It was no use. He had her.
Dead to rights.
I’m sorry, Carmen, I failed.
Please forgive me…
She thought he might say something clever — or at least something he thought was clever — before he shot her, but he didn’t. Instead, he just fired—
— and she felt a sharp sting as the bullet buzzed past her.
The sudden jolt of pain came from her right ear, the sensation like getting stung by a bee, as the bullet clipped her.
There was the look of surprise on his face, shock that he had missed her from less than five feet away. Maybe it was the fact that he was using his heavily bandaged hand to hold the gun, which couldn’t handle the recoil in its current condition. She didn’t know and didn’t particularly care, because she was alive!
Beckard attempted to stand up when she lunged at him, throwing herself forward, headfirst this time. He saw her coming and fired a second shot—
And missed again!
This time he fired so quickly that the bullet went wide, even as she barreled into him with everything she had and knocked both of them back to the ground again. He struggled under her, his much bigger body already getting into position to throw her off. Before he could do that, she grabbed the gun by the barrel with both hands and rolled off him. He let out a piercing scream as she twisted the gun and broke his finger in the trigger guard in the process.
She might have also screamed right along with him as every inch of her hands throbbed with misery under the swaddling, even as she tightened her fingers around the barrel and jerked it with everything she had until it slid out of his stubborn grip.
Allie landed in a pile next to him and kept rolling until she was sure she had enough space between them. She scrambled up, managing to get to her knees even as he mirrored her actions four feet away.
She heard rather than felt the blood dripping from her right ear, where his first shot had taken a big chunk. Every inch of her hands vibrated, currents of pain rippling from every single one of her fingertips. She tried not to think about what she looked like at the moment and focused on controlling her breathing instead. It wasn’t nearly as easy to shoot a man with a handgun, even from a few feet away. Despite her best efforts, though, it felt like a train was rumbling across her chest.
If she thought she looked miserable, Beckard was in even worse shape. He was cradling his broken finger, his face covered in a thick film of pain and fury and blood. Eyes — one bloodshot, the other normal — glared back at her as if he couldn’t quite believe what had happened, or what was happening.
She stared back at him, the Glock in both hands, and aimed at his head.
“No,” he gasped.
“No?” she repeated.
“It can’t end this way.”
“Why the hell not? What makes you so special?”
“It can’t end this way,” he said again, as if she hadn’t said anything.
“Yes, it can,” she said, and blew his brains out with the first shot.
His body — lifeless and empty, a husk of nothing, if he ever was anything to begin with — flopped to the ground and lay perfectly still.
She let the gun fall to her lap because it felt suddenly very heavy, and she just didn’t have the strength to keep it raised any longer. The recoil against her mangled hands didn’t hurt nearly as much as she had expected, and whatever fight she had in her seemed to evaporate in a rush of expelled air at the sight of his body toppling over and not getting up.
It was over.
Ten years of research, six years of training, and three years of getting ready for this moment…and it was finally over.
There wasn’t much of Beckard’s head left. With the hole in his forehead and the blood that covered nearly sixty, maybe seventy percent of his face, it was a grotesque sight, the kind that she was sure would give her nightmares for years to come. Even in death, the man would still continue to haunt her.
Allie let out a deep breath and lay down on the earth, letting the Glock fall from her numbed fingers. She stared up past the tree canopies and focused on the clearing sky. It was getting brighter with every second, signaling the coming of a new day.
Somewhere in the distance, she might have heard dogs barking, or maybe that could have just been her imagination.
She decided not to fight the unbearable fatigue and closed her eyes. She went to sleep, forcing herself to think about good things and better times.
Hi, Carmen, it’s your big sister.
You can go to sleep now. It’s over.
It’s all over…
Epilogue
She woke up in bed.
It was quiet and peaceful, and the mattress under her was soft and comfortable, far from the hard and pricking cot of a prison cell. Both of her hands were heavily bandaged and there was surprisingly very little pain. If anything, she felt numbed all over, although from time to time there was a slight itching sensation from one of her ears. An IV drip-drip-dripped next to her bed. The clear liquid inside the bag was probably morphine or a damn fine substitute. A lone machine to her right occasionally beeped.
Every now and then she could hear a calm voice over a loudspeaker, and something clanking as it rolled past the door to her left. It was almost entirely dark inside the room except for a computer monitor next to a sink and a yellow night-light near the floor in front of her.
“Allie Krycek,” a familiar male voice said. “CPA, secretary, waitress, and I believe at one point you even worked as a nanny?”
Allie looked to her right at the man in the state trooper’s uniform, sitting on a long uncomfortable sofa next to the windows.
“I guess now we can add ‘vigilante’ to that list,” Harper said.
She could barely make him out in the semidarkness, but there was no mistaking that voice. Harper would have made a great hero in a Hollywood Western.
“How long?” she asked.
“A couple of days. You lost a lot of blood out there.”
“How did I get here?”
“We were looking for Beckard in the area when we heard the gunshots. He killed one of my troopers a few miles from where we eventually found you.”
“I heard dogs…”
“Apollo found you.”
“Apollo?”
“The dog.”
She gave him a confused look.
“The one that took a chunk out of Beckard in the cabin. He was helping with the search and picked up your scent. You’re lucky we had him out there, otherwise you might have bled to death before we found you in time.” He leaned slightly forward. “I’m curious. How long did it take?”
“What?”
“To lure him out.”
“Four months, one week, and five days.”
Harper chuckled. “Four months. Out there, driving back and forth. You’re a pretty impressive woman, Allie.”
“I had a lot of time on my hands.”
“I bet. If I was looking to hire someone who could do a little of everything, I’d give you a call. I guess when your sole goal in life is to find and kill someone, it doesn’t pay to get stuck in a long-term career.”
She wasn’t sure where he was going, and Allie was too tired to care. “Am I under arrest?”
“Now what would you be under arrest for?”
“Beckard.”
“You’re a hero. The state police don’t arrest heroes.”
Hero?
She wanted to laugh but didn’t have the strength to do even that. She said instead, “I was right. Beckard is the Roadside Killer.”
“Was, yeah. We’ve been turning his life inside out. Everything he was, everything he did…we know everything there is to know. There’s no doubt that he is — was — the Roadside Killer, and that he kept on killing long after we stopped looking for him. The national media is burning us alive at the stakes for that.” He sighed. “I guess we had it coming.”