radiating with pain. I didn’t want to lift up my pants or take off my shirt. I knew it would be just a minor version of what the explosion had done to Halliday’s chest.

  The sun had already started to grind me down again and turn my throat to dust. I wondered where Livermore was at that moment. Somewhere on the other side of the canyon. If he was smart enough to set up that ambush, then he was smart enough to leave himself a cache of water for his way out. Some new clothes so he could ditch the orange. Money. A cell phone with a separate battery to recharge it if it was dead. It would be so easy to hide just about anything in these rock piles. He might even have a vehicle hidden nearby, within walking distance. That was how empty it was out here.

  The sun kept beating down on me with every step, making me more thirsty than I’d ever been in my life. My knee kept throbbing, and I started to get dizzy again. But I kept moving. I heard nothing but the silence of the desert and my own footsteps.

  And the explosions. Still roaring in my ears.

  The road finally came into view, waves of heat rising from the vehicles that were still parked there, exactly where we had left them. I went to the agents’ car and tried the doors. They were locked. The van was locked. The state car was locked.

  I went and found a rock the size of a softball, went back to the agents’ car, and hit the driver’s-side window, right in the center. It exploded into a thousand glass pebbles. I reached inside and hit the door lock, opened the door, and sat down behind the wheel. I grabbed the radio receiver and hit the transmit button.

  “Code thirty, code thirty,” I said, bringing back from my memory the one code you never wanted to hear on a Detroit police radio. “Seven officers down.”

  I let up the button and waited for an answer. The airwaves crackled.

  “Please respond,” I said, hitting the button one more time. “I repeat. Seven officers down.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE RECOIL FROM the shotgun was still tingling in his hands as Livermore walked from the canyon. He could still see McKnight’s face, could still feel the moment, that shotgun pointed at his chest. The power he’d felt, knowing he could end his life with one slight movement of his finger.

  But of course he hadn’t. It wasn’t time for that yet.

  Not for McKnight.

  He found his pack where he had hidden it behind a thick juniper bush. The fabric was the exact color of the brown-red rocks around it. You could stand five feet away and not see it. Livermore pushed his way through the bush and pulled it out, zipped it open and took out the hacksaw that was inside. Priority number one, cut his hands free. That took a minute. Priority number two, cut the shackles on his legs, increase his mobility. Another minute. Then he was on the move. He ducked into another side canyon and took off the orange jumpsuit. Priority number three. He put on the hiking clothes—the shorts, the shirt, the boots. He put on the baseball cap and stuffed the orange jumpsuit in a plastic bag, left that behind as he looped the pack around his back and kept walking. Five minutes out of the canyon and he already looked like just another hiker, out on the trail on a perfect February day in Arizona.

  Priority number four, he took out the metal bottle of water from the pack and drained it. It was warm, but his body needed hydration. He’d get fresh water soon enough.

  That left priority number five.

  He walked up the hill through the barren red rocks, taking a quick look behind him now and then, just to make sure McKnight wasn’t following him. He saw a thin haze of smoke still rising from the canyon, this place he had taken so much care to choose, a couple miles down the trail from the end of the abandoned road, next to a mine that hadn’t been used in years. He had known the explosives would still be intact, even after several days. The weather was dry, and he’d packed them just right. He had known the angles would be correct, and that he would have enough time to get himself safely onto the ground. Above all, he had known that the wiring would perform exactly as designed, and that the battery-powered jammer would activate in time to transmit on a broad spectrum of radio frequencies, temporarily overwhelming the service on any two-way radios nearby. And of course on any cell phone, because a cell phone is nothing but another kind of radio.

  He kept walking. When he got to the road, he took it northeast, walking a little over a mile and a half to the old junkyard just outside of Bagdad. It was a graveyard of old vehicles, all stored out here in the dry weather for parts. He picked his way through the ancient Fords and Chevys, and the occasional piece of copper-mining equipment, until he came to the SUV on the far edge of the yard. It was pulled in between two panel trucks, so you had to know exactly where to find it. And even if you did, you’d see that it was covered with decades’ worth of dust and sand. You’d walk right by and probably never give this vehicle another thought.

  But Livermore found the key in the tailpipe, opened up the back hatch, and pulled out the broom. He climbed onto the top and started brushing off the sand he had poured on the vehicle himself. Then he opened the driver’s-side door. It didn’t look like an old vehicle once you got inside, because of course it wasn’t. The thing barely had thirty thousand miles on it. A Nissan Pathfinder, from Japan, of course—a land where the designers knew enough to let robotic arms, machines that Livermore himself had helped design, build their vehicles with a care and a precision that no human being could ever match. Bought with cash, never registered, the Pathfinder had a pair of stolen Arizona plates from a vehicle that was up on blocks behind a barn, the registration tab still current, but the plates unlikely to be noticed missing anytime soon.

  Livermore popped the hood, reconnected the battery, and started it up. Then he cranked the wipers to push off the last of the sand on the windshield, put the vehicle in gear, and drove out of the yard.

  When he hit the road, he went south for a few miles. At that point, he could have turned west and driven to Las Vegas. That would have been three and a half hours. An obvious choice. Too obvious, because everybody runs to Vegas. The lights call to you from the desert. Come and get lost here.
Anyone looking at a map would choose that as the first place to look for him—and there was really only one road to Vegas, US 93 all the way. They’d be all over it.

  Flagstaff, on the other hand, was about the same distance to the east, with three different ways to get there. The superior choice for a superior mind.

  So of course he wasn’t going there, either.

  When you have a mind that is beyond superior, you go in the last direction anyone would expect. That was why he was driving directly back toward Phoenix, but not before looping around to the east so he could come in from a new direction.

  He settled in for the drive, already thinking about where he’d eat that night. Real food, after all of those hours spent in the Fourth Avenue Jail, his first and only experience having a metal tray slid through an opening in cell bars.

  Livermore’s pack was on the passenger’s seat next to him. Inside was ten thousand dollars in cash, another change of clothes, his laptop, his cell phone with a charger, a set of ropes, and his Walther PPS semiautomatic with a box of nine-millimeter shells.

  There were more supplies in the back of the vehicle, the things he’d packed several days ago. More ammunition for the pistol. More clothes. Two five-gallon cans of gasoline, sealed tight to prevent any fumes. A large plastic box filled with electronic components. Another plastic box filled with explosive material.

  Because he needed to be ready for anything.

  He turned on the AM radio, started scanning the dial for the news reports. An escaped fugitive is on the run, six foot two, with long, light brown hair. Armed and dangerous. A two-million-dollar reward for anyone who provides information leading to his capture.

  Free less than an hour, Livermore thought, and I’m already worth two million dollars.

  As he drove, he kept his mind busy by working through the odds. After another day, then another week of being free, of doing whatever he wanted to whomever he wanted to do it to, how high could that number go?

  Finally, his mind settled on the last part of his plan. Almost an afterthought, the diversion he had set up to make sure the FBI and everyone else would stay busy looking in exactly the wrong direction.

  They’d all be off chasing a ghost, leaving him alone with Alex McKnight.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  AS I WAITED, I kept replaying the scene in my mind. Watching those men die. Watching the blood fly against the canyon walls.

  A squad car responded to my radio call, followed by more squad cars, ambulances, fire trucks, pretty much every official vehicle in central Arizona, until there wasn’t room to maneuver on that road anymore. When the two FBI agents showed up, they took me from the ambulance, where someone had cut away my left pant leg and wrapped my knee, then cut away my left sleeve to do the same for my arm. The agents put me in the back of their sedan and drove me all the way back to Phoenix, that same two and a half hours down that same lonely road, never saying a word to me. Not that I felt like talking.

  They took me to a hospital just off the expressway and checked me in to the emergency room. I sat there for another hour until a doctor and a nurse finally came in and looked me over. The nurse took my vitals while the doctor asked me about my ears and how much water I’d had in the past few hours. Then he unwrapped my knee and got to work on the shrapnel, taking out little round hunks of metal with a long set of tweezers and dropping them with a loud clang into a metal bowl.

  He did my arm next. Three more clangs in the metal bowl. When both injuries were wrapped up with fresh bandages, they left me sitting there for another half hour, until I’d finally had enough of the place. I got up and limped out. I was expecting to see the agents in the waiting room, but they weren’t there. All I saw was the usual assortment of the city’s underclass, something I’d seen on a thousand different occasions back in Detroit. They came here because it was the one place that wouldn’t turn them away.

  When the agents finally caught up to me, I was standing in the parking lot, replaying the whole thing in my head and trying to find some way I could have made it come out different in the end. I noticed that my hands were shaking, and I almost wished I was a smoker then, so I could have a familiar ritual to calm myself down. The agents came out and found me, and one of them made the mistake of grabbing me by my wrapped-up arm, like I was some kind of fugitive trying to escape.

  “I’ve had a bad enough day,” I said to the man. “You grab me again, you’ll have to shoot me.”

  He let go of me, but he didn’t apologize. They put me in their vehicle and took me over to the FBI building on Deer Valley Road, parked me in an empty conference room, where I waited some more, until Agent Madison came in and sat across from me. He was another old-timer, same vintage as Halliday. Gray hair, dark suit, all business. He looked at me, took a long breath, then he went right to the question of the day.

  “Why are you alive?”

  I replayed those few seconds in my head one more time, right before the first explosion ripped through the canyon. How Livermore had stopped and turned, how he had called out to me . . . And then how someone had taken me to the ground.

  Agent Cook. He’d been acting purely by instinct, neutralizing a perceived threat when Livermore had turned all of the attention to me.

  “It was Agent Cook,” I said. “He saved my life.”

  And then the next thought, which hit me even harder. Livermore knew someone would take me down. All he had to do was wait for it, then go down himself.

  That was part of his plan, from the beginning. He wanted me to survive.

  “Take me through it,” Madison said. “Everything that happened.”

  I went over it as well as I could remember. Every detail, from the drive to the canyon to Livermore standing over me with the shotgun. Then leaving me there, with Halliday. Until Holliday couldn’t go any farther.

  “We’re losing valuable time,” Madison said. “He could be three hundred miles away right now, in any direction.”

  Basic fugitive-hunting, I thought. Time equals distance. Keep the time line as short as possible, or you’ll never catch him.

  “You have no idea where he is right now,” Madison said.

  “No.”

  “Or what he may be planning next.”

  “How the hell would I know that?” I said. “Why are you asking me this?”

  He put both of his hands on the table. “You still can’t tell us how you’re connected to—”

  “No,” I said, doing my absolute goddamned best to stay calm. “If I had an answer, don’t you think I’d give it to you?”

  He sat there across the table and looked at me for a long time without saying anything.

  “Agent Cook’s got a couple of kids,” he finally said. “Twelve and thirteen years old. He just recently transferred here. Roger, I knew a lot longer. We came up together. He and Louise . . .”

  He stopped to clear his throat.

  “Their daughter just had their first grandchild. I mean, literally, he was just born a few days ago.”

  “I know,” I said. “He told me.”

  Madison took a moment to let that sink in. At some point, I’d want to deliver that message to his daughter and grandson, as I had promised. But today probably wasn’t the day.

  “You’re staying in Phoenix for a while,” Madison said. “We’ll keep you at the same hotel, and I’ll introduce you to the whole team, as soon as we have it together.”

  “How long will I be here?”

  “I can’t answer that right now. It’s not totally up to me, anyway. There are other parties waiting to talk to you. Starting with the state police.”

  That wasn’t a surprise. I knew I’d be answering the same questions, again and again.

  “I know you were once a cop,” he said, “so you know this is the worst day ever.”

  “Been there, yes.”

  My mind flashed to the
funeral of my own partner, a million years ago. I only saw photographs in the newspaper, because at the time I was still in a hospital bed.

  “Along with the grief, there’s a lot of anger.”

  I nodded.

  “DPS lost two men. They want somebody to be accountable for that. The jail lost three men. Same feeling. Everybody’s looking at each other right now.”

  “Looking for somebody to blame. I get it. And I’m right in the middle of everything.”

  “Yes,” he said. “You are.”

  “So tell me everything you know about this guy. Show me his file. If there is a connection with me, that’s the only way I’m going to see it.”

  “I told you, there are other people waiting to talk to you . . .”

  “By the end of the day, he could be another three hundred miles away. Show me the file.”

  He thought about it for another few seconds. Then he got up and left the room. He came back carrying a box.

  “Most recent first,” he said, pulling out one file. “Not counting Stephanie Hyatt, who at this point is still missing.”

  I started paging through the reports for Carolyn Kline, the woman who had been taken to the house in Scottsdale. They were all from different local police departments, all written in that same bloodless cop language that never seemed to change, no matter who was writing it.

  Victim is a twenty-five-year-old female, five foot five, one hundred and thirty pounds. Last seen around 2300 hrs. on 11-07-2017 in vicinity of Skyline Tavern, 2200 N. Central Ave., Phoenix. Abducted at her home by persons unknown.

  Everything the writer of the report could think of saying—but in the end just a collection of details, with no ultimate answers. Then the ME’s report, which used a more obscure kind of detached language to describe this woman’s last few hours on earth. The trauma, the violation, the rope ligatures.

  Using every word except the one word that would have fit best.

  Torture.