With her elbows? Her feet?
If she could find something stronger — a rock, maybe — she might be able to gain access. Of course, she’d need time for that, which was something she didn’t have at the moment.
She ran past the car and saw the rough trail Beckard had carved out for himself with his travels back and forth from the bunker. It was barely noticeable, but the trampled grass told her where to go. Or, at least, the direction.
Allie didn’t run down the road. Instead, she darted into the thick patch of woods alongside it and burst into the trees, lifting her arms over her head like a shield to batter away branches in her path.
There was just enough light for her to see where she was going. All she had to do was keep following the road while staying out of sight. Eventually, it would take her back to the highway. Harper would have mobilized the state police by now and would be looking for them. There would be cops on the road. She might not have needed — or wanted — them last night, but she could use one (or a dozen) of them right about now.
She wasn’t sure how long she had been running when she saw it — a large bump lying in front of her, like some creature that had dug its way out of the ground to block her path. Her instincts were to jump over it, but knowing what she should have done and actually doing it were two different things. Her body was tired and her hands hurt so damn much, and she ended up tripping on it instead. Allie stumbled forward but still managed to turn her entire body, ending up on the slightly damp ground on her butt.
She stared forward at the body. It was the state trooper she had seen in the backseat of the squad car when Beckard first put her inside. Jones something. She hadn’t seen it last time, but in the growing daylight the gaping hole in the back of his head, facing her, was hard to miss.
Allie scrambled to her feet and started off again, but she hadn’t gone very far when she stopped and looked back at Jones.
Weapons. She needed weapons!
But Jones didn’t have one to give her. He was unarmed and wasn’t even wearing his gun belt. Instead, she began unbuttoning his khaki shirt, when—
“Allie!”
The only reason she didn’t get up right away and race off, Jones’s shirt be damned, was the realization that Beckard’s voice was coming from a distance. Though near enough she could hear it echoing across the woods, she concluded he was still back at the bunker. That helped her to finish unbuttoning Jones’s shirt.
“You can run, but you can’t hide!” he shouted.
Who says I’m hiding, asshole?
She pulled Jones’s shirt off and staggered up to her feet a second time and turned and began jogging through the woods. She ripped the shirt apart as she went, then began wrapping the pieces around her damaged hands. The feel of the soft fabric cocooning her raw skin stung briefly before becoming a soothing glove.
After about thirty more yards of constantly moving, she could barely feel the pain anymore.
Or, at least, that’s what she told herself.
Chapter 22
He didn’t know what hurt more, getting hit in the head with the lamp or rolling down ten concrete steps and landing on the back of his neck. Of course, he didn’t have time to really turn over the options before he saw her standing at the top of the stairs, halfway between following him down (for his gun, no doubt) or fleeing.
He helped her with that decision by groping for the sidearm, then switching the gun over to his left hand and taking a shot at her. Thank God Glocks didn’t come with safeties, otherwise he would have spent another second trying to find the switch. Of course, even without wasting that extra time, his first shot still went awry, smashing into the wall above the door.
Not even close!
He had been wondering all day if he could hit the broad side of a barn with his left hand. Now he knew.
Then she was gone, fleeing through the door.
He didn’t know why, but he fired a second shot after her anyway. Maybe it was frustration or anger or — oh, who was he kidding. It was anger. Simple, pissed-off anger. At that moment, he stopped caring about using her as his final swan song, and he just wanted her dead. Too bad she wasn’t cooperating.
Beckard pushed himself up from the hard ground with a lot of effort. A bag of chips that had landed on his stomach fell and he stepped on it with his boots. There was blood all over the steps, and for a moment he thought it was his.
He checked, but he wasn’t bleeding. At least, not outside his bandages. His neck hurt and his back felt like someone had landed a train on top of it, and every part of his legs and arms and joints shivered with every movement he made. But he wasn’t bleeding.
So where did all the blood come from? And how the hell had she gotten out of the handcuffs?
Then he remembered the sight of her hands. Bloodied.
He stumbled down the steps and turned the corner and saw the handcuffs dangling from the metal spike in the wall. Blood was still dripping from them.
Beckard turned around and started up the steps again. He crunched a package of Snowballs and kicked a bottle of Gatorade out of his path. He had wanted this to go down a different way, but well, nothing was really going as planned these days anyway, so why should this be any different? He had adjusted on the fly before, and he’d just have to do it again.
No muss, no fuss.
He knew she wasn’t going to be outside waiting to bash his head in a second time. Not the way she was running. No, she’d look for a weapon. A smart girl like her would go right for the car. But he had locked it (old habits die hard, even out here in the middle of nowhere) so she wouldn’t get anything there. He expected her to at least try to break the window, get at the shotgun inside, but the Crown Vic looked intact when he stepped out of the bunker.
He stopped for a moment and glanced around. A generous dose of warm orange was spreading above the tree crowns and filling up large sections of the wood with slivers of light.
He checked his watch to be sure: 5:45 A.M.
It wouldn’t be long now. Half an hour before the sun came up completely and the world woke up. It would be another hour, maybe two, until Harper got the manpower he needed to put in all the roadblocks up and down the highway, seal off the state, and pray he hadn’t already made it out hours earlier. By now, Harper would have torn Thomas Beckard’s life upside down. The banks, the credit cards — all those would be frozen by the end of the day.
Ten years. Not a bad run…
“Allie!” he shouted at the top of his lungs.
He listened to his own voice echoing off the trees, scattering birds nearby.
“You can run, but you can’t hide!”
She didn’t answer. Of course not. She’d be running by now. Where to? That was the question.
And the answer was easy.
The highway. A smart girl like her would recognize the barely-there road at the end of the clearing. There wasn’t much, but enough to get a firm direction of where civilization lay.
It didn’t take him long to spot the fresh bloody drops on the ground leading into the woods. That made him grin to himself. It was just last night when she had been tracking him using the same method.
He slipped in through two towering trees in pursuit.
Beckard was feeling giddy, which explained why he had just chuckled at the sight of Jones lying in the grass sans shirt. Someone had been rummaging through the poor trooper’s dead body, and it wasn’t the animals.
What were you looking for, Allie?
He remembered the sight of her hands dripping blood. Taking Jones’s shirt also explained why the blood trail he had been following for the last few minutes had suddenly dried up past Jones’s body.