He nodded.
She handed him her automatic. "You know how to use this?"
He hefted the pistol in his hand. It was a Glock, .40 caliber, but smaller than the ones he'd held in the sporting goods shop. "Yes."
"Take it with you. Bring your gun back with the pills. I'll watch Ben till you get back."
"I will. If he wakes up—"
"I can handle it. Go."
Chris closed his eyes long enough to dilate his pupils, then walked out into the darkness. He felt no fear, but even on normal nights he kept his eyes open during this walk. There were always deer in the yard, not to mention the occasional coyote, and he'd killed a six-foot rattlesnake on the patio only last spring. He covered the distance to the house in thirty seconds, then slipped through the back door and went to the master bedroom.
He had several rifles in his gun cabinet in the study, but his only handgun was a .38 kept locked in a small safe in his closet. He retrieved it, then pulled down an old box from the top shelf of the closet, where he kept old medicines and samples he'd brought home from the office. Sure enough, a bottle of Ritalin lay at the bottom, a drug that Ben should probably never have been taking. Chris slipped the bottle into his pocket, shoved Alex's gun into his waistband, then left the house and jogged back to the studio with his .38 in his right hand.
"Take one of these," he told Alex. "Take another later if you start to fade. I'll get you some water."
"No need." She dry-swallowed one of the pills, then put the bottle in her pocket.
"You're pretty good at that."
A wry smile. "Birth-control pills."
"Ah."
"Not that I've needed them lately." She looked up, suddenly self-conscious. "Too much information?"
"Not at all. You just focus on staying awake."
She nodded thankfully, then took her gun back and went to the door. "I'll talk to you tomorrow, okay?"
"Tonight," he said. "Call me when you get to Jackson. Call before that if you can't stay awake."
"I will. But I'll be all right."
She lingered for a moment, as though she wanted to say more, but then she turned and walked away. In seconds she was swallowed by the blackness. Chris stood looking at the lights of the main house, wondering if he would ever truly leave it to move to Avalon with Thora. Even before Alex arrived in Natchez, the idea had not seemed quite right, but now it seemed truly tainted. He was thinking of the night he'd carried Thora over the threshold of this house when he heard an engine start in the distance. It revved a couple of times, then slowly faded away. He breathed in the night smell of spring leaves and sweet olive, then turned and went back into the studio.
CHAPTER 24
Alex turned left out of the driveway across from Chris's house and headed toward Highway 61. It was nearly a mile to the turn, with much of the narrow lane threading between high, wooded banks. Thankfully, she didn't see a single headlight on the road, nor any vehicles parked in the darkness on the few driveways she passed.
Turning north on 61, she soon passed St. Stephen's Prep, then half a mile farther the Days Inn. She felt an impulse to stop and get her computer, but since she already had fresh clothes in the bag from her earlier trip, she decided to go on without stopping. If her mother died tonight, she could use Uncle Will's computers for any necessary e-mail. If by some miracle Margaret survived the night, then Alex would probably be back in Natchez by noon tomorrow.
As she passed the fork where Highway 84 veered away toward the Mississippi River, she realized that a pair of headlights was pacing her from behind. Her first thought was "cop," because the car seemed to have come up suddenly, then remained at a uniform distance behind. He was probably radioing her tag in now. But after watching the lights for a while in her rearview mirror, Alex decided they were too high off the ground for a police cruiser. More probably a pickup truck or a van.
A Baptist church with a tall steeple drifted by on her right. Then the road narrowed to a single lane—construction where a new stretch of the Natchez Trace highway intersected Highway 61. Alex could see the Super Wal-Mart ahead on her left. She accelerated steadily, then whipped the Corolla across the oncoming lane of traffic and into the Wal-Mart lot.
The vehicle behind kept on at a constant rate of speed. As it passed the turn, she saw that it was indeed a van—a white van covered with patches of mud and primer. The driver's window appeared almost black. She didn't have the angle to see the license plate, but something told her that mud would be covering it.
She parked thirty yards from the store, the nose of the Corolla pointed toward the highway.
What do I do now?
she wondered. She could call the local police, complain of harassment, and have them stop the van—if they could find it—but she didn't want to do anything that would force her to reveal her FBI credentials if she could avoid it. But neither did she want to blindly begin a hundred-mile journey to Jackson over a mostly deserted highway. She needed to know if the van represented a real threat or an overactive imagination.
The idea that Grace's killer might be in that van was almost too much to hope for, but she cradled her Glock in her lap nevertheless. Occasional cars passed on the highway, and two turned into the parking lot, but she saw no further sign of the van.
"That's long enough," she said aloud.
She put the car in gear and drove out to the highway, but there she turned right instead of left, which would carry her away from Jackson. She hadn't gone more than fifty yards when an approaching vehicle made a U-turn between orange-and-white traffic barriers immediately after passing her. She hadn't seen the make, but she made a quick right turn anyway, which put her on Liberty Road. If memory served correctly, this road would take her past a few of the town's premier mansions, then into the heart of downtown.
A set of headlights appeared behind her. They sat high enough to be a van. She took the first right turn she came to, this time into what appeared to be a residential subdivision: tract homes that looked as though they'd been built in the 1950s. She gunned the motor for five seconds, then waited to see if the headlights followed her into the neighborhood. They slowed, stopped, then rolled into the road behind her.
Alex wrenched her wheel left, sped up a low incline, then took another left into a lane that wound beneath a pitch-black canopy of trees. A mansion like something out of a Technicolor period piece materialized out of the darkness on her left. She could almost see gray-clad officers and ladies in hoop skirts strolling across the wide veranda. She idled past the broad front steps, then accelerated and found herself at another intersection. She sensed this was the same road she had been on before, looping around the estate at the center of this strange subdivision. As she pondered which way to go, the high headlights floated toward her from behind.
Sensing that a left turn would carry her back to Liberty Road, she jerked the wheel right and sped around a curve that swept through 180 degrees. At the end of the curve, she turned left, then right, and reduced speed again. The headlights had fallen farther behind, but they were still there. There could be no doubt now.
She drove thirty more yards, then on impulse turned into a long driveway beside a one-story ranch house. The driveway actually ran past the house, which was set far back from the road. She shut off her engine and got out, moving quickly underneath a carport that held two American-made sedans. She'd worried that the occupants of the house might wake up, but no lights came on.
She cycled the slide on her Glock and waited.
The headlights glided up the road, then passed the driveway without slowing down. Alex leaned back against the clapboard wall, her pounding heart resonating through the wood. Was she going crazy? Her left hand went to the cell phone in her pocket. Who could she call? Chris? He couldn't leave Ben. Even if he did, he wasn't trained for this kind of situation. Will Kilmer was too far away to help. Christ, even if she called 911, she couldn't direct help to her exact position. She only knew where she was in general terms. In the last ten minutes, she had broken half the rules in the FBI book.
"They
ought
to fire me," she whispered.
Her heartbeat slowed steadily and, when no headlights appeared, stabilized at something like high normal. To pass the time, she counted the beats per minute:
seventy-five.
As she stood there waiting, it occurred to her that the driver of the van might only have been insuring that she was out of the way before attacking Chris.
"Fuck," she muttered, digging out her cell phone. She dialed Chris's cell phone, and this time, thankfully, he answered.
"Hey, you doing okay?" he asked.
"No. Listen to me. The white van followed me after I left your place. I'm parked in a neighborhood off Liberty Road, and he took off about five minutes ago. He couldn't be at your place yet, but it's possible that he could be headed there. Are you still in the studio?"
"Yeah."
"Your gun close by?"
"In my hand. Should I call the police?"
"It wouldn't hurt. You could just say you saw a prowler."
"I've done that before. It took fifteen minutes for anybody to show up. This is the country, not the city."
"Make the call now."
"Okay."
"I'll call you back in a few minutes."
"What are you going to do?"
"Find the van. Anybody approaches that studio, you shoot to kill."
"Alex—"
"I'm hanging up now."
She was reaching into her pocket for her keys when her threat radar redlined. There was no warning, no sound, nothing tangible to make her freeze—yet she had. Something had changed while she was on the phone. Her conscious mind had not registered it, but deep in her reptilian brain, some ancient sensor had been triggered. Adrenaline was flushing through her as though she had an infinite supply. It took all her self-control not to burst into panicked flight. A normal person would not have been able to resist the urge, but Alex's training had set deep; she knew that to run was to die.
Her heartrate had doubled. Thirty yards away, the asphalt street was dimly lit by the spill from a distant streetlight. The nearby houses had single bulbs on their porches, nothing more, and there was no moonlight to speak of. Her world was black and gray. She crouched and moved swiftly to the inside corner of the carport, sweeping the area with her Glock as she moved. It took an act of will not to push the doorbell button beside the screen door.
Her ears were attuned to the slightest sound, but she heard only the steady thrumming of air conditioners in the humid darkness. Then it came: a percussive skating sound, like a stone skipping across cement. Her pistol flew to the right, where the carport opened to the driveway. She stared into the blackness like a trapped miner searching for light. She stared so hard that she was almost entranced when a leather-gloved hand seized her throat.
Before she could react, another hand slammed her Glock against the carport wall. She fought with every fiber of muscle in her body, but her struggles had no effect. She couldn't even see her attacker; his enormous bulk blocked out the light. She tried to lunge upward with her right knee, but this only revealed the helplessness of her position. Her assailant had pinned her lower body against the wall. She tried to scream, but no air could escape her windpipe.
Think! What can you do? What weapon do you have? One free hand
—
She struck again and again where she thought a face should be, savage blows, yet they had no effect. Her fist collided with flesh and bone, yet her attacker didn't even move to avoid her blows.
He was choking her to death. In seconds she would lose consciousness. Fear welled up with debilitating force: she was stunned to realize that it had no limit. It shot up into terror and rocketed free, like a missile breaking away from the earth's gravity. She tried to gouge the invisible eye sockets with her fingernails, but the man simply drew back his head, putting them out of reach. Had she heard an appreciative chuckle? Tears of rage blurred her eyes. The already faint image of the distant street began to go black….
A ringing crash of metal on metal heralded a barrage of canine fury. A huge dog had launched itself against the Cyclone fence at the end of the driveway. The animal was fifteen feet away, but his thunderous barking made an attack sound imminent. The grip at Alex's throat lessened for a moment, and the massive thigh pinning her to the wall torqued away. With all the strength left in her body, she twisted into the attacking shadow and hammered her knee into the apex of faint light at its center.
Testicles crushed beneath her knee, and an explosive grunt burst from the shadow. The grip at her throat loosened, and she screamed with the piercing shriek of a panicked five-year-old. Even the dog fell silent. But before she could exploit the instant of uncertainty, the glove closed around her throat with redoubled force, and the hand pinning her arm slid down toward her Glock.
If he gets my gun, I'm dead…
The hand tried to wrench the pistol from her grasp. In desperation she thrust her left hand deep into her pocket, dug past her cell phone, and jerked out her car keys. Raising her hand high, she stabbed again and again, like Norman Bates in
Psycho.
She felt the Glock tear loose from her hand, but her next blow struck something vital—something soft and yielding anyway—and a gasp of pain gave her hope. Praying she'd hit an eye, she whirled away from the blast of her Glock.
In the same instant, the carport light switched on.
What she saw disoriented her: not the face of a man, but a huge maroon shape sitting on a massive pair of shoulders. A door flew open behind her. A man shouted a warning, but the Glock flashed up to her face with eerie slowness and blotted out the light.
"Hey, miss? Hey! Are you okay?"
Alex blinked her eyes open and looked up at the face of a bald man wearing pajamas. In his right hand was a pump shotgun, in his left her Glock 23.