Dead Run m-3

by P. J. Tracy

  "Automatic rifles," Sharon replied without a trace of doubt, slipping her weapon from her leather shoulder bag, and Annie's vision of rescue by some husky country good ol' boys took a dark turn.

  Grace already had her Sig in her hand. Over the years, her survival instinct had been honed down to the most primal level. She never stopped to analyze, to moralize, to ethically weigh the wisdom of pulling her gun. If she sensed danger, the weapon came out of the holster. It was that simple. And automatic rifle fire didn't belong in the Wisconsin countryside.

  She was still looking through the screen door to the left where the road curved into the woods, and then they all heard it and saw it at the same time: a battered white pickup roaring around the curve and into the town, zigzagging crazily, steam pouring out of the grill, the shredded rubber of its tires slapping the tar while sparks flew from the undercarriage.

  Grace flung out an arm, saying, "Back! Back!" and pushing Annie and Sharon away from the door and the big front windows, her first fear being that the truck would veer into the cafe, shattering the glass.

  Instead, the roaring sound ended abruptly with the sudden death of its engine, and the truck came to a wheezing stop in the middle of the street directly in front of the cafe, its windows shattered, its side peppered with what had to be bullet holes.

  In the next heartbeat, a jeep came careening around the curve and screeched to a halt inches behind the crippled truck, and Grace and Sharon both started to raise their guns. But then two soldiers jumped out, automatic rifles leveled at the truck, both of them red-faced and screaming, "Get out! Get out! Get out!" and for the very first time in more than a decade, Grace was holding a gun in her hand and wasn't certain what to do with it. Pulling her gun at the sound of automatic weapon fire had seemed perfectly sensible, but when the fire was coming from men in uniform, it changed everything. She caught a glimpse of Sharon's gun in her peripheral vision, frozen at half-mast as hers was.

  The soldiers were yelling, the damaged passenger door screamed as it was flung open, and then there was silence so deep that Grace could hear the bright tinkling of shattered glass tumbling to the asphalt. A pretty blonde woman in a print dress stepped down from the truck and would have collapsed, had she not been supported by the strong hands of the man who climbed down behind her. Grace had a millisecond to see the flash of a gold wedding band on the man's left hand and a skim of white slip showing below the hem of the young woman's dress before the soldiers opened fire.

  The man fell first, a red blossom erupting on the blue of his denim shirt. And then new red flowers bloomed all over the woman's dress and she began to sink to the ground.

  For an instant, Grace, Sharon, and Annie were frozen in place like mannequins on display-three women with their breath caught in their throats, standing ten feet behind a plate-glass window in plain view of anyone who happened to look.

  But the guns kept firing, and when the man and the woman fell, that single heartbeat of immobility was over. The three women dove to the floor as one, below the sight line of the windows, and started scrambling on hands and knees toward the cafe's back door. They slipped outside with the guns still firing behind them, bolted across the narrow strip of grass between the cafe and the frame house, then into the woods.

  That was the great thing about women, Grace thought. Forget the female reputation for endless speculation and discussion-when things went south, women didn't stop to analyze. Even women with guns in their hands deferred to instincts honed by centuries. Warning. Danger. Run. Hide.

  A FEW YARDS into the trees, the relative darkness of the forest closed around the three women, giving the illusion, if not the reality, of safety.

  And then the shooting stopped.

  It was deathly still again-quiet enough to hear the muffled voices of the soldiers in the street in front of the cafe, even with the buildings and trees between them-quiet enough for the soldiers to hear them if they made too much noise.

  The three women froze, moving again only when new noises broke the silence-another vehicle arriving in front of the cafe, then more voices that sounded like mad dogs barking.

  More soldiers,Grace thought.But how many more, where are they coming from, and why the hell did they shoot those people down?

  She remembered last October, when the entire city of Minneapolis knew that a killer would be at the Mall of America looking for the next anonymous victim; and she remembered how many people went to the mall anyway, blinded by that ingrained belief that bail things happened to other people, not to them. Grace had never thought that way- If there was a bad thing in the neighborhood, it was surely coming for her next, and the very first thing you did was try to get the hell out of there.

  Her eyes searched the trees until she caught a glimpse of the old logging road, and when she started to move toward it, Annie and Sharon followed. Apparently all of them had the same thought in mind: getting back to the Range Rover, to the highway they'd come in on, away from whatever nightmare was happening in this town.

  The going was easier on the old overgrown logging road. They moved quickly and silently past lacy banks of ferns so tall and thick that they brushed against their hands as they passed. Grace stayed in the lead, stopping every few yards to listen, long after the sounds from the street in front of the cafe had faded into the distance.

  When they came to the place where the path angled left, Grace stopped again, but this time she went so still and rigid that Annie and Sharon both stopped in mid-step behind her, eyes wide to pierce the gloom, finally focusing on what Grace had seen before them. None of them breathed.

  Several yards ahead, nearly obscured by the drooping arms of a big white pine, a soldier leaned casually against the tree, looking directly at them.

  Sharon's fingers twitched ever so slightly.

  Don't do that. Don't reach for the gun. You should have had it in hand anyway, you idiot, because now you don't dare move a muscle, you don't dare unsnap the holster because a tiny noise like that could get us all filled. And what the hell do you think, you're going to do with it anyway? You've never shot anyone in your life, even that one time you should have, and now you're planning to start with a man in uniform? Jesus God, you don't even know what's going on here, you don't know who the bad guys are,

  and what if those people in the truck were terrorists planning to blow up the country and you shoot the brave soldier risking his life to defend his country just because he has a gun bigger than yours and you're scared? Think, goddamnit. Think like a cop, not like a woman.

  She eased a quiet breath into her lungs and expelled it slowly, silently, her eyes on the soldier, trying to figure out if he was really looking right at them or if it only appeared that way.

  After an endless, heart-stopping moment, he turned his head to the side and said, "Pearson, you got a cigarette?" and then all three women looked in the direction he had turned and saw things that hadn't been readily visible before: another soldier standing a few yards to the right of the first, filtered sunlight glancing off the metal barrel of a gun, and farther away still, the distinctive shapes of other heads and shoulders, shifting slightly to relieve stiff muscles.

  "They didn't say we could smoke out here."

  "Yeah, well, they didn't say we could take a piss, either, and you didn't let that stop you."

  "All right, all right, just a sec."

  As the two men moved together and dipped their heads to share a light, Grace sidestepped ever so slowly off the path, into the trees, and ducked into the lush cover of a thick stand of the giant ferns. She kept her head above the level of the greenery until Annie and Sharon were settled on their bellies beside her. When she was sure she couldn't see either one of them, even this close, she eased all the way down, closed her eyes, and listened to the pounding of her heart. It seemed terribly loud, and yet the rest of the woods was so quiet that she could hear the soldiers' conversation over it quite clearly.

  "We're too tight here, Durham. We should spread out more."
<
br />   "Tight on the funnel points, Pearson. Perimeter 101."

  "You ask me, it's a waste of time. If we pulled everyone in off the perimeter, we could be out of here a hell of a lot sooner."

  "If somebody else gets through, it wouldn't matter how fast we pulled out. Containment. That's what it's all about now."

  Silence for a long moment, then the sound of a throat clearing. "It wasn't supposed to go down like this."

  "It never is. And then the wild card shows up. Anybody with half a brain would have turned around at that roadblock instead of crashing through it."

  "I heard their kid was in here, Durham. What if there are other people out there like that? People who weren't here when everything went to hell, on their way back home right now? Then what?"

  "You know damn well what. We follow orders, just like Zacher and Harris did. Look at it this way, Pearson. Everyone they knew is dead anyway. Not a lot to come home to. Bottom line, anybody gets into this town, they don't get out, fucking period, end of story."

  And there it was, Sharon thought, as clear as new glass. The man and woman in the pickup had not been terrorists, drug runners, foreign agents, or any of the other things her mind had been buzzing through, searching for something that might explain, if not justify, being gunned down by American soldiers. They'd simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Just like we are.

  "Goddamnit, Durham, this is a fucking nightmare. Somebody's going to find out."

  "Not if we do our job."

  Right next to her, Sharon heard Annie take a soft breath. And then a plump hand moved a fraction of an inch in the darkness beneath the greenery, and a rainbow fingernail touched her hand. It startled her at first. She'd never seen Annie touch anyone. For the first time in nearly twenty years, she felt a sharp sting behind her eyes. She'd been alone for a very long time.

  On Sharon's other side, Grace had rested her forehead on the tops of her hands, eyes closed.Too close, she was thinking.Too damn close. They'd almost walked into those soldiers, and it was her fault. She had been in the lead and she'd almost gotten them all killed. She put the guilt away, back in the place where she carried all the guilt for so many other things, and began to inch backward on her belly, deeper into the woods, farther away from the path. She moved very slowly, careful not to disturb the fronds overhead, because there could be no more mistakes. After several minutes of this painstaking, backward belly crawl, they were deep enough into the cover of the trees to rise to their hands and knees and begin the agonizingly slow, silent crawl away from the soldiers, away from freedom, back toward the town.

  After what seemed like a very long time, they reached the edge of the woods behind Four Corners and lay abreast in the cover of a thicket of young locust trees.

  Grace examined the strip of lawn that lay between them and the frame house behind Hazel's Cafe, then looked carefully in every direction, focusing longer on the shadows behind them. Those men in the woods had been so hard to see until they were almost on top of them. There could be a dozen of them within spitting distance and she wouldn't know it.

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, forcing herself to clear her mind and concentrate only on the needs of the moment, and what they needed at the moment was a place to hide, a relatively safe place where they could consider all they'd seen and heard and decide what to do next.

  Her gaze fixed on the storm-cellar door that slanted up to the foundation of the frame house. In front of the door was a bare patch of grass, indicating frequent use-maybe it was unlocked, too, like everything else in this town.

  Grace looked over at Sharon and Annie, held up one finger that told them to stay put, then sprang away, darting across the grass, grasping the handle of the heavy wooden door and heaving it upward. The hinges moved easily in their oiled casings. She laid the door to rest on a concrete block obviously placed for that purpose, then looked down a short, steep flight of concrete steps. There was another wooden door at the bottom. Without a moment's thought to what she would do if there was someone behind that door, she scrambled down the steps, turned the old metal knob, and pushed inward.

  A wall of cool, dank air rushed past her like a chilly ghost anxious to warm up. Goose bumps rose on her arms, as much from the temperature change as from anything lurking within. Her hand closed tighter on the sweat-slicked grip of her Sig as she let her eyes adjust to the gloomy space, barely illuminated by the thin, brownish light that filtered in through window wells near the ceiling. Sweating rock walls shored up the foundation, and rough-hewn uprights marched across a packed earth floor. Stacks of cardboard boxes with sides bowed and sagging from the damp climbed around some of the posts like moldy pyramids.

  Grace moved silently through the clutter, zeroing in on every shadow that had the potential to conceal, then hurried back up the concrete steps to wave Sharon and Annie in. She watched as the two women crossed the lawn in the kind of fearful, crouching run you saw in war movies, not in real life.

  Once they all were safely inside and the doors were closed behind them, Annie made a beeline for an old, four-legged concrete sink-to get a drink, wash her hands, rinse out her dress, who knew with Annie-but Grace grabbed her arm and pointed silently toward the ceiling. Even turning on a faucet wouldn't be safe if there was someone upstairs.

  She moved to the flight of open wooden steps leading up a dark passage to the first floor, Sharon and Annie right behind her. At the top, she stopped and pressed her ear to the door, holding her breath, listening for a long time before turning the knob.

  The door opened onto a central hallway that bisected the house from front to back. To their right was the front door that Grace had peered through earlier from the other side, when she'd been standing on the stoop, wondering who on earth would cut all the phone lines in this little nowhere town.

  They moved soundlessly through the house in a stealthy, tiptoe exploration, stopping briefly at the open, double-hung windows in the living room to look and listen. There were no sounds coming from the street anymore, and that in itself was chilling. There should be noise after a slaughter, Grace thought-the wail of sirens and people to mark the terrible occasion. And yet there was nothing.

  In the kitchen, at least, they found evidence that someone actually lived in this town-there was an unopened package of four pork chops floating in a bowl in the sink. The three women raised their heads from the sink and looked around, more wary than ever that this abnormally deserted town had been normal not so long ago, populated by normal people who took pork chops out to thaw for supper.

  The bedroom and bath belonged to an older woman, filled with a lifetime of knickknacks, crocheted doilies, and bizarrely, an old stuffed animal propped carefully against the pillows on the bed. Grace imagined a carnival game fifty years past and an aging woman's memories of a lanky boy and better times. The pervasive, sickly-sweet smell of cheap perfume that's been in the bottle too long lingered in the stifling air.

  Sharon sat on the bed and reached halfheartedly for the phone on the nightstand. She knew it wouldn't work. It was just something you did. "You heard them," she said, putting down the useless phone. "They're all dead. Everybody who lived in this town. The woman who lived in this house."

  Grace and Annie just looked at her. Well, yes, that was probably true, but that didn't mean there was any reason to just blurt it out like that.

  "And they're not soldiers. Our soldiers do not kill civilians. They do not shoot down people in the street."

  Grace didn't think it was necessary to remind her that such unthinkable things had indeed happened, in this country and others. Sharon knew that as well as any American. But good soldiers and good cops had a bond and common purpose that Grace had never experienced. She'd been on the other side too long, glimpsing it only through Magozzi's eyes. And Annie didn't bother herself with such trifles, never trusted a man inside or outside of a uniform, as far as Grace knew.

  "It wouldn't be the first time the military tried to bury a sc
rewup," Annie said tactlessly. "Maybe it's not soldiers-maybe it's some fringe group of whackos with a charge card at the local surplus store, but it could be either. And in the long run, what does it matter? These are not nice people."

  Sharon narrowed her eyes. "You sound like every conspiracy theorist I ever met. Do you really think soldiers just walked into this place and started shooting everybody?"

  Annie found a little boudoir chair at a makeup table that interested her. It held a jumble of cosmetics tubes and jars and a surprisingly neat row of nail enamel in every color of the rainbow. She picked a jar of purple with sparkles in it and held it up to the window. "I'll tell you what I think. I think something unexpected happened here-an accident, maybe-and those assholes in camouflage, whether they're soldiers or not, are trying to keep it quiet, and they're willing to kill people to do it-including us, just because we happened to stumble onto the place."

  Grace was watching Sharon's face, thinking this was harder for her. She was a good cop, like Magozzi. Believing the worst of the people you thought shared your ideals was almost impossible. "Annie's right about one thing," she said. "Who or what they are doesn't make a whole lot of difference at this point. We need to get the hell out of here. Those men are all over the woods, and eventually they're going to find the Rover, then there won't be a place in this town that's safe."

  "Oh, Lord," Annie whispered, staring into the mirror as if she were seeing something that wasn't her reflection. "That's not the only thing they're going to find. We left our purses in the cafe."

  Sharon closed her eyes. "Oh, Jesus."

  Grace blew out a long sigh and glanced out the window. "What time does it get dark?"

  "Seven-thirty, eight," Annie said immediately, but Sharon shook her head.