Then, amazingly, they were over the crest of a ledge and on a dirt road.
“Go, go, you sonovabitch!” Swagger was yelling. “Wooo-eeee, left those old boys way back there.”
Indeed the police cruisers and the FBI cars didn’t have the gear ratios to make the incline. Nick could see one or two of them stuck halfway up and the others paralleling his course at ground level. But the choppers were everywhere, two, three, now four of them, darting like predatory birds.
“You won’t shake the choppers,” he yelled.
“You just drive, Pork. You let me worry about that,” Bob commanded. He actually looked a little happy.
A shot tore into the hood of the truck with a clang.
“Oh, fuck, they’re shooting,” Nick said.
But Bob squirmed half out the window and brandished the carbine, and instantly the choppers fell back.
“Gutless bubbas,” he said, sliding back in.
They tore down the high road at eighty, dogged at a distance by choppers. And behind them rose state police cars, their lights flashing. The squad cars gained.
“Go on, boy, hit it. Push this damn thing or I’ll have to dump you at hundred miles per.”
“It’s pushed, dammit, I got the pedal on the floor, they’re gonna get us!”
“Another mile or so, boy, that’s all.”
This distance narrowed appreciably over the next few seconds, as the state police cruisers rocketed down the road much faster than the truck could hit. In the rearview mirror, Nick could see the offside man in the lead car slide a pump gun out the window and try to find enough of a sight picture to fire as the car drew nearer, but the road bucked too hard and the dust was too thick.
“Okay, boy, get ready!” shouted Bob, “she’s coming up now.”
Nick looked at him in horror and watched as his hand snaked out gleefully, seized the wheel, and gave it a hard yank to the right. Nick’s foot reflexively shot to the brake but it was too late. The truck careened at sixty miles an hour off the edge of the road and back down the mountainside.
Through the windshield, the world tipped crazily, and turned to instant vegetation as branches and tufts of high grass whipped at the truck. It rocked savagely as it plummeted downward, now and then feeling about to launch itself in a gut-squeezing, heart-crushing thrust through the air. Then the wheels touched down again and the truck tore through the underbrush. Nick fought the wheel for some semblance of control; he saw trees again and heard himself screaming – and then he lost it. The whole thing flipped; the windshield stretched and shivered and seemed to liquefy as it turned to silver webbing in the instant before it shattered, pouring a torrent of glass atop him. He felt himself careening and the smell of dust and gas filled his ears, amid bolts of pain as he banged his head hard against the door pillar. And then they were still.
It took Nick a second or two to realize he was alive. He heard the ticking of the truck and shook his head, touching it, tasting salt as blood ran into his mouth. His eyes shot open. He lay half in, half out of the vehicle, which had come to a twisted rest in a tangle of trees at the end of the long plunge down the mountain. Up top, he could see the police cars halted and a couple of troopers, guns in hands, edging down the steep slope. A chopper hovered above and then another one swooped low overhead, its roar deafening. Nick turned and watched as a whole cavalry charge of police cars roared across the flatland at them, still a good three minutes distant.
Where was Bob?
He blinked, shook his head, pulled himself free. His hand shot down to his ankle and he unlimbered the.38 Agent. Where was he?
Then he heard a grunt and looked back through the cab to see Bob lifting the body bag with Mike’s corpse out of the truck bed. There was blood on his face too, and when he got the body to him, Nick saw him pause; there was a tenderness in him Nick would never have wired into his Bob Lee Swagger profile.
Then Bob spun and began to lurch away.
Nick had him.
“Stop!” He thrust out the.38, cupping it in two hands, as he thumbed back the hammer. He had its cylinder primed with Glaser safety slugs. At this range the bird-shot-loaded bluetips generated seventy-three percent one-shot stops.
“Goddammit, freeze!” Nick boomed again. He lurched forward, blinking blood from his eyes, and feeling himself begin to tremble like a child in the cold rain without a coat. He set himself against the canted hood of the truck, locking his elbows, sliding into a sight picture. It was a good hold; he had Bob, center mass, in the notch of the rear sight and the nub of the front.
Bob himself blinked away some blood as he studied on this new situation.
“Put the dog down and your hands behind your neck and get to your fucking knees, Swagger. You do some speed stuff on me and I swear to Christ I blow your spine out. These are Glasers.”
“Hell, Pork,” Bob said, “if you were going to shoot me, it’d be done by now.”
Then the sonovabitch winked at him! And he turned and began to amble off, dog under one arm, Winchester carbine under the other.
Shoot him! Nick ordered himself. The trigger was a curse against his finger; he yearned to expel it, to end all his failures.
But shooting a man takes one of two things: an overwhelming fear of one’s own death, which Nick did not have in the least; or conviction. It turned out he lacked this component as well.
He didn’t miss vertically; he missed horizontally, Nick found himself thinking as he stood there, watching Bob run away.
Bob got to the field and shot across the meadow a hundred yards or so to what Nick now saw was your picture-postcard country cemetery under a tall stand of ancient trees, hard by a doddering wooden church. He watched as Bob vaulted the stone wall, and there among the teetering, blackened gravestones set the dog down in what must have been a perfectly sized hole already cut from the earth, and snatched up a shovel that must have been part of the master plan. With seven strong strokes, he heaped dirt upon it. In the next half-second, he’d scooped up the Winchester carbine and headed into the church.
Nick heard the cars closing in now, but they would not make it. Bob was inside the church and suddenly out the door skeedaddled a class of black children, running desperately, even as the first state cruiser arrived, and its occupants, Magnums and shotguns aimed and cocked, took cover behind it. Then came a second, a third and then ten more, then twenty; a whole caravan of lawmen was at the church in less than a minute, ready and waiting, when the last occupant emerged, a stooped black gentleman.
They got him, Nick thought.
Someone was screaming in his ear.
“You didn’t shoot! You had him, goddammit,” the voice said. He turned. It was a tough-looking state police sergeant. Behind him his buddy radiated contempt at Nick.
I’ll have to pay for that one too.
“Goddamn,” said another state policeman, holding aloft Bob’s.45 as he found it in the cab. “It’s fucking empty!”
Nick heard a bullhorn demanding surrender. There was just one second of silence. Then the sound of shots rose against the sky, and Nick turned in horror. The lawmen were shooting gas grenades into the church. He watched as the heavy shells sailed through and the cottony white fog began to steam through the broken windows. A tendril of smoke leaped out, and a flame, and then another from another window, and the church began to burn.