Lemon Tart (34 page)

Madsen continued, causing her to look away from the gun and
meet his eyes. “But as you said, we both know you’ve done all the damage I can
allow you to do. And we also know that an old lady like you is no match for a
man like me.”

Chapter 35

Old lady,
she repeated as he got out of the car and pulled open her door. She was barely
fifty-six years old—and felt a good fifteen years
younger than that even if she was a bit oldfashioned at times. She glared at
him and drew upon all the fury and anger of a lifetime—those
things she usually refused to dwell on. But she called them up and felt them
begin to ball up in her chest as she prepared herself. This was something he didn’t have, a lifetime of
fortitude a punk kid like himself could never muster. Rather than panic, she
felt calm and began taking measured breaths, sending all the oxygen to her
muscles and tissues. She balled her fists, still locked in the handcuffs, and
got out of the car on her own accord, scanning the ground as she did so.

There was nothing but trees and pine needles covered with half
an inch of snow from this morning. He grabbed her arm and began pulling her
toward the trees. He didn’t seem to think this would take long enough for him
to bother locking up the car. That meant he didn’t expect much—a
point in her favor. She noted that he’d left the key ring full of keys—including
a small key she assumed was for the handcuffs—in the
ignition.

She dug her heels into the frozen top layer of forest floor,
prepared to fight it out here and now, but he simply pulled on her arm more
sharply, causing the metal cuffs to cut into her wrists. She determined to be
more patient—not one of her greater virtues—and
wait for the right moment. Good conquered evil all the time. Surely God could
spare her a moment or two of his intervention to help her right now. She tried
to remember exactly where Jack’s cabin was. If she got away and didn’t make it
to the car, could she find her way to the cabin? She didn’t like her odds so
she abandoned that idea. She’d have
to make it to the car.

Other than their feet moving through the snow and leaves on the
ground, there was hardly any sound, save for a rustling wind that caused the
tops of the trees to sway in a very languid, peaceful motion that seemed a
betrayal of what was happening to Sadie at this moment. They’d gone perhaps
fifty yards to where the trees thickened so that there was barely a skiff of
snow on the ground, and approached a downward slope. She looked at the incline
he was pulling her toward and the tangle of brush at the bottom—the
perfect place to hide a body. No one would find her until spring, if they found
her at all.

Madsen was a foot or so ahead of her, pulling her forward, when
she stopped suddenly and pulled back hard. He didn’t let go of her arm as she’d
hoped.

“Don’t make this more difficult than it needs to be,” he said
in a droll tone, tightening his grip and yanking her forward, nearly pulling
her off balance.

“I plan,” she said, pushing her feet into the ground, “to make
this as difficult as possible.” She pulled again, but when he planted his own
feet for leverage she took a step, not backward as he expected her to, but
forward, throwing him off balance as she pulled hard, managing to get her arm
out of his grasp.

“I don’t have time for this,” he growled, forced to take a step
back to rebalance himself. The split second his emphasis was not on her, she
kicked his hand that held the gun, taking him completely off guard. Thanks to
her once-a-week yoga classes she was pretty flexible. Especially
for an old lady.

Madsen craned to watch the gun disappear into a pile of leaves
and then turned back to her, his face twisted in rage. He immediately lunged
forward, and she lifted her handcuffed hands as high and fast as she could,
catching his chin with a hard snap and sending him reeling backward down the
embankment. Then she turned and ran for all she was worth. She broke out of the
trees, stumbling and almost losing her balance, but she caught herself and with
her hands held to her chest she focused on her destination. The car was only
ten yards away when she heard him behind her. She didn’t dare glance back,
intent on the door handle ahead of her.

Oh please, oh
please, oh please, oh please, she repeated as she got closer and closer.
Madsen was shouting behind her but she could barely hear him over the rushing
blood in her ears. She didn’t know how far behind her he was, but she knew he
could run much faster than she could, even if her hands weren’t cuffed. She
braced herself for a gunshot, but knew he’d have had only moments to decide
whether to shuffle through the ground cover to find the gun or run after her.
Since she could hear him, and she had no bullet holes through her body, she
assumed he was without his weapon.

In her mind, she choreographed what she needed to do to get
inside the car, amazed at how detailed she could review the plan in the
remaining yards and ignore doubts that it might not work. It had to work! She’d
only have one chance.

When she reached the car door she pulled up on the
driver’s door handle with both handcuffed hands, then used her foot to
kick it open before turning to jump backward into the driver’s seat. The turn
afforded her the first glance of Madsen since she’d sent him careening down the
embankment. He was less than a dozen feet away and looked as if he could take
one leap and grab her. She practically fell into the car, landing hard on the
seat. The steering wheel caught her right shoulder but she leaned forward,
grabbed the armrest of the door—he was literally three feet
away—curled her fingers around it, tucked her feet inside, and
threw herself backward across the front seat to slam the door.

She expected a slam of molded door fitting into molded metal
made just for its connection. The crunching of bone and Madsen’s agonized
scream took her completely by surprise. With her feet wedged at odd angles
between the seat and steering wheel, she felt her stomach drop as she
realized that in his attempt to keep her from shutting the door, he’d managed
to catch his hand in it.

He looked at her from the other side of the glass, pain thick
in his wild eyes as he pulled at his trapped hand. It wasn’t coming out, vised
in the door. It made her stomach roll to imagine the crushed skin and bone, but
she took advantage of his panic to lock the doors before he realized she hadn’t
done so yet. Oh, but she felt horrible. In any other circumstance she’d have
done all she could to help a man in a situation such as his—she’d
been first-aid and CPR certified for the last thirty years and didn’t
take such training lightly. But considering that he had just minutes earlier
admitted that he planned to kill her, she felt justified to leave him screaming
on the other side of the glass. His feet kicked wildly at the loose ground
cover, and he twisted and pulled as if a new position would help his plight.
She couldn’t look at him.

It was awkward maneuvering around the car’s interior with her
hands still cuffed and she fumbled the keys from the ignition, feeling through
them with her fingers to identify the small one she suspected would open the
handcuffs. She muttered a prayer as she wriggled her hands around, then poked
around for the lock on the cuffs. She felt like singing the Hallelujah Chorus
when the ring around her left wrist sprung open.

She righted herself in the seat, her shoulders aching from her
acrobatics, and looked at Madsen. He was staring at her, not with the glaring
arrogance she was used to, but with the absolute shock of his situation,
begging her to help him. “I’m so sorry,” she said as in one fluid motion she
unlocked and opened the door so fast and so hard that not only was his hand
released, but the door caught him on the side of the head and propelled him to
the ground a few feet away. She pulled the door shut, locked it again, and
turned the key in the ignition. Without looking back at the man struggling to
his feet, cradling his grotesquely misshapen hand, she punched the gas and
U-turned sharply. She regained the road and, with the handcuff still
dangling from her right wrist, managed to put on her seatbelt. Safety
first.

She was back on the dirt road in mere seconds and felt secure
enough to start pushing buttons surrounding a CB radio thing as the main road
came into sight. She held the wheel with her left hand and picked up the
speaker thing, the handcuff banging against the console of the car.

She pushed the button on the side of the radio, then released
the button and listened to the static for a minute. “Hello?” she asked. Someone
had to be there! She glanced in the rearview mirror to see if Madsen was behind
her and though she’d only driven a few hundred yards, the road was empty. Her
hands and voice were shaking as she pushed the button again. “This is Sadie
Hoffmiller. I just got away from Detective Madsen. He admitted to me that he
killed—”

The radio tumbled out of her hand and fell to the floor. She
groaned before leaning forward and grabbing at it with her still shaking right
hand—taking her eyes from the winding road for a moment as she
searched the floor for the radio.

The impact threw her forward for a split second before another
force—a big white billowing one that felt like concrete—threw
her back against the seat. She heard crunching metal and felt the loss of level
ground beneath the car’s tires. Pain shot through her face, head, neck, and
shoulders. The entire world spun as that charging force pushed all air from her
lungs, leaving her choking on her own tongue and gasping for air that no longer
seemed to exist. The air bag deflated just as her lungs had done a moment
before, leaving her crushed against the seat, moaning and trying to remember
where she was. Her face burned and she could barely open her eyes, but when she
did, she could see the trunk of a large tree that seemed much too close. The
windshield was intact, but had it been gone she felt sure she could reach
forward and pull off a strip of mangled bark.

She’d run into a tree? She’d never hit anything in her
life—well other than Shawn’s bike when he was ten and parked it
behind her car, but she didn’t count that. It was nothing like this. The
stinging in her eyes persisted and she continued to try to blink it—whatever
it was—away.

A disembodied female voice seemed to be speaking to her from
the floor of the car. “Do you copy? Mrs. Hoffmiller, please give us your
location, do you copy?” The voice faded into static.

Copy what?
she thought to herself as she continued to blink, trying out the muscles in her
body to see if any of them still obeyed her. Most of them did, though not
without laborious protesting. Where was the voice coming from? She looked
around and saw a black speaker attached to a curly wire dangling from the
dashboard. Her chest still felt as if it were being crushed into the back of
the seat. She reached for the speaker, but something was wrong with her depth
perception and she simply brushed through air.

Air! She
took a breath, a gasping, painful breath, and was reminded of the moment she’d
stood on Anne’s back porch and heard the police say they were calling in a
homicide unit. She’d had to suck in air then too, but that was based on shock,
not physical inability. The memory filtered through and she wasn’t sure if that
had happened yesterday, last year, or this afternoon. Her brain still seemed to
be bouncing around in her head.

And then another voice sounded from the speaker still on the
floor. This one she recognized and with that recognition the last hour of her
life came back to her recollection with startling clarity that caused her newly
rediscovered breathing to come fast and erratic.

“Mrs. Hoffmiller!” Cunningham screamed from the floor mat, his
voice draining away into static then rising again. “Where are you? Where did he
take you?”

“I’m in the mountains,” she said in a gasping voice, still
fighting for air. “Off the Grass Valley exit. Jack’s cabin is around here
somewhere and Trevor’s there.” Then she realized she’d have to pick up that
speaker and push a button in order for him to hear her. She reached for the
speaker again, this time catching the cord with the chain of the handcuff still
swinging from her hand. The handcuff reminded her of Madsen. The reminder of
Madsen made her realize she likely hadn’t made it half a mile before hitting
the tree.

He would have heard the crash, which meant . . . she
had to get out of there. Now!

Chapter 36