by Barry Eisler
She heard an engine roar to life on the other side of the dividing wall. Tires squealing.
Sherrie Dobbs. Oh God.
For a bad second, she slowed, her body trying to drag her back almost of its own accord. But no. She couldn’t engage Snake over the wall and take fire from behind at the same time. She couldn’t help Sherrie Dobbs until the immediate threat was neutralized.
She forced herself to keep running. When she judged that she was sufficiently north of the shooters, she snatched a glance over the wall—
The man on the closest side of the van saw her. He brought up a pistol, his movements all slow motion—
She put her sights on his chest and fired. He jerked from the impact. She brought up her sights a notch and put a round in his face. He went down.
Little fired once more, then stopped. For an instant, everything was surreally silent. She heard the clink of metal on concrete—Little’s spent magazine. The sound of a fresh one slamming into place.
She caught Little’s eye and nodded fiercely. He nodded back, then turned and began firing furiously at the van.
Livia leaped over the wall and ran at a diagonal toward the van. She had no cover and no concealment. She didn’t care. All she could think of, all she could feel, was Sherrie Dobbs, in the trunk of that car, helpless to protect the baby inside her, terrified, being driven to God knows where so a monster could rape and murder her and leave her body someplace where it would never even be found.
They must have heard her coming. One of them stepped out and fired at the same time she did. They both missed. She felt the bullet whiz by her. Another punched into the vest over her stomach. It meant nothing to her. Screaming, still running straight at him, she kept firing. Hit him in the chest. He fired again, his aim off now. She hit him a second time in the chest, still screaming, still charging forward, the dragon totally ascendant now, an engine of atavistic fury, enraged, fearless. He twitched and tried to reacquire her. She hit him again, this time in the neck. He staggered back spastically, his free hand flying over a crimson fountain suddenly pouring from his throat. Five feet away she put a last round in his face and leaped over his body as it hit the ground.
She saw Little closing, exchanging fire with a third guy. The guy must have heard her screaming on the way in and realized his partner was down. He started to turn but it was way too late. She shot him in the back of the head from so close she knew there would be powder burns on his scalp. His head snapped forward, his knees buckled, and he slid straight down like an imploding building.
She heard sirens. She was distantly aware that shooting while running was insane, and she didn’t know how she’d come out on top—luck; rage; fear of her screaming, heedless charge; or some combination.
“That’s three!” she called to Little. “Were there more?”
“I only saw three,” he called back.
He came up next to her. They were at the back of the van now. Livia pointed to him, then to the passenger side. Then to herself, and to the driver side. He nodded. They each peeled off.
She came to the driver-side door. One, two—
She flash-checked through the window. Saw nothing. A longer look. Still nothing.
She pulled the door handle and shoved the door open and away from her. She heard Little do the same from the other side.
“Anything?” she called out, her back to the side of the vehicle just behind the door.
“Nothing!”
The sirens were much closer now.
“Ready?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Go!”
She spun into position, the muzzle of the Glock up and pointed diagonally toward the back of the van. Little was doing the same from the other side. But the cargo space was empty.
She retracted the Glock. “We need to go!”
Little was breathing hard, his pupils massively dilated from adrenaline. “Where?”
“That was Sherrie Dobbs on the other side of that wall! And Snake, pushing her into the trunk of a car! Who do you think I was shouting those commands at?”
She turned and ran toward their car. Little followed her. “How the hell should I know?” he said. “Who were these three guys shooting at us just now?”
She did a perimeter check. “We’ll figure it out later. Give me the keys. Come on!”
He dug a hand in his pocket, and—
Two patrol cars came barreling into the driveway straight at them, one behind the other. “Come on!” Livia shouted.
The cars stopped thirty feet away, blocking the driveway. Livia felt like she was in a cage, in that foul shipping container again.
Sherrie Dobbs, Sherrie Dobbs, I have to go, have to go, HAVE TO GO—
“Come on!” she screamed again.
“We can’t!” Little shouted. “We’re blocked in.”
“Give me the fucking keys!”
“No! We have to stand down, now!”
Four uniformed cops jumped out of the vehicles, using their doors for cover, pointing their weapons at Livia and Little.
“Drop your weapons!” the driver of the first car, a pale white woman who couldn’t have been twenty, shouted. Her voice was high and she was plainly terrified.
“We’re on the job!” Little shouted. “Homeland Security and Seattle PD. We’ll show you our badges. Let’s all just slow it down here.”
“Drop your weapons!” the woman shouted again, and somehow, the fear in her voice, and the determination, got through to Livia. Lowering herself slowly, Livia set down the Glock on the pavement. But her mind was screaming that she was being a fool, this was a trap, someone was going to hurt her now, her or Nason or both—
“You too!” the woman shouted at Little.
“It’s cool, it’s cool,” Little said, bending down and setting his gun on the pavement.
Livia straightened, stepped away from the Glock, and raised her hands in the air. “A woman was just kidnapped,” she shouted. “Sherrie Dobbs. Every minute we waste doing this dance is a minute farther her kidnapper takes her!”
“Prone out!” the woman called, her voice more confident now. “Face down, arms and legs spread, toes out, fingers splayed!”
“No,” Livia said.
Little looked at her. “Livia, for God’s sake—”
“I’m not proning out, or getting on my knees, or anything fucking else. I will show my badge and ID. Livia Lone, Seattle PD. Detective. If you want to shoot a cop, shoot me. Just make it fast because for fuck’s sake someone has to save Sherrie Dobbs!”
The woman glanced at the cop on the opposite side of the patrol car, another young woman, this one black. The black woman nodded.
The white one called out, “Show me your badge. Slowly.”
Livia took the badge from her pocket and held it out in front of her. Both women squinted. “I’ll toss it to you,” Livia said.
The white cop nodded. Livia tossed her the badge. The woman tried to catch it in her left hand, but was too adrenalized. She bobbled it, dropped it, then picked it up and examined it. “What about you?” she said to Little.
Little repeated the procedure. The black woman got back in the patrol car and spoke on the radio. They were being careful, checking Little’s and Livia’s credentials. But the time they were taking was making Livia want to jump out of her skin.
He’s back on the highway now. He won’t take a chance on speeding. Sixty miles an hour. A mile a minute.
It had been five minutes already. That was a five-mile radius they’d be working with. If this went on for ten minutes more, the radius would be fifteen miles. Over seven hundred square miles. And growing larger by the minute.
She wanted to scream. She would have begged, if she thought it would have helped. But she knew it would be useless. She would have to wait.
The white cop looked at her. Livia could tell from her expression that she believed Livia and Little were legitimate. But still she was being careful. Livia knew she would have done the same, but it di
dn’t matter. In that moment, she hated her.
“We’re trying to reach the chief,” the woman said, a note of apology in her tone.
“Tom Cramer?” Livia said.
The woman looked at her, frowning in confusion. “Yeah. You know him?”
“I spoke with him earlier today. And I hope I’m wrong, but I think he’s in the cruiser on the other side of that wall behind us.”
34
Afterward, they regrouped at Kanab police headquarters. It had been as Livia had feared. Snake and Sherrie Dobbs were gone. Tom Cramer was in the cruiser, shot to death.
Both the Utah Highway Patrol and the Arizona Highway Patrol were searching, but they didn’t have a lot to go on. Chief Cramer hadn’t been wearing a bodycam—the town didn’t have the budget—and the dashcam video in the cruiser was useless because Snake had never been in front of the vehicle. On top of which, Livia had gotten only a cursory look at the car Snake was driving. So what it came down to was, the state troopers were looking for a gray or silver sedan driven by a medium-sized white man. Eventually they might get photos from the military—assuming Boomer’s father hadn’t already found a way to deep-six them—but eventually was unlikely to help Sherrie Dobbs.
Worse, because of all the confusion at the scene, the checkpoints were getting set up late—over thirty minutes from when Snake had driven off. Even in a remote town like Kanab, hemmed in by various national parks and forests, that was a long head start. The closest interstate was I-15, about an hour’s drive west, whether through Utah or Arizona, and the state troopers thought Snake would be heading that way. Livia doubted it. From what she could tell, looking at a wall map at the police station, Snake had at least seven routes out of town he could use, and she expected that with the military background he would have given a lot of thought to which ones would be best if anything went wrong. And that was assuming he even kept to the roads. Given his training and experience, Livia thought he’d have no trouble holing up for a few nights in the wilderness and waiting out a dragnet. His timing would certainly be good. The federal government was in the midst of one of its periodic shutdowns; the national parks closed, the park rangers all furloughed.
The Kanab cops were doing a good job of keeping it together, but they were all obviously in shock. As Chief Cramer had said, nothing bad ever happened in their town. And suddenly, their police chief was murdered, a pregnant woman abducted, and three mystery men gunned down by an out-of-town cop in a hotel parking lot. All John Does: no identification, the van they were driving reported stolen the day before in Flagstaff, Arizona. Nothing at all other than a video camera set up in the trees overlooking the area near where Snake had been parked at the motel, and a phone inside the van that was still receiving the camera feed when the local cops searched the vehicle. A useless feed, naturally, because the phones it was transmitting to were presumably the dead men’s, and they were passcode protected.
Little came in from outside, where he’d been using his cellphone to talk to Homeland Security. “Any luck?” Livia asked.
He shook his head. “My boss, Tilden, is having a shit fit. Told me I’m AWOL. And he’s way more concerned about what I’m doing out here than with the matter at hand. Told me to get my ass back to Washington and prepare to be grounded. I told him to fuck off and called the Salt Lake City field office instead. But Salt Lake City told me I’d have to coordinate through headquarters. That’s Tilden, basically issuing an ICE-wide burn notice on my ass. Not that it matters. The field office is a five-hour drive from here. They couldn’t help us right now if I were the pope instead of persona non grata. It’s going to be the same with the FBI. It’s all up to the state troopers.”
He looked around the office. Livia knew what he was thinking—they were short on resources. The Kanab Police Department was just a storefront in a strip mall, alongside a liquor store and across from an insurance agency.
They were quiet for a moment. Livia felt horribly helpless. She had to call Strangeland, but she was dreading it. She wanted to go after Snake, but at this point he could be anywhere. The local cops had told her and Little to stay put—a compromise, given the exigencies of the moment, with what would have been SOP following an officer-involved, especially one where the shooter was an out-of-town cop. At least in the confusion and urgency surrounding Sherrie Dobbs, no one had tried to confiscate Livia’s gun. Not that in her current state she would have let them.
Livia had briefed everyone on Stephen “Snake” Spencer, explaining that she suspected he was involved in the abduction and murder of two women who had gone to high school with Sherrie Dobbs, and that she had come to Kanab to interview Dobbs about Dobbs’s fears of being next. There was no time to explain the rest, but she knew eventually she would have to. She couldn’t prove any of it, and she could only imagine the shit storm Boomer’s father would bring down on her for even trying.
They’re going to throw you off the force after this, she thought. Two bodies in an officer-involved just a month ago. The dead snipers outside your loft. Strangeland tells you in no uncertain terms to lay low for a while, so you charter a plane to Utah and gun down three more bad guys after the Kanab chief of police is murdered and a local woman is kidnapped. And the vice president and his congressman son are going to investigate you. Call you a psycho. Look into your past and dig up who knows what . . . and they’ll attack the department, too. Lean on Best. Claim SPD hasn’t been adhering to the DOJ consent decree. They’ll put pressure on everyone all the way up to the governor to throw you to the wolves.
She imagined herself saying I can explain this, and it almost made her laugh. Then she imagined Sherrie Dobbs, bound and gagged and terrified in a dark car trunk, and felt desperate tears welling up. She willed them back.
You have to think. The only way you can help her is if you think. THINK.
Of course, the woman might already be dead. Or would be, soon enough. But Livia wouldn’t accept that. She’d never accepted it with Nason until she’d been proven wrong. And until she was proven wrong here, she would assume Sherrie Dobbs was alive. And that she could be saved.
Given all that had happened, the small office was less chaotic than Livia would have expected. The bodies of Chief Cramer and the three men Livia had shot had been transported to a nearby hospital, and several of the local cops were liaising with state troopers there. But the dispatcher, a young guy with a ponytail, was within earshot. And although one of the locals had gone to give the horrific news to Sherrie Dobbs’s husband, the plan was to bring the husband back to the station. Beyond which, various people were coming and going—paramedics, a councilwoman, even the mayor. The department wasn’t a great place for a private conversation.
“I need some air,” she said to Little. “Come outside with me?”
He nodded, seeming to catch her drift, and they stepped out into the parking lot.
“He wasn’t here just to kill her,” Livia said as soon as the door was closed behind them. The sun was getting low in the sky now. If the state troopers didn’t manage a lucky stop soon, they were going to have to figure out something else.
“Yeah,” Little said. “If that was all he’d wanted, he would have shot her at the house, right after killing the police chief. Would’ve been a lot less trouble and a lot less risk.”
“So why didn’t he?”
“Because he’s a rapist. Couldn’t bear to waste the opportunity.”
Livia didn’t disagree, exactly, but she knew there was more to it than that. That thing she’d sensed she was missing. But she still couldn’t see it.
“What about the three men?” she said.
Little glanced back at the entrance to the station. “Yeah, I was thinking about that. The camera. The way I see it, Boomer’s father sent them. If we could figure out where Snake was going to show up, so could someone else.”
Livia nodded. She was furious at herself for not having accounted for the possibility. Kane had been expecting Snake to make a run at Sherrie Dobbs, just a
s Livia and Little had been. What he hadn’t expected was Livia and Little, any more than they had expected Kane. They had all been focused on Snake, and not on each other.
She knew Carl’s friend Rain wouldn’t have made the same mistake. One of the things that had impressed her about him was how thoroughly the man could put himself in the mind of the opposition. It kept him a step ahead. If someone like Rain, rather than Admiral Kane, had been gaming things out, it would have been very bad for her.
“So assassinate the assassin?” Livia said.
“That’s my guess. After Noreen Prentis and Hope Jordan, Kane knows his boy Boomer is having Snake tie up loose ends. Kane wants the same thing, but he figures when it’s done, convicted-rapist Snake, who’s a known associate of his boy, becomes a loose end himself. So Kane sends his men to the known nexus—the third target, Sherrie Dobbs. They follow Snake, see where he parks his car, and set up a camera so they can keep concealed when he comes back. If he’s alone, they figure he killed Dobbs already. They follow him regardless, though, just to be sure. And if he has her, they follow the two of them and take care of business on some deserted stretch of mountain road.”
That sounded generally right. But something was still bothering her. “But then you and I pulled into the hotel parking lot . . .”
He nodded. “They came swarming out of the van the moment you threw down on Snake and started yelling commands at him. Which makes sense, because about the last thing in the world Kane would want would be Boomer’s good buddy Snake in custody after attempting to kidnap the third girl Boomer raped in high school.”
You should have just shot him, Livia thought for the dozenth time since Snake had driven away. Maybe they’d have a harder time making a case against Boomer if Snake were dead. But Sherrie Dobbs would be safe. And with the three men Livia had killed, and Boomer’s father certain to be on the warpath, Chief Best was going to crucify Livia no matter what.