It’s not Beckard’s voice! her mind shouted.
Don’t shoot!
You’re going to kill cops!
In the back of her mind, another voice screamed, What if they’re like Beckard? Don’t take the chance!
Through the blind spots she saw not one, or two, but what seemed like half a dozen figures standing in a semicircle, their flashlights and the headlights of multiple vehicles pointed right at her as if they knew exactly where she would emerge out of the woods and had been lying in wait all this time.
But of course they knew. She was following the blood trail that Beckard had left behind.
Beckard!
She couldn’t tell if the figures had their weapons drawn, but it was a damn good chance they did.
“Lower your weapon now!” the voice boomed again. “You’re surrounded! Lower your weapon, or we will open fire on you!”
No, no, I was so close.
I was so close!
Allie lowered her arms slowly, expecting the first gunshot to ring out and the first bullet to strike her. She had seen stories like this on TV. All it took was one trigger-happy cop and it was over. The irony was that she wouldn’t have blamed them. She had just burst out of the woods with a shotgun, after all. Shooting her down now would have been completely justified.
She kept waiting for the bullet, for the loud crash of a gunshot, but they didn’t come.
Instead, the lights continued to blind her mercilessly even as Allie bent her knees slowly and placed the shotgun on the ground. As soon as she did that, three of the shadowy figures rushed forward. They swarmed her, one almost tackling her as he pushed her down with his much bigger body. She grunted through the pain, wondered if maybe she had just broken another rib.
A pair of large hands ripped the shotgun from her grip while their owners shouted, “I got it! I got the weapon!”
You got it because I let you have it, asshole! she wanted to shout back, but of course she couldn’t because there was suddenly a knee pressing down on the small of her back and her face was buried in grass and dirt.
Callous hands seized her arms, followed by the cold sting of metal handcuffs snapping into place and biting into her wrists. She grimaced through the assault, but it was nothing compared to the burning fire roaring up and down her sides.
Finally, the one on top backed off and she could breathe again.
“This her?” she heard a voice she didn’t recognize ask.
“Yeah, that’s her,” another voice answered. This one sounded familiar.
She turned her head sideways. Two of the state troopers were standing behind her, their legs blocking her view of another man in the background. She didn’t have to see his face to know who it was.
She recognized his voice easily enough.
“That looks like the shotgun she tried to kill me with,” Beckard said.
Then, when the two troopers bent to haul her from the ground like she was a piece of useless meat, Beckard took the moment to wink at her.
Chapter 16
Trooper Jones wasn’t going to be a problem, but Sergeant Harper, the shift supervisor, was another story. Beckard knew both men well enough to be indifferent of Jones and very, very wary of Harper.
“Tell me again,” Harper was saying from the front passenger seat of the Crown Victoria. “What were you doing out there in the middle of the night with a knife?”
Beckard sat in the back of the vehicle, on the wrong side of a fourteen-gauge steel partition. The setup had been good enough to haul around criminals for the last ten years or so, and it was still good now. Not that Beckard had any ideas about escaping.
Not yet, anyway. They were on their way to the closest hospital nearly twenty-five miles away, which he was very thankful for. Once he got his wounds taken care of and was satisfied he wasn’t going to die tonight, he could then decide how to proceed. Besides, he was too busy grimacing through the pain, which ironically probably made his story more convincing to Harper, who kept a close eye on him by way of the rearview mirror.
Or, at least, Beckard hoped he was being convincing. Harper was a hard-ass, so there was always a chance he wasn’t buying it. It was difficult to tell from the man’s facial expression, which looked permanently frozen in a state of being pissed off.
“I had the knife in my truck, Sarge,” Beckard said. “It’s a good thing, too. I was coming home from Rita’s when she came out of nowhere and almost sideswiped me. I figured she was drunk and chased her, tried to flag her down before she did the same thing to some poor sap on the highway, but she wouldn’t stop. I ended up having to PIT her, and we went flying into the woods.”
“Why didn’t you call for backup?” Harper asked.
“No time. I did what I thought I had to at the time.”
“And the shotgun?”
“She had it in her car. Don’t ask me what she was doing with it. Maybe you can get her to talk later at the station.”
“I’ll do that.”
Did the sergeant looked convinced? Maybe semi-convinced?
Damn, it was hard to read the guy.
“Cold back there?” Jones asked with a grin.
Beckard snorted. Although he hadn’t felt the cold while he was stumbling his way through the woods bare-chested, he could feel it now. He would have preferred something longer — maybe a sweater — but one of Jones’s spare work shirts from the trunk would have to do for now.
“How’s the arm?” Harper asked.
“It hurts like fuck, Sarge,” Beckard said. It was the only thing he had said in the last few minutes that wasn’t a complete fabrication. “Jones, step on it, man. I’m dying back here.”
Jones chuckled behind the wheel. “I’m already going seventy. Any faster and you might end up in the woods again, pal.”
“Where did the dog go after it attacked you?” Harper asked.
“I have no friggin’ idea, Sarge,” Beckard said. “I was too busy running for my life.”
“It wasn’t hers? The dog?”
“I don’t think so. I’d remember a dog in the backseat of the Ford.”
“So where’d it come from?”
Beckard shrugged. “It looked wild.”
“Rabies?” Jones said, still with that stupid grin on his face.
“God, I hope not,” Beckard said, and played along by frowning at the suggestion he might have contracted rabies from the dog bite.
Bite? That was a mauling.
“Well, was it foaming at the mouth?” Jones asked.
“It was too dark,” Beckard said. “I couldn’t see shit. And, like I said, I was too busy trying to stay one step ahead of the crazy bitch.”
Jones laughed again. “Some night.”
“No kidding.”
Harper didn’t join in, and his face remained stoic. The veteran trooper was one of the more well-liked supervisors among the noncommissioned personnel at the state police. Personally, Beckard had never had any real uses for the man, and he assumed Harper would say the same thing about him, if asked. Of course, Beckard liked to think he could have won the older man over if they’d had more shifts together.
Ifs and asses don’t grow on grasses.
“I called the lieutenant,” Harper was saying. “Had to wake him up, but since no one’s dead — yet — he’s going to let us handle it until tomorrow morning when he comes in. So you have that long to get your story straight.”
“Yes, sir,” Beckard said. Then, because he knew Harper expected it, “But there’s nothing to get straight, Sarge. I told you the whole story. All of it.”