“I am a cop,” Joanna shouted over her shoulder, but without taking her eyes off Larry. “Everybody down.” To Larry Dysart, she said, “Let her go!”
“You bitch,” he snarled back, his face distorted with unreasoning rage. “You goddamned, interfering bitch!”
Pressing his forearm against the terrified waitress’s throat, he held her captive against his chest while his other hand sought to retrieve something from his jacket pocket.
“Watch it, Joanna,” Jim Bob warned. “He’s going for a gun.”
Then, disregarding any possible danger to himself from Joanna’s drawn Colt, Jim Bob rose to his knees and lunged at Dysart a second time. Because the second tackle was launched from below waist level, Dysart never saw it coming. Jim Bob’s unexpected weight pounded into the waitress’s wildly flailing knees. In what seemed like slow motion, Dysart toppled over backward toward the fireplace, pulling the struggling waitress and Jim Bob with him.
All three of them hit the floor in a writhing heap of arms and legs. Before the tackle, Dysart must have managed to pull his handgun—a small-caliber pistol—loose from his pocket. The force of Jim Bob’s blow knocked it from his grip. The revolver clattered to the floor and then came skidding past Joanna’s feet, spinning across the polished surface like a deadly Christmas top. Joanna turned and knelt to retrieve it. By the time she regained her feet, Larry Dysart had rolled behind Eva Lou’s chair. When she saw him again, he was on his feet and halfway across the room, sprinting toward the door to the pool area.
The lobby erupted in a chorus of yells and shouts. A woman’s high-pitched scream rent the air. Joanna barely heard it. She paused only long enough to press Larry Dysart’s .22 into Jim Bob’s hand, then she raced after the fleeing man. By the time she threw open the gate to the wrought-iron fence to the pool, Dysart was already beyond the deep end, pushing his way past a startled gardener and scrambling over the six-foot stucco wall that separated the pool from the hotel’s back parking lot.
With the gardener standing right there, Joanna couldn’t risk a shot. She was enough of a marksman that she probably could have hit Dysart, even from that distance, but what if the terrified gardener dodged into the bullet rather than away from it?
The sore muscles she had strained during physical training earlier in the week screamed in protest as she pounded down the pool deck after him. When she reached the wall, she found it was too high for her to pull herself up.
Holstering the semiautomatic, she turned to the gardener for help. “I need a boost.”
Without a word, the man knelt down in his freshly planted petunias and folded his hands together, turning them into a stirrup. His strong-armed assist raised Joanna high enough to pull herself up onto the wall. She dropped heavily onto the other side, hitting the ground rolling, the way she’d been taught. Even so, the graceless landing knocked the breath out of her. Gasping for air, she scrambled to her feet just as Larry Dysart disappeared behind a huge commercial garbage bin.
Hoping for help, Joanna looked around. There were no cop cars anywhere in sight. If Carol Strong’s reinforcements were on the scene, where the hell were they? But Joanna knew the answer to that. Based on what she had told Carol about where they were, the cops were focused on the front of the building—on the lobby not on the loading dock.
Fueled by adrenaline, Joanna took off after Dysart. She stopped at the corner of the building long enough to reconnoiter. Peering carefully around the stuccoed wall, she caught sight of him and knew that his back was toward her before she stepped into the clear. Instead of waiting for her in ambush, Larry Dysart was still running.
Joanna ran, too. Past the back of the kitchen where a cook and a dishwasher stood having a companionable smoke; past the open door of the overheated laundry with its heavy, damp air warmed with the homey smell of freshly drying
linens. Halfway down that side of the building, Dysart veered sharply to the left and headed for Grand Avenue. Half a second later, Joanna saw why. An empty cop car, doors ajar, sat parked at e front corner of the building. The reinforcements had arrived, all right, but they had been sucked into the lobby by the panicked uproar there.
Realizing she was on her own, Joanna despaired. Dysart was headed for the street. She was running flat out behind him. Even so, she was still losing ground.
This way, Joanna wanted to shout to the invisible cops in the lobby. Come out and look this way.
But there wasn’t yet enough air in her tortured lungs to permit yelling and running at the same time. And there was no one to hear her if she had. Instead, straining every muscle, she raced after him.
Dysart burst through a small landscaped area that bordered on Grand Avenue and then paused uncertainly on the shoulder of the road. A moment later, he darted out into traffic. Horns honked. Brakes squealed. Somehow he dodged several lanes of oncoming traffic. Making it safely to the other side, he disappeared down an embankment.
Joanna, too, paused at the side of the road. She looked both ways, across six lanes of traffic. Then, taking advantage of a momentary lull in vehicles, she too plunged across Grand. Halfway to the other side, she heard the unmistakable rumble of an approaching train.
Her heart sank. By then, Dysart had gained so much ground that if he managed to cross the tracks just ahead of the train, he might be able to disappear behind the seventy-five or so freight cars the train before Joanna or anyone else would able to come after him.
When she finally reached the far shoulder of Grand Avenue, Joanna looked down in time to see Larry Dysart climbing over the barbed-wire-topped chain-link fence that separated railroad right-of way from highway right-of-way.
“Stop or I’ll shoot.” She screamed the warning over the roar of the approaching train. And he must have heard her, because he turned to look. But he kept on climbing. And when he hit the ground, he kept on running, straight toward the tracks, less than fifty yards ahead of the rumbling southbound train.
He was out in the open now, with nothing but open air between him and Joanna’s Colt 2000. She dropped to her knees and held the semiautomatic with both hands. A body shot would have been far easier. His broad back would have offered a far larger target, but she didn’t want to risk a body shot. That might kill him. Instead, she aimed for his legs, for the pumping knees that were carrying him closer and closer to the track.
Joanna’s first shot exploded in a cloud of dirt just ahead of him. It had no visible effect on Dysart other than making him run even faster. Gritting her teeth, Joanna squeezed off a second round and then a third. The fourth shot found its mark. Larry Dysart rose slightly in the air, like a runner clearing a curb. When he came back down, his shattered leg crumpled under him. He pitched forward on his face.
Giddy with relief and triumph, Joanna stumbled down the rocky incline from the roadway. By then the train was bearing down on the injured man. She had him. All she had to do now was wait for help. With a broken leg, he’d never be able to cross the tracks before the train reached him. And even if he did, the leg would slow him down enough that someone would be able to catch up with him.
“Hold it!” she yelled, running toward the fence with her Colt still raised. “Hold it right there!”
He must have heard that, too. He raised up on both elbows long enough to look back at her, then he started crawling toward the track, dragging the damaged leg behind him. By the time Joanna realized his intentions, there was nothing she could do.
“Stop!” she screamed. “Please! Don’t do it.”
But without a backward glance, Larry Dysart threw himself under the iron wheels of the moving train. He disappeared from sight while behind him a single severed foot and shoe flew high in the air. Spewing blood, it landed in the dirt thirty feet from the tracks.