Bang! Another bullet smashed through the windshield and drilled a neat hole in the upholstery of the front passenger seat.
Bang! A third bullet missed the vehicle entirely, even though at this point Beckard was close—
WHUMP! The front grill hit the moving figure head-on and sent it flying through the air.
Beckard didn’t wait to see where the man landed. He kept going, both hands gripping the steering wheel to keep the Crown Vic from swerving off the road post-impact.
His mind spun, processing the facts before him.
Just the facts, ma’am!
The fact that Harper only had one trooper at this roadblock meant he was short on manpower. Not a surprise, given the time of day. That wasn’t going to last forever, though. By morning, the entire highway would be crawling with state police. And leaving the body behind would signal to them that he was in the area. If he was lucky, Harper would assume he had kept going, which would put him out of the state by sunrise. Only an idiot would remain behind, hiding in a bunker in the woods nearby.
He grinned. Maybe he was an idiot. A brilliant idiot.
Was that the pills talking? It was hard to tell, given the last few hours.
Beckard turned his options over in his head as he drove on. A part of him was surprised he wasn’t more freaked out. Everything he had worked for since the academy days was gone in one night. But for some reason, he wasn’t nearly as angry about that as he thought he would have been when the time finally came.
He reached down and took out the pill bottle and shook out two more of the delightful white stuff.
Oh yeah, that hit the spot…
There was a chance Harper or one of the other troopers might stumble across the same wooded entrance Beckard was taking now, but that possibility was something he had to live with. His only consolation was that this part of the highway was surrounded by absolutely nothing, with the closest hiking trails and hunting grounds many miles away. The way in was also not on any map and there were no signs to indicate a road, such as it was, even existed. Beckard himself had driven right past it for years before that incident with the lost campers.
Even so, as he arrived back at the bunker entrance, he stood outside the squad car for a moment and tried to see if he could hear any noises that didn’t belong, or that weren’t there when he left an hour ago.
Voices, a car’s engine, anything.
But there was just the sound of the creatures around him. The birds chirping, the smaller animals racing along branches, and the much bigger ones darting in and out of brushes on the ground. The sun was starting to peek through the trees and the warmth was already pushing away last night’s chill.
His biggest worry was a hunter getting lost and stumbling across him by accident. Or maybe another pair of clueless campers…
He shook those thoughts away. If it happened, it would happen. Right now, every minute, every hour was a gift that he had to take advantage of. If they found him, then they found him. Until then, he would make it count.
Cool as a cucumber, remember?
Beckard grabbed the bags out of the back seat and headed to the bunker. Pushing the door open was a pain in the ass, and he had to put his left shoulder into it. His entire right side tingled, but he gritted his teeth and sucked it in. Nothing good in this world came without a little pain. He had learned that a long time ago—
Something heavy hit him in the back of the head and Beckard stumbled forward, more stunned than hurt, though he hurt a little bit, too.
What looked like sparks (sparks?) showered the air around him as he fell — falling, he was falling! — down the stairs.
Chapter 21
Police handcuffs consist of two cheek plates and the chain in the middle that connects them. The cheek plates themselves make up only half of the rings used to secure the captive’s wrists. The other half is the single strand, its end consisting of the ratchet that includes the “teeth” that is pushed into the plate in order to lock the device. This is what makes the clink-clink noise when a pair of handcuffs is secured. If properly locked, the teeth go all the way in, leaving no wiggling room for the captured wrist. It also hurt like a sonofabitch, but that’s the price of being a criminal.
Of course, when you toss the handcuffs to someone and don’t pay attention, it’s easy for him (or her) to not push the ratchet all the way in, thus leaving the handcuffs with a generous space for someone with slim hands to slide out of.
Like most women, Allie had slim hands. It was one of the reasons why it took her so long to become comfortable with handling weapons. “Girly hands,” one of her instructors called them. So when Beckard told her to cuff herself back inside the interrogation room, she did, just not all the way. Thank God he was too busy listening for signs of his fellow troopers out in the hallway to notice anything more than the clink-clink noise he had expected to hear (and did), and seconds later, the sight of her hands visibly secured as she stood across the table from him.
To keep Beckard from noticing, Allie hadn’t done anything to make him inspect her hands up close. He had believed her, because in fact the handcuffs were around her wrists and they did hurt, but they weren’t as all the way in as they could have been.
After that, she bided her time. Her best chance of escape was at the state police building, but that wouldn’t have worked. Beckard had made it perfectly clear he was willing to kill her if faced with capture. She believed him, too. This was a man who had murdered countless women, including her sister, in the last ten years. What was one more to him? She wanted Beckard dead in the worst way, but she didn’t want to die herself. Revenge was only sweet if you were alive to savor it.
When he gave her an extra pair of handcuffs and told her to “chain-link” herself to the metal spike in the bunker, Allie was worried. Beckard had proven himself unpredictable, and she wasn’t sure what he was going to do next.
But then he left, and she knew that was her chance. Maybe her only chance.
The only thing she wasn’t prepared for was the blood. There was a lot of it. All hers.
She started working on freeing herself five minutes after he closed the bunker door. Girly hands or not, it was far from easy. Her left hand was covered in blood, the skin along the thumb and pinky fingers raw and bleeding by the time she managed to pull the hand completely free of the encircling steel. She could barely hold her mangled hand up and felt sick to her stomach at the sight of so much blood dripping to the concrete floor.
Ten years of research, six years of training, and three years of getting ready for this moment, and I’m going to die from blood loss inside a stinking old bomb shelter from the fifties.
She fought back the nausea and went to work on her right hand.
A part of her thought it would be easier now that she had managed the left, but it wasn’t. If anything, it was more difficult because she knew what to expect — pain, blood, and tearing skin. She spent every second of it trying not to pass out and was able to do so by closing her eyes. That way, she didn’t actually have to see what she was doing to her hand. If she had a stick, she would have bitten down on it. But she didn’t, so Allie thought about Carmen instead.
Her little sister. Beautiful, vivacious, and so talented. Carmen would have been a dancer. A singer. An actress. Maybe all three, as long as it showed off the free spirit that she was, that Allie knew her to be.