by Brad Parks
11:43. We pressed on. We had reached Route 4 and made the turn toward Gile.
Then Emmett’s radio crackled.
It was the SWAT team. They had found the RV. Chang had taken the right fork and pulled off to the side of the road in a clearing. The SWAT team was now assessing its options.
Driving at terrifying speeds, we were just a few minutes behind. Emmett turned on the logging road. 11:45. Then 11:46. The road surface was snow covered, with some combination of gravel and mud underneath it. His tires kept spinning, slowing us down.
“We’re running out of time,” Aimee said.
“I know,” I said.
Emmett didn’t reply. It was taking all his concentration just to keep us on the road. The trees leaned in close on both sides, forming a kind of tunnel over us. No wonder the satellite had lost track of Chang.
We reached the fork and turned right. Emmett kept gunning the engine until we arrived at a spot where the road had been blocked by a half dozen state police vehicles.
One of them was a green truck that had SPECIAL WEAPONS AND TACTICS emblazoned on the side.
11:48 now.
Ten minutes to go.
“What’s the plan?” Aimee asked.
“Just stay here,” he said, coming to a stop and opening his door.
Then he jogged briskly away.
From behind me, Aimee was putting on her twin jacket. She said something I didn’t hear over the rustling of the fabric.
“What?” I asked.
“I said: ‘That’s a really crappy plan.’”
CHAPTER 66
Emmett’s boots kept slipping on the slushy mud as he covered the ground between himself and where the rest of the officers had convened in a rough clump.
Captain Angus Carpenter was in the middle of the gathering. He had binoculars slung around his neck and a radio in his hand.
Toward the front of the group were four officers from the SWAT unit, dressed in body armor, carrying long rifles with scopes, ready for action.
“Okay, what’s the situation?” Emmett asked.
“There’s an RV with a license plate that matches the one you gave us,” Carpenter said. “It’s up ahead in that clear-cut area. The road runs through it, and he just came to a stop in the middle of the road. He’s got at least fifty yards of open space on all sides. Whether he knows it or not, that was a really smart move. There’s no sneaking up on him.”
Emmett nodded toward the SWAT guys.
“That’s what those scopes are for, aren’t they?” Emmett said. “Just wait until he walks past a window and take him out.”
“Can’t. Curtains are drawn.”
Emmett looked toward the distance, where he could just see the clearing.
“The only advantage we have right now is that Chang doesn’t know we’re here,” Carpenter said. “Or at least I think he doesn’t. Other than that, it’s all advantage Chang.”
And Emmett already knew the road dead-ended somewhere beyond where Chang was. So there was no sweeping in around from the other side.
He toed the ground, trying desperately to think of something.
“Are there any blind spots we could use to approach the vehicle?” he asked.
“There are no windows in the rear of the RV. Problem is, he’s got a pretty good view out the side. Plus, if he was in the driver’s seat, he could see us coming in the mirrors. We wouldn’t truly be in a blind spot until we were maybe ten, fifteen feet away. It’s too risky. Then there’s the problem of what to do once we got there. He’d still be inside somewhere, and we’d still be outside.”
“I could pretend to be a lost hunter,” Emmett suggested. “Use that as a way to at least get closer. Maybe draw him out so we could take a shot.”
“The way you’re dressed?” Carpenter asked, looking skeptically at Emmett’s khakis. “He’d see through that in three seconds.”
“Well, we have to establish contact soon. We have”—Emmett checked his watch—“eight minutes until that explosive goes off. And the Bomb Squad needs three minutes to extract the hostages. We have to move now. I’ll walk toward him with my hands up. At least that way he’ll know he’s been caught. Maybe he’ll be reasonable and—”
He stopped because Brigid was running up from behind him.
As he turned to face her, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a shape moving quickly through the wilderness, nearly at the tree line.
It was Aimee.
Emmett sputtered, “What is she . . .”
Heads turned.
“Oh God,” Carpenter said, seeing it now too.
“The last thing she said before she got out of the car was that one of us had to do something, and it couldn’t be me because I was a mother,” Brigid said, panting.
Aimee was almost to the clearing. Without pause, and without a single glance behind her, she plunged through the last of the brush.
She was now out in the open, on the snow-covered field, a black-jacketed dot set against a white background, marching toward the RV.
“Aimee,” Emmett called, as loud as he dared. “Aimee, no!”
But she either couldn’t hear him or wasn’t going to pay attention to his warning. She was walking without hesitation toward a man who had killed three people in the last twenty-four hours and wouldn’t hesitate to kill another. He obviously had the means—that powerful rifle he had used to blow away the back side of Scott Sugden’s head.
She might as well have been striding into a tornado.
He had to stop her.
Or protect her.
Or something.
The other cops were just standing there, flat footed, unable to act. They had many hours of training in how to respond when an enemy did something erratic but were a lot less certain when that unexpected action came from an ally.
Emmett dashed toward the clearing, snatching a rifle from a very surprised SWAT team member on his way.
“Hey, what are—”
Emmett ran to where the road met the clearing, then partially hid behind a tree that was too small to conceal him completely. He could see the RV, which meant anyone inside could see him.
He had no body armor. Or shield. This was madness.
There was an impulse, a fleeting one, that told him to keep going. If Wanda was waiting for him on the other side, wouldn’t it be worth it?
Then the impulse left him. There were too many other people who wanted him to stick around for a while longer. His kids. His grandkids. His friends.
“Aimee,” he said in a fierce whisper. “Aimee, for the love of—”
There was no point. He was only increasing the chance he’d get noticed.
He raised the rifle, tucked the stock against his shoulder, and looked at the RV through the scope. The vehicle instantly ballooned in size. It was older, boxier than the newer models. Still, a twenty-four-footer. Just like the one he owned. The one he and Wanda were going to travel the country in.
The way it was angled, Emmett could see both the rear bumper and the entire right side, including the door that served as the only exit.
The door was closed. And the windows were curtained, just as the SWAT guy said.
Emmett kept the rifle up, but took his eye out of the scope. Aimee was walking up the middle of the road now.
Completely fearless.
Completely foolhardy.
Completely vulnerable.
He could sense Carpenter coming up behind him.
“Stay back,” Emmett said. “No sense in you being in the line of fire too.”
“What’s she doing?” Carpenter demanded.
“I don’t know. She’s—”
And then, when she was about fifty feet away, Aimee sat down on the snowy ground and started scooching forward, using her hands and her bent right leg to propel herself.
She trailed her left leg behind her, like it was useless.
“Help,” she called out. “Hello? Is anyone there? Help me, please!”
And then Emm
ett got it.
He had been thinking about the lost-hunter gambit.
She had decided to go for injured hiker.
“Hello? Please?” she called. “I think I broke my ankle. I can’t walk. Help!”
“Does she have a death wish?” Carpenter asked, awed.
“I don’t know. Maybe this will actually work.”
Emmett’s eye was back in the scope. It wasn’t giving him the kind of wide view he might have liked, so he kept sliding it between the door and the curtained window. His finger was resting lightly on the trigger.
“Just tell everyone to stay back,” Emmett said. “If Chang is looking out, I don’t want him seeing anything but her. That’s the only way this works.”
“Can you see him? Do you have a shot?”
“No.”
Aimee’s protests were growing louder and more inventive—about the rock she hadn’t been able to see, about how she knew she shouldn’t have gone out alone, about how she was worried about hypothermia. All the while, she continued scooching closer to the RV, gaining maybe two feet with each lunge.
“What time is it?” Emmett demanded, not daring to take his eye out of the scope.
“Fifty-three,” Carpenter said.
Five minutes. But really two. They needed to give the Bomb Squad three minutes to get through the ceiling and disarm the explosive.
Or three minutes to get the hell out.
Aimee unleashed another “Please! Help!”
She had roughly halved the distance from where she had started, and was getting closer with each lunge. There was no chance Johnny Chang hadn’t heard her yet.
He was probably just deciding what to do about her.
Stay in the RV with the door locked and let her bellow until she went hoarse?
Pretend to be a Good Samaritan—just a nice guy in an RV—and take her in?
Or shoot her without a word?
“Fifty-four,” Carpenter said. Then, like he was reading Emmett’s mind, he added, “Sixty seconds until I have to tell the Bomb Squad what to do.”
Emmett was trying to keep himself steady. Nothing ruined a shot faster than if you let your breathing get out of control.
He swiveled his scope from the door, to the window, back to the door.
Then the door swung outward.
Emmett increased the pressure on the trigger, looking for a target, finding none. The door didn’t seem to have anyone behind it, at least no one Emmett could see.
Realistically, he would have exactly one attempt at this. If he missed, Chang would realize this was a trap, close the door, and retreat back into the RV.
“Thirty seconds,” Carpenter snarled softly.
What happened next took maybe three of those thirty.
But it didn’t feel like real time. Not to Emmett, anyway. And it wasn’t that he had changed.
Time itself had changed.
Emmett finally understood what Beppe Valentino had been talking about when he described being pulled into a black hole. The galaxy was pinwheeling around, faster and faster. But to Emmett’s frame of reference, from somewhere inside that churning blur, everything was happening much more slowly.
The first thing he saw was a figure emerging in the doorway, standing on the lowest step of the RV.
It was a man with his own rifle, raised in a firing position, its barrel pointed at Aimee. She was perhaps forty feet away. Practically can’t-miss range.
Emmett took in a breath and centered the crosshairs of his scope on the man’s forehead.
It had a slope to it.
Like a Neanderthal.
Unmistakably, this was Johnny Chang. Michael Dillman.
Whatever his name, it didn’t matter. He was about to be a dead man.
Emmett didn’t wait another beat.
He just squeezed the trigger.
A bullet travels faster than sound. And you certainly can’t see one in flight. So Chang had no way of knowing, as he took careful aim, that a projectile was hurtling toward him at supersonic speed.
He was focused on his own ministrations, and his own trigger, which was also in the midst of squeezing.
And that, in turn, sent his own bullet flying.
Toward Aimee.
In what order those bullets landed, not even Emmett and his pinwheeling galaxies knew for sure.
CHAPTER 67
Silence is not truly a thing.
It is the absence of a thing.
In the same way that white is a lack of color, silence is a lack of sound, which can make it a very hard quality to describe, even for someone whose life is largely shrouded in it.
So what I heard was the thunderclap of simultaneous gunshots, followed by a silence that was, in all its absence, the most deafening thing I had ever not heard.
It seemed to stretch out, creating a void in every direction, filling the world with the totality of its nothingness.
The man with the rifle had fallen out of the RV and landed on the ground face-first. His arms were splayed. His weapon had hurtled out of his hands, almost like he had thrown it, and had speared itself in the snow, stock down, muzzle up, several feet away.
Aimee was lying on her back. From the distance that separated us, I couldn’t tell if it was because a bullet had knocked her down, or if she had simply gone horizontal to make herself a smaller target.
The first thing that ruptured the silence—at least to my damaged ears—was me.
Shouting, “Aimee!”
Then I started running toward her.
There was a roar from the men behind me. I’m sure it was “Stop” or “No” or “Don’t.” But I couldn’t hear it.
Or, more accurately, I wasn’t listening.
I just ran up that slope, alternately crunching and slipping on the snow, powering toward my sister.
As I got closer, I became hopeful. There was no massive wound, no great mess of blood, nothing apparently wrong with her.
The bullet must have missed.
Somehow, someway, through some miracle of fortune or aerodynamics—or just bad aim—the projectile had gone high, or wide, or low, or who knows.
As I reached her, Aimee’s eyes were open and she was staring up at the sky in a way that was somehow peaceful, like a child searching for pictures in the clouds. Her legs were still akimbo underneath her, bent like the injured hiker she had pretended to be. Her arms were resting at her side.
I knelt beside her.
“Aimee, Aimee,” I said, trying not to shriek.
She studied me but didn’t seem to comprehend what she was seeing.
Her mouth opened. No words came out.
Then I looked down at her black jacket, the one that was identical to mine—except hers now had a small hole high on the right side of her chest, out of which a few down feathers protruded at odd angles.
And the feathers weren’t white.
They were dark red.
“Aimee, honey, what happened?” I asked. “What have you done?”
They were stupid questions.
And she wasn’t answering.
I stared down into that hole, and all I could see was wetness. But then, around the edges of her back, there was a new color creeping into the snow.
Crimson.
“Oh God,” I said. “Oh God, oh God.”
It was a prayer, a plea, and an expletive all at once.
I grabbed her one hand in both of mine and squeezed. She did not squeeze back, just let me mash her hand.
Then, rattling out of her, there came a sound.
“Brig,” she said.
There was a wheezy quality to her voice. Almost like she was inhaling water as she spoke.
I brought myself close to her face so she knew I was there. She didn’t seem to be capable of saying more.
“Stay with me. You have to. Come on, Aim. You and me together now. Like always. Just stay with me.”
She was back to looking up at the sky, which was a monolith of gray.
“So c
old,” she groaned.
“I love you, Aimee,” I said. “I love you so much. Now stay with me.”
There were suddenly hands on my shoulders, moving me from Aimee with gentle but insistent force. Someone was saying something.
“No,” I moaned, trying to fight it.
But the hands were large, strong, and attached to a member of the state police SWAT team. They were suddenly under my armpits, and I was brought unwillingly to my feet.
They needed me out of the way so they could get to Aimee. I turned and staggered into the arms of Emmett Webster.
There were two SWAT team members now on either side of her. One of them was digging quickly through a medical bag. The other had torn open the buttons of Aimee’s jacket, exposing a gruesome mess of red. He barked out an order to another SWAT team member just behind him.
Emmett started speaking.
“What?” I asked, now looking at his mouth.
“We got the bomb in time. It was disarmed safely,” he said. “We got Matt out. He’s going to be okay.”
I nodded, then sagged against him for a moment before I turned back toward Aimee. She was still supine. Her eyes had closed. The SWAT team guys were working on her furiously.
She let out a weak moan. One of the men was pressing hard against the wound.
Emmett had to restrain me from running back to her. “Just let them work,” he said. “They’re trained for this.”
There were tears falling off my face in large drops.
“Aimee,” I bawled. “Aimee.”
I sank to the ground, my knees planted into the snow, my eyes aimed toward the sky, where a medical helicopter was now angling aggressively toward us, closing in fast.
CHAPTER 68
A feeling was coming over Sean Plottner.
He was sitting in the lobby of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, with Theresa on one side and Lee on the other, when it began.
At first, it was just a mild tingling.
He thought perhaps it was a reaction to the hospital. Plottner hated hospitals—the smell of disinfectant and death; the haughtiness of the doctors; the irrational worry that even noncommunicable diseases, like appendicitis or diabetes, might somehow be contagious if you hung around them long enough.