No Man's Land

by G. M. Ford

  The steering wheel jerked violently to the left. Driver hung on, trying to maintain control. The right side of the windshield shattered in the same instant the driver’s airbag blew out of the steering column, pushing Driver back in the seat and preventing him from seeing the road.

  Driver forearmed the airbag flat just in time to see the car throw its right headlight into the canyon wall. The impact shook loose everything in the car. Harry saw it coming, got his arms up in front of his face and let the seat belt do its job. Heidi, however, wasn’t strapped in. The impact sent her catapulting forward, crashing into the back of the driver’s seat with sufficient force to partially separate her right shoulder. She came to rest on the floor behind the driver’s seat, curled up in a ball, moaning as she checked herself for blood.

  Driver’s eyes rolled across the wrinkled hood and the dead doe, then came to rest on a bulge in the passenger-side windshield. About the size of a dinner plate, all cracked and looking like somebody tried to force something hard and round through the safety glass from the inside. Something with blood. And then he knew. As he moved his eyes farther right, he wasn’t surprised by what he saw. Kehoe was slumped in a heap. His body collapsed on the seat with his legs folded beneath him, his shoulders twitching, his mouth agape and full of blood. Although it was hard to tell in the near darkness, the silhouette of his head seemed, at one point, to lose its arc, as if perhaps it had been pushed in.

  Driver turned the key. The grind of the starter announced that the Mercedes was still running. He threw it into reverse and gave it some gas. The twisted sheet metal popped and groaned as it came away from the boulder. He pulled left as far as he could go, jammed the lever into park and got out of the car, leaving the door hanging open.

  One headlight had been completely destroyed, the other pointed up into the sky as if searching for satellites or something. The passenger door had been warped by the crash. It took two hands and every bit of strength Driver could muster to pull it open. If he hadn’t been there to get his arms under him in time, Kehoe would have fallen out onto the ground.

  Carefully, he took Kehoe beneath the arms and pulled him out onto the road. The sheer volume of blood made it impossible to tell exactly how bad the damage was. He carefully set Kehoe’s head down and started to rise. Kehoe grabbed onto his forearm with a surprisingly powerful grip. He opened his good eye and Driver could tell he was conscious and knew what was going on. He wanted to know. Driver could tell.

  “Bad,” Driver said. “It’s real bad.” He removed Kehoe’s hand from his forearm. “Don’t move,” Driver told him. “I’ll be right back.”

  He moved quickly. Retracing his steps back around the front of the car, pulling the keys from the ignition, then continuing on to the trunk, where he gathered a handful of towels together and started back toward Kehoe.

  Harry was out of the car by then, standing on the far side of Kehoe with his hands behind his back. “Help your girlfriend,”

  Driver told Harry. Driver knelt at Kehoe’s side, slipping a folded towel beneath his head. Harry still hadn’t moved. Driver picked up a clean towel and began to daub at the blood, trying to wipe away enough to be able to see the wound. He didn’t get far before Harry’s voice hijacked his attention. “Get up,” Harry said.

  Driver looked up to find Harry pointing Kehoe’s shiny Colt revolver at his head. Kehoe grabbed his arm again. Stronger this time. Driver looked down into his eye expecting to see a man using the last of his strength in a death grip. Instead, in that single blue eye, he saw Cutter Kehoe in all of his murderous rage. Felt Kehoe release his arm. Saw the look in his eye. Watched Kehoe slip his hand down into his pocket and, in that instant, he knew exactly what to do. Driver got to his feet and began to mosey backward, away from Kehoe and Harry. It worked. Harry followed along, stepping over Kehoe. Must not have had much faith in his marksmanship. Wanted to shoot at point-blank range.

  Heidi was out of the car now, holding one arm across her chest. She looked from Harry to Driver and back. “Honey . . . you sure you wanna—”

  “Shut up,” he said and pulled back the hammer. A smile crossed his full lips. He aimed down the barrel at Driver. “Adios, motherfucker,” he said.

  And then Kehoe reached up and did what he did best, he cut him, hard and deep across the back of the leg with that awful boning knife of his, severing the artery and the tendon both, dropping him to one knee in the road like a puppet with a broken string. Harry emitted a high-pitched squeal as he pivoted on his knee, pointed the revolver and shot Kehoe in the face. And then again and a third time, before toppling over on his side in the road, rocking back and forth in pain.

  Driver stepped around the back of the car, keeping the trunk between him and Harry. He watched as Heidi ran around the front and knelt at Harry’s side. The river of blood pouring out of Harry’s leg told her all she needed to know. “Oh baby,” she said.

  “You’re hurt bad. We gotta stop the blood . . . oh baby . . .”

  She lifted his head and put it in her lap. Driver followed her footsteps around the front of the car, She was stroking Harry’s hair when Driver reached down and plucked the gun from his fingers. He weighed it in his hand for a moment, then heaved it as far out into the barren field as he was able. When he looked down at the ground, Harry was a whiter shade of pale, looking into Heidi’s big blue eyes and mouthing silent words.

  “You’re bleeding out, kid. You got something to say to your girl, now’s the time for it,” Driver said.

  Overhead, the clouds were on the march; shaded and scattered, they moved westward across the night sky like circus elephants joined trunk to tail. To the north, the lights of a town twinkled from the valley floor below.

  Harry died without a final word. His lower lip trembled as he sought to speak, then he was gone, lying there in the road with his hair all nice and neat in Heidi’s opulent lap.

  “Never said a word,” Heidi said, her face darkening. “After all we been through that son of a bitch never said a word to me. I can’t believe it. Not a single word.”

  “I’m guessing most people die without saying anything,” Driver said. “I’ve always figured that ‘famous last words’ stuff was made up by other people afterward. Something to make the whole thing seem more momentous than it really was.”

  She pulled herself away, letting Harry’s head drop to the road with a thunk not unlike the sound of a melon on a concrete floor. She scrambled to her feet, dusted off her hands and looked down at Kehoe.

  “Sorry about your friend,” she said.

  Driver shrugged. “The Cutter went out like he would have wanted to,” he said.

  “Harry always said he was gonna die in bed with his boots on.”

  Driver looked down at Harry’s twisted body. “I guess he was half-right anyway.”

  Driver wrapped the remains of Kehoe’s head in a clean towel, tied the ends in knots so it would stay in place, then picked the body up in his arms, maneuvering it into the backseat of the Mercedes, where he laid him out with great care, before straightening up and returning the back of the passenger seat to the upright position.

  “What about him,” she said, pointing down at Harry’s remains.

  Driver reached down and put a finger through one of Harry’s belt loops. He lifted hard, turning him over, setting the body to rolling down the incline into the overgrown ditch, where he slipped among the thick weeds and disappeared from view. When she looked up again, Driver had the black automatic in his right hand.

  “Oh please, mister,” she stammered. “I can . . . oh God I . . .”

  “Looks like your time isn’t here yet. Like maybe you get to be more than just protein. Like maybe some of you goes on from here.”

  “You can just leave me here . . . uh . . . you know, I don’t even know your name.”

  He pointed the gun at her head. She wet her pants, then her shoes, then the road.

  He snapped the safety on and returned the gun to his waistband. “You can stay here or
you can come along. It doesn’t matter to me,” he said. “It’s not my place to interfere with the river.”

  She was already in the car with the door closed by the time Driver dropped the transmission into drive and started down the hill. They moved slowly, running with the lights out and the radio off. Took fifteen minutes before the road leveled out a bit. All the way down to where they could make out a pair of church steeples at the far end of the town.

  Driver braked the car to a stop. He pointed out over the damaged right fender.

  “You see that gate there? “ he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Open it up,” he said.

  Took her two tries to shoulder open the door enough for her to squeeze out. As soon as he moved the pole-and-barbed-wire gate aside, Driver rolled the Mercedes through. She watched as he headed across the field toward the pond on the far side. One of those man-made farmer’s ponds. A good week’s work with a bulldozer. Probably full of bass. The near end had a little wooden dock, with a two-by-four ladder running down into the water. Something maybe you could dive off in the summertime. Up at the far end, a thinning grove of willows leaned over the water like supplicants.

  Driver parked the car thirty yards uphill from the center of the pond. He lowered the windows to half-mast, turned off the engine and set the emergency brake. From the trunk he retrieved the pair of Nike bags and set them on the ground behind the car, before returning to the driver’s side, releasing the emergency brake and closing the door, as the car began to move forward, slowly at first, then gaining momentum as gravity pulled it toward sea level.

  The Mercedes hit the water with a splash. Moving easily as the water covered the hood and started rushing through the windows. Then it stopped. Three-quarters of the way into the pond. Hung up on some subterranean obstruction with its ass sticking up in the air. Driver cursed. He walked uphill and picked up the bags. As he began to walk off, the big car shivered and seemed to lower its head as it began to move again, more slowly now, as if it wanted to enjoy the view for as long as possible, until, finally, after what seemed like an eternity, it slipped beneath the brackish water and vanished.

  “What now?” she asked as she latched the gate back into place.

  “Now we walk,” he said.

  32

  “You want to do the honors, this morning?” Rosen asked. Special Agent Westerman blanched. “Me?”

  “No time like the present,” he said with a smile.

  “I haven’t been briefed.”

  “You don’t need to be briefed. We’re not telling them anything.”

  She laughed and flicked a glance in Rosen’s direction. Half to see if he was kidding, half to get another feel for where he was coming from. For the past couple of days, she’d had an inkling that Rosen was working his way up to hitting on her, then she’d had second thoughts, wondering if perhaps her misgivings were nothing more than a girlish interpretation of an otherwise purely professional situation. As one of her favorite adages was “when in doubt, trust your instincts,” she figured she’d go with the inklings.

  The offer to let her do the press conference added another straw to her burgeoning suspicions. Agents went entire careers without ever getting their faces on TV, let alone briefing the press on anything as lurid as escaped convicts and multiple police officer murders. Even better, these weren’t the type of fugitives who G.M. Ford were going to lose themselves in the south of France. Yahoos like these got caught or killed in fairly short order, making this the kind of case where her face and name would be associated with a positive outcome. No doubt about it, opportunity was rapping its knuckles on her door. As decisions went, this was strictly a nobrainer.

  “What are we telling them?” she asked.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw a come-and-go smile cross his lips.

  Rosen removed a single sheet of folded paper from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. He handed it to Westerman, then stood with his arms folded across his chest for the ten seconds it took her to read the three short paragraphs.

  “That’s it?” she said.

  Rosen stepped over and looked at the paper in her hand. He pointed at the first paragraph. “Introduce yourself, and then just run over the facts for them. Two officers down at Utah rest area. They were transporting Harry Gibbs and Heidi Anne Spearbeck. Yadda yadda. Kehoe’s fingerprints at the scene. We’re assuming they’re together, but probably not for long. The officers’ names are being withheld pending notification of next of kin. Subjects are considered to be armed and extremely dangerous.”

  He leaned in closer, pointing to the second paragraph, brushing his shoulder against hers. “We’re here in Salt Lake City working with the Utah State Police, in conjunction with the local Bureau office.” He rolled his wrist over the top of itself as if to say “and so forth.” “Nationwide manhunt. Judging from the direction they’ve been moving thus far and the capital crimes they’ve committed along the way, we’re assuming they’re trying to make for the Canadian border, as Canada has a long history of refusing to return anyone facing the death penalty.”

  “Is that what we believe?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “You think Driver’s headed for his mother.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m sure of it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I saw her during his trial. I was Bureau liaison to King County.” He anticipated her question. “Driver was a federal employee, so the situation required a federal presence. By the time it was over she’d been cited for contempt, carried out of the building several times and eventually was no longer allowed in the courtroom at all. She took a swing at a witness. She spit on reporters.” He leaned in even closer. “Blood may be thicker than water, but that lady’s support of her son was way over the top.”

  He shook his head. “Maybe it’s got something to do with the father walking out on them or something, but there’s a bond between those two that’s positively . . .” He searched for a word.

  “. . . positively unhealthy,” he said finally.

  “You mean like . . . ?”

  “Let’s leave it at that,” he said.

  She was relieved. Others would have taken the opportunity to delve into the subject. His refusal gave her pause to wonder about her earlier suspicions.

  “What about Corso?” he wanted to know.

  “He left the Phoenix office in a motor home with Melanie Harris . . . you know, the host of that TV show American Manhunt.”

  He nodded that he knew.

  “We’ve located the motor home in Scottsdale. They’re both registered at the Phoenician Resort. I should have word within the next half hour or so.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “A tryst?”

  “Separate rooms. In which they slept separately.”

  He seemed disappointed. “Let’s do it,” he said.

  • • • “What happened to your hand?”

  “And you’d been doing so well,” Corso said. “Just chatting along. Not running your reporter number on me at all.”

  “It’s in the blood,” Melanie said with a laugh.

  “What say you keep it up.”

  “But I’ve got the number one interview in America sitting right across from me slurping coffee. How could I resist?”

  “Do us both a favor. Resist.”

  As she laughed again, the warm desert breeze lifted her hair, illuminating the highlights. The double French doors, separating the private balcony from the main dining room, eased open, allowing the buzz of muted conversations to wash outside. Corso stifled a frown. One of the joys of places like the Phoenician was that the staff generally had impeccable timing, arriving when they were needed but otherwise fading into the background. The waiter had peeked out five minutes ago. Again now was too much.

  Wasn’t the waiter though. It was Oscar, the concierge. Oscar was Swiss and had mastered the art of patrician disinterest. Today, however, he looked a bit nonplussed. He nodded politely at each
of them, then closed the doors behind him.

  “You have . . . er . . . some guests, Mr. Corso.”

  “Guests?”

  “Official guests.”

  “Official as in badges?”

  “Exactly, sir.” Before Corso could ask, he said. “FBI, sir.”

  “How many?”

  “Eight, ten, a dozen. Perhaps more. They’re blighting the lobby in those dreadful suits. They’re waiting in your rooms for both of you. They’ve also let themselves into Ms. Harris’s recreational vehicle.” His tone implied disapproval of such recreation even more than FBI tailors.

  Corso thought it over. “As a citizen and a taxpayer I believe a person should assist our law enforcement agencies in any way possible, don’t you, Oscar?”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  “To the extent that your research among the staff has revealed that I left early this morning.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Asking that you forward my meager belongings to the usual Seattle address.”

  “And the young lady?” Oscar inquired.

  “Hopefully, Oscar, the young lady is going to do what she does best.”

  “Very good, sir,” he said with a short bow. “Uh . . . by the by, sir, it might be best if you exited via the kitchen. I’ll inform Fritz. There will be no problem.”

  “Thank you, Oscar. As usual, my visit here has been a pleasure.”

  “I will inform the manager, sir.”

  Corso waited for the soft sound of the doors latching.

  “You want that interview?” Corso asked. When she didn’t answer immediately, he went on. “The interview all America has been waiting for. The man on the inside of the prison break. The perfect closer for this Arizona sojourn you’ve been on.”

  “Why do I get the feeling this isn’t going to be free.”

  “Nothing’s free.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want you to get me out of here.”

  She looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “You heard the man. They’re waiting in my trailer.”

  “So, go to the trailer. Tell them we had dinner last night, then said good-bye. You’ve got no idea where I am right now and what are they doing in your trailer without a warrant anyway. Get huffy with them. They’ll leave in a heartbeat.”