Where would she go? Savage pounding ache in his head now… he couldn’t think clearly. He gritted his teeth, pinched his eyes hard with his free hand. Think! Where would she go? The road, across it to the thicker woods on the other side? If she made it into that stretch, there were plenty of places she could hide and he might not be able to find her. Or would she go over the boundary fence onto Brannigan’s parcel? You could see the farmhouse from there, Brannigan had a big family and there was always somebody around. If they saw her… if he couldn’t stop her…
Boundary fence. Wire, barbed wire. Meadow on the other side, graze for Brannigan’s mangy herd of dairy cattle. No, she wouldn’t go that way… the barbed wire, all that open ground… if she made as far as the fence she’d veer off…
The road.
He pulled up, sucking air. Pinched his eyes again, jammed the heel of his hand against one socket, then the other. The road. Couple of hundred yards of woods… she didn’t know them, it’d take her a while to find her way through. He didn’t have to chase her on foot to catch her before she ruined everything. The road, Old Stovepipe Road.
He swung around and ran back out of the trees, over the creek and across the clearing to where the Suburban waited.
TAMARA
She heard him crashing around somewhere behind her. Then she didn’t hear him anymore. Must’ve slowed down so he wouldn’t make as much noise and she wouldn’t be able to tell where he was.
She forced herself to do the same thing. Would’ve had to anyway because her ankle was on fire and she was afraid it’d give out on her or she’d step on a rock or something hidden under the thick matting of needles and twist it even worse, maybe break it. And Lauren, small as she was, was no longer a clinging featherweight; heavy now, a constant strain on the tired muscles in her arm and shoulder.
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 g
un 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.
What Lemoyne did was fling the gun down clattering and skidding onto the road, the way you’d throw something that was burning your hand, and then turn and run away.
I was up and after him almost instantly. Behind me I heard Tamara calling out something, Runyon telling her to get into the car and lock the doors. Then he was running too.
Lemoyne fled straight up the road fifty yards or so, then veered off onto a rutted driveway. He had fifteen years on me and he was in better shape; he should’ve been able to outdistance me from the get-go. But it didn’t happen. Anger and adrenaline gave me speed I wouldn’t normally have had, but the main reason was the way he ran. Splay-legged, stiff-backed, both hands clamped down hard on top of his skull and elbows jutting out at right angles, as if he were trying to keep his head from flying off his shoulders. It was the weirdest gait I’d ever seen, like a comic character being chased in a Mack Sennett two-reeler. But there was nothing funny about it. It was as if he were in the throes of an uncontrollable frenzy that had thrown his motor responses out of whack.
I dogged him up the driveway, gaining with each step. He veered sideways onto a grassy clearing with an old Silver Stream trailer at the far end, and that was where I caught him, about halfway along. I grabbed a handful of his jacket and brought us both up short, jerked him around to face me. He lashed out with one hand, the other still clutching his head. I ducked away from it and slammed the flat of the. 38 across the side of his face.
The blow knocked him down, flopped him over on his back grunting and moaning. I could hear Runyon coming; I didn’t need the weapon anymore. I threw it to one side, threw my body down on top of Lemoyne’s. He flopped again, flailing with his arms, but I got both hands on his neck and lifted his head and slammed it on the ground.
It tore a scream out of him, a high-pitched animal sound threaded with too much pain for the amount of force I’d used. His body convulsed and he bucked me off; rolled over a couple of times clenching his head again, his back arched and his legs kicking. Sweat and spittle came flying off his face, glistening in the sunlight. His eyes were rolled up so far you couldn’t see the whites; something that looked like foam crawled out of one corner of his mouth.
Runyon moved into my line of sight, gave me a hand up. He said, staring at Lemoyne, “Some kind of fit.”
“Looks like it. Better get him off his back before he swallows his tongue.”
Together we rolled him over, pinned him facedown in the grass. I loosened his belt and stripped it off and we used it to tie his hands. When we let go of him, he twisted over on his side and lay there twitching, his irises showing again but in an unfocused stare, foam still dribbling out of his mouth.
Runyon said, “I’ll get the car.”
“Tamara?”
“Okay. But looks like the little girl’s pretty sick.”
“Call nine-eleven.”
“First thing.”
It took me another couple of minutes to get my breathing back under control-too much exertion for an incipient senior citizen. Lemoyne didn’t need much watching, so while I waited I scanned around the property. Trailer in the woods. Yeah. The rust-flecked Silver Stream, a barn, a wellhouse, a child’s playset-it all looked ordinary enough. But it wasn’t ordinary. Some places give off bad vibes, and I’ve always been sensitive to that kind of thing. This was one. I could literally feel faint shimmers of evil, like something crawling on my skin.
Runyon’s car came bouncing up the driveway. Out on Old Stovepipe Road I could see a straggle of people-neighbors, probably, drawn by the noise-but none of them ventured onto the property. The car stopped and Tamara and Runyon both got out.
He said, “County law and paramedics on the way,” and I nodded and put my arms around Tamara and held her. Normally neither of us went in for that kind of thing, but this situation was anything but normal; we clung to each other for several seconds before I broke the embrace and stood her back to get a good look at her. Scratches, abrasions, torn clothing, and the way she stood on one leg indicated a twisted ankle. Not too bad, considering.
“You’ve really had a hell of a time, haven’t you?”
“Not as bad as that poor little kid,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it when you and Jake showed up when you did. I guess we’re pretty lucky.”
“It wasn’t luck.”
“No? What was it then?”
I grinned at her. “Timing,” I said. “What else?”
30
TAMARA
A lot of stuff happened over the next few days.
Some of it was kind of exciting. Lauren and her being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance with the siren on full wail. All the attention while she repeated everything that’d happened to the county law, then a bunch of reporters, then a couple of honest-to-God FBI agents. More than once hearing herself called a hero for saving Lauren’s life, even though she’d made a really stupid mistake there at the end that’d almost gotten both of them killed anyway.
Some of it was horrifying. The four filled graves out back of Lemoyne’s barn, one adult and three children, probably his wife and the real Angie and two other little girls he’d kidnapped. And the two freshly dug graves that’d been meant for her and Lauren. And somebody telling her Lemoyne had been examined in a hospital prison ward and he had a malignant brain tumor.
Some of it she could’ve done without. Doctors and nurses fussing over her in the hospital ER, poking and prodding in rude ways; she’d never much cared for medical people even when she was growing up. Telling her story so many times it began to sound remote and unreal in her own ears, as if it’d happened to somebody else. Answering the same questions over and over and over. Too much attention, too many people getting in her face.
And some of it-no surprise-was same-old, same-old.
Ma: “I almost had a heart attack when I heard. That’s twice in four months we almost lost you. I swear, worrying about you is going to drive your father and me into an early grave.”
Pop: “Why didn’t you call me that first night, tell me what you suspected? What in God’s name made you go back there by yourself and prowl around that man’s property? You’re too reckless, you don’t think before you act, you don’t follow the rules.”
Sister Claudia: “Of course I’m glad you saved that poor little girl’s life, but you shouldn’t’ve been in that situation in the first place. You’re not a wild child anymore, you’re supposed to be a responsible adult.”
Horace: “It makes me crazy, thinking about what almost happened to you… again. I understand how you feel about your career, you know I do, but maybe it’s time you took a leave of absence. Come back here and let me take care of you for a while. Will you
at least give it some serious thought?”
Vonda: “Tam, my God, what a horrible experience. I mean, it must’ve been like living through a Samuel Jackson movie or something. Makes all my troubles seem pretty small, not that they are small. Not to me anyway. I thought Alton was gonna take Ben’s head off just for walking in the front door. And you should’ve heard Daddy go off on him when he said he wanted us to get married in a synagogue…”
Best part, far and away, was finding out Lauren didn’t have pneumonia, just needed an IV and some antiobiotics and a few days’ rest, and then later on going to the hospital with Bill and Jake to see her and meet her folks. Her dad had a city government job in Vallejo and her mom was a schoolteacher-nice mixed race couple. There were a lot of hugs and a few tears; she even got a little moist herself when the mother said, “Thank you for our daughter’s life.”
Lauren was all smiley and happy, surrounded by stuffed animals and her Alana Michelle African-American doll. As if the kidnapping, all that’d gone down up in Nevada County, had never happened. That was the great thing about kids-they were resilient, they could get on with their lives more easily than adults because they didn’t have all the grown-up baggage to carry around yet.
She got a long, clinging hug and a kiss from Lauren. And a whisper into her ear that made her blink and grin all over her face: “I love you, Tamara.”
Sweet little girl. Funny, but she had a feeling she was going to miss her a little. The bonding thing. Or maybe it was more than that. In fact, she knew it was. For the first time in her life tough Tamara, independent Tamara, really wanted kids of her own… someday.
JAKE RUNYON
It was Saturday before he had a chance to talk to Joshua in person, at the Hartford Street flat. If he’d thought about it beforehand, he’d’ve known how it would be, that it couldn’t be anything else. But he’d been too busy, too tired out, and so he walked into it cold.
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