I bit my tongue and thought, Gee the last time I saw you, you tried to shoot me, missed, and put a bullet through my windshield. When that didn’t work you guys placed a bomb in my car to blow me up. Instead I half joked, “Oh, you know Kerri, I just thought this sort of fit my personality a little better, and well, the time seemed right to get a fresh set of wheels. Like it?”
She nodded, took a final drag, and then ground out her cigarette with the toe of her heeled boot. Deja vu all over again. Just like before, she spent a long time grinding it into the ground. When she looked up her eyes seemed a little glazed. Was it possibly a tear, or just heartless determination?
“Have you have found Nikki?”
“Your sister?” suggesting by my tone she was anything but “Matter of fact I think I may have.”
I glanced up and down the road again, checked for vehicles, nothing looked out of the ordinary. I turned back to Kerri, I thought she was looking at me but her focus was a few feet beyond to the bluff.
From the bluff down to the river was parkland. The terrain was steep, wild, filled with deer, fox, raccoons, and the occasional gaggle of underage teens sneaking off to smoke dope and drink something memorable like root beer schnapps or strawberry-flavored vodka.
I saw the first shaved head struggling up the bluff, red-faced with heavy muscular arms and a thick upper body, some sort of inordinately large pistol in his hands. There were three other guys close on his heels, all armed. They were gasping and groaning, struggling to make the steep grade and pick up the pace in the final four or five feet and then they’d be virtually on top of us.
Kerri suddenly had her pistol out from under her elbow, with her right arm extended, the barrel looked to be about six inches wide and pointed right between my eyes. I hate it when I’m right.
It sounded like a slight clearing of someone’s throat, sudden, brief, not at all loud.
The first shaved head was picked up and thrown back over the bluff just as he was beginning to pick up speed. It was so sudden one of his compatriots yelled something in Russian. I couldn’t understand it, but the tone was more of chastisement than a warning to the others. Maybe something like What the hell are you doing? or Quit screwing around! It took them a step or two but then suddenly they all dropped to the ground.
Kerri quickly spun around and crouched down behind the rear of her BMW. I seemed to have suddenly become the least of her concerns. I accelerated out of the parking lot, back onto the River Boulevard and away. No one followed or shot at us.
Hale was suddenly up, crouched in the backseat with what looked like a MAC 10 clenched in his hands.
“I don’t think they’re following,” I said giving half a glance in the rearview mirror before screeching around the corner, back onto Summit Avenue and racing up a small hill. The Hummer swayed back and forth a bit as I accelerated.
“You see where the hell that shot came from?” Hale asked, then mumbled something unintelligible into his radio.
“I’m thinking the college parking ramp. No neighbors, it’s secluded, and she can just get in a car and calmly drive out like she’s heading home after a class.” I whipped around the corner, forced a handful of college kids crossing against the light to jump back as I leaned on the horn. Then I rocketed down the street past the science building at the university, heading toward the three-story parking ramp. There were already two squad cars with lights flashing blocking the entrance and exit ramps. In the distance I could see the flashing lights of at least two more police vehicles racing toward us. They’d be here in no more than fifteen seconds.
“Pull over, pull over,” Hale commanded.
I hadn’t even come close to stopping before he leaped out the passenger-side door, stumbled a step or two and then hurried toward the parking ramp, half running and hopping, shouting instructions into his radio as he moved.
Chapter 64
They got the parking ramp cordoned off quickly, more police arriving every couple of minutes. I saw Aaron a couple of times from a distance but never got close enough to talk with him. In the end, they never found Nikki in the parking ramp. They found her car or at any rate a car, a gray, 2006 Honda Accord, abandoned on the ground level of the ramp. The car was thirty feet from the exit, with the driver’s door left open. She must have fled on foot the moment she saw the police squad blocking the exit. A rifle with a scope rested on the floor of the backseat, buried beneath two twenty-four packs of newborn sized Pampers. A child’s car seat was belted into the rear. But no Nikki.
“Damn it, I can’t believe it. We must have just missed her,” Aaron said, clearly upset. We were standing on the top level of the parking ramp in the broiling sun. Waves of heat shimmered off the concrete. We’d just completed another walk through the entire ramp, uniformed officers checked each and every one of the vehicles twice for a redhead hiding inside.
Looking out of the ramp and down toward the river I could see where the area was cordoned off with crime-scene tape. A small tent was getting set up at the edge of the bluff not quite over the body. I thought I might be able to see the body or at least where it was with a shroud draped over it, but it must have rested just that much further down the bluff to be hidden from view. There was an EMT vehicle parked in the lot at about the same place where Hale and I had been when the shot was fired. To my knowledge neither Kerri nor any of the guys that had climbed up over the top of the river bluff were in custody. A number of police vehicles were parked around at haphazard angles. The medical examiner wagon was there. I wondered if Aaron’s friend Dr. Mallory Bendix was down there, but then figured her sort of arrogance probably suggested she wouldn’t work out in the field with common folk.
Hale was limping, cringing with each step, most likely injured during his jumping exit out of the moving Hummer, but I guessed he may have had larger problems on his mind at the moment. The last thing either he or Aaron needed was my meddling right now.
Aaron was the senior officer on site and as such it was his crime scene. So he was dealing with a very full plate. I had just finished writing out my statement, signed it and handed it to a uniformed sergeant. Hale limped over to me, said quietly, “Why don’t you get out of here? There’s going to be enough heat without you getting dragged into the meat grinder. We got your statement. I’ll square it with LaZelle soon as he gets a moment.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” he groaned, “not like we don’t know where to find you. Anything comes up I’ll give you a call. Jesus,” he groaned a second time.
“Look, why don’t I run you down to United? You might just have a bad sprain but I’m willing to bet you broke or tore something when you jumped out of the Hummer.”
“No, I’ll make it, just a little uncomfortable is all. Oh, my God!” he suddenly groaned.
“Okay, that’s it, you’re coming with,” I said. Hale didn’t argue, we did the walking wounded routine, with his right arm draped over my shoulder. Together we limped and hopped down the stairwell and across a parking lot to the Hummer.
There were news vans, three of them, parked on the far side of the crime-scene tape. Satellite dishes on top of the vans, call letters emblazoned on all four sides. Off to one side an attractive-looking woman with a microphone was wading through a crowd of casual college kids. No one paid any attention to us. The Hummer was parked on the street, just at the end of the parking ramp. There was a parking ticket beneath the wiper on the front windshield, par for the course.
I tossed the parking ticket between the front seats and pulled away from the curb. Two coeds looked the Hummer over as they passed, one raised her eyebrow and gave me an all-knowing wink then held a suggestive grin. Her companion said something to her and they both laughed as we passed by.