Duck and Run

by TL Schaefer

Anticipation and a greedy kind of anger kindled in Smith’s body. Yeah, now he’d get his revenge.

  He walked slowly, savoring the panic in Coleman’s eyes. His fingers went to the small of his back through force of habit. Unsnapping the holstered Smith and Wesson, fitting the familiar hashed grip in his palm, fingers curling around the curved trigger, thumb clicking off the safety. It was like coming home.

  He halved the distance between his sedan and the Mustang, beginning to pant in anticipation.

  The pain came out of nowhere, a freight train of agony centered right between his shoulder blades. Jesus. He swung around, trying to bring his weapon to bear, but it was so very heavy, and clunked back to his side, useless. He dropped to his knees only a few scant feet from the Mustang, his vision beginning to cloud.

  But he saw her, the woman who’d shot him in the back. Who even now strode toward both him and the wrecked car, her expression focused and tight as she raised her handgun to bear once again. And then he knew nothing more.

  “Ma’am, step out of the car, hands raised!” The voice just beginning to penetrate Cris’ consciousness was pissed, that much she could tell.

  She surfaced slowly, so slowly, so painfully, like climbing through layers of steel wool. The pounding in her head banged like a bass drum. Boom. Boom. Boom.

  Then that voice was yelling again, practically piercing her eardrums.

  She swiveled her head, barely focusing on the dark blue uniform of the uniformed cop, on the gun pointed at her, sure and steady. Then the cop was being pushed aside by a familiar face.

  “Linc,” she groaned, and the car door was being wrenched open with a squeal of metal that pierced her eardrums all over again.

  “Jesus, Cris,” his arms were warm and sure around her, and she let the blackness take her back under.

  This time when she surfaced it was with a bright flash of pain that left her breathless. As soon as the breath left her lungs, she saw Nick’s face in her mind’s-eye, saw him behind the wheel of the Mustang, felt that sickeningly familiar jarring as they were sideswiped—oh God, not again. The swirl of emotions threatened to pull her under, but she forced her way out, into the light.

  Linc was shaking her. “Wake up, Cris. Can’t let you fall asleep.”

  She sat up fast, brushing against Linc’s restraining arm. “Where’s Nick?” Her voice didn’t sound like her own. Rough, cracked, dusty with disuse. “How long have I been out?”

  Linc was shaking his head, as if to negate her questions, and the motion told her she wasn’t going to like any of the answers.

  “Don’t hold out on me, old man.” Fear began to turn to anger, even as she wondered what in the hell had happened. She’d been afraid they were truly going to die. But if she was all right, then where was Nick?

  Linc ran a hand over his face, looking older than she’d ever seen him.

  “You’ve been out for a few hours. We were worried you weren’t going to wake up at all. As for Nick, we just don’t know,” he finally answered. “When I got to the scene, you were still in the car. Nick was gone. And Gary Smith was eight feet away from you, his service weapon drawn, with three armor-piercing green-tip cop killers in his back. He never even got off a return shot.”

  Linc’s words rang with conviction, but… “Gary Smith. As in Patrolman Gary Smith who was impersonating Burt England? Where did he come from?”

  As of three days ago, she’d taken Smith off her worry-scope, as had pretty much everyone on the task force. Jesus. What a cluster. Surely they didn’t think Nick had done this…

  “Nick wouldn’t…” she began, before Linc cut her off, a look of horror on his face.

  “Oh no. This wasn’t Nick. It’s worse. Smith’s dashcam caught it all. He boosted a car from the dispatch lot, we think because he needed to set the scene after he forced you off the road. Anyway, he slammed you into an overpass abutment and was coming in to finish you both off. It was Lori Wright, Cris. She dropped Smith like a pro, then Tased Nick and dragged him away from the scene. She’s got Nick.”

  Jesus. Her plan had worked all too well. And now Nick was paying the price.

  Something deep within her started to claw to the surface. Something that went beyond anger. Beyond hate or rage. It was a burning so profound she was surprised it didn’t incinerate her from the inside out.

  Her next words were cold as ice, even as she burned inside. “Where is she?”

  “We don’t know. She must have turned off Nick’s cell, so we can’t ping off a tower. She came prepared, Cris. Nick’s a big guy, no way a little thing like her could drag him off, but somehow she did.”

  “I want to see the footage,” Cris said as she swung her feet to the floor, her head and stomach swimming. If only this was the first time she’d felt this way.

  For the first time she took in her surroundings. She was on a semi-ratty couch, likely in a break room of some kind. “Where am I?”

  “OCPD, Hefner Division. You refused medical treatment at the scene, made such a fuss about it the EMTs made you sign a release. Then as soon as we got you in the car, you dropped off.” Linc was watching her, then nodding slowly. “And you can’t remember one bit of it, can you? Dammit, Cristine, we should have taken you to the hospital. What if you have a concussion?” Now he was fretting.

  “Negative,” she said, allowing Linc to grab her elbow as she stood, even though it took everything inside her to not shrug off the helping hand. But it was Linc, and she wouldn’t hurt him like that. “I obviously had it together enough at the scene, and if I had a concussion, I’d likely be nauseated. What I am is beyond pissed off.”

  She got her feet under her better than she thought she might, and suspected it was being driven by whatever had unclenched inside her.

  The bullpen inside the division was buzzing, and every head in the room swiveled when Cris and Linc walked in. Captain Montgomery himself was there, having relocated from the main building downtown.

  “Ms. O’Connor, Agent Lincoln, please have a seat.” Montgomery gestured them into a working conference room. Cued up on a sleek projection screen was the frozen image from dashcam video showing her and Nick riding in the Mustang, oblivious as can be.

  She sank onto a hard plastic chair, the anger that had fueled her now dwindling. That strange energy was still there, but banked now, waiting to be stoked.

  “Please show it to me,” she asked Captain Montgomery and his team. “I need to see what she’s done with my own eyes.”

  Montgomery nodded and hit play.

  The screen filled with the image of her car moving down the freeway at a good clip. The distance between Smith’s car and theirs narrowed, then disappeared as he pulled alongside, then drew ahead of them and jerked hard to the right, sending them careening offscreen.

  Smith pulled over to the side of the road and backed up, maneuvered the car so it was blocking the lane approaching the “accident.”

  Then he was shouldering out of the unmarked, striding toward the Mustang with a sure gait, and as he turned to look down the darkened highway, she could see a little smirk on his face. His right hand went to the small of his back, freeing the handgun resting in its holster. He raised the weapon, bringing it to bear.

  In the here and now, Cris felt every muscle in her body go tense and tight. While she knew he wasn’t going to shoot her or Nick, the intent in his gaze, in the way he walked toward them, was unmistakable. It was eerie.

  Then his back was blooming red as a bullet punched into his back. He turned, his face incredulous as a second, then third shot tore through his chest, stilling him forever.

  A woman stepped into the camera frame, gun still raised as she looked pitilessly at the body at her feet. She raised her head and stared directly into the dashcam, a small, secret smile curving her lips.

  Cris felt the smile slice through her effortlessly, leaving bone-chilling cold in its wake. Lori Wright was smiling just for her.

  Then the woman moved toward the Mustang, duffel bag in h
and, her strides just as long and purposeful as Smith’s had been. Inside the car, Cris remained blithely unconscious, and Nick thrashed, trying to clear himself from the wreckage.

  Jesus, where was his gun? Had he called this in on the radio he carried? Where was help?

  Wright wrenched open the door as she extracted a Taser from the bag, and Nick went stiff with shock as the leads hit him and voltage coursed through him. By the time Wright let go of the trigger, he lay limp against the steering wheel.

  The beast barely at rest inside Cristine roared to life.

  Wright tinkered with something out of sight on the other side of the car, then Nick was sliding bonelessly out of the seat. A moment later, she appeared again, this time pulling Nick behind her, apparently effortlessly.

  It took Cris a long moment to figure it out, and when she did, she laughed mirthlessly. “She came prepared all right.”

  The rest of the men in the room looked at her expectantly, waiting for her to explain.

  “She had a collapsible mechanic’s creeper in that duffel. Those things are light and would easily support a man Nick’s size. You just can’t see it because his clothing is covering it.”

  One of the detectives across the room groaned and ran a hand over his face. “She’s right. I’ve got one of those things in my own garage.” When everyone else looked at them in mystification, he continued. “It’s what you lay on when you roll under a car to work on it, people. All she had to do was position him on it and then lift his legs. Just like she did.”

  On screen, Wright was approaching the camera. She gave it a long look and a wink, then disappeared. The camera continued to roll, now showing only an unconscious Cris and a very dead Smith.

  Linc stood and turned off the video feed. “And that’s where we stand. We’re three hours into this thing, and all we’ve got is the video. We’re scouring any potential cameras, but where Smith hit you, there just aren’t any commercial businesses that would have surveillance set up. As we would suspect, because even though it’s easy to think Smith was an idiot, he managed to go to ground for over three days, eluding not only us, but Wilson as well. How he let Wright get the drop on him is a mystery.”

  “Not really,” Cris said absentmindedly. Her gaze was glued to the now blank screen. “She’s crazy, but she’s street smart, kind of like Smith. The crazy overshadowed everything else when she came after me the first time. But she had to get out of the hospital somehow, and I can guarantee she knew exactly what she was doing when she shot Smith. She knew she was taking out a cop. She knew that would raise us to DEFCON One. She doesn’t care. It’s all about hurting me. And she knows that by taking Nick, she can get to me. Just like my plan called for.” She allowed herself a brief moment of bitterness, then screwed on her game face.

  “She’ll call. Probably soon. She’ll want to talk, and talk, and talk. Prolong it until she thinks I’ll do her bidding. And she’ll be right.”

  “Bullshit, you can’t know what’s going on in her head,” scoffed one of the detectives by the door.

  Cris swiveled her head slowly and pinned him with an expression she knew had to be deadly. “I’m a psychologist, numb nuts. It’s what I do. Plus, she’s tried to kill me before, so yeah, pretty sure I know how this is going to go.” She turned away from him and focused on the computer screen again. Something she’d seen on the video was pinging at the back of her mind. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t pull it to the forefront.

  Her head ached, she was pissed off, and Nick was gone. It was one hell of a banner day. She propped her head against the wall behind her and closed her eyes. “Now we wait.”

  Chapter 15

  Every muscle in Nick’s body ached, and he could feel a groan getting ready to let loose, but something kept him still, kept him silent. He slitted his eyes, seeing nothing but white walls. He inhaled shallowly, smelled a slight mustiness, but nothing that should give him the bone-deep sensation that something was really, really wrong.

  He flexed his hands, wasn’t so surprised to find them tied behind his back. His feet were also bound. And as he carefully and quietly tested his restraints, he remembered.

  Remembered Lori Wright gunning down Gary Smith. Remembered the look in her eyes as she stalked toward the car, the delight when she saw Cris’ unconscious form. The calculation when she realized he was trapped. Saw her bring a Taser to bear, felt the voltage pouring through him. Remembered the helpless feeling as the last thing he saw was Cris’ face, beautiful and so very far away.

  “Ah good, you’re awake. I didn’t put that much juice into you. You shouldn’t have even passed out. Guess you knocked your head. No airbags in cars that old, you know.” His captor edged into his line of sight.

  In person, Lori Wright was petite, almost angelic looking. Her voice was the exact opposite, scarred and rough, as if she’d gargled with razor blades. It served him well to remember that no matter how she looked, she was crazy as hell. So instead of pretending to be unconscious, he fully opened his eyes.

  She pushed him onto his back, and now he could see he was in a small bedroom of some kind. Not a hotel room, but a private residence. He could just see through the open door into a hallway. It might be an apartment, but for some reason, it had the vibe of a house, and an older one at that.

  Wright fished a cell phone out of the duffel he remembered seeing when he’d been trapped in the car. She studied him for a long moment.

  “At least the bitch has good taste,” she muttered, then began snapping pictures with the phone.

  Now that he could see the room fully, he scanned it for anything that seemed familiar, or that could help him identify where he was. But it was like any other room. Hell, he could have been back in Tulsa for all he knew.

  Just five days ago he’d been bounced around the trunk of the car Cris had repossessed and remembered thinking to himself that he might be the victim of a vicious time space warp. Were the circumstances really that different? He laughed bitterly. No, they weren’t, because Lori Wright was just as dangerous as Smith and his goons had ever been.

  She was looking at him with a quizzical look on her face, and he could see that she’d been attractive, once upon a time, before she’d gone off the rails. Dark hair framed a petite face that was almost elfin in appearance. Her eyes, though, were her most arresting feature. Big and dark, they would have made her appear helpless were it not for the fact they were completely dead.

  “Are you finished?” she asked, and cocked her head, studying him like he was a bug. The fact she didn’t seem to care why he’d been laughing would have been odd in anyone else. Wright just didn’t give a shit.

  He grunted in assent, and tried the bindings on his hands again, now that they were beneath his back and out of sight. Dammit. Zip ties.

  He could try to squirm out of them, but Wright was front and center, would see him making the attempt. Every scenario he ran through his mind ended with her zapping him with the Taser again, likely while filming it.

  In that moment, Nick knew he wasn’t going to make it out of this room alive. After everything he’d done over his too-short life. After surviving Kabul and Kandahar and forward operating bases with no real name. He’d lived through all that, only to be done in by a one-hundred-forty-pound lunatic. Irony sucked.

  He knew, intellectually, that the knowledge should fill him with fear, with terror. Instead, he felt a strange dissonance, as if he were viewing the scenario, his own death, through a long-range scope.

  He’d never see his parents again, his squad mates. Then the sense of being far away vanished and despair crashed over him. He’d never told Cris he loved her, had fallen for her about five minutes after she pulled him out of that trunk. All his reasons for waiting seemed stupid in hindsight. The weight of that knowledge crushed him.

  His thoughts took only seconds, the blink of an eye, really, though it felt like hours had passed. Wright was still staring at him with those dead eyes.

  Anger surged throu
gh him. How dare she do this to Cris and him? How dare she take away the first good thing he’d had in years, since he’d left the Corps? Screw it. He’d get out of this somehow, some way, and get home to Cris.

  Cris’ phone rang, and it was within the ten-minute window she’d predicted. The detective who’d seconded her on the collapsible creeper held out his hand, and the guy who’d doubted her profile disgustedly slapped a twenty into his palm.

  She would have laughed if Nick’s life weren’t on the line, and both detectives knew it. It was why they’d made the bet publicly, to ease tension, to infuse the gallows humor only the armed forces and first responders seemed to understand.

  It was Nick’s number flashing on the screen. She’d known this was how it would go, but that knowledge didn’t stop the uneven thump of her heart.

  “O’Connor,” she answered, changing her tone to pure professional, even though she wanted to rant and scream and hurt, desperately hurt, Lori Wright. But Wright wanted that, wanted her off her game.

  “Bitch.” Wright said it almost as if it were a lover’s greeting, long, drawn out, almost sibilant. “You’re back to using your real name. Good. I’ve got something of yours here.”

  The call was cut off abruptly. Too quickly, Cris knew, to get a ping off a cell tower. She’d expected no less. Wright was crazy, not stupid.

  The phone alerted to an incoming text.

  Cris opened it, and her breath caught in her throat. Embedded in the text was a still photo of Nick, bound and gagged on a bed. He looked alert and pissed.

  Something about the room kicked at the back of her mind, but her attention was riveted to Nick, and how she was going to get him out of this. If she could.

  She forwarded the text to one of the IT guys in the bullpen, and he pulled it up on the big screen, so they could all see.

  The image surprised a grunt out of Linc, a hard stare from Montgomery.

  “I know that bedspread,” Linc stood, shifting his weapon as if he was getting ready to draw. “It’s in my goddamned guest room.”