Goodbye to the Dead (Jonathan Stride Book 7) (30 page)

56

The small row of six storage units was immediately across the street from Anna’s house. The facility was built from cinder blocks, with double-wide green wooden doors, on a dirt lot that was overgrown with weeds. Dense trees swarmed the units, dropping leaves and branches on the mossy roof. Where the lot ended, the ground fell off into a steep ravine.

Anna backed her SUV to the last unit in the row. She got out, making sure they were alone. Bernd was in the back seat with Cat, and he dragged her out of the truck by the collar of her T-shirt. The gun was in his hand. Outside, the dirt under Cat’s feet was wet and spongy. Rain spattered her face, and wind swirled the treetops that grew out of the gully, making a roaring noise.

‘Erin’s inside,’ Anna told Bernd as she opened the tailgate of the SUV.

‘Let’s get her, and get the hell out of here.’

A packing crate filled the rear of the truck. The unfinished wood was stamped with the name of a foreign manufacturing company and labeled for steel shims. A bungee cord looped the square box, and Anna yanked heavily on the cord to drag the crate from the rear of the truck, where it dropped into the mud. She used a crowbar to pry open the lid. The crate was empty.

Cat saw her future, and she knew it was inside the box. Cat and Erin, the two of them, imprisoned together. The thought of being nailed into the wooden coffin, rolling with the waves of the sea, set off panic in her chest. She wanted to shout, but she couldn’t. She wanted to run, but she had nowhere to go. Her legs bowed; she began to fall. Bernd grabbed her elbow and jerked her to her feet.

‘Open the door,’ he told Anna impatiently.

The double doors of the storage unit were secured by a padlock, which Anna undid with a key. She swung open one of the green wooden doors. Cat saw the rear bumper of a purple Nissan Versa with a license plate from North Dakota. Otherwise, the interior was black.

Anna went inside and plugged an orange extension cord into an outlet, which illuminated a floodlight hanging from the ceiling. The breeze blew in, making the floodlight sway. Anna headed for the back of the storage unit, and Bernd pushed Cat inside, pulling the door shut behind them. The space smelled of mold and metal. Strange shadows played across the walls through streams of dust. At her feet, an army of black bugs pushed through the dirt and feasted on scraps of meat and bread.

Anna got to the front of the Versa and stopped cold. A strangled gasp blew from her mouth, and her fists clenched. ‘Oh, fuck.’

‘What is it?’

Anna stared at the floor and shook her head.

Bernd pushed Cat by the neck, and she stumbled forward, trying to keep her balance. When she came up next to Anna, she screamed into her gag. A woman lay at their feet, chained to a metal table that was weighted down with bags of cement. She was on her back, spread-eagled, her skin gray. A two-inch gash was open on her neck, and blood pulsed from the wound, pooling under her head and staining her long hair.

‘You stupid bitch . . .’ Bernd muttered to Anna.

He let go of Cat and swung his arm in a haymaker to the side of Anna’s skull. The blow knocked her halfway across the hood of the Versa. Her wool hat flew off. Dizzied, she slid to the dirt. She tried to right herself, then crawled on hands and knees to the woman on the floor. She put her fingers on the woman’s neck, coming away with blood on her nails.

‘She’s still alive,’ Anna told him. ‘She’s still breathing.’

‘And we’re supposed to move her like that?’ Bernd demanded.

‘Well, I don’t know – we could
—
’

‘Shut up,’ Bernd said. ‘Stop talking.’

‘Bernd
—
’

‘
Shut the fuck up
.’

Anna staggered to her feet. She grabbed for balance on the hood of the car. Blood was everywhere now. On Anna’s skin, her knees, her arms, her clothes. She’d bitten down on her tongue when Bernd hit her, and blood dripped from the sides of her mouth.

‘I’m sorry,’ she pleaded with him.

Bernd’s face was knotted up into a mask of rage.

‘I didn’t know, how could I know?’ Anna went on. ‘We still have Cat. You said yourself, she’ll be worth a lot. Come on, let’s get out of here.’

‘Not you.’

‘You can’t leave me here!’ She took Bernd’s shirt in her bloody fists and shouted in his face. ‘You think I’m going to prison for the rest of my life for you? Fuck that! I’ll give you all up. Every one of your sorry asses. I’ll tell them everything!’

‘I know,’ Bernd said.

He brought the gun up and fired through Anna’s stomach. The noise reverberated in the shut-up space. Anna screamed in agony and laced her hands over her belly as she staggered backward. Streams of blood squeezed through her fingers. She stared down at herself in disbelief.

‘You son of a bitch
—
’

Bernd straightened his arm and fired again, directly into her head. The shot was like a bomb. Cat watched Anna’s face explode in a shower of bone and brain. Her friend’s knees crumpled, and Anna slumped to the floor in a dead pile. Cat squeezed her eyes shut and looked away. She felt deaf from the bang of the gun, and her skin was pricked with stinging, pinpoint burns.

The killer’s hand locked around her wrist. ‘Let’s go.’

Bernd dragged Cat by her bound hands, and her shoes scraped on the dirt. He got to the door of the storage unit and kicked it open with his heel. She squinted into the gray light of the afternoon. The rain was heavier, sheeting sideways in the wind.

The SUV was there, its tailgate open. The packing crate lay on the ground, the wooden lid next to it. Cat knew what came next. Bernd cocked his arm and flipped the pistol in his grip, ready to crash the butt of the gun into her head. Cat swung at him with her arms, but it was like striking an oak tree. His body barely moved. She lost her footing in the mud as she hit him and stumbled to her knees. Protecting her stomach, she tried to skitter away from him, but he grabbed her under her shoulders and hoisted her into the air. Her legs kicked. She landed blows without felling him. He dropped her down again, and with his bloody hand around her neck, he pointed the gun into her face.

She felt the heat of the barrel burning her.

And then she heard it. They both heard it. Sirens. Loud, wailing, roaring closer, not even a block away. She stared past the dirt lot to the street, barely able to hope for rescue, but there they were. The strobe lights of squad cars flashed between the tall trees, one after another, brake lights squealing as the cars swung wide. In the midst of them, she saw a truck she recognized.

Stride’s Expedition.

*

‘There!’ Al shouted, pointing at an ivy-covered house at the corner of a T intersection with Edward Street. ‘That’s where Anna lives.’

Stride jerked to a stop and bumped over the curb on the boulevard. With his window open, he gestured police cars past him, where they swerved into position, blocking both streets. He opened the driver’s door. Serena and Maggie climbed out of the back seat behind him.

‘Stay here,’ he told Al. ‘Don’t move.’

All of Stride’s attention was focused on Anna’s house, which was built on a shallow slope of lawn and had steps leading from the sidewalk to the front door. The wall nearest the street was completely draped in dense vines, obscuring the windows. He led the way toward the door, with Serena and Maggie close behind him. Rain slashed his face. He’d nearly reached the door when he heard Al shouting from inside his truck. The kid’s high-pitched voice was muffled by the window, but he screeched a name over and over, and Stride recognized what Al was saying.

‘
Cat! Cat!
’

Stride swiveled toward the street. So did everyone else. He saw a dilapidated row of storage units, a muddy, weed-covered driveway, a forest of soaring, waving trees, and an SUV parked near the last unit with its tailgate swung open. Beside the truck, a tall man backed away toward the edge of a steep ravine.

The man had a gun in his hand.

And he had Cat.

The passenger door of Stride’s truck swung open. Al screamed Cat’s name and bolted across the street, his arms and legs flying. Stride shouted after him, but the kid didn’t stop. Then they were all running: Stride, Serena, Maggie, the cops. Stride skidded down the lawn of Anna’s house and hit the pavement in a sprint. Ahead of him, Al kept shouting.

‘Cat! Cat!’

Al pumped through the mud, his sneakers splashing. He was almost at the SUV when the man holding Cat raised the pistol and fired. The first shot missed wide. Al threw himself behind the truck bumper, but a moment later, he charged again, and the man fired again. This time the bullet drilled into the meat of Al’s shoulder. Al jerked at the impact, his face twisted in pain, and his knees buckled. His hand clutched his shoulder, and he fell against the truck door.

Stride didn’t dare shoot. He kept the SUV between himself and the gunman as he evaluated Cat’s situation. She was bound with her hands in front, but otherwise looked unharmed. She wriggled frantically in the man’s grasp, but he had her neck in a chokehold as he pulled her toward the edge. When the man spotted Stride, he laid the barrel of the automatic against Cat’s cheekbone.

The two of them kept backing toward the ravine. Thick trees soared from the pit of the valley and loomed over their heads. Dense, leafy brush leaned in around them. Compost and dead branches, dumped at the fringe of the slope, made the earth like quicksand.

‘Stop!’ Stride shouted at him. ‘Stay where you are!’

The man cast a glance behind him, where the ground fell away. He was up to his ankles in mud. He took the gun from Cat’s head and squeezed off another shot, which pinged against the metal siding of the SUV. With one more shot, he shattered the truck’s windshield, pelting Stride with glass.

Stride ducked behind the truck and waited an excruciating five seconds. The man didn’t fire again. When Stride stood up, the slope ahead of him was empty. The deep gully had swallowed them up.

57

Stride went down and down and down.

He half-fell, half-climbed the sharp slope. The soft earth gave way under his feet, and he stayed upright by grabbing onto wet brush. Leaves slipped through his fingers. The deeper he went, the darker it got, blocking out the charcoal sky. When he glanced behind him, he saw Serena and half a dozen cops starting down the hill, but soon they disappeared behind the crowns of trees. He was alone.

Where the ground finally leveled, water gurgled over his feet. He was no more than a hundred yards from the open coastline where the St. Louis River widened into Spirit Lake, but for now, he may as well have been in a rainforest, trapped among trees so dense that he couldn’t see ten yards in front of him. He listened, but the noise of rain and wind drowned other sounds.

He saw fresh footprints in the mud of the creek, heading east toward the lake. That was their trail.

Stride yanked out his phone and called Maggie. ‘They’re moving east. There’s an abandoned set of railroad tracks by the lake. We should be able to get people in from the north.’

‘On my way,’ she told him.

He followed the ravine, shoving branches aside and wiping water out of his eyes. He felt blind and deaf. The rain got harder, drumming like thunder on a million leaves over his head. The creek water deepened, filling his boots. Every few steps, he stopped and squinted to peer through the forest ahead of him. There was no sign of them.

And then –

The flaky trunk of a birch tree burst into bark and wood dust two feet from his head. The crack of a gun rippled over the noise of the storm. He squatted and caught a glimpse of a man’s legs, anchored in the creek, facing toward him. Cat was still with the man, struggling to escape. They were fifty feet away. Another second later, the man turned and disappeared, dragging Cat behind him.

Stride gave chase, but the wilderness fought back. Spindly branches scraped his face and drew blood. The water and mud sucked his boots into the ground, clinging to him with each step. His arms hacked through the foliage, forcing a path. It couldn’t have been more than five minutes that he’d been inside the woods, but it felt longer. He no longer saw anyone ahead of him, but he kept low as he pushed forward, in case the man fired blind shots to slow his pursuers. He was glad he did, because four more gunshots echoed wildly around him, swallowed by the woods. He didn’t know how close any of the bullets had come.

Finally, beyond the trees, he saw water and sky. He spilled out of the forest and found himself on the graveled fringe of old railroad tracks, steps from the dappled surface of Spirit Lake. The wooded land mass of Wisconsin was visible a mile across the water. Streaks of rain surged from the low clouds. Almost immediately, as he reached the clearing, gunshots rang out again. He ducked, taking cover.

The man with the gun pulled Cat northward on the railroad tracks. On his left was the impenetrable forest, and on his right was the expanse of the lake. He had nowhere to go, but he ran anyway.

‘Stop!’ Stride shouted. ‘Give it up!’

In answer, the man fired at him again and kept running.

Stride followed. The railroad tracks were overgrown with weeds. The lake beat against the land, and the rain gushed across his body. He jogged, then threw himself flat as the man twisted back and squeezed off another shot.

Behind him, Stride saw Serena emerge from the trees. Six other officers did, too, crouched and ready. They spread out between the woods and the lake, and all of them pushed northward. Stride moved again, closing the gap between himself and the man with the gun. Beyond the man, a quarter-mile away, he spotted Maggie and a team of officers converging from the other direction.

They had him in a squeeze now, police coming from both sides. The man with the gun saw it, too, and he stopped dead on the tracks. He looked ahead. He looked back. There was no escape in any direction.

He put his gun to Cat’s head. ‘Everybody stop!’

Stride held up his hands to freeze those behind him. Up the tracks, Maggie did the same. Nobody moved. The man had a dozen guns trained on him, but he knew they wouldn’t fire with Cat in jeopardy. The man’s face swiveled back and forth, north then south. He tugged Cat tighter against his chest and jabbed the barrel into her hair above her ear. She squirmed in his grasp.

Her eyes met Stride’s. He was only fifty feet away, close enough to fire if he got a clean shot. Which he didn’t have. He tried to will himself into her brain. To tell her to be calm. To tell her that nothing was going to happen to her. To tell her that this would all end with her safely in his arms.

He wanted to believe that.

The stand-off drew out. The rain poured across them from left to right like a wave, carrying a sweet smell of pine. The forest was a lush wall of green, dark on a dark sky, practically dipping its roots in the lake. The railroad tracks made parallel lines that seemed to meet at the horizon. Stride dug his feet in the gravel of the tracks, steadying himself. He pointed the barrel of his gun squarely at the man’s head, but all he saw was Cat’s face. Too close.

His eyes flicked behind him. Serena was twenty feet back, down on one knee, her gun also aimed at the man’s body.

‘Let the girl go!’ Stride shouted at him. ‘Put your gun on the ground, and put your hands up.’

The man gave no sign of surrendering. Trapped in the man’s arms, Cat used the heel of her shoe to hammer his shin, but her kicks did nothing to dislodge him. The man whispered in her ear, then moved the gun from the side of her head to the soft skin of her face, and she stopped struggling.

‘You can come out of this alive,’ Stride called. ‘If you put down your gun, no one’s going to shoot you.’

Stride watched the man’s stony face as he weighed his options. He was trapped, pinned down, with nowhere to run.

‘You want this girl alive,’ the man shouted to Stride.

‘I want everybody alive.’

‘Call off the dogs,’ he demanded. ‘Give me a way out of this.’

‘You have one way out. Put the gun down. Let the girl go.’

‘Are you ready to let this girl die? And her baby?’

Cat flailed again, erupting in fury, but he kept her locked in his grip. As she struggled, Stride noticed one thing that the man with the gun had missed. Cat’s hands were almost free. Their run through the woods had shredded the tape binding her wrists, and if she twisted hard, they’d come apart.

She knew it, too. He could see it in the blackness of her eyes. There was something in her face that he’d never seen before – something determined and violent. This man had threatened her child, and she was ready to fight back.

They were running out of time.

‘I want all of these cops out of here!’ the man shouted.

‘You can get a lawyer. You can do a deal with the feds. But not if you hurt the girl.’

‘As soon as I put down the gun, I’m dead. You think I don’t know that?’

He sounded like an animal backed against a wall, and Stride didn’t like it.

‘If you surrender, you’re safe. You have my word. No one’s going to shoot you.’

But the situation was spiraling out of control, and Stride couldn’t stop it.

Cat’s hands were free. She’d severed the tape and was flexing her fingers. She’d gone limp in the man’s grasp, but the looseness was a ruse. She wanted to go for his gun. And she’d lose.

Serena saw it, too, and she murmured a warning. ‘
Jonny
.’

‘Cat, don’t move,’ Stride called to her. ‘We’ll get you out of this. Stay calm.’

A mistake.

He regretted it as the words left his mouth, and the man didn’t miss it. Cat. Stride had admitted that he knew this girl. She wasn’t a stranger. She was more than a hostage.

‘You want to save
Cat
?’ the man shouted. ‘Then get these cops out of here! You’ve got ten seconds before I pull the trigger. Kill me if you want, but she’ll be on the ground. Is that what you want?’

‘Stop! Don’t do this! Cat, don’t move, it’s okay.’

‘Ten . . .’

Cat’s fingers curled like claws. Fragments of torn tape dangled from her slim wrists. Her breathing accelerated.

‘Nine . . .’

‘Put the gun down!’ Stride shouted at the man.

‘Eight . . .’

Cat stared at Stride, and he stared back.
Don’t
, he tried to tell her, but she wasn’t listening; she was too far gone with fear and fury
.

‘Seven . . .’

‘Jonny, he’s going to do it,’ Serena whispered.

‘Six . . .’

And he was. Stride knew that. The man was insane. When he reached zero, he’d pull the trigger, regardless of the consequences. And before that, Cat would wrestle him for the gun, and he’d overwhelm her in seconds. It all ended the same way. With both of them dead.

‘Five . . .’

Everything was careening to a finish. One way or another.

‘Four . . .’

Stride bent down and put his gun beside him on the railroad tracks. He straightened up and put his hands in the air with his fingers spread wide.

‘Look at me!’ Stride shouted. ‘Look! No gun!’

The countdown stopped. The man stared at Stride.

‘Now the others, too,’ he called. ‘All of them. Tell them to drop their weapons.’

‘First, we chat,’ Stride said. He took a step closer to the man.

‘Stay where you are!’ the man shouted. He kept the gun at Cat’s head. ‘She and I are going to walk out of here. Just her and me. And you’re going to let us go.’

Stride shook his head and took another step closer. ‘I can’t let you do that. I just wanted to prove that I’m not going to shoot you.’

‘Stop!’

Stride took another step closer.

‘I told you to stop!’

And another step closer.

Then the man finally did what Stride wanted. He took the gun away from Cat’s head and pointed it directly at Stride’s chest. ‘I said,
stop
!’

Stride froze. No one had a clear shot yet. Cat stared at him with a question in her eyes.
Now?

‘Let me talk to her,’ Stride said. ‘I need to talk to Cat and make sure she’s okay. Take off the gag.’

He didn’t dare look at Serena, but he hoped she was keeping a dead aim on the man for the instant when Cat was free.

‘I need to talk to Cat,’ Stride repeated. ‘That’s a deal-breaker. Take off the gag!’

The man relented. He ripped the tape away from Cat’s mouth and yanked out the gag inside. In doing so, he had to let go of the chokehold holding the girl in place. Stride wanted Cat to fall where she was, but instead, with her hands free, she grabbed the man’s wrist and sank her teeth into his thumb and knuckle, biting down hard until her teeth were stopped by bone.

The man wailed. The gun fired wildly in the air. His hand, spurting blood, let go, and the pistol dropped at his feet.

Stride ran. So did Cat. The girl threw herself into his arms, and Stride spun her around and lowered her to the ground and sheltered her with his body. He couldn’t see behind him. He couldn’t see the man drop to the tracks as bullets missed high, couldn’t see him grab the gun with his uninjured hand and swing around to aim at Stride’s back.

An easy shot. A paralyzing shot. A kill shot.

The beach was alive with gunfire. Deafening, overlapping.

The man aimed, but he never fired again. A dozen bullets hit him at once. In his chest. In his head. The gun fell again, and so did he.

Stride waited, protecting Cat, until the echoes died to silence.