Vapor Trail (21 page)

The ground was hilly, eroded, and thick with impassable brush. Bits of tense conversation drifted in the night.

“On the ground, facedown.”

“No!” Gasping. “He’s chasing me. Him back there.”

Then Broker heard Lymon yell, “You got her?”

“We got her, but we ain’t got a gun. Must have ditched it.”

A blond-haired woman dressed in running gear thrashed in the flashlight beams as she was being handcuffed. “Ow, shit, what are you doing?” she screamed. “If I have
scars . . .
”

“Calm down.”

“Not me, you moron. This
black guy
just chased me through
the fucking woods
. Call the fucking cops!”

The cops exchanged looks by flashlight.

Someone said, “Uh-oh.”

She heard the sirens,
the neighborhood dogs barking in their yards, and realized the cops could have dogs too. Angel ran in a blind panic for half a block, then ducked, panting, behind a parked car to think.

Get yourself straightened out. Get a plan . . .

First she’d have to get off the streets and get under cover. The cops would own the streets.

A swarm of sirens was building in the night. Most of them up ahead, in the direction she’d been running. Instinctively she got up and moved in the opposite direction, away from the sirens. Off the street now, she picked her way through the dark yards . . . weaving around hedges and fences.

She reached the end of the block and burst into the open to cross the intersection. And nearly collided with some damn kid on a skateboard doing solo routines. The boy immediately grabbed his board and stepped back.

But he’d glimpsed her. The light was not good enough to see her face, but Angel realized she was running with a pistol in one hand and her makeshift silencer in the other.

She ducked back into the yards, praying she didn’t encounter dogs. Twice she had to backtrack when she ran into six-foot fences.

Angel darted across a street and ran toward a trio of houses with dark windows. Three blocks to the west, a circular wind of red flashers lashed at the motionless trees and rooftops. But here it was still dark.

They were concentrating on the direction in which she’d initially run.

But that damn skateboard kid . . .

Okay, right now, hide; catch your breath.
She scrambled up a limestone retaining wall into a yard and crouched behind a dwarf lilac hedge. She wiggled the backpack from her shoulders and stuffed the silencer and her latex gloves into it. Put it back on. Her bare knees tickled in the night dew collecting in the grass. She was dizzy. More than fear. The scent of foliage and humid earth made her head swim.

She could hear snatches of staccato disembodied traffic from the cop radios. And still the sirens were coming. They were cordoning the streets, but still to the west.

Then a cop car roared past her in a scream of sirens and whooping red lights and pulled a screeching U-turn almost right in front of her.

Angel’s heart started to count down to implosion in her chest. The cop car stopped. A man jumped out and ran into the shadows about a hundred yards from her. The cop in the car turned on a searchlight. The long beam swung across the facades of the dark houses; it played across the porch behind her.

Her hand closed over the pistol.
I won’t be taken alive.

The idea of putting the filthy barrel in her mouth repelled her. Better to put it to the temple.

Won’t be taken.

Won’t.

Angel may not
have been invisible anymore, but she was the next best thing: absolutely motionless. Several minutes passed, and the cop car, with its probing light, moved away. She was instantly up, running in a low crouch through the shadows. Then another light barred her path.

She ducked down and made herself small under a wide juniper as the police car searchlight swung back and forth like a white lantern down the street.

She watched the curve of her ankle pulse red as flashers atop police squad cars passed down the next block. Everywhere, she heard the static squawk of the radios.

Time to move.

“Lady, the guy chasing you
is a cop
.”

Broker and Terry could see them now: two officers, one in Stillwater blue, the other in county tans. They were pulling the handcuffed woman to her feet. She was lean, sun browned, and
pissed off in the weaving flashlight beams. She wore black shorts and a green halter that passed for gray in the dark. Her blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Her trophy legs were cut and bleeding from thrashing through the brush.

Lymon Greene walked in circles, hands on hips, chest heaving, trying to catch his breath. His left knee was banged up, and a string of blood twisted down his shin.

“Bag . . . her . . . hands,” Lymon said, gulping for air.

“Right,” one of the arresting cops said. Then he jogged toward the street.

“So where’d you throw the gun?” the other cop asked her.

“The gun?” Her eyes widened, flashing white. “Oh you poor, dim fucking moron,” she snarled. “My husband is a
lawyer
.”

Broker approached Lymon and put a hand on his shoulder. Lymon’s T-shirt was drenched with sweat. But he was grinning. “Man, jogging around the neighborhood doesn’t even start to get you ready for this kind of steeplechase.”

Broker studied him, glad that this chase had ended without bullets finding flesh. “Did Benish get ahold of you?” Broker said.

Lymon shook his head. “No. I was on my way to the grocery store and heard the radio call and came running.”

“You don’t know about Harry?” Broker said.

Lymon shook his head, blinking; distracted, still into the drama of the chase, he watched the two cops who’d cuffed the protesting woman walk her toward the street. Then his grin froze when an urgent voice came over the mobile radio mike clipped to a Stillwater cop’s epaulet.

“All units, we have a problem. She’s going east, toward the river . . .”

“Say again.”

“We got a boy on a skateboard who saw a woman with a gun her hand running east through Everett and Maple.”

“One hundred. All units copy?”

Aw, shit. They piled into cars and converged on the North Hill. Immediately, it all felt wrong to Broker: the cops were road-bound; the suspect was working through the yards in the dark.

“Lemme out,” he yelled. “We gotta comb through the backyards.” He jumped from the rolling cruiser and jogged into the shadows.

Angel held her breath as the cop car shone its light into the yards on either side. The officer stopped two blocks away, got out of his car, took a handheld flashlight, and shone it into the overgrown ravine that abutted the street. Then his radio squawked. He turned off the light, got back in the car, and drove away.

Shaking, she took a fast inventory. Okay. They’d talked to the skateboard kid, figured out she’d doubled back, and now they would start cordoning these streets.

But the cop had given Angel an idea.

She was a Stillwater girl. It was a hill town, and in between the hills lay wooded ravines. She struggled to get her bearings and realized she was two blocks from a ravine that had a storm sewer running down its length. If she could slip into the intake grate at the bottom of the ravine, she could scurry underground and wiggle out on the bluff overlooking Battle Hollow. She’d come out close to her car, parked downtown.

She rose to a crouch and started maneuvering slow and low from shadow to shadow, feeling her way through the dark yards. But she could see people coming out on the street into patches of light, looking toward the red lights, the activity.

She hunkered along a hedge. There was a driveway partially screened by more lilacs. Then the open space. She looked behind her. A garage was attached to the house. No car in the drive.

Maybe no one was home.

A fence with grapevines ran from the garage to the edge of the ravine. If she could get into the backyard, she could move on the other side of the fence, behind the grapes. No yard lights back there, pitch-black.

She’d have to chance it. She duck-walked up the drive and crouched next to the doorway. Out of sight, hidden. A nice feeling but for how long? Too long. Too long.
You have to move.

But it was comforting here in the dark.

She placed her hand against the garage side door.
Please be open.

She twisted the knob and the door opened. The garage was empty, no car. She pushed the door open and rushed through, tripping on empty cardboard boxes, squinting in the dark. Found the back door, came out on a deck. The rolling backyard was hemmed in with lilacs, grapevines, and tall arborvitae. The obligatory pile of kid’s plastic junk.

Even better, the flower bed on the other side of the fence was thick with grapevines and eight-foot sunflowers that screened her from the street.

And the light was almost gone. Really getting dark now. She eased in along the lilac hedge and began to cross the yard. That’s when the dog in the wire pen in the next yard started going crazy.

On reflex, Broker moved in a crouch and pulled out the .45 as he tried to adjust his night vision. His shoes slid on the damp grass under his feet; mosquitoes buzzed in close, blowing little pincushion kisses.

Through breaks in the foliage and bushes he caught glimpses of police cars in the distance, people starting to congregate under streetlights.

This was bad. No radio. No coordination. Going mobile in the
dark with guns was always bad. He’d operated at night in wartime, before night-vision goggles. Murphy’s Law. Accident waiting to happen. He kept jogging, weaving around shrubs, avoiding fences; she’d be avoiding them too, not hiding, moving fast to get out of the area. He was sure of that.

She?

Was Gloria out there ahead of him running on those strong legs, with a gun in her hand?

He vaulted a low rail fence and heard a dog start to bark in a yard up ahead. Then he heard the animal go frantic, banging its body against kennel mesh. Broker sprinted through some thick shrubs toward the sound. He came out in a broad yard and . . .

The shadow darted, low from behind a tall lilac hedge.

“Halt, halt, halt.” Broker yelled as he ran, bringing up the .45. He let go of the reins and let his senses drive, all kinetics now, all reflex . . .

The shadow ducked low, twisted, and was illuminated by the twinkle-crack of a muzzle flash. Broker felt a tiny bee buzz past his head.

Shit. She was firing at him. Still moving, he bent forward from the waist to make a smaller target, gripped the pistol in both hands, extended his arms, aimed low at her legs and pulled the trigger.

It was like squeezing a steel rock.

He’d forgotten to reload
when they left the casino. Now he was running straight at a shooter who was taking her time to squeeze, not jerk, the trigger.

Like Harry had probably taught her.

Crack-buzz-crack-buzz-crack-buzz.
More bees. A window shattered in the house behind him.

Broker dived, rolled sideways, and scrambled on all fours through a kid’s plastic play set and crawled into the nearest cover,
a patch of staked tomato plants. He lay absolutely still for a whole minute, during which he distinctly remembered leaving his eight .45 rounds in Mouse’s car when they agreed to unload their guns before confronting Harry. Slowly, he caught his breath facedown in the rich black dirt, the mulch, and the thick chlorophyll fragrance of the tomato plants. He listened. But now all he heard was the onrushing cars, coming to the sound of the shots.

She was long gone.

Broker had other things to worry about. All the car doors slamming, the radios crackling—all the young coppers out there who’d never heard a shot fired in anger, their sweaty, overeager hands gripping their guns.

“Don’t shoot,” he yelled. “Over here, a friendly.”

“Who’s there? Come out with your fuckin’ hands up,” a hypertense young voice yelled back.

“Broker.”

“Broke who?”

“Broker, you know,” a different voice yelled. “Cool it. He’s buddies with the fuckin’ sheriff.”

“Oh,” the first voice said.

“All right everybody, stand down, holster the pieces. We clear? Okay? Come out, come out wherever you are, Sheriff Friend Broker.” It was Mouse, breathing hard, but his voice unmistakable, coming in through the garage, then out onto the deck.

Slowly, Broker rose to his feet, knocking dirt from his chest as Mouse approached, flanked by two Stillwater cops.

“Were those shots you?” Mouse said.

“
At
me. I ran into her when she came through here. She took four shots—they went high—then she changed direction and headed for the ravine,” Broker said.

Mouse told the two cops to fan out in an area search centered
on the ravine. He turned back to Broker and said, “Did you get a look at her? Was it Gloria?”

“Too dark. Just a shape,” Broker said. He shook his head, looked into the darkness, and thought,
Goddamn Harry. If he didn’t get you one way, he’d get you another.

She had bolted when she heard someone crash through the hedge behind her; then the loud voice had ordered her to stop. She half turned and picked out his moving broken shadow against the shrubs, saw the shadow’s arms come up, extended. Trying to get off the first shot, she planted her feet, swung the Ruger up in the classic Weaver stance, and pulled the trigger.

He went down. Out of sight. She turned and ran.

Sprinting now, across the lawn, she hurdled over the edge of the ravine and slid through the bushes, past the chain-sawed trunk of a large cottonwood that had fallen.

The cottonwood’s upper branches were still intact, the foliage wilted and dead. But it tangled up the bottom of the ravine with irregular lines that broke up her shape. Under the tree’s cover, she hunted for the sewer grate.

Her hands found the slanted steel bars among the branches. She slipped off the pack, pushed it through the grate, and squeezed through herself.

Inside, underground, dank, with sand and debris left by the last bad storm weeks ago, before the hot spell. All black where she was. No flashlight. Basically, it was a big concrete pipe that ended in a catch pond at Second Street. Every one hundred yards there was a steel ladder leading up to a manhole opening.

She could hear them ganging up out there. Think. They’d block the other end, seal her in.

She wiggled back out of the grate, took off the pack, and used
one of the latex gloves to remove the makeshift silencer. She tossed it in through the grate.

Then, very carefully, stepping on rocks where possible, she backed away from the sewer entrance and slowly crawled up the far slope through the thick brush. Behind her she heard the cops moving down into the ravine from the street.

Very slowly, she emerged from the ravine and slipped across a dark dead-end street and went through another yard. The controlled panic of being hunted gave way to a warm sweat of elation. As she started down the bluff toward Main Street, she took in deep breaths of the sweet hot air.

It was time to call it quits. Maybe after she was gone, someone else would take up the cause.

Not her. She was done.

But if she was finished, she intended to have some control over the way her life ended. She wasn’t going to be snared like a rat in a . . . sewer.

She had thought about this in great detail. And now she knew exactly what she had to do.