The first rush of panic was gone. She was still plenty scared, but mad as hell and even more determined. Son of a bitch wasn’t gonna get his hands on them again. Not after all they’d been through, not this close to freedom. If he got near enough to shoot her he’d better kill her with the first bullet. Otherwise she’d find a way to claw his eyes, break his balls, tear his throat out with her teeth, take that Saturday night special away from him and shove it up his ass so far the barrel be poking out one of his nostrils. Wasn’t gonna hurt Lauren. Wasn’t gonna stop her. Wasn’t, wasn’t, wasn’t!
She dodged around tree trunks, hopping on her good leg, dragging the bad. How far was the road? Couldn’t be too far now. She was sure she hadn’t lost her sense of direction, it had to be straight ahead. Ground slanted upward here, little moss-coated humps of rock sticking out of it, thick grass and bushes and ferns and the trees close-packed again. She made it to the top of the rise, paused with her back to one of the pine boles to catch her breath and listen. At first all she heard was Lauren’s breathing-raspy, liquidy, as if she might have fluid in her lungs, hot and moist in her ear.
Sudden rustling, snapping noise somewhere behind her… but it wasn’t Lemoyne. Jay or some other bird high up in the interlacing of branches; it squawked when it flew off.
Was that a fence over there?
She focused, staring past a tangle of brush and dead limbs to a spot twenty or thirty yards away. Yo… fence post, wire, barbs glinting in a patch of sun. She pushed off the tree, forgetting her ankle for a second, biting down hard against the splintering pain, and hobbled that way. Once she got to the tangle she could see all the way past. Boundary fence, long stretch of it visible from there. And on the other side a wide meadow, empty except for stumps where some trees had been cut down. Above it was a section of tilled land And a farmhouse. Long way off, few hundred yards. Flatbed truck parked on one side, some kind of car under a carport on the other. Thin streamers of smoke coming out a tall metal chimney.
People.
Help.
Her pulse rate jumped. But the rush of relief didn’t last long. Try to climb over or through that barbed wire, she might get herself hung up and Lauren hung up… and she didn’t know where Lemoyne was, he might be close enough to catch her before she made it onto the other property. The farmhouse was too far away for yelling to do any good; it’d just tell him exactly where she was. And even if she did get past the fence, there was all that open space over there. She couldn’t outrun him with a twisted ankle. Be easy for him to catch her in the meadow, drag her and Lauren back onto his property. Or shoot them while they were out in the open, pick them off like animals on the run…
Her attention snagged on a long driveway that led up to the house between rows of whitewashed wooden fence. She followed it with her eyes. She couldn’t see where it intersected with the road, but in the distance she could see a piece of the road itself. Cars, other farms, other people… all she had to do was get to the road. It had to be closer than the farmhouse. And the boundary fence paralleled the driveway, just follow the fence.
She hobbled along it, holding on to Lauren with both hands now, straining to hear over the blood-pound in her ears. Wherever Lemoyne was, it couldn’t be too near… there were no sounds of pursuit. A berry thicket forced her away from the fence, back among and through the trees. Sharp-thorned suckers scratched her bare legs, caught at her skirt. Twigs snapped and crackled under her shoes, loud, loud. But nothing happened, she didn’t see or hear Lemoyne, and when the berry thicket ended and she veered back to the fence, she was near enough to the road to see the driveway gate next door, longer pieces of the road. Empty pieces, but somebody might come along any minute. Wasn’t far now, less than fifty yards.
Long, dragging seconds… minutes… she’d lost all track of time. Follow the fence, just keep picking her way along the fence.
The trees thinned again ahead. Through them she could see part of the road directly in front of her.
A little farther… and out of the trees finally, onto a grassy verge, onto the road itself.
Made it!
ROBERT LEMOYNE
From behind one of the pines that edged his driveway he saw her stagger into sight a hundred yards away. Watched her limp out onto Old Stovepipe Road, turn in the direction of Brannigan’s place. Just what he’d figured. He ran to where he’d left the Suburban, engine idling, just far enough back on the drive so it couldn’t be seen from down the road. The Saturday night special was on the seat. He put the car in gear, swung fast out of the driveway.
Dark Chocolate heard him coming, but by then it was too late for her to get away again. She took a couple of lurching steps toward the woods on the other side, stumbled back when he veered over that way to cut her off. When she tried to run, her hurt leg gave out and she fell down, almost fell on the little girl that wasn’t Angie. He hit the brakes, twisted the wheel, rocked to a stop a few feet from them, and jumped out with the gun in his hand.
She looked up at him, angry and scared. The blanket had pulled away from the little girl’s head; she looked scared, too. He felt sorry for them both, but not too sorry. They were strangers. His head hurt so much and they were strangers and the only thing that mattered was taking them back and putting them where they had to be put, so he could go home and start looking for Angie again.
29
Timing.
Everything we do in this world, everything that happens good and bad, planned and unplanned, expected and unexpected, is ruled by it. Right place or wrong place, right moment or wrong moment, salvation or disaster. Runyon’s intervention in last night’s gay bashing and his capture of one of the perps had been a matter of timing. And now, this morning We went into a turn on Old Stovepipe Road, nobody around, hadn’t been another car since we passed through Rough and Ready, and we started to come out of the turn and it was going down smack in front of us, less than a hundred yards away. All three of them there on the road-Tamara, the kidnapped child, a middle-aged man who had to be Robert Lemoyne. Tamara sprawled on one hip, half on and half off the pavement, clutching the blanket-wrapped little girl protectively against her body. Lemoyne hovering over them with a gun in his hand. The Chevy Suburban was there, too, slewed at an angle across two-thirds of the road surface.
The shock of it was like a blow to the eyes. I humped forward so fast I nearly cracked my head on the windshield. “Jake!”
He punched the gas, leaned hard on the horn at the same time. The blatting noise and the sudden awareness of our approach had opposite effects on Tamara and Lemoyne. She scrambled away from him, onto the grass-furred verge. He stood as if paralyzed, still in a half crouch, looking up at us out of a rictus of confusion.
Runyon braked the car to a sliding stop on the side away from where Tamara and the little girl were. Both of us were out before it quit rocking. Lemoyne straightened with his weapon pointed downward at a forty-five-degree angle to his body, and when he saw that we were both armed he stayed that way, his mouth open and his eyes bulging. I went to one knee, the. 38 straight-armed out in front of me. Runyon yelled something that had no effect on Lemoyne; he kept on standing there, gawping. If he’d lifted that piece of his any higher, made any movement to cap off a round, I’d have shot him and so would Runyon. He didn’t, but even so I came close to squeezing off anyway, shooting one of his legs out from under him or worse. The only thing that stopped me was the knowledge that Tamara and the child were alive and not seriously injured.