by Lee Killough
Pfeifer said, “He can still get to I-70 if he finds his way to 12 or 282 but we can’t follow him and see which way he’s going without being seen. We need to cover both roads.”
Garreth gunned in a tight u-turn and toward the road taken by the kidnapper. “Tell them I can drive with just parking lights and keep track of him. He won’t see me.”
“Garreth, you’re crazy,” Maggie said, but passed it on.
After a short silence, the sheriff came back, “You know the road that well?”
“Yes.” No...but no need when his night sight let him see it perfectly well.
At the corner, he switched off all his lights before turning. Paving at the junction made County 1120 look like a regular county highway, but fifty feet in, the surface turned to gravel. It stretched out in a grey ribbon visible farther than he would see using headlights.
Maggie caught her breath. “Are you sure about this? I can’t see a thing.”
He accelerated after the tail lights ahead. “Give yourself time to adapt. The clouds aren’t that heavy and we still have more than a half moon up there.”
“They’re heavy enough and you claim you’re seeing right now. How can you?”
He made a joke of it. “I guess I forgot to mention my mother is a werewolf.”
“Terrific. So sometime I’m going to wake up next to a fur coat.” She paused. “Which might not be a bad thing in the win — Garreth!”
He saw. Brake lights coming on past where 1120 passed under I-70. Garreth braked, too. “He’s realized there’s no on-ramp for the Interstate.”
Hopefully Emma had not tried tricking her kidnapper by saying there was...something that might get her shot. To his relief, no light came on inside the vehicle, indicating a door had opened to perhaps push out a body.
Presently the brake lights went off. The car moved forward again. Garreth waited to make sure the car was not turning around before he drove on, too.
Several minutes later the car braked once more, this time at a crossroad. Trying to decide which direction to go? It turned left.
Maggie keyed the radio. “Subject turning east two miles south of I-70.”
“That’ll be Droge Road.”
So called, Garreth guessed, by virtue of Droge topping the farm names on the signpost at the corner.
The road should follow the section line straight to 282, but Pfeifer had time to meet them at the other end with a spike strip.
Then the road made to a right angle turn south...as they sometimes did to jog around a large pasture. A couple of miles farther on, it turned back east. Shortly it forked, one branch going east, the other, south. The kidnapper took the east fork.
Not for long, Garreth realized. He braked.
Maggie frowned. “Is something wrong?”
“In a minute he has to stop. The road dead ends at stock pens and an oil holding tank.”
In the pasture beyond the holding tank, a gleam of moonlight breaking through the overcast picked out the leisurely rocking arm of a well pump. Garreth still found himself surprised at Kansas being a oil state with wells in the middle of pastures and wheat fields...despite stories Maggie’s father told about his drilling days, and his photographs of the forest of derricks once stretching from Russell to Ellis County.
“You can really see that?”
The flare of brake lights down the road distracted her and saved him from answering. He put the ZX in park, waiting for the vehicle to turn around...but while its brake lights went out, the car remained motionless.
Garreth’s neck prickled. “I don’t like this.” He switched off his dome light so the car would remain dark when he opened the door, and climbed out.
“What are you doing?”
“Going up there to see what’s happening.” He stripped off his jacket. His dark turtleneck worked better for stealth than the pale leather. “This turkey’s been driving around in the dark not knowing where he is. Even if Emma isn’t misleading him, he’s got to be frustrated, maybe desperate. I have to make sure he isn’t about to kill Emma.”
“But going on foot! Garreth, that’s crazy.”
“He won’t be expecting that.”
“What if he turns around while you’re up there? I can’t follow him.”
“I’ll get back here in time to drive. Update Pfeifer.”
He sprinted away before she could protest further. After giving himself a few yards, where he felt sure Maggie no longer saw him, he shifted to vampire speed.
As he reached the fork, the driver’s door of the patrol car opened. A thin figure in a hooded sweatshirt climbed out and reached for the rear door. Gut lurching, Garreth reached down into himself for all the speed he could find. Light from inside the vehicle revealed a revolver in the man’s hand.
The night air brought him scents of blood and sweaty fear, and voices: Emma’s, struggling for calm. “You don’t have to do this. I told you I don’t know the roads in this end of the county.”
Her captor’s, irritated: “This ain’t about that. Nothing personal...just you and this crate ain’t working out for me.”
“Then just leave me locked — ”
“You might see which way I go.”
In despair, Garreth watched him aim into the back seat. Even vampire speed could not reach reach the car before that finger pulled the trigger.
He needed a new target.
Garreth managed to find one more notch of speed and hurtled forward yelling: “Police! Drop your weapon!” No way would he let this turkey claim later that Garreth had not identified himself.
As he hoped, the other man whipped toward the sound in panic. But to Garreth’s dismay, instead of the weapon discharging wildly, the muzzle flash pointed straight in his direction.
For a moment time seemed to freeze. Cursing his miscalculation, Garreth stared at the bright blast and pictured the bullet tearing into him. Then Lane’s voice echoed in his head — You need a head shot to stop me with lead, lover — laughing off the bullet he put through her as he lay wounded by her arrow. Meaning, what...that bullets could not harm him as long as they missed his nervous system? Only one way to find out.
Time leaped forward again. Searing pain punched through his chest...all that of a door passage condensed into a single excruciating point. But he had just time to feel it before momentum slammed him into the kidnapper. Reflex overrode shock. He ripped the revolver from the kidnapper’s hand and tossed it onto the floor of the rear seat, spun the man and kicked his feet from under him to drop him face down on the ground.
“Lace your fingers together behind your head!”
When the man seemed too dazed to comply, Garreth wrenched the hands back himself, and held them with one of his own while he began searching his prisoner. “Are you all right, Emma?” Two speed loaders in one pocket of the sweatshirt joined the .38. Ditto a switch blade in the other sweatshirt pocket.
The woman sliding out of the patrol car stared up at him in astonishment from the level of his chin. Her small size and wide eyes made her look about fifteen years old. “Who are you? Where did you come from?”
As if in answer, headlights suddenly blazed on, blinding them, and a motor roared their direction, skidding to a halt a few yards away.
Maggie jumped from the ZX. “Garreth, are you all right! I heard a shot! I’ve called it in.”
As she stepped into the light he stared at the weapon she held, her Desert Eagle. “You brought that cannon on our date?” No wonder she had a purse the size of a gym bag.
Her chin jutted. “Why carry a pop-gun off duty? I have handcuffs, too.”
It figured. Just like she flaunted her job on her Bronc’s tags and carried a scanner in it.
“Then you can do the honors here.”
Garreth let her slap on the cuffs, then finished the search — netting a wallet, a Holiday Inn room key, and a Pontiac ignition key suspiciously missing any kind of tag or key ring.
Sirens pierced the night air as Garreth hauled the prisoner to h
is feet.. Lights appeared down the roads south and west. Shortly the space between storage tank and stock pens, big enough for a semi to turn around in, had filled with flashing light bars and vehicles that also included Ellis and Rush county deputies’ and a highway trooper’s.
Emma babbled in relief. “I was a fool at the office. This guy wanted to fill out a vandalism complaint he said, but he collapsed. When he fell he was gasping that he’d dropped his pills. I ran out to help him find them.”
The next thing she knew, he had her by the hair and a knife at her throat, forcing her to let him into the corridor and take him up to the jail.
That made everyone turn to stare at the prisoner — one Clinton Carver according to the Arizona driver’s license in his wallet — now locked in the rear seat of the patrol car he had stolen.
“What did you want in the jail?” Pfeifer asked.
Carver stared sullenly at the floor.
On the jail level, however, they had not left the stairwell. Carver peered through the window in the door, swore, and dragged Emma downstairs again. Where they met Officer Jamison coming up from the garage.
“He kicked Wes under the chin like some kung fu fighter and knocked him out and took his gun and car keys. I didn’t think he could find which unit they went to before someone saw us but he did it by feeling the hoods.”
Clever. If Jamison had just come in, Garreth reflected, the hood would be warm.
“He was going to shoot me here...only this officer came out of nowhere and saved me!” She turned, peering into the crowd around her. “Only I don’t see him.”
Garreth had backed toward the ZX as other officers arrived...retreating from the flood of adrenaline-filled blood scents making his throat burn and teeth ache. As his own adrenaline drained away, hunger replaced it. He needed to go home and drink something, however unsatisfying. And he needed to discard this shirt with its bullet holes that surreptitious inspection had found front and back.
Hooking his jacket out of the car, he pulled it on and buttoned it over the holes. “Maggie, I’m tired. Let’s go home.” He slid behind the wheel.
Tom Frey spotted them and loped over. “You’re leaving?”
Garreth shrugged. “You’ve got your man. It’s all over but the booking.”
Frey’s brow furrowed. “But it’s your collar and I’m sure Emma wants a better chance to thank you. I’m not sure she even caught your name.”
Garreth started the car. “It’s enough for me that she’s safe. And as far as I’m concerned about the collar, it’s yours...being your jurisdiction and your personnel who were attacked.”
Giving Frey a salute, he backed the car away between the law enforcement vehicles until he could turn around and head back on Droge Road.
In his peripheral vision, Maggie stared at him. “You don’t want credit for what you did?”
“I did my job and we’re all able to go home. I’m satisfied with that.”
She rolled her eyes. “But you were incredible. I mean, my god, when you climbed out I could still hardly see anything it was so dark and you got there so fast! It seemed like just seconds later I heard the shot.”
The best of reasons to duck credit: avoid scrutiny of his driving and how fast he ran. Maggie, pumped up, filling the car with the scents of her own blood and adrenaline, needed to think about something else, too. “I thought you were incredible, roaring up and jumping out with that cannon.”
She grinned. “Dramatic, huh. I was afraid he’d shot you and was going to blow him away!”
“Good thing you didn’t have to. Think of the paperwork.”
After they laughed, he encouraged her to rehash the chase as many times as she liked during the drive home. While he pushed the speed limit toward his blood supply and planted suggestions in the retelling of a longer time to reach the patrol car and more moonlight than she remembered. Hopefully, that would alter her memory of the night.
Chapter Eleven
Pounding woke him. At first he thought it was part of his dream, hammering on the barn being unaccountably built by a swarm of Amish men at the land end of the bridge from Pioneer Park’s island. He did wonder when the entire group turned and began shouting in unison: "Garreth! Garreth! damn it, wake up!" Amish would not curse that way. These could not be real Amish.
Then he noticed that though they stopped pounding when they yelled at him, the pounding noise went on.
Their voice sounded familiar, too...like Maggie’s.
Slowly he realized both voice and pounding were real...outside his door. He clawed his way up out of sleep to squint at his clock...and glare in annoyance. Twelve-thirty!
“Garreth! Wake up!”
"I’m coming!" He dragged himself to the door...opened it half the width of the safety chain, and squinted at Maggie standing outside. The glare beat at him, turning his mind to sludge. “Maggie? What— ”
She leaned up to the opening, talking fast. “I came to warn you that the guy you took down last night has been ID’d as Frank Danner, half of the pair wanted for that California bank robbery and Nevada trooper’s murder, and now probably a Colorado trooper’s murder, too. They found the bank loot, a .38, and a .45 in his motel room, the same caliber that killed the troopers and the people at the bank. And the ignition key in his pocket fit a Fiero parked a block away from the courthouse that turns out to have been stolen in Denver, carrying plates stolen in Utah along with five other sets of plates hidden under the carpet in the trunk.”
“Okay.” Not the most scintillating reply but the best the sludge produced. Why wake him up to tell him? He was going to hear it when he went in this evening.
“Oh, his brother Lyle’s in custody, too. He’d been arrested earlier in the evening for drunk and disorderly, only the arresting officer didn’t know who Lyle was at the time because he had a false ID that didn’t get any hits in NCIC. We’re thinking Frank went to the jail with the idea of breaking Lyle out, but changed his mind when he saw it was a real jail.”
The sludge shifted, regurgitating a word Maggie used initially. “You said warn me. Why?”
“Because Sheriff Pfeifer commended you by name during the press conference about the arrests and that bit made the national news.”
Garreth leaned his head against the door jam. Shit.
She sighed. “I knew you’d react like that, god knows why. Most people would like recognition for a job well done. So this you’ll really hate; Gerry Weaver’s taken messages from a couple of reporters wanting to get in touch with you...someone from the Hays TV station and Penny Ellison at the Bellamy Globe.”
Great. Just what he needed. Reporters interested in him...maybe digging and uncovering too much about him.
She shook her head. “Gerry says it’s nice there’s someone who doesn’t care about getting his name in the paper...”
Bless their day dispatcher.
“...but I see a big difference between that and running away like it’s poison.”
He sighed. “Because incidents get blown out of proportion, like when I woke— ”
“Woke up in the morgue, yeah...you’ve told me. This isn’t anything like that but...okay, have it your way.”
“Thank you for coming over.” He unchained the door and opened it enough to give her a kiss. Though her blood scent brought a surge of appetite.
Then he went back to bed, giving himself up to oblivion to escape hunger, daylight, and the threat of reporters.
The threat came thundering back when he woke later and saw someone had slipped a square of paper through the slot in his door. Had a reporter learned where he lived?
To his relief, when he picked the note off the floor, he found it came Ellie Thompson, the woman who cleaned for Helen Schoning. His father had called and wanted a call back.
He did so promptly, and the moment Phil Michaelian picked up, asked, “Dad, is everything all right out there?”
“We’ll all fine. I called to tell you what a great piece of police work you did nailing tha
t cop-killing dirtbag.”
As much as Garreth wished the sheriff had not named him, if it earned praise from his father, fine. That came so rarely. “Thank you. I was just doing my job of course.”
His father’s voice boomed down the line. “Don’t sell yourself short, son. It took real guts to drive without lights and take that killer down single-handed. If you work it right, I’ll bet you can parlay that into a job with a real department.”
Bitterness welled up in Garreth. His father could not just give him an attaboy. No, he had to use the call for criticism of Baumen’s department. And would probably carry that one step farther.
Sure enough, his father said, “You might even manage reinstatement in San Francisco.”
Not something he would ever contemplate...but he knew better than to argue. “That’s certainly something to think about. Can I talk to Mom?”
His father put her on. She complimented him, too, but her main concern was when to expect him home for a visit.
Then Grandma Doyle came on. “Harry needs your help.”
His neck prickled. That sounded like the pronouncement of a Feeling. However skeptical some friends and neighbors might be of Second Sight, the family knew enough to listen, even hard-headed cop Phil Mikaelian. “Why? How?”
“I don’t know.” She lowered her voice. “I do know it involves great danger to you, and maybe true death, but only you can do what needs to be done. Watch out for a woman with violet eyes.”
The prickle turned icy and ran down his spine and into his gut. The trouble with Second Sight was so often the damned lack of detail...the need to interpret the vision.
“Be careful.”
Making an unsettling end to what had already become an uncomfortable call, and he carried the chill to work with him.
Chapter Twelve
Sue Ann greeted him with an exuberant: “Ta-ta-daa! Hail the hero!”
Behind a typewriter Nat gave him a thumbs up.
At the door of Danzig’s office, Duncan muttered, “Yeah...hail the hero.” and disappeared inside with an evidence bag containing a short pry bar, presumably to place in the evidence lockers.
